Lucas jogged back to the campsite, picked up the knife, closed it, and walked back to where Greave held Junky's arm, Junky swaying in the path. Junky's mind had slipped away again, and he mutely followed Lucas and Greave across the yellow dirt, walking stiffly, as though his legs were posts. Only the big toes remained on his feet. His thumb and the lowest finger knuckles remained on his left hand; the hand was fiery with infection.
Back at the shed, the fat man came out and Lucas said, "Call 911. Tell them a police officer needs an ambulance. My name is Lucas Davenport and I'm a deputy chief with the City of Minneapolis."
"What happened, did you…?" the fat man started, then saw first Junky's hand, and then his feet. "Oh my sweet Blessed Virgin Mary," he said, and he went back into the shed.
Lucas looked at Junky, dug into his pocket, handed him the knife. "Let him go," he said to Greave.
"What're you gonna do?" Greave asked.
"Just let him go."
Reluctantly, Greave released him, and the knife, still closed, twinkled in his hand. Lucas stepped sideways from him, a knife fighter's move, and said, "I'm gonna cut you, Junky," he said, his voice low, challenging.
Junky turned toward him, a smile at the corner of his ravaged face. The knife turned in his hand, and suddenly the blade snapped out. Junky stumbled toward Lucas.
"I cut you; you not cut me," he said.
"I cut you, man," Lucas said, beginning to circle to his right, away from the blade.
"You not cut me."
The fat man came out and said, "Hey. What're you doin'?"
Lucas glanced at him. "Take it easy. Is the ambulance coming?"
"They're on the way," the fat man said. He took a step toward Junky. "Junky, man, give me the knife."
"Gonna cut him," Junky said, stepping toward Lucas. He stumbled, and Lucas moved in, caught his bad arm, turned him, caught his shabby knife-arm sleeve from behind, turned him more, grabbed the good hand and shook the knife out.
"You're under arrest for assault on a police officer," Lucas said. He pushed the fat man away, picked up the knife, folded it and dropped it in his pocket. "You understand that? You're under arrest."
Junky looked at him, then nodded.
"Sit down," Lucas said. Junky shambled over and sat on the flat concrete stoop outside the shack. Lucas turned to the fat man. "You saw that. Remember what you saw."
The fat man looked at him doubtfully and said, "I don't think he would have hurt you."
"Arresting him is the best I can do for him," Lucas said quietly. "They'll put him inside, clean him up, take care of him."
The fat man thought about it, nodded. The phone rang, and he went back inside. Lucas, Greave, and Junky waited in silence until Junky looked up suddenly and said, "Davenport. What do you want?"
His voice was clear, controlled, his eyes focused.
"Somebody's cuttin' women," Lucas said. "I wanted to make sure it wasn't you."
"I cut some women, long time ago," Junky said. "There was this one, she had beautiful… you know. I made a grapevine on them."
"Yeah, I know."
"Long time ago; they liked it," he said.
Lucas shook his head.
"Somebody cuttin' on women?" Junky asked.
"Yeah, somebody's cuttin' on women."
After another moment of silence, Greave asked Junky, "Why would they do that? Why would he be cuttin' women?" In the distance, over the sound of the trucks moving toward the working edge of the fill, they could hear a siren. The fat man must have made it an emergency.
"You got to," Junky said solemnly to Greave. "If you don't cut them, especially the pretty ones, they get out of hand. You can't have women getting outa hand."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. You cut 'em, they stay put, that's for sure. They stay put."
"So why would you go a long time and not cut any women, then start cuttin' a lot of women?"
"I didn't do that," Junky said. He cast a defensive eye at Greave.
"No. The guy we're looking for did that."
Lucas looked on curiously as the man in the lavender Italian suit chatted with the man with no toes, like they were sharing a cappuccino outside a cafй.
"He just started up?" Junky asked.
"Yup."
Junky thought about that, pawing his face with his good hand, then his head bobbed, as though he'd worked it out. "'Cause a woman turns you on, that's why. Maybe you see a woman and she turns you on. Gets you by the pecker. You go around with your pecker up for a few days, and you gotta do something. You know, you gotta cut some women."
"Some woman turns you on?"
"Yup."
"So then you cut her."
"Well." Junky seemed to look inside himself. "Maybe not her, exactly. Sometimes you can't cut her. There was this one…" He seemed to drift away, lost in the past. Then: "But you gotta cut somebody, see? If you don't cut somebody, your pecker stays up."
"So what?"
"So what? You can't go around with your pecker up all the time. You can't."
"I wish I could," Greave cracked.
Junky got angry, intent, his face quivering. "You can't. You can't go around like that."
"Okay…"
The ambulance bumped into the landfill, followed a few seconds later by a sheriff's car.
"Come on, Junky, we're gonna put you in the hospital," Lucas said.
Junky said to Greave, pulling at Greave's pant leg with his good hand, "But you got to get her, sooner or later. Sooner or later, you got to get the one that put your pecker up. See, if she goes around putting your pecker up, anytime she wants, she's outa hand. She's just outa hand, and you gotta cut her."
"Okay…"
Lucas filed a complaint with the sheriff's deputy who followed the ambulance in, and Junky was hauled away.
"I'm glad I came with you," Greave said. "Got to see a dump, and a guy cutting himself up like a provolone."
Lucas shook his head and said, "You did pretty good back there. You've got a nice line of bullshit."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. Talking to people, you know, that's half of homicide."
"I got the bullshit. It's the other part I ain't got," Greave said gloomily. "Listen, you wanna stop at my mystery apartment on the way back?"
"No."
"C'mon, man."
"We've got too much going on," Lucas said. "Maybe we'll catch some time later."
"They're wearing me out in homicide," Greave said. "I get these notes. They say, 'Any progress?' Fuck 'em."
Greave went on to homicide to check in, while Lucas walked down to Roux's office and stuck his head in.
"We picked up Junky Doog. He's clear, almost for sure."
He explained, and told her how Junky had mutilated himself. Roux, nibbling her lip, said, "What happens if I feed him to the Strib?"
"Depends on how you do it," Lucas said, leaning against the door, crossing his arms. "If you did it deep off-the-record, gave them just the bare information… it might take some heat off. Or at least get them running in a different direction. In either case, it'd be sorta cynical."
"Fuck cynical. His prior arrests were here in Hennepin, right?"
"Most of them, I think. He was committed from here. If you tipped them early enough, they could get across the street and pull his files."
"Even if it's bullshit, it's an exclusive. It's a lead story," Roux said. She rubbed her eyes. "Lucas, I hate to do it. But I'm taking some serious damage now. I figure I've got a couple of weeks of grace. After that, I might not be able to save myself."
Back at his office, a message was waiting on voice maiclass="underline" "This is Connell. I got something. Beep me."
Lucas dialed her beeper number, let it beep, and hung up. Junky had been a waste of time, although he might be a bone they could throw the media. Not much of a bone…
With nothing else to do, he began paging through Connell's report again, trying to absorb as much of the detail as he could.
There were several threads that tied all the killings together, but the thread that worried him most was the simplicity of them. The killer picked up a woman, killed her, dumped her. They weren't all found right away-Connell suggested he might have kept one or two of them for several hours, or even overnight-but in one case, in South Dakota, the body was found forty-five minutes after the woman had been seen alive. He wasn't pressing his luck by keeping the woman around; they wouldn't get a break that way.