“So are we going to get the name of the guy who took the piece?” asked Daniel.
Lucas shook his head. “No. I swore. You could probably break it out of Rice, if you want, but you really don’t want to know. He was doing a kindness. He’s a pretty good guy.”
Daniel looked at him for a minute and nodded. “Okay. But if it becomes relevant . . .”
“You might be able to break it out of Rice,” Lucas repeated. “You won’t get it from me.”
There was a moment of silence; then Daniel let it go. “We’ve got another problem,” he said. “Somebody fed a story to Jennifer Carey that we have an attack survivor. I’m going to talk to her in ten minutes and try to put her off. Anybody know anything about who tipped her off?”
Nobody answered.
“We can’t have this,” Daniel said.
One of the detectives cleared his throat. “I might, uh, have an idea about that.”
“What?”
“She shot that documentary on St. Paul cops, the one that ran on PBS? She’s got sources over there you wouldn’t believe.”
“Okay. Maybe that’s it. So now, we don’t talk to St. Paul cops any more than we have to. Be polite, but . . .” He groped for a word. “Reserved.” He looked around. “Anything else?”
Lucas opened his notebook and looked at a short list on the back page.
“I’d like to find out about doctors. Did any of these women see the same guy? Ruiz’ doctor is a woman, but there may be a few male docs going through her gallery. She could have been picked up there, and we ought to check.”
“We can check that,” said Anderson.
“How about those change-of-address cards?”
“That’s a problem,” Anderson said. “We called the post office and they don’t have cards for incoming people. Only people moving out. So if we want to check change-of-addresses for people coming to the Cities, we’d have to take the Cities and all the suburb names and go to every post office in the Southwest and check them.”
“They’re not computerized?”
“Nope. It’s done at the local post offices.”
“Dammit.” Lucas looked at the chief. “What’d it take to check all the major cities down there, ten guys for three weeks? Something like that?”
“Three months is more like it,” said Anderson. “I looked in the phone book and there are about eighty post-office branches just in the Minneapolis area, and that doesn’t include St. Paul and the St. Paul suburbs. So then I looked at a map and the major cities we’d have to check, and I figure maybe two thousand post offices to cover just the bigger cities. And at each one, we’d have to check for all the different cities and suburbs up here. We’d be lucky if a guy could do three or four a day, even with good cooperation from the post offices.”
“Maybe we could work through the post office,” Daniel suggested. “Get a list of all the post offices, work out some kind of form they could fill out, and mail it to them. Explain how important it is, call all these places to make sure they’re doing it . . .”
“If we did it that way, we could maybe do it with a couple, three guys full-time,” said Anderson.
“They wouldn’t have to be cops,” Daniel said. “Work up a form and I’ll talk to the post office. I’ll send a couple of clerks over there to handle it.”
“Driver’s licenses,” said one of the detectives.
“What?”
“If he just moved in, he probably had to get a new driver’s license. They make you surrender your old one when you move in. The Public Safety people over at the state should have a record.”
“Good,” said Daniel. “We need that kind of thinking. Check that.”
The detective nodded.
“Anything else?” he asked. “Lucas?”
Lucas shook his head.
“All right,” said Daniel, “let’s do it.”
“Detective Davenport.”
Lucas turned and saw her walking down the hall, Carla Ruiz, a smile on her face.
“Hi. What are you doing over here?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Divorce stuff. When I moved out of the house, my ex-husband was supposed to sell it and give me half the money. He never sold it and we’re trying to get him moving.”
“Unpleasant.”
“Yeah. It just drags things out. I’ve been over here a half-dozen times. I’m tired of it.”
“Got time for a cup of coffee?” Lucas asked, tilting his head toward the cafeteria.
“Ah, no, I guess not.” She glanced at her watch. “I’ve got to be in the judge’s chambers in twelve minutes.”
“I’ll walk you down to my corner,” Lucas said. They fell in together and started toward the tunnel that led to the county courthouse. “Sorry about that weird call last night.”
“That’s okay. This morning I almost thought it was a dream. Did it help?”
“Oh, I guess. I was thinking maybe a doctor did it. Maybe all the women had the same doctor or something. You just about eliminated that possibility.”
“Bet that made you happy,” she said, smiling again.
“It’s early,” he said. They walked along for a minute and Lucas said, “We might have a problem. Involving you.”
“Oh?” She was suddenly serious.
“One of the television stations got a tip about you. A reporter, Jennifer Carey, is in talking to the chief right now. She wants an interview.”
“Is he going to give her my name?”
“No. He’s going to put her off, but it can’t hold up. Carey’s got good sources over in St. Paul. Sooner or later, she’ll find out, and she’ll harass the hell out of you.”
“So what do we do?”
“We’ve been thinking it might be better to give her an interview and then give the rest of the stations a press conference with you. Get it over with. That way, we can control it. You won’t have people hitting you by surprise.”
She thought it over, her face downcast.
“I don’t trust those people. Especially TV.”
“Carey’s about the best of them,” Lucas said. “She’s a friend of mine, to tell you the truth. I didn’t tell her about you, though. I don’t know where she got the information. Maybe from St. Paul.”
“Would she really be okay?”
“She’d probably do the most sensitive job. After it was done, we’d get you out of town for a few days. When everything cooled off, you could slide back in quietly and probably be okay.”
“Can I think about it?” Carla asked.
“Sure. The chief will probably call you about it.”
“If I went out of town, would the city pay? It’s not like I’m rich.”
“I don’t know. You could ask the chief. Or if you want to, you can stay in my cabin. I’ve got a place on a lake up north, in Wisconsin. It’s a pretty place, quiet, out-of-the-way.”
“That might be okay,” she said. “Let me think.”
“Sure.”
There was a long moment of silence which Lucas broke by asking, “So how long have you been divorced?”
“Almost three years. He’s a photographer. He’s not a bad guy. He even has some talent, but he doesn’t use it. He doesn’t do anything. He just sits around. Other people work, he sits. One of the reasons I’m so anxious to get the money out of the house is that it was my money.”
“Ah. Good reason.”
“I’m looking forward to Aerosmith tonight,” she said, “I mean, if it’s still on.”
“Sure it’s on,” Lucas said. He stopped at a branching corridor. “I turn here. See you at six?”
“Yes. And I’ll think about the TV thing.” She walked on, half-turned to wave, and kept going. Nice, he thought as he watched her go.
Mary Rice was not very bright. She sat slumped on a kitchen chair, looking nervously at Lucas and Harrison Sloan, the second detective assigned to talk to her. Sloan had the ingratiating manner of a vacuum-cleaner salesman.
“It’s very essentially important that we get a complete list from you,” he purred, scooting his chair an inch closer to Rice’s. He looked like a gynecologist on an afternoon soap opera, Lucas decided. “We would like to get a calendar or something, so we could figure out week by week and day by day who your husband saw.”