"I understand you dated her."
"Jesus, they really did dump it on you, didn't they," Dunn said, his voice softening. "I took Nancy out twice. Neither one of us was much interested in a third try. So when we were saying good-bye that second time, the last time, she said, 'You know, I've got somebody who'd be perfect for you.' And she was right. I called up Andi and we got married a year later."
Lucas hesitated, then said, "Does your wife have any distinguishing marks on her body? Scars?"
Dunn froze: "You've got a body somewhere?"
"No, no. But if we should contact the people who have her, if there's a question…"
Dunn wasn't buying it. "What's going on?"
"We got a call from a guy," Lucas said.
"He said she's got a scar?"
"Yeah."
"What kind of scar?"
Lucas said, "He said it looked like a rocketship…"
"Oh, no," Dunn groaned. "Oh no…"
Sloan came in, looked at the two men facing each other. "What's going on?"
Lucas told Dunn, "We'll get back."
Dunn swung a large workman's hand across the cherry desk, and the cigar safe flew across the room, the fat Cuban cigars spraying out like so much shrapnel. "Well, fuckin' find something," Dunn shouted. "You're supposed to be the fuckin' Sherlock Holmes. Quit hanging around my ass and get out and do something."
Outside the office, Sloan said, "What was all that?"
"I asked him about the rocketship."
"Oh-oh."
"Whoever it is, he's raping her," Lucas said.
As they stood talking in the parking lot, Greave called from the Minneapolis Public Library. "It's the Bible," he said. "The Nethinims are mentioned a bunch of times, but they don't seem to amount to much."
"Xerox the references and bring them back to the office. I'll be there in ten minutes," Lucas said. He punched Greave out and called Andi Manette's office, and got Black: "Can you bring a batch of the best files downtown?"
"Yeah. On the way. And we got another problem case. A guy who runs a chain of video-game arcades."
"So what're we doing?" Sloan asked.
"You want to work this?" Lucas asked.
Sloan shrugged. "I ain't got much else. I got that Turkey case, but we're having trouble getting anybody who can speak good Turk, so it's not going anywhere."
"I've never met any Turks who didn't speak pretty good English," Lucas said.
"Yeah, well, you oughta try investigating a Turk murder sometime," Sloan said. "They're yellin' no-speaka-da-English when I'm walking down the street. The guy who was killed was outa Detroit, he was sharkin', he probably had thirty grand on the street and nobody was sorry to see him go."
"Talk with Lester," Lucas said. "We need somebody to keep digging around the Manettes, Wolfe, Dunn, and anybody else who might make something out of Andi Manette dying…" He flipped the engagement ring up in the air and caught it, rolled it between his palms.
Sloan said, "You're gonna lose that fuckin' stone. You're gonna drop it and the ring is gonna bounce right down a sewer."
Lucas looked in his hand and saw the ring: he hadn't been conscious of it. "I gotta do something about this, with Weather."
"There's pretty general agreement on that," Sloan said. "My old lady is peeing her pants, waiting for you to ask. She wants all the details. If I don't get her the details, I'm a dead man."
Greave was waiting with a sheaf of computer printer-paper and handed it to Lucas. "There's not much. The Nethinims were mostly just mentioned in passing-if there's anything, it's probably in Nehemiah. Here, 3:26."
Lucas looked at the passage. Moreover the Nethinims dwelt in Ophel unto the place over against the watergate toward the east, and the tower that lieth out.
"Huh." He passed the paper to Sloan and walked down the office to a wall map of the Metro area, traced the Mississippi with his finger. "One thing you can see from the river is all those green water towers," he said. "They're like mushrooms along the tops of all the tallest hills. The water gate could be any of the dams."
"Want me to check?"
Lucas grinned. "Take you two days. Just call all the towns along here." He snapped his finger at the map. "Hastings, Cottage Grove, St. Paul Park, Newport, Inver Grove, South St. Paul, like that. Tell them you're working Manette and ask them to swing a patrol car by the water towers; see if there's anything to see."
Black showed up ten minutes later, morose, handed Lucas a file and a tape. "Guy's messing with kids. Somebody ought to cut his fuckin' nuts off."
"Pretty explicit?"
"It's all there, and I don't give a shit what the shrinks say. This guy likes doing it. And he likes talking about it-he likes the attention he's getting from Manette. He'll never stop."
"Yeah, he will," Lucas said, flipping through the file. "For several years… I'll take it to the chief. We want to hold off until Manette's out of the way."
Black nodded. "We got some doozies in the files." He sat down opposite Lucas, spread five files on the desk like a poker hand, pushed one toward Lucas. "Look at this guy. I think he may have raped a half-dozen women, but he talks them out of doing anything about it. He brags about it: breaks down for them, weeps. Then he laughs about it. He says he's addicted to sex, and he's coming on to Manette… right here, see, she mentions it, and how she might have to redirect his therapy."
They were reading files an hour later when Greave hurried in. "They've got something in Cottage Grove."
Lucas stood up. "What is it?"
"They said it's like an oil drum under one of the water towers."
"How do they know?"
"It's got your name spray-painted on it," Greave said.
"My name?"
Greave shrugged. "That's what they said-and they are freaked out. They want your ass down there."
On the way down to Cottage Grove, the cellular buzzed and
Lucas flipped it open. "Yeah?"
Mail cooed, "Hey, Davenport, got it figured out?"
Lucas knew the voice before the third word was out. "Listen, I…"
But he was gone.
CHAPTER 9
Six blocks from the water tower, Lucas ran into a police blockade, two squad cars V-ed across the street. The civilian traffic was turning around, jamming up the street. He put the Porsche on the yellow line and accelerated past the frustrated drivers, until two cops ran toward him waving him off.
A red-faced patrolman, one hand on his pistol, leaned up to the window. "Hey, what the hell…"
Lucas held up his ID and said, "Davenport, Minneapolis PD. Get me through."
The cop ran back to one of the squads, yelled something through an open window, and the cop inside backed it up. Lucas accelerated through the gap and up toward the water tower. Along the way, he saw cops in the streets, two different sets of uniforms. They were evacuating houses along the way, and women with kids in station wagons hurried down the streets away from the tower.
A bomb? Chemicals? What?
The water tower looked like an aqua-green alien from War of the Worlds, its big egg-shaped body supported by fat, squat legs. Three fire trucks, a cluster of squad cars, a bomb squad truck, two ambulances, and a wrecker were parked a hundred yards away. Lucas pulled into the cluster.
"Davenport?" A stout, red-faced man in a too-tight cop's uniform waved him over. "Don Carpenter, Cottage Grove." He wiped his face on his sleeve. He was sweating heavily, though the day was cool. "We might have a big problem."
"Bomb?"
Carpenter looked toward the top of the hill. "We don't know. But it's an oil barrel, and it's full of something heavy. We haven't tried to move it, but it's substantial."
"Somebody said my name is on it."
"That's right: Lucas Davenport, Minneapolis Police. Standard bullshit graffiti-artist spray paint. We were gonna open it, but then someone said, 'Jesus, if this guy's fuckin' with Davenport, what's to keep him from putting a few pounds of dynamite or some shit in there? Or a gas bomb or something?' So we're standing back."