So they had all been in the courthouse. The gun had come from City Hall, through a guy who hung around the courthouse. Lucas walked down the hall to Anderson’s office.
“So what does it mean?” Anderson asked. “He’s picking them up right here?”
“Picking them out, maybe,” Lucas said. “Three of them were involved in courts and would have court files. Our man could be researching them through that.”
“I’ll check on who pulled the files,” Anderson said.
“Do that.”
“So what do you think?” Anderson asked.
“It was too easy,” Lucas said. “This cat don’t fall that easy.”
Aerosmith was fine. Lucas sat back in his seat, watching with amusement as Carla bounced up and down with the music, turning to him, laughing, reaching a fist overhead with the other fifteen thousand screaming fans to shake it at the stage . . . .
She asked him up for coffee.
“That’s the most fun I’ve had since . . . I don’t know, a long time,” she said as she put two cups of water in the microwave.
Lucas was prowling the studio, looking at her fiber work. “How long have you been doing this?” he asked.
“Five, six years. I painted first, then got into sculpture, and then kind of drifted into this. My grandmother had a loom, I’ve known about weaving since I was a kid.”
“How about this sculpture?” he asked, gesturing at the squidlike hangings.
“I don’t know. I think they were mostly an effort to catch a trend, you know? They seemed okay at the time, but now I think I was playing games with myself. It’s all kind of derivative. I’m pretty much back to straight weaving now.”
“Tough racket. Art, I mean.”
“That isn’t the half of it, brother,” she said. The microwave beeped and she took the cups out, dumped a spoon of instant gourmet coffee into each cup, and stirred.
“Cinnamon coffee,” she said, handing him a cup.
He took a sip. “Hot. Good, though.”
“I wanted to ask you something,” she said.
“Go.”
“I was thinking I did pretty well when I fought this guy off,” she said.
“You did.”
“But I’m still scared. I know what you said the other night, about him not coming back. But I was lucky the first time. He wasn’t ready for me. If he comes back, I might not be so lucky.”
“So?”
“I’m wondering about a gun.”
He thought about it for a minute, then nodded.
“It’s worth thinking about,” he said. “Most people, I’d say no. When most people buy a gun, they instantly become its most likely victim. The next-most-likely victims are the spouse and kids. Then the neighbors. But you don’t have a spouse or kids and you’re not likely to get in a brawl with your neighbors. And I think you’re probably cool enough to use one right.”
“So I ought to get one?”
“I can’t tell you that. If you do, you’d be the most likely victim, at least statistically. But with some people, statistics are nonsense. If you’re not the type of person to have stupid accidents, if you’re not careless, if you’re not suicidal or think a gun’s a toy, then you might want to get one. There is a chance that this guy will come back. You’re the only living witness to an attack.”
“I’d want to know what to get,” Carla said. She took a sip of coffee. “I couldn’t spend too much. And I’d want some help learning to use it.”
“I could loan you one, if you like, just until we get the guy,” Lucas said. “Let me see your hand. Hold it up.”
She held her hand up, fingers spread, palm toward him. He pressed his palm against hers and looked at the length of his finger overlap.
“Small hands,” he said. “I’ve got an older Charter Arms .38 special that ought to fit just about right. And we can get some semiwadcutter loads so you don’t get too much penetration and kill all your neighbors if you have to use it.”
“What?”
“Your walls here are plaster and lath,” Lucas explained. He leaned back and rapped on a wall, and little crumbs of plaster dropped off. “If you use too powerful a round, you’ll punch one long hole through the whole building. And anybody standing in the way.”
“I didn’t think of that.” She looked worried.
“We’ll fix you up. You live about a hundred yards from the St. Paul police indoor range. I shoot over there in competition. I could probably fix it to give you a few lessons.”
“Let me sleep on it,” she said. “But I think so.”
When he was leaving, she closed the door except for a tiny crack and said as he started down the hall, “Hey, Davenport?”
He stopped. “Yes?”
“Are you ever going to ask me out again?”
“Sure. If you’re willing to put up with me.”
“I’m willing,” she said, and eased the door closed. Lucas whistled on his way to the elevator, and she leaned against the door, listening to the sound of him and smiling to herself.
Late that night, Lucas lay in the spare bedroom and looked at the charts pinned to the wall. After a while he stood and wrote at the bottom of the killer’s chart, “Hangs around courthouse.”
CHAPTER
8
He was delighted by the newspapers.
He knew he shouldn’t save them. If a cop saw them . . . But then, if a cop saw them, here in his apartment, it would be too late. They would know. And how could he not save them? The inch-high letters were a joy to the soul.
The Star-Tribune had SERIAL KILLER SLAYS 3 CITIES WOMEN. The Pioneer Press was bigger and better: SERIAL KILLER STALKS TWIN CITIES WOMEN. He liked the word “stalks.” It reflected a sense of a continuing process, rather than a historical one; and work that was planned, instead of random.
Purely by chance, on the night the story broke, he saw a nine-o’clock newsbreak promoting it. The station’s top reporter, a tall blonde in a trench coat, rapped the harsh word “murder” into a microphone set up outside City Hall. An hour later, he taped TV3’s ten-o’clock news report, which replayed key parts of the press conference with the chief of police.
The conference was chaotic. The chief was terse, straightforward. So were the first few questions. Then somebody raised his voice, cutting off a question from another reporter, and the whole conference reeled out of control. At the end, newspaper photographers were standing on chairs in front of the television, firing their strobes at the chief and the half-dozen other cops in the room.
It took his breath away. He watched the tape a half-dozen times, considering every nuance. If only they’d run the whole press conference, he thought; that would be the responsible thing. After thinking about it for a moment or two, he called the station. The lines were busy and it took twenty minutes to get through. When he finally did, the operator put him on hold for a moment, then came back to tell him there were no plans “at the present time” to run the entire conference.
“Might that change?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. She sounded harassed. “It might. About a million people are calling. You oughta check the Good-Morning Show tomorrow. If they decide to run it, they’ll say then.”
When he got off the phone, the maddog got down on his knees with the VCR instructions and figured out how to program the time controls. He’d want to tape all the major newscasts from now on.
Before he went to bed, he watched the tape one last time, the part with Lucas Davenport. Davenport had been shown in a brief cut, sitting cross-legged in a folding chair. He was wearing jeans and an expensive-looking sport coat. Called the smartest detective on the police force. Working independently.
He got up early for the Good-Morning Show, but there was nothing but a rehash of the news from the night before. Later, when he was reading the morning papers, he found a short sidebar on Lucas Davenport in the St. Paul paper, with a small photograph. Killed five people? A games inventor? Wonderful. The maddog examined the photo closely. A cruel jawline, he decided. A hard man.