“Don't be such a fatalist. You can use this to your advantage. Ask Quinn. Besides, if the sketch is even partially accurate, you might get something off it. Maybe someone out there will remember seeing a similar individual near a truck. Maybe they'll remember a partial license plate, a dent in a fender, a guy with a limp. You know as well as I do, luck plays into an investigation like this in a big way.”
“Yeah, well,” Kovac said, reluctantly pushing himself away from the wall. “We could use a truckload. Soon. So where's the sunshine girl now?”
“I had someone take her back to the Phoenix. She's not happy about that.”
“Tough.”
“Ditto,” Kate said. “She wants a hotel room or an apartment or something. I want her with people. Isolation isn't going to open her up. Plus, I'd like someone keeping an eye on her. Did you go through that backpack she carries around?”
“Liska checked it out. Angie was steamed, but, hey, she came running away from a headless corpse. We couldn't risk her going psycho and pulling a knife on us. The uniform picked her up should have done it at the scene, but he was all shook up thinking about Smokey Joe. Stupid rookie. He screws up that way with the wrong mutt, he'll get himself whacked.”
“Did Nikki find anything?”
He pursed his lips and shook his head. “What are you thinking? Drugs?”
“I don't know. Maybe. Her behavior is all over the map. She's up, she's down, she's tough, she's on the verge of tears. I start to think something's off about her, then I stop and think: My God, look what she's been through. Maybe she's remarkably stable and sane, all things considered.”
“Or maybe she needs a score,” Kovac speculated, moving toward the door. “Maybe that's what she was doing in that park at midnight. I know some guys in narcotics. I'll reach out, see if maybe they know this kid. We got nothing else on her yet. Wisconsin had nothing.”
“I talked to a Susan Frye in our juvenile division,” Kate said. “She's been at this forever. She's got a great network. Rob is checking his contacts in Wisconsin. In the meantime, I need to get Angie some kind of perk, Sam. A show of appreciation. Can you kick her something out of petty cash as an informant?”
“I'll see what I can do.”
Another duty to add to his long list. Poor guy, Kate thought. The lines in his face seemed deeper today. He had the weight of the city on those sturdy shoulders. His suit jacket hung limp on him, as if he had somehow drawn the starch out of it to supplement his draining energy.
“Listen, don't worry about it,” she said as she pulled the door open. “I can weasel it out of your lieutenant myself. You've got better things to do.”
Halfway out the door, he turned and gave her a lopsided smile. “What gave you that idea?”
“Just a hunch.”
“Thanks. You're sure you're not too busy tackling armed gunmen?”
“Heard about that, did you?” Kate made a face, not comfortable with the attention yesterday's incident had gotten her. She'd turned down half a dozen requests for interviews and made too many trips to the ladies' room to dab makeup over the bruises.
“Wrong place, wrong time, that's all. The story of my life,” she said dryly.
Kovac looked thoughtful, as if he were considering saying something profound, then shook his head a little. “You're a wonder, Red.”
“Hardly. I've just got a guardian angel with a sick sense of humor. Go fight the fight, Sergeant. I'll take care of the witness.”
12
CHAPTER
THE TRAFFIC ANNOYS him. He takes 35W south out of downtown to avoid traffic lights and the tedious twists and turns of the alternate route. Stop-and-go traffic until he wants to abandon the car and walk down the shoulder, randomly pulling people out of their vehicles and beating their heads in with a tire iron. It amuses him that other motorists are likely entertaining the same fantasy. They have no idea that the man sitting in the dark sedan behind them, beside them, in front of them, could act on that fantasy without turning a hair.
He looks at the woman in the red Saturn beside him. She is pretty, with Nordic features and white-blond hair done in a voluminous, airy, tousled style that has been sprayed into place. She catches him looking, and he smiles and waves. She smiles back, then makes a gesture and a funny face at the traffic snarled ahead of them. He shrugs and grins, mouths “What can you do?”
He imagines that face drawn tight and pale with terror as he leans down over her with a knife. He can see her bare chest rise and fall in time with her shallow breathing. He can hear the tremor in her voice as she begs him for her life. He can hear her screams as he cuts her breasts.
Desire stirs deep in his groin.
“Probably the most crucial factor in the development of a serial rapist or killer is the role of fantasy.”—John Douglas, Mindhunter.
His fantasies have never shocked him. Not in childhood, when he would think of what it might be like to watch a living thing die, what it would be like to close his hands around the throat of a cat or the kid down the block and hold the power of life and death literally within his grasp. Not in adolescence, when he would think of cutting the nipples from his mother's breasts, or cutting out her larynx and smashing it with a hammer, or cutting out her uterus and throwing it into the furnace.
He knows that for killers such as himself, these thoughts are a sustained part of the internal processing and cognitive operations. They are, in effect, natural for him. Natural, and, therefore, not deviant.
He exits on 36th and drives west on tree-lined side streets toward Lake Calhoun. The blonde is gone and the fantasy with her. He thinks again of the afternoon press briefing, both amused and frustrated. The police had a sketch—this amused him. He stood there in the crowd as Chief Greer held up the drawing that was supposed to be a rendition of him so accurate that people would recognize him at a glance on the street. And when the briefing had ended, all those reporters had walked right past him.
The frustration has its source in John Quinn. Quinn made no appearance at the briefing, and has made no official statement, which seems a deliberate slight. Quinn is too wrapped up in his deduction and speculation. He is probably focusing all his attention on the victims. Who they were and what they were, wondering why they were chosen.
“In a sense the victim shapes and molds the criminal . . . To know one we must be acquainted with the complementary partner.”—Hans von Hentig.
Quinn believes this too. Quinn's textbook on sexual homicide is among many on his shelf. Seductions of Crime by Katz, Inside the Criminal Mind by Samenow, Without Conscience by Hare, Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives by Ressler, Burgess, and Douglas. He has studied all of them and more. A voyage of self-exploration.
He turns onto his block. Because of the way the lakes lie in this part of town, the streets immediately around them are often irregular. This one has a bend in it that gives the houses larger lots than usual. More privacy. He parks the car on the concrete apron outside the garage and gets out.
Night has inked out what meager daylight there had been earlier. The wind is blowing out of the west and bringing with it the scent of fresh dog shit. The smell hits his nostrils a split second before the sound of rapid-fire toy-dog barking.
Out of the darkness of the neighbor's yard darts Mrs. Vetter's bichon frise, a creature that looks like a collection of white pompoms sewn loosely together. The dog runs to within five feet of him, then stops and stands its ground, barking, snarling like a rabid squirrel.
The noise instantly sets off his temper. He hates the dog. He especially hates the dog now because it has triggered the return of his foul mood from the traffic jam. He wants to kick the dog as hard as he can. He can imagine the high-pitched yip, the animal's limp body as he picks it up by the throat and crushes its windpipe.