Lucas turned and looked at him. "He said right now?"
"He said right now. And he sounded like he meant it."
Lucas' eyes defocused and he turned toward the track, staring sightlessly across the oval to the six-furlong starting gate. The jockeys were pressing their horses toward the gate and the crowd was starting to drift down the patio to the finish line.
"It's the maddog killer," Lucas said after a moment.
"Yeah," said the fat cop. "It could be."
"Has to be. Goddammit, I don't want that." He thought about it for another few seconds and then suddenly smiled. "You guys got horses for this race?"
The fat cop looked vaguely uneasy. "Uh, I got two bucks on Skybright Avenger."
"Jesus Christ, Bucky," Lucas said in exasperation, "you're risking two dollars to get back two dollars and forty cents if she wins. And she won't."
"Well, I dunno..."
"If you don't know how to play..." Lucas shook his head. "Look, go put ten bucks on Pembroke Dancer. To win."
The two cops looked at each other.
"Really?" said the thin one. "This is a maiden, you can't know..."
"Hey. It's up to you, if you want to bet. And I'm staying for the race."
The two internal-affairs cops looked at each other, looked back at Lucas, then turned and hurried inside to the nearest betting windows. The thin one bet ten dollars. The fat one hesitated, staring into his wallet, licked his lips, took out three tens, licked his lips again, and pushed them across the counter. "Thirty on Pembroke Dancer," he said. "To win."
Lucas was sprawled on the bench again and had started a conversation with the woman in the cowboy boots. When the surveillance cops got back, he moved down toward her but turned to the cops.
"You bet?" he asked.
"Yeah."
"Don't look so nervous, Bucky. It's perfectly legal."
"Yeah, yeah. It ain't that."
"Have you got a horse?" The woman in the cowboy boots leaned forward and looked down the bench at Lucas. She had violet eyes.
"Just a guess," Lucas said lazily.
"Is this, like, a private guess?"
"We've all got a couple of bucks on Pembroke Dancer," Lucas said.
The woman with the violet eyes had a Racing Form on the bench beside her, but instead of looking at it, she looked up at the sky and her lips moved silently and then she turned her head and said, "She had a terrific workout at six furlongs. The track was listed as fast but it probably wasn't that good."
"Hmm," said Lucas.
She looked at the tote board for a few seconds and said, "Excuse me, I gotta go powder my nose."
She left, hurrying. The fat cop was still licking his lips and watching the tote board. The odds on Pembroke Dancer were twenty to one. Three other horses, Stripper's Colors, Skybright Avenger, and Tonite Delite, had strong races in the past three weeks. Pembroke Dancer had been shipped in from Arkansas two weeks earlier. In her first race she finished sixth.
"What's the story on this horse?" asked the fat cop.
"A tip from a friend." Lucas gestured over his shoulder with his thumb, up toward the press box. "One of the handicappers got a call from Vegas. Guy walked into a horse parlor a half-hour ago and bet ten thousand on Pembroke Dancer to win. Somebody knows something."
"Jesus. So why'd he lose his last race so bad?"
"She."
"Huh?"
"She. Dancer's a filly. And I don't know why she lost. Might be anything. Maybe the jock was dragging his feet."
The tote board flickered and the odds on Pembroke Dancer went up to twenty-two to one.
"How much you bet, Lucas?" the fat cop asked.
"It's an exacta. I wheeled Dancer with the other nine horses. A hundred each way, so I have nine hundred riding."
"Jesus." The fat man licked his lips again. He had another twenty in his wallet and thought about it. Across the track, the first of the horses was led into the gate and the fat cop settled back. Thirty was already too much. If he lost it, he'd be lunching on Cheetos for a week.
"So you got anything good?" asked Lucas. "What was this thing about Billy Case and the rookie?"
The fat cop laughed. "Fuckin' Case."
"There was this woman lawyer," said the thin one, "and one day she looks out her office window, which is on the back of an old house that they made into offices. The back of her office looks at the back of the business buildings on the next street over. In fact, it looks right down this walkway between these buildings. At the other end of this walkway there's a fence with a gate in it, like blocking the walkway from the street. So you can't see into the walkway from the street. But you can see into it from this lawyer's office, you know? So anyway, she looks down there, and here's this cop, in full uniform, getting his knob polished by this spade chick.
"So this lawyer's watching and the guy gets off and zips up and he and the spade chick go through this gate in the little fence, back onto the street. This lawyer, she's cool, she thinks maybe they're in love. But the next day, there's two of them, both cops, and the spade chick, and she's polishing both of them. So now the lawyer's pissed. She gets this giant camera from her husband, and the next day, sure enough, they're back with another chick, a white girl this time. So the lawyer takes some pictures and she brings this roll of Kodachrome in to the chief."
The first of the horses was guided into the back of the gate and locked. The woman with the violet eyes got back and settled at the end of the bench. The thin cop rambled on. "So the chief sends it down to the lab," he said, "and they're only like the best pictures anybody ever took of a knob-job. I could of sold them for ten bucks apiece. So the chief and the prosecutors decide there's some problem with the chain of evidence and we wind up in this lawyer's office with a video unit. Sure enough, here they come. But this time they got both the spade chick and the white chick. This is like in Cinemascope or something. Panavision."
"So what's going to happen?" Lucas asked.
The fat one shrugged. "They're gone."
"How much time did they have in?"
"Case had six years, but I don't give a shit. He had a bad jacket. We think he and a security guard was boosting stereos and CD players out of a Sears warehouse a few months back. But I feel sorry for the rookie. Case told him this was how it's done on the street. Gettin' knob-jobs in alleyways."
Lucas shook his head.
"Right on the street, in daylight," said the fat cop.
The last horse was pushed into the back of the gate, locked, and there was a second-long pause before the gate banged open and the announcer called "They're all in line... and they're off, Pembroke Dancer breaks on the outside, followed by..."
Dancer ran away from the pack, two lengths going into the turn, four lengths at the bottom of the stretch, eight lengths crossing the wire.
"Holy shit," the fat cop said reverently. "I won six hundred bucks."
Lucas stood up. "I'm going," he said. He was staring at the tote board, calculating. When he was satisfied, he turned to the other two. "You coming behind? I'll drive slow."
"No, no, we're all done," said the fat cop. "Thanks, Lucas."
"You ought to quit now," said Lucas. "The rest of these races are junk. You can't figure them. And, Bucky?"
"Yeah?" The fat cop looked up from his winning ticket.
"You won't forget to tell the IRS about the six hundred?"
"Of course not," the cop said, offended. Lucas grinned and walked away and the fat cop muttered, "In a pig's eye." He looked at his ticket again and then noticed that the woman with the violet eyes was hurrying after Lucas. She caught him just before he got inside, and the fat cop saw Lucas grin as they walked together into the building.
"Look at this," he said to the thin cop. But the thin cop was looking at the tote board and his lips were moving quietly. The fat cop looked at his partner and said, "What?"
The thin cop put up a hand to hold off the question, his lips still moving. Then they stopped and he turned
and looked after Lucas.
"What?" said the fat cop, looking in the same direction. Lucas and the woman with the violet eyes had disappeared.
"I don't know much about this horse-race bullshit," said the thin cop, "but if I'm reading the tote board right, this exacta payoff, Davenport took down twenty-two thousand, two hundred and fifty bucks."
***
The office of the chief of police was on the first floor of City Hall, in a corner. Windows dominated the two walls that faced the street. The other two walls were covered with framed photographs, some in color, some in black and white, stretching back in time to the forties. Daniel with his family. With the last six Minnesota governors. With five of the last six senators. With a long and anonymous chain of faces that all looked vaguely the same, faces that took up space at chicken dinners for major politicians. Directly behind the chief was the shield of the Minneapolis Police Department and a plaque honoring cops who had been killed in the line of duty.
Lucas sprawled in the leather chair that sat squarely in front of the chief's desk. He was surprised, though he tried not to show it. It had been a while since anything surprised him, other than women.
"Pissed off?" Quentin Daniel leaned over his glass desktop, watching Lucas. Daniel looked so much like a police chief that a number of former political enemies, who were now doing something else, made the mistake of thinking he got the job on his face. They were wrong.
"Yeah. Pissed off. Mostly just surprised." Lucas did not particularly like Daniel, but thought he might be the smartest man on the force. He would have been surprised-again-to know that the chief thought precisely the same about him.
Daniel half-turned toward the windows, his head cocked, still watching.
"You can see why," he said.
"You thought I did it?"
"A couple of people in homicide thought you were worth looking at," said Daniel.
"You better start at the beginning," Lucas said.
Daniel nodded, pushed his chair away from his desk, stood up, and wandered to a wall of photographs. He inspected the face of Hubert Humphrey as though he were looking for new blemishes.
"Two weeks ago, our man made a run at a St. Paul woman, an artist named Carla Ruiz," he said as he continued his inspection of Humphrey's face. "She managed to fight him off. When St. Paul got there, the sergeant in charge found her looking at a note. It was one of these rules he's leaving behind."
"I haven't heard a thing about this Ruiz," Lucas said.
The chief turned and drifted back to his chair, no hurry, his hands in his pockets. "Yeah. Well, this sergeant's a smart guy and he knew about the notes in the first two killings. He called the head of St. Paul homicide and they put a lid on it. The only people who know are the St. Paul chief and his chief of homicide, the two uniforms who took the call, a couple of people in homicide here, and me. And the artist. And now you. And every swingin' dick has been told that if this leaks, there'll be some new foot beats out at the landfill."
"So how'd it point to me?" Lucas asked.
"It didn't. Not right away. But our man dropped his gun during the fight with the artist lady. The first thing we did was print it and run it. No prints-checked everything, including the shells. We had better luck on the ownership. We ran it down in ten minutes. It went from the factory to a gun store down on Hennepin Avenue, and from there to a guy named David L. Losse-"
"Our David L. Losse?"
"You remember the case?"
"Shot his son, said it was an accident? Thought somebody was breaking into the house?"
"That's him. He fell on a manslaughter, though it was probably a straight-out murder. He got six years, he'll serve four. But there's still an appeal floating around. Because of the appeal, the evidence was supposedly up in the property room. We went up and looked. The gun is gone. Or it was gone, until the killer dropped it."
"Shit." Things had disappeared from the property room before. Five grams of cocaine became four. Twenty bondage magazines became fifteen. As far as Lucas knew, this was the first time a gun had gone missing.
"You had access to the evidence room a couple of times. During the Ryerson case and during that hassle over the Chicago burglary gang. We cross-referenced everything we had from the killings and the witness. Times, places, the artist's description. We could eliminate as suspects all the women who had access to the room. We could eliminate cops who were confirmed on-duty when the killings took place. People have been killed or attacked in all three shifts... Anyway, we got it down to your name, basically. You're the right size. Nobody ever knows where you're at. You're a games freak and this guy is apparently playing some kind of game. And the gun came out of the property room. I never really thought you were the one, but... you see how it went down."
"Yeah, I see," Lucas said sourly. "Thanks a lot."
"Hey, what would you have done?" Daniel asked defensively.
"Okay."
"Now we know you're clean," the chief said. He leaned back in his chair, stretched, and crossed his legs. "'Cause our man did another one. Four to six hours ago. We figure it was just about the time you were sitting out on the lawn eating that apple."
Lucas nodded. "Where's this one?"
"Down by Lake Nokomis. Just west of the lake, up in those hills."
"Can you contain it?"
"No." Daniel shook his head. "This is three. If we tried to contain it, we'd be leaking like a rusty faucet by tomorrow afternoon. That'd cause more trouble than if we go out front with it. I've already called a press conference for nine o'clock tonight. That'll give the TV stations time to make the ten-o'clock news. I want you to be here. I'll outline the killings, appeal for help, all that. And I'm assigning you to the case, full-time."
"I don't want it," said Lucas. "Homicide bores me. You walk around all day talking to civilians who don't know anything. There are other guys do it better. And I got a lot of stuff going on this crack business. I got a half-dozen guys picked out-"
"Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's absolutely fuckin' wonderful, but the media is going to hang us all by our balls if we don't get this freak," Daniel said, cutting Lucas off in mid-sentence. "You remember back a few years when those two women got killed in the parking ramps? Like two, three weeks apart, different guys? Pure coincidence? You remember how the media went out of their minds? You remember how the TV stations were having seminars on self-defense? How they had reports every night on progress? You remember all that?"
"Yeah." It had been a nightmare.
"This is going to be worse. Those guys in the parking ramps, we grabbed one the same day, we got the other one a couple days after he did it. We still got hysteria. This guy, he's killed three, attacked another one, raped them and stabbed them, and he's still on the loose."
Lucas nodded and rubbed his jaw with his fingertips. "You're right. They'll go berserk," he admitted.
"Guaranteed. This doesn't happen in the Twin Cities. So fuck the crack. I want you on this thing. You'll work by yourself, homicide will work parallel. The media'll like that. They think you're some kind of fuckin' genius."
"What does homicide think about me working on it?" Lucas asked.
"A couple of guys will be moaning about it, because they always do, but they'll go along. Besides, I don't care what they think. Their asses aren't on the line. Mine is. I come up for new term next year and I don't need this sitting on my back," Daniel said.
"I've got full access?"
"I talked to Lester. He'll cooperate. He really will." Lucas nodded. Frank Lester was the deputy chief for investigations and a former head of robbery-homicide.
"I'll want to talk to this artist," Lucas said.
Daniel nodded. "The woman doesn't have a pot to piss in. We had to get her a phone two days after she was attacked. Just in case the guy comes back after her. Here's her number and address." He handed Lucas a slip of paper.
Lucas tucked the slip in his pants pocket. "They're processing this Nokomis killing now?"
"Yeah."
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"I better get down there." He stood and started for the door, stopped and half-turned. "You really didn't think I did it?"
Daniel shook his head. "I've seen you around women. I didn't think you could do that to them. But I had to know for sure."
Lucas started to turn away again, but Daniel stopped him.
"And, Davenport?"
"Yeah?"
"Be here for the press conference, okay? Dress just like that, the tennis shirt and the khakis. You got any jeans? Jeans might be better. Those whatdaya call them, acid jeans?"
"I could change on the way back. I got some stone-washed."