Lucas looked at the body and said, "Jesus Christ," and somebody else said, "More'n you might think, brother. She was scourged."
SCOURGED. The word hung there, in the mist, in the lights. She'd been a young woman, a few pounds too heavy, dark hair. Her body, from her collarbone to her knees, was crisscrossed with cuts that had probably been made with some kind of flail, Lucas thought: a whip made out of wire, maybe. The cut lines were just lines: the rain had washed out any blood. There were dozens of the cuts, and the way they wrapped around her body, he expected her back to be in the same condition.
"You got a name?" he asked.
"Angela Larson," Sloan said. "College student at the U, from Chicago. Worked in an art store. Missing since yesterday."
"Cut her throat like she was a goddamn beef," said one of the cops. A strobe went off, a flash of white lightning. Lucas walked around the body, down to stand next to Sloan.
Because his feet were lower than the victim, he could get closer to her face. He looked at the cut in the throat. As with the wire cuts, it was bloodless, washed clean by the rain, resembling a piece of turkey meat. He didn't doubt that he could have buried a finger in it up to the knuckle. He could smell the rawness of the body, like standing next to the meat counter in a supermarket.
"The neck wound's what killed her, I think," Sloan said. "No sign of a gunshot wound or a stab wound. He beat her, whipped her, until he was satisfied, and then cut her throat."
"Ligature marks on her wrists," said a man in plainclothes. His name was Stan, and he worked as an investigator for the Hennepin County Medical Examiner, and was known for his grotesque sense of humor. His face was as long as anyone's.
"We got a call last night when Larson didn't get back to her apartment," Sloan said. "Her roommate called. We found her car in the parking lot behind Chaps; she worked at a place called the MarkUp down the block…"
"I know it," Lucas said. Chaps was a younger club, mixed straights and gays, dancing. "… and used to park at Chaps because the store didn't have its own parking, the street is metered, and the Chaps lot has lights. She got off at nine o'clock, stopped and said hello to a bartender, had a glass of white wine. Bartender said just enough to rinse her mouth. Probably about twenty-after she walked out to her car. She never got home. We found her car keys in the parking lot next to the car; no blood, no wit-nesses saw her taken."
Lucas looked at the ligature marks on her wrists. The rope, or whatever she'd been tied with-it was rope, he thought-had been a half inch thick and had both cut and burned her. There were more burns and chafing wounds at the base of her thumbs. "Hung her up," Lucas said.
"We think so," Sloan said. He tipped his head down the bank. "Give me a minute, will you?"
THEY STEPPED AWAY, twenty feet down the bank, into the privacy of the darkness.
Sloan took off his hat, brushed his thinning hair away from his eyes, and asked, "What do you think?"
"Pretty bad," Lucas said, turning back to the circle of lights. Even from this short distance, the body looked less than human, and more like an artifact, or even an artwork. "He's nuts. You've checked her friends…"
"We've started, but we're coming up empty," Sloan said. "She was dating a guy, sleeping with him off and on, until a couple of months ago. Until the end of the school year. Then he went back home to Pennsylvania."
"Didn't come back to visit?"
"Not as far as we can tell-he says he hasn't, and I sorta believe him. He was there when she disappeared, we talked to him ten hours after she dropped out of sight-and the Philadelphia cops called a couple people for us, and he checks out."
"Okay"
"He said they were a little serious, but not too-she knew he planned to go in the army when he got out of school, and she didn't like the idea. Her friends say he's a pretty straight guy, they can't imagine that he's involved. They don't know she was involved with anyone else, yet. And that's what we've got."
Lucas was still looking at the body, at the rain falling around the cops. "I'd put my money on a semistranger. Whoever did this… This guy is pushed by brain chemistry. He's got something wrong with him. This isn't a bad love affair. The way she's displayed…"
Sloan half turned back to the lights: "That's what I was thinking. The goddamned display."
THEY JUST STOOD AND WATCHED for a minute, the cops moving around the lights, talking up and down the bank. The two of them might have done this two hundred times. "So what can I do for you?" Lucas asked. Lucas worked with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Minneapolis had its own murder investigators, who would tell you that they were better than any BCA cherry who ever walked the face of the earth.
Lucas, who had been a Minneapolis cop before he moved to tile state, mostly bought that argument: Minneapolis saw sixty or eighty murders a year; the BCA worked a dozen.
"You agree he's a nut?"
Lucas wiped his eyebrows, which were beading up with rain. "Yeah. No question."
"I need to talk to somebody who is really on top of this shit," Sloan said. "That I can get to whenever I need to. I don't need some departmental consultant who got his BA three years ago."
"You want to talk to Elle," Lucas said.
"Yeah. I wanted to see if you'd mind. And I wanted you to look at the body, too, of course. I'm gonna need all the brains on this I can get," Sloan said.
"Elle's an adult," Lucas said, "She can make up her own mind."
"C' mon, man, you know what I'm saying. It's a friendship thing. If you said not to call her, I wouldn't. I'm asking you."
"Call her," Lucas said. "I would."
SLOAN CALLED ELLE-Sister Mary Joseph in her professional life. She was the head of the department of psychology at St. Anne's Col-lege and literally Lucas's oldest friend; they'd walked to kindergarten together with their mothers.
When Lucas became a cop and she became a teacher, they got back in touch, and Elle had worked on a half dozen murders, as an unofficial advisor, and not quite a confessor. Then, once, a crazy woman with a talent for misdirection caught Elle outside at night and had nearly beaten her to death. Since then, Lucas had shied from using her. If it happened again…
Elle didn't share his apprehension. She liked the work, the tweezing apart of criminal psyches. So Sloan called Elle, and Elle called Lucas, and ley all talked across town for two weeks. Theories and arguments and suggestions for new directions…
Nothing. The murder of Angela Larson began to drift away from them-out of the news, out of the action. A black kid got killed in a bar outside the Target Center, and some of the onlookers said it had been a racial fight. Television news pushed Larson back to an occasional mention, and Sloan stopped trudging around, because he had no place farther to trudge.
"Maybe a traveler?" Elle wondered. She had a thin, delicate bone structure, her face patterned with the white scars of a vicious childhood acne; Lucas had wondered if the change from a pretty young blond girl in elementary school to a irredeemably scarred adolescent might have been the impulse that pushed her into the convent.
She'd known he'd wondered and one time patted him on the arm and told him that no, she'd heard Jesus calling…