Broken Prey (21 page)

LUCAS WRENCHED THE CONVERSATION back on course: “So give me two names,” he said. “Who are two people most likely to have been taken over by the Big Three? Include women—do women work around them?”

“When they’re not in isolation,” West said. He twitched, said, “
Don’t
,” and pulled away from his invisible uncle, tears coming to his eyes. Lucas looked away, but then West went on, as if there’d been no interruption. “Okay: Danny Anderson. He got out a couple of months before I did, and he was pretty . . . dim. Like you could take him over.”

Sloan stirred, and asked, “Who else?”

West scratched his head with a fork and finally said, “You know what you’re asking is, who knows those guys? The answer is, lots of people. But I don’t know anybody who was likely to get taken over. I tried to stay away from them, and so did everybody else. I mean, those guys weren’t just nuts, they were
nasty.
They’d yell shit like ‘Hey, ugly boy, hey pimple boy, your dick as big as that pimple on your nose?’ And Biggie was aways yelling at guys to show their asses. Or Taylor would yell at some woman that he had some grease for her pussy, and he’d have like a handful of come. I mean, who is gonna get taken over by somebody like that? When you’re trying to stay away from them?”

Sloan said to Lucas, “Dan Anderson’s been in California since two days after he got out, living with an aunt. He had to check in with the authorities out there because it was a sex crime, and they’ve tagged him ever since. He’s not the guy.”

West was disappointed: “Never liked him. He was an ass wipe.”

“So you got no names,” Lucas said to West. “You’re not helping us much.”

West was drinking a Budweiser through a straw. “No. That’s not right. I got about a million names. I knew everybody in the place. But I don’t know which one it is. Like I said, it all seems wrong to me. Hardly anybody hung around those ass wipes.”

They all sat there for a minute, then West said, “What time is it?”

“Two o’clock,” Lucas said.

“If somebody gives me a ride, I could still make it over to my light.”

OUT ON THE SIDEWALK, squinting in the bright sunlight, West burped beer fumes and said, “Sorry I couldn’t help. This guy sounds like a serious ass wipe.”

“Ah,” Lucas said and stepped away.

“You know, I do got an idea, when I think about it. Ones who might have got their brains changed,” West said. He said it with the self-conscious smile of a bad comedian about to deliver a worse joke.

“Who?” Sloan said.

“Like O’Donnell and Jimenez and Grant and Hart and Sennet and Halburton and Grosz and Steinhammer . . . those are the guys who hung around with the Big Three all the time, talking to them. Docs and guards.”

LUCAS STARED AT HIM for a long beat, then looked at Sloan and said, quietly, “Oh, shit.”

Sloan said. “No way.”

Lucas nodded: “Way. Ah, Jesus, Biggie told us, and I missed it.”

“What?” Del asked.

“What?” West said after him. His eyes were sharp and blue: no sign of vagueness now.

Lucas said to Del, “Take Mike over to Dinky Town or get him a cab or something. Sloan and I gotta talk. Here.” He dug into his pocket, took out two twenties and a ten, handed them to West. “Catch a cab, take a bus, I don’t care, that makes your nut for the day. We gotta go.”

LUCAS HEADED OFF, hurrying, Sloan jogging after him to catch up. They’d left Lucas’s truck at the mission. Sloan caught up with him and said, “Wait, wait, wait—you think a staff member?”

“I think it’s possible,” Lucas said. “It’s one thing we haven’t looked at. Goddamnit. When we were talking to O’Donnell and Hart, they made a big deal out of how nothing goes into the cells and nothing comes out. Those guys are supposed to be super-isolated. Total information blackout.”

“Yeah. So?”

“So Biggie yelled something about arresting the killer for not having a hunting license. Taylor knew it, too, that there’d been a hunter-oriented killing. And they didn’t try to get any details out of us. You know why? Because they had the details. And the staff was specifically
forbidden
to talk to them about any of the crimes, right?”

“Yeah, but . . .” Sloan frowned.

“And down in the isolation wing, nobody goes in but staff.”

Sloan thought about it, then said, “You know lockups, Lucas. People tip other people off, even when they don’t mean to. Supper comes, Taylor asks the guy if the hunter has killed a woman yet. The guy looks away, and Taylor
knows
 . . .”

“That’s a possibility,” Lucas admitted. “But the way they were behaving . . . C’mon, Sloan. Think about it.
They knew all about it.
This wasn’t a tip.”

Sloan rubbed his head, looked back toward the disappearing figures of Del and West. “Jesus. I hate to think . . . they’re doctors.”

“Maybe a guard. Maybe a food guy. But we’ve hit a blank wall trying to find another candidate among the inmates . . .”

“Yeah . . .”

“We gotta go back there. We’ve got to look at tapes for the last two days.”

“Goddamn,” Sloan said, more to himself than to Lucas. “Is this
possible?
”

18

DR. CALE WAS WAITING in his office. Their escort dropped them, and Cale shut the door. “All right: What’s going on?”

“We need to see the tapes for the isolation cells for the past two days,” Sloan said.

Cale rocked on his feet, his hands in his jacket pocket: “Why?”

“We want to see who’s been talking to the Big Three,” Lucas said.

Cale drifted down his wall of books and papers, looked at a plaque, then said, sadly, “Nobody talks to them but staff.”

Lucas said, “That’s why we need to see them.”

Cale continued drifting along the books, turned the corner at his desk, sat in his swivel chair, and turned until his back was toward them, and he was looking out the window at the Minnesota woods and the river valley beyond. “You think a member of the staff might be passing them information?”

“Something like that,” Lucas said, his voice cool, neutral.

Cale hadn’t become head of the hospital by being stupid: he swiveled to face them, took off his glasses, rubbed one eye with the heel of a hand, and said, “Oh, boy. Who are you looking at? Grant?”

“Why do you say Grant?” Lucas asked.

“He’s the new guy. Been here less than a year. The other guys have been here longer.”

“Grant would be interesting,” Lucas said. “Any reason to think . . . ?”

“He sometimes seems a little naïve . . . uncertain of what he’s doing. He seems to struggle,” Cale said. “But that’s often the sign of a good therapist—a guy who doesn’t fall into routine and cliché.”

“Is he good?”

“He
is
good,” Cale said. “He has a fine touch with patients, especially the lost souls. You know, the quiet ones, the helpless ones—well, like Mike West. And I have to say, he came highly recommended.”

“Doesn’t have to be a therapist,” Lucas said. “Could be anybody who’s had intimate contact with the Big Three.”

“That’s a lot of people. Until they went into isolation, at least. Dozens of people, including staff members, in here,” Cale said. “Then there are outsiders. We contract for some medical services, for example, and Biggie, in particular, has been having problems. He’s a borderline diabetic, he’s got circulatory problems, and his PSAs are out of sight. He’s gonna lose his prostate in the next few years.”

“We need a list of the outside docs,” Lucas said. “We still want to see the tapes.”

“Okay. Let me call Security. They can put you in the monitoring room and run them right there.”

“We could use a little privacy,” Lucas said. “But we’d also like somebody who can identify the people going in and out.”

“I’ll get you Leon Jansen. He’s one of our security people, knows everybody, and he can keep his mouth shut.”

“And he doesn’t have access to Biggie.”

“No. Not since they went into isolation, anyway.”

CALE CALLED JANSEN on a voice pager; he showed up a couple of minutes later, a tall black man with a hard face and close-cropped hair. He wore a small green crescent moon on a chain around his neck, which Lucas recognized as some kind of Muslim symbol. Cale introduced Lucas and Sloan and explained the problem. Jansen said, “Most unusual. Well. Come this way.”

“Wish I could wish you good luck,” Cale said as they went out the door.

Lucas and Sloan followed Jansen back out through the hospital, toward the security wall. “Are you conversant with our security structure?” Jansen asked. His language was formal, almost academic.

“We’ve been through the wall a few times . . .”

“The cage is essentially a booth with armored glass on all sides. From the outside, you have to go through the barred door to get to the security booth. The door closes, and then you go through the scanner process . . .”

“We did all that,” Sloan began.

Jansen ignored him and continued. “When you’re cleared through the scanner, the person manning the booth opens the interior barred door, and you can proceed. The point here is, you can’t open both doors at once. There’s an electronic interlock that won’t allow it. The people in the booth are completely isolated from the outside. While they’re in there, it would take military munitions to get them out. Gas won’t work, guns won’t work.”

“And that’s where you monitor the cells from,” Lucas said.

“Yes.”

“Could the guys inside the booth talk to the inmates through the intercom system?”

“Of course. And they do,” Jansen said. “They’re on the tape.”

“Could somebody turn off the tape?”

“Could . . . but it’d be apparent in the time code, and the recorder notes when the tape is taken down. Also, the cage is about the size of two bedrooms, and there are always at least three people in there. You couldn’t have a conversation that’s not overheard.” He put a finger along the side of his nose, like Santa Claus, thinking, then said, “But you know, given human nature . . . the monitoring room is at the far end, and there’s a door that closes between the monitoring area and the main booth. You might find some excuse to close the door, and then talk to an inmate . . . but I would find that odd.”

“Huh.”

THE EXTERIOR DOOR slid open as they came up to it. They stepped through it, into the middle space where the cage was, and the door closed behind them. Cale had called ahead, and when both the interior and exterior barred doors were closed and locked, one of the people inside the cage popped a door and Jansen led them inside.

“We need to look at some tapes, people,” Jansen said to the three people in the booth, two women and a man. “Dr. Cale has probably talked to you, so you know that we’re required to view them privately.”

“What’re you looking for?” the male guard asked.

“Don’t know,” Sloan said genially. “We’re looking at the Big Three, and anything would help.”

“This way,” Jansen said. He took them into a second small room, where one wall held three dozen small monitoring screens and a couple of larger ones. Only half of them were turned on.

“We monitor the isolation rooms constantly, and tape them. We also monitor what we call ‘watch rooms,’ where we put people who might be at some risk of attempting suicide, and also the high-risk individuals, like the Big Three,” Jansen said. “The rest of the cameras are scanners and are meant to pick up disturbances in the hallways and recreational areas and so on.”

“We’re interested in the Big Three, going back three days,” Lucas said.

BY FAST-FORWARDING, they got through the tapes for the Big Three in two hours. The three had no privacy at all: they used the toilet, masturbated, exercised, slept, screamed, ate before the unblinking camera eye. At first, it carried a voyeuristic fascination; two days in, they just wanted it to end. The boredom was grinding, and Lucas began to empathize with Chase’s wish to die. Lucas looked for seams in the tape, where it might have shut down; but it was seamless. Nobody, as far as they could tell, had said anything about the Peterson killing.

“Could it be a code word, telling them that the killing was done?” Sloan asked. Jansen glanced sideways at him, an idiot glance, and Sloan said, defensively, “All right, it’s not a code word.”

“There’s gotta be something,” Lucas said. He’d written down a list of names of the people who’d gone through the security area; there were thirty of them.

“Every single person you’ve seen in there—half the staff, I didn’t know that many people went in and out, to tell you the truth—but every single person knows he’s on tape,” Jansen said.

“You can’t see them very well, unless they’re right up against the viewing panel,” Lucas said. “Is there another angle?”

“Yeah, we have one of the scanning cameras at the end of the hall.”

“Let’s see that.”

They spent ten minutes fast-forwarding through three days of the staff coming and going. “I keep thinking, the
food
,” Sloan said. “It’s the only thing that consistently goes into the cells.”

They thought about that for a moment, and then Jansen said, “Suppose one of the guys delivering the food wrote down what happened, like a little strip of paper, and put it in the mashed potatoes . . .”

“Let’s look at the guys bring in the food.”

Seven different staff members delivered food over the three days. The food went into the cell on a kind of metallic lazy Susan device. “Wouldn’t even have to put it in the food—you could just drop it on the tray when you put the food in the slot,” Sloan said. “The cameras aren’t so good that you could pick that up.”

They watched the three men eating, saw nothing out of the ordinary, except that Biggie had bad manners, eating with his hands as much as with his spoon.

“Okay,” Lucas said, when they were done. He was discouraged. “Maybe this isn’t it. Goddamnit, I thought I was on to something.”

“Want me to go down and drop Peterson’s name on Biggie? Or on all three of them?” Jansen asked. “I could mention ‘a Peterson thing’ in passing, see if we get any reaction.”

“It’s an idea,” Lucas said, considering him. “You’re not going to get anything from Chase, though. He was hypermanic this morning.”

“He’s gone over the top and is on the way back down,” Jansen said. “If I go now, I might catch him before he crashes. You could watch from here, in real time.”

Lucas nodded. “Let’s do it.”

CHASE GAVE IT AWAY. Jansen rolled the observation window back and said, “How’re you doing? Sleepy?”

“Man, I’m dying,” Chase whimpered. “I’m going out. I’m like a light, I’m going out.” He put his hands on both sides of his head and squeezed: “Why am I like this, Mr. Jansen?”

“We don’t know, man.” There was a note of sympathy in Jansen’s voice, and it resonated.

Chase said, still holding his face, “If I could just, if I could just . . . If I could get out of here just for a couple of hours . . .” He sounded desperate, like a man who needed water.

“That’s gonna be tough, since the Peterson thing. The director is adamant about keeping the three of you under wraps. That might not seem fair . . .”

Lucas liked the way he did it: in passing, as part of another idea, the raisin in the rice pudding. Chase’s hands came down; his face was brighter, and his thin lips turned up in a joker’s smile. “You know about that? How he got her . . .”

“I’ve heard the usual stories,” Jansen said, noncommittally. He looked over his shoulder, as though he shouldn’t be talking about it.

“So cool. He fucked her all night. He had her tied up, he had this rope around her neck like a fuckin’ bridle, he fucked her all night. Six, seven, eight times. The bitch could hardly walk in the morning. He took her up there, rolled her out of the car, naked as the day. Then he says, ‘You got a hundred yards and then I’m coming.’ ”

“She ran, but there was no place to go, so she ran into the woods.” Chase was leaning on the viewing glass now, face only inches from Jansen’s.

“She was screaming: but there was nobody out there. He caught her by this big tree, and she tried to run around it, keep the tree between them. Then he caught her and there was a creek and she fell into it, and that’s when he got her; right on her shoulder blades. She had this long black hair and he pulled it up and zip with the razor. Then you know what he did? He did like this victory scream, he screamed . . .”

And Chase screamed, his head thrown back, his mouth open, his eyes glazed . . . and then he staggered backwards onto his bed, as though he’d been struck by lightning, his tongue out now, his body vibrating, words bubbling out, all nonsense.

Jansen disappeared from the camera view, and they could hear his voice from down the hall. Calling for help?

Sloan said, “That’s not something you see every day.”

THEY WERE BACK in Cale’s office: “They got the message somehow. In detail. There’s nothing on the tape, so it wasn’t oral. It must have been written and delivered with the food,” Lucas said. “We’ve got a list of the people who were around when food was delivered. Seven orderlies, three therapists. There were also two doctors and two more therapists in and out of the hallway, who looked or spoke to the Big Three at one time or another.”

“Goddamnit. I can hear them building the crucifix, up at the Capitol,” Cale said. He spun his chair, looking out his window. “And it’s so hard to believe. I’ve known Dr. Hart for ten years, and he’s a fine man. So is O’Donnell, despite all the hair and the hip bullshit. Dr. Sennet has been controversial sometimes, but he’s a good therapist.”

“I’m most interested in O’Donnell, Sennet, and Halburton,” Lucas said. “They were both nearby when the food deliveries were made. I mean, right there.”

Cale spun back to face them and shook his head. “I can make one suggestion: we could hope that whatever went into the cell stayed there. They could have flushed it, or eaten it, but sometimes . . . people like this will hold on to something as an artifact. A trophy. If we lock them down and shake down the cells, we might come up with one of the notes. That might give us something.”

“Do that,” Lucas said. “There’s nothing we can do to help you—but I want the personnel files on those fourteen people. I’ll need to copy them and take them back to St. Paul; and I’d like to get copies of the tapes, if I could. I don’t know—maybe we missed something, because we were going through them too fast.”

“I’ll get it started,” Cale said. He pushed himself heavily out of his chair and said, “God Almighty.”

LUCAS CALLED THE Blue Earth County sheriff’s office and gave them the information about the murder having been done in a creek, in a place remote enough that Peterson could scream and not be heard; but because of the search for a white car, Lucas couldn’t believe that the killer would drive far with the body.

So: a creek close to the point where the body was found.

That done, he joined Sloan in Xeroxing the fourteen personnel files, while Cale organized the shakedown. They were halfway through with the paper when Cale came back to say that they were doing all three cells simultaneously, and included body-cavity searches.

“We’re taking out every piece of cloth in there, including the mattresses, all the books, the clothing, everything. We’ll shred all of it.”

“How long?”

“Another hour. We’ve got six people working on it. Biggie was very unhappy. Taylor acted like he didn’t care, and Chase is gone. I’m thinking of moving him to the medical ward.”