Anger swelled in his heart, and he pushed himself out of the chair and paced back to the kitchen, sobbed. Pounded a fist into the other palm, then stuffed his knuckles into his mouth and bit until he felt the skin break. She'd take it as a victory: She'd outlasted him.
Well, fuck her. Fuck her. He shouted it at the walls: "FUCK HER."
So what to do? He sat down again, stared at the box of Froot Loops. He'd enjoyed making his drawings and he'd known right from the start that he'd be in trouble if he were found out. So he'd been secretive. He still had some of the images stored on the computer at school, but he could get rid of them.
He sighed, and calmed himself. Things weren't completely out of control. Not yet. He'd have to get busy, get cleaned up, just in case.
His mind skipped back to his mother: bitch. He couldn't believe her pleasure at his suicide. Couldn't believe it. There wasn't any doubt about it: The clarity of his vision carried the unmistakable scent of the truth. They hadn't had much to say to each other for five years, but she could show him enough loyalty to regret his passing.
More tears gathered at the corners of his eyes. Nobody loved him. Not even Barstad-she just wanted the sex.
"I'm alone," he said. His hand hurt, and he looked down at his knuckles. They were bleeding, badly; how had that happened? He was bewildered by the blood and pain, but he could also feel the anger gathering. "I'm all alone."
6
THE SKY WAS churning, but it was neither snowing nor raining when Lucas made it down to City Hall. He'd had too much coffee, and he stopped at the men's room; Lester, the deputy chief for investigations, was facing into a urinal when Lucas stepped inside and parked next to him. "What do you think about the mayor?" Lester asked.
"Gonna be some changes," Lucas said.
"Don't see any way that Rose Marie'll be reappointed," Lester said gloomily. "I'll probably get stuck out in the weeds somewhere."
"So quit, get a state job, and double-dip. Two pensions are better than one."
"I sort of like it here." Lester shook a couple of times, zipped up and walked over to a sink, and turned on the water. "What are you going to do? Stay on?"
"That'd be tough," Lucas said. "A little depends on who gets the top job."
"I'll tell you what, there's a lot of calculation going on today," Lester said. "People standing around talking. The bullshit machine is running overtime."
"Always happens," Lucas said, zipping up and moving to the next sink. "How many chiefs you been through?"
"Nine," Lester said. "Rose Marie was the ninth. But it was a lot easier to make the change on the first four or five, when I was sitting in a squad with a flashlight and a doughnut."
DEL AND MARCY were waiting in the new office. "Swanson and Lane are over at the Cheese-It, trying to find somebody who might have seen Aronson with Bruce Willis," Marcy said. She handed Lucas a photograph of the actor. "We downloaded a picture of Willis from the net, and we're gonna have it redrawn, and sort of generalized, with the long black coat. Put it out in the papers."
Lucas snapped the photo with his fingertip and said, "That's good. Get it going. How about the lists?"
"We got Anderson to set up a computerized sorting program. We type in lists for each woman and push a button and it finds matches. So far, we don't have any. But we do have something else."
"What?"
"We have nine women calling in-count 'em, nine-saying they got these drawings in the mail."
"Nine?"
"Over three years. Five of them saved the drawings. I've got a couple of squads running around right now, picking up the drawings, and four of the women are coming in this afternoon to talk to me and Black. We're probably gonna have to go out for the others. They can't get away from their jobs so easy."
"If we got nine, then there are probably twenty more," Lucas said.
"We're also getting a little more media space than we thought. There hasn't been much good crime news lately, so CNN and Fox picked up on the drawings from the local stations last night, and they're showing them every fifteen minutes all day."
"So I can go home and take a nap?"
"No. You and Del are going to six ad agencies. Gonna look in the art department for buzzcut guys with long dark coats. Also, you got a call from a Terry Marshall-he's a sheriff's deputy from over in Menomonie, in Wisconsin. Dunn County. He's hot to talk. And a guy named Gerry Haack who wants you to call back right away."
Del said, "I've got the list of ad agencies. We can walk to them."
"Let me make the calls, and we'll go," Lucas said.
HE CALLED HAACK first. "What?"
"You told those guys who I was," Haack screamed. The scream was followed by two rattling whack s, as though Haack had banged the receiver against a wooden wall. "They're gonna kill me. I'm gonna lose my job."
"I didn't tell them anything," Lucas said bluntly. "I asked if Aronson was on the corner, and they said no. Then they asked who told me that, and when I wouldn't say, they guessed. And guess who they thought of first?"
"Goddamnit, Davenport, you gotta tell them I wasn't the one. They're gonna pull my nuts off," Haack shouted.
"You've been hanging out with the wrong people," Lucas said. "Your speeder friends might pull your nuts off, but these guys, they're not bad guys. They might give you a little shit, but that's about all."
"Goddamnit, Davenport."
"And Gerry… if you call back, make sure you know what you're talking about, okay? This worked out, no problems. They even gave me a little help. But bad information is usually worse than no information, because we waste time chasing it. Think you can remember that?"
"Goddamnit…"
Lucas hung up, looked at the slip for the Dunn County cop, and poked in the number. A woman answered on the first ring. "I'm returning a call from Terry Marshall," Lucas said.
"I'm afraid he's gone for the day," the woman said. "Who's calling?"
"Lucas Davenport. I'm a deputy chief over in Minneapolis."
"Oh. Okay. Terry's on his way there now. I think he's looking for you."
"You know what it's about?"
"Nope. I just got a note. Says if I need to get him, call your office, he expects to be there by noon unless there's a problem with the snow. He's driving."
"There's snow?"
"Around here there is; it looks like a blizzard. You can see it on the radar all the way to Hudson… Must be past you guys."
"Yeah, it's past here… I'll keep an eye out for your guy." He dropped the phone on the hook and went to get Del. As they were leaving, Marcy got off the phone and said, "I just talked to Mallard in Washington. He says the shrinks are looking at the drawings and pulling on their beards, but don't expect anything before tomorrow."
COOL SPRING DAY, the air damp, walking across town, looking at all the muddy cars, eighty-thousand-dollar Mercedes-Benzes that resembled melting mudbergs, and at the women with their red noses and cheeks and plastic boots. "Kind of interesting, having Marcy as a coordinator," Del said, as he hopped over an icy puddle at a corner curb.
"Could be chief someday, if she works things right," Lucas said, hopping after him. "If she's willing to put up with some bullshit."
"Hate to see her go for lieutenant," Del said. "She'd wind up stuck away somewhere, property crime or something. They'd start pushing her through the rounds."
"Got to do it, if you want to go up," Lucas said.
"You didn't do it," Del said.
"Maybe you didn't notice, but I never went up until I pulled a political job out of my ass," Lucas said.
THE SIX AD agencies took the rest of the morning; hip, smart people in sharp clothes, all with a touch of color, the people looking curiously at the cops. Lucas, in his straight charcoal suit, felt like a Politburo member walking in a flower garden. They showed pictures of Willis in Pulp Fiction, and got shaking heads at four of the agencies, raised eyebrows at two others. They looked at the possibilities presented by these two agencies, without any personal contact, and agreed that they were possible but unlikely.