"Nothing," Sherrill said.
"Nothing."
"Jesus, I make forty thousand a year," Sherrill said. "And I’ve been shot for it."
"For your big shots, forty ain’t a salary," Sloan said from behind Robles. "It’s more like the price tag on something they might buy next week."
"Okay, okay," Lucas said. "So this woman…"
"Bonnie Bonet."
"… told you she killed Kresge, and she has some motive."
"Yes."
"Why’d she tell you?"
"Ah, God. Because I asked her." He twisted his hands nervously, and Lucas noticed that he seemed to sweat all the time, and copiously. "See, the thing is, when she came on the ’net and asked if the merger could be stopped, I told her, not unless we killed Kresge. I didn’t mean it, we were just joking on the ’net. But she came right back and said, ‘Let’s do it.’ "
"And you said…"
"I said maybe we could figure a way to blow his car up," Robles said.
"Blow his car up," Sloan said, repeating the phrase as though he were astonished.
"I was joking. I really was-I’d never hurt anyone, it was just all bullshit. We went back and forth about ways to kill him, all ridiculous, like sci-fi stuff, and then… we stopped."
"Stopped?" Sherrill’s eyebrows went up.
"Yeah. It never came up again," Robles said. "It was like, a couple of nights, then we wore the subject out, and it never came up."
"Until somebody killed him," Lucas said.
"Why didn’t you tell me this Saturday?" asked Sloan.
"Because I didn’t think there was any chance she’d done it. And if she hadn’t done it, talking about it could only get me in trouble. So I wanted to check with her. I came back, and I couldn’t find her online, and I didn’t know where she lived. She’s unlisted, and I’d only gotten together with her at Uncle Tony’s. That’s a bar…"
"We know," Sherrill said. "The one with the porno on computers."
"Porno? You mean the TV Three story? That was all bullshit…"
"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Lucas said. "Go ahead."
"Anyway, when I did find her, yesterday, I asked her if she’d heard about it, and she said yeah, she’d done it," Robles said.
"But you don’t believe her."
"No. She’s never fired a gun. She doesn’t even go outside, for Christ’s sake. She’s white as a sheet… she doesn’t know about walking around in the woods. Her old man’s got something wrong with his bowel or something and never worked, and they never went anywhere when she was growing up. She said she shot him with her father’s.30–30, and I bet she doesn’t even know what a.30–30 looks like or that he has one."
"Could be the right kind of rifle," Lucas said. "The medical examiner says Kresge was killed with a largecaliber rifle, which around here probably means thirtycaliber…"
"That’s why I decided to tell you," Robles said plaintively. "I’m ninety-five percent sure she didn’t do it-but I’m five percent not sure."
"And you don’t know where she lives," Sloan said.
"No, but she uses her driver’s license as an ID, and I figured you could get that."
"Bonnie Bonet?"
"B-O-N-E-T," Robles said, spelling it out. "Is this gonna be in the newspapers?"
Sherrill looked at Lucas: "Want me to pick her up?"
"Yeah. Do that. Get some uniforms to back you up. Call me when you’ve got her." When Sherrill had gone, Lucas turned back to Robles, looked at him for several seconds, then said, "We’ll need a statement. Detective Sloan will take it."
And to Sloan: "Read him his rights on the tape."
"My rights?" Robles threw his head back to peer at Lucas. "To a lawyer? Do I need a lawyer?"
Lucas shrugged: "Purely up to you… Anyway, talk to Sloan." And to Sloan: "I’ll be down at my office. I’ve got some paper to look at."
Two files were waiting for him: files on the people mentioned in the anonymous letter as victims of Wilson McDonald.
Lucas took off his jacket, hung it on an antique oak coatrack, and dropped in the chair behind his desk. He picked up the first file, put his heels on his desk, and leaned back. And then let the file drop to his lap for a few seconds. He was not particularly introspective, but he was suddenly aware that the constant mental grinding in the back of his head-the grinding that had gone on for weeks, a symptom of the beast prowling around him-was fainter, barely distinguishable.
A book project, he thought: Serial Murder: A Cure for Clinical Depression? by Lucas Davenport.
George Arris was killed on a rainy night in September 1984 while walking down St. Paul’s Grand Avenue toward a restaurant-bar generally regarded as a meat rack. Somebody unknown had fired a single shot from a.380 semiautomatic pistol into the back of Arris’s head, and left him to die on the sidewalk.
St. Paul homicide investigators had torn the city apart looking for the killer, because Arris was only the last of four nearly identical killings, spaced about two weeks apart.
All the victims were younger white men, all relatively affluent, all walking alone at night. All of the killings were within twenty blocks of each other. A racial motivation was suspected, and black gang members were targeted as the primary suspects.
Four different pistols had been used in the killings. Two of the guns had been found.
The first, a.22-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver which had been used in the second killing, was found by a city work crew trying to open a clogged storm sewer a halfmile from the killing. That set off a general inspection of storm sewers, and the second pistol, a.25-caliber semiauto, was found three blocks from the.22. Neither of the other two pistols was found.
The lead detective on the case was George Jellman.
"Jellman was retired, and it took two phone calls to locate him. "He’s out back," his wife shouted. "I’ll go get him." She must have been shouting. Lucas mused, because they lived in Florida, which was a long way from Minnesota.
Jellman came to the phone a second later: "Davenport, you miserable piece of shit. I never thought I’d hear from you again."
"How are you, Jelly?"
"Well, I’m looking out at my backyard," he said.
"There are two palm trees and two orange trees and a lime tree-Denise makes key lime pie from it. It’s just a bit shy of eighty degrees right now, and I can smell the ocean. About an hour from now, I’ll be hitting golf balls on the greenest golf course you ever saw in your life… How’s it up there?"
"Cool, but nice."
"Right. Nice in Minnesota means the snow’s not over your boots yet… So what’s happening?"
"You remember a bunch of killings you handled back in ’84, four guys shot in the back of the head?"
"Oh, hell, yes," Jellman said. "Never got the guys who did it."
"I’m interested in the last one-George Arris."
"Why him?"
"We got an anonymous letter with the name of the supposed killer."
"I bet it ain’t no goddamn Vice Lord," Jellman said.
"Why is that?"
"Is it? A Vice Lord?"
"No. It’s a bank vice president."
"Hah. I knew it. Trust the letter, Lucas-if it was a bullshitter, he would’ve said it was a Vice Lord, ’cause that was on all the media. The Vice Lords did the other three, but that fourth one, that was a copycat."
"Are you sure?"
"Pretty sure. That was the word on the street, though nobody had any names for us. But the word was, the fourth one came out of the blue. That the Vice Lords who’d done the shooting had split for Chicago before the fourth one ever happened."
"So it was pretty much street talk about the fourth one."
"There was something else too-the first three were all up there in the colored section. But the last guy was down on Grand Avenue. You look on a map, it looks pretty close, but you don’t see many blacks over there. Not walking on the street-especially not then, not as tight as everybody was about the first three shootings. And there’s Wylie’s arket used to be over there. You remember Wylie’s?"