Broken Prey

state BCA agent, and I need to talk to your wife. Now. Or should I have a cop come over there and take her downtown?”
    Beloit was dazed, being awakened at two in the morning. When she finally understood who was calling, he said, “I want you to call our headquarters in St. Paul. There’s a guy there, his name is Ted. He’ll play a tape of a call to a newspaper reporter earlier this evening. None of this is public: if you let this out, I’ll come down and run over you with my truck, okay?”
    “Okay, but what do you want me to hear?”
    “I want to know if it might be Sam O’Donnell calling. It doesn’t sound like him, but it does sound like somebody disguising his voice.”
    “I heard people were looking for Sam . . . we were a little worried.”
    “Who’s we?”
    “Everybody.”
    Lucas thought: Ah, shit. Everybody in the state would know in a couple of days . . . He said, “Just call Ted, okay? Here’s the number . . .”
     
    SHE CALLED BACK five minutes later. “I hate to say this, but that could be Sam.”
    “You think?”
    “We have a Christmas play every year, and Bob Turner, I don’t think you’ve met Bob . . .”
    “No.”
    “. . . Bob plays Santa, and Sam plays one of Santa’s elves. Some of the patients have parts. You know. Anyway, Sam always plays the elf as a, mmm , pervert, for lack of a better word. He talks about going down chimneys and catching people making love. I mean, that’s sort of the running gag. Every chimney he goes down seems to have something going on. The thing is, he’s got this heavy-breathing thing going, that spit-in-the-back-of-the-throat whisper thing. This guy tonight . . . that sounds like Sam doing his act.”
    Lucas couldn’t think of anything to say for a moment, then blurted out, “An elf?”
    “Yeah, you know, everybody gets a little weird and we have a play . . .”
    “But it could be him.”
    “I don’t . . . I can’t see Sam O’Donnell hurting anyone, for any reason. I mean, he did the karate and all, but that was just exercise. He was really a gentle man, I think.”
     
    IF THE KILLER was in Chicago, and he certainly was, then there wasn’t much to do except identify him—somebody else would make the eventual bust.
    And though they didn’t have a hard identification on O’Donnell, if it wasn’t O’Donnell, that should be apparent in the morning, when somebody else didn’t show up for work.
    Nothing to do now, at night . . . Lucas tried to sleep, and sometimes made it, mostly not. If they couldn’t make a clear identification, and if the killer ran far enough, interest would fall off . . . he could be gone for years.
    He thrashed around, thrashed around, and finally got up at six o’clock. He’d never make it through the day like this, so he popped an amphetamine, quickly felt a lot better, shaved, showered, and dressed. Still early, but he called Sloan anyway. Sloan had Caller ID and groaned into the phone, “Lucas, you gotta get yourself a life. It’s not even seven o’clock in the morning.”
    “Yeah, yeah, listen . . .”
    Then, Sloan was suddenly awake: “Jesus: he didn’t do another one?”
    “No, but he did call Ignace. He was in Chicago when he called.”
    He and Sloan agreed to meet downtown at nine o’clock. “I’m gonna get Elle to come in. We need some more theory.”
     
    TWO DAYS WENT BY:
     
    ON THE FIRST DAY , Sam O’Donnell’s name got out as a “person of interest” in the case. None of the cops would confirm that O’Donnell was the man, and the media outlets were afraid to name him because of libel or slander potential, but most of the newsies knew, and Lucas heard that there were raging arguments going on about when to name him.
    On the second day, the lab finished sequencing the DNA. The blood in the truck was Peterson’s.
    “At some point, Peterson was in the back of that Acura and dribbled a little blood out,” John Hopping Crow told Lucas. “There wasn’t much, maybe an ounce or two . . . maybe blood that had gathered in her throat after he cut her windpipe and trachea when he gutted her . . .”
    “Did you look at it through a scope?”
    “Yeah. It was never frozen.”
    The blood from inside the freezer had been frozen, of course—and the DNA was Charlie Pope’s.
    “The sonofabitch cut a chunk out of Pope, a finger or something, and stored it in his freezer in case he needed it,” Hopping Crow said.
    “He knew he was gonna need it—it was