“Lucas?”
“Yeah?”
“Please don’t come back,” she said, and shut the window.
He heard from her next a year and a half later, a week before graduation. She called to tell him that she was entering a convent.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I have a vocation.”
Years later, and two days after Lucas had killed his first man as a police officer, she called him. She was a shrink of sorts, she said. Could she help? No, not really, but he would like to see her. He took her to the ice-cream shop. Professor of psychology, she said. Fascinating. Watching minds work.
Did she have a vocation? Lucas wondered. Or was it her face, the cross that she bore? He couldn’t ask, but when they left the shop she took his arm and smiled and said, “I have a vocation, Lucas.”
A year later, he sold his first game and it was a hit. The Star-Tribune did a feature story about it and she called him again. She was a game player, she said. There was a games group at the college that regularly got together . . .
After that, he saw her virtually every week. Elle and another nun, a grocer and a bookie, both from St. Paul, a defense attorney from Minneapolis, and a student or two from St. Anne’s or the University of Minnesota made up a regular war-gaming group. They met in the gym, played-in an old unused room off what had been a girls’ locker room. They furnished the room with a half-dozen chairs, a Ping-Pong table for the gaming maps, a used overhead light donated by a pool parlor, and a bad stereo that Lucas got on the street.
They met on Thursdays. They were currently working through Lucas’ grandest creation, a replay of the Battle of Gettysburg that he would never be able to sell commercially. It was simply too complex. He’d had to program a portable computer to figure results.
Elle was General Lee.
Lucas parked the Porsche just down the hill from Albertus Magnus Hall and walked through the falling leaves up the hill toward the entrance. As he reached the bottom of the steps, she came out. The face was the same; so were the eyes, grave and gray, but always with a spark of humor.
“He can’t stop,” she told him as they strolled down the sidewalk. “The maddog falls into a category that cop shrinks call the sadistic killer. He’s doing it for the pleasure of it. He’s not hearing commands from God, he’s not being ordered by voices. He’s driven, all right, but he’s not insane in the sense that he’s out of control. He is very much in control, in the conventional sense of the word. He is aware of what he’s doing and what the penalties are. He makes plans and provides for contingencies. He may be quite intelligent.”
“How does he pick his victims?”
She shrugged. “Could be a completely adventitious encounter. Maybe he uses the phone book. But most likely he sees them personally, and whether he realizes it or not, he’s probably picking a type. There may well have been an encounter of some kind when he was young, with his mother, with a female friend of his mother’s . . . somebody whose sexual identity has become fixed in his mind.”
“These women are small and dark—dark hair, dark eyes. One is a Mexican-American . . .”
“Exactly. So when he encounters one of these types, she somehow becomes fixed in his mind. Why it’s that particular one, when there are so many possibilities, I just don’t know. In any case, after he’s chosen her, he can’t escape her. His fantasies are built around her. He becomes obsessive. Eventually . . . he goes after her. Acts out the fantasies.”
At the ice-cream parlor, she ordered her usual, a hot-fudge with a maraschino cherry. A few of the customers glanced curiously at them, the nun in her black habit, the tall, well-dressed male who was so obviously her friend. They ignored the passing attention.
“How long would it take him to fix on a particular woman? Would it be an instantaneous thing?”
“Could be. More likely, though, it would be some kind of encounter. An exposure, a conversation. He might make some kind of assessment of her vulnerability. Remember, this may be a very intelligent man. Eventually, though, it goes beyond his control. She becomes fixed in his mind, and he can no more escape her image than she can escape his attack.”
“Jesus. Uh, sorry.”
She smiled at him. “You just didn’t get enough of it, you know? If you’d stayed at St. Agnes for another two, three years, who knows? Maybe it’d be Father Davenport.”
Lucas laughed. “That’s a hair-raising thought,” he said. “Can you see me running the little ankle-biters through First Communion?”
“Yes,” she said. “In fact, I can.”
The phone was ringing when Lucas got back to his office. It was Carla. She thought the shoes on the maddog were the Nike Air model, but she was not sure which variation.
“But the bubble thing on the sole is right. There wasn’t anything else like it,” she said.
“Thanks, Carla. See you tomorrow.”
Lucas spent ten minutes calling discount shoe stores, getting prices, and then walked up the stairs to the homicide office. Anderson was sitting in his cubbyhole, looking at papers.
“Am I set on the meeting?” Lucas asked.
“Yep. Just about everybody will be there,” Anderson said. He was a shabby man, too thin, with nicotine-stained teeth and small porcine eyes. His necktie was too wide and usually ended in the middle of his stomach, eight inches above his belt. His grammar was bad and his breath often smelled of sausage. None of it meant much to his colleagues. Anderson had a better homicide-clearance rate than any other man in the department. On his own time he wrote law-enforcement computer-management programs that sold across the country. “There’ll be four missing, but they’re pretty marginal anyway. You can talk to them later if you want.”
“What about the union?”
“We cooled them out. The union guy will give a statement before you talk.”
“That sounds good,” Lucas said. He took out his notebook. “I’ve got some stuff I want to get in the data base.”
“Okay.” Anderson swiveled in his chair and punched up his IBM. “Go ahead.”
“He’s very light-complexioned, which means he’s probably blond or sandy-haired. Probably an office worker or a clerk of some kind, maybe a professional, and reasonably well-off. May have been born in the Southwest. New Mexico, like that. Arizona. Texas. May have moved up here fairly recently.”
Anderson punched it into the computer and when he was done, looked up with a frown. “Jesus, Davenport, where’d you get this?”
“Talking to Ruiz. They’re guesses, but I think they’re good. Now. Have somebody go around to the post offices and pull the change-of-address forms for anybody coming in from those areas. Add Oklahoma. Everybody who moved into the seven-county metro area from those places.”
“There could be hundreds of them.”
“Yeah, but we can eliminate a lot of them right off the bat. Too old, female, black, blue-collar, originally from here and moving back . . . Besides, hundreds are better than millions, which is what we got now. Once we get a list, we might be able to cross-reference against some other lists, if we get any more.”
Anderson pursed his lips and then nodded. “I’ll do it,” he said. “We got nothing else.”
They met in the same room where the press conference had been held the night before, thirty-odd cops and civilians, an assistant city attorney, three union officials. They stopped talking when Lucas entered the room.
“All right,” he said, standing at the front. “This is serious. We want the union to talk first.”
One of the union men stood, cleared his throat, looked at a piece of paper, folded it, and stuck it back in his coat pocket.
“Normally, the union would object to what’s going to happen here. But we talked it over with the chief and I guess we’ve got no complaint. Not at this point. Nobody is being accused of anything. Nobody’s going to be forced to do anything. We think for the good of the force that everybody ought to hear what Davenport’s going to say.”
He sat down and the cops looked back at Lucas.
“What I’m going to say is this,” Lucas said, scanning the crowd. “Somebody took a piece out of the property room. It was a Smith, Model 15. From the David L. Losse box. You remember the Losse case, it was the guy who lit up his kid? Said it was an accident? Went down on manslaughter?” Several heads nodded.