Tangled. And interesting. Without realizing it, Lucas began whistling, almost silently, under his breath.
CHAPTER 10
The briefing room stank of cigarette smoke, nervous armpits and hot electronics. Twenty reporters crowded the front of the room, Lucas and a dozen more cops hung in the back. Carly Bancroft's early-morning report on the second murder had touched off a panic among the other stations. The press conference had started just after ten o'clock.
"Any questions?" Frank Lester's forehead was beaded with sweat. Lester, the deputy chief for investigations, put down the prepared statement and looked unhappily around the room.
"Lester in the lion's den," Sloan muttered to Lucas. He stuck a Camel in the corner of his mouth. "Got a light?"
Lucas took a book of matches out of his pocket, struck one and held it for Sloan's cigarette. "If you were Loverboy, would you come in?"
Sloan shook his head as he exhaled a lungful of blue smoke. "Fuck no. But then, I'm a cop. I know what treacherous assholes we are. I don't even know if I would've mentioned Loverboy in the thing…"
"About Mrs. Bekker's… friend, have you done any voice analysis on the nine-one-one tapes?" a reporter asked Lester.
"Well, we've got nothing to match them to…"
"We hear you're calling him 'Loverboy.'…"
"Not me, but I've heard that," Lester said grimly.
"Could the killer be going for women in the arts?" a reporter called out. She worked for a radio station and carried a microphone that looked like a Ruger Government Model.22-caliber target pistol. The microphone was aimed at a point between Lester's eyes.
"We don't know," he answered. "Mrs. Bekker would only be peripherally in the arts, I'd say. But it could be-there's no way to tell. Like I said, we're not even sure it's the same perpetrator."
"But you said…"
"It probably is…"
From the front row, a newspaper reporter in a rumpled tan suit: "How many serial killers have we had now? In the last five years?"
"One a year? I don't know."
"One? There were at least six with the Crows."
"I meant one series each year."
"Is that how you count them?"
"I don't know how you count them," Lester barked.
"By series," a newspaper reporter called.
"Bullshit." Television disagreed. "By the killers."
From the back of the room, a radio reporter with a large tapedeck: "When do you expect him to hit again?"
"How're we gonna know that?" Lester asked, a testy note creeping into his voice. "We told you what we knew."
"You're supposed to be running the investigation," the reporter snapped back.
"I am running the investigation, and if you'd ever worked in a market bigger than a phone booth, you'd know we can't always find these guys overnight in the big city…"
There was a thread of laughter, and Sloan said dryly, "He's losing it."
"What the f f f… What's that supposed to mean?" the reporter sputtered. The TV cameraman behind him was laughing. TV people ranked radio people, so laughing was all right.
"What's 'fff' supposed to mean?" Lester asked. He turned away and pointed at a woman wearing glasses the size of compact discs. "You."
"What precautions should women in the Twin Cities take?" She had an improbably smooth delivery, with great round O's, as though she were reading for a play.
"Don't let anybody in your house that you're not sure of," Lester said, struggling now. "Keep your windows locked…"
"Who tipped Three, that's what I want to know," another reporter shouted from the back of the room. Carly Bancroft yawned, tried not very hard to suppress a grin, then deliberately scratched her ribs.
When Daniel had scheduled the press conference, he'd expected the police reporters from the dailies and second-stringers from the television stations. With the Armistead killing, everything had changed. He'd passed the press conference to Lester, he said, in an attempt to diminish its importance. It hadn't worked: media trucks were double-parked in the street, providing direct feeds to the various stations. City Hall secretaries were gawking at the media stars, the media stars were checking their hairsprays, and the TV3 anchorman himself, tan, fit, with a touch of gray at the temples and a tie that matched his eyes, showed up to do some reaction shots against the conference. His station had the beat; he had nothing to do with it, but the glory was his, and his appearance gave weight to the proceedings.
The conference started angry and got angrier. Lester hadn't wanted to do it, and every reporter but one had been beaten on it. By the end, the Channel Eight reporter was standing on a chair, shouting at Lester. When she stood on the chair, the cops around her sat down; she wore a very short black leather skirt.
"I guess you gotta get what you can get," Sloan said, laughing. Lester had fled, and Sloan, Lucas and Harmon Anderson walked together down the hall toward Homicide.
"Department full of fuckin' perverts," Anderson said, adding, "You could see the crack of her ass, if you sat just right."
"Jesus Christ, Harmon, I think that's sexual abuse in the third degree," Lucas said, laughing with Sloan.
"You know why they've got such great voices, the TV people?" Anderson asked, going off in a new direction. "Because they reverberate in the space where most people have brains…"
Swanson came slouching down the hall toward them, heavyset, glittering gold-rimmed glasses. "Did I miss it?"
"You missed it," Sloan confirmed. "Anderson got his first look at a woman's ass in twenty years."
"How about Bekker?" Lucas asked.
"Not a thing. We got his ass in here first thing, asked him if he wanted a lawyer, he said no. He said he'd ask if he needed one. So we said, What'd you do? He said he spent the late afternoon working at home, and the evening watching television. We asked what he was watching, and he told us. He was, like, watching CNBC in the afternoon, some kind of stock market shows, and then the news… He went out around nine o'clock to get a bite to eat. We got that confirmed…"
"How about phone calls?"
"He talked to one guy on the phone, a guy from the hospital, but that was late, way after the killing."
"Who called who?" Lucas asked. The four detectives circled around each other as Swanson talked.
"The other guy called in…" Swanson said.
"Could have a VCR, tape the shows," Anderson suggested.
"He does have a VCR," Swanson said. "I don't know about taping the shows. Anyway, we got his statement, and shit, there was nothing to say. He didn't know Armistead, doesn't even know if he'd ever seen her on the stage… He was just… There wasn't anything there. We sent him home."
"You believe him?" Lucas asked.
Swanson's forehead furrowed. "I don't know. When you're leaning on a guy, like we been leaning on Bekker, scouting around his neighborhood, calling his neighbors, all that… and something happened that could clear him, you'd think he'd be peeing all over himself in a rush to prove he didn't do it. He wasn't like that. He was cool. Answered all the questions like he was reading off of file cards."
"Keep up the pressure," Anderson said.
Swanson shook his head. "That ain't gonna work with this guy. I'm starting to think-he's an asshole, but he could be innocent."
They were still talking about it when Jennifer Carey turned the corner.
"Lucas…" Her voice was feminine, clear, professional.
Lucas turned in instant recognition. Sloan, Anderson and Swanson turned with him, then moved away down the corridor, furtively watching, as Lucas walked toward her.