Broken Prey

had their shoes back on, one of the men in the cage opened the second door, and they stepped through into the secure area.
    “Gives me the creeps, being inside,” Sloan said, looking back at the doors.
    “Never get used to it,” said their new escort. He pointed down the hall. “You’re down this way.”
    The inside of the hospital reminded Lucas of an aging high school. Bronson took them to a conference room where a principal’s office should have been, popped open the door, said, “Have a seat—I’ll see what happened to the team.”
    They dropped into the chairs and looked around: the place had the same architectural neutrality as the press-conference room back at the BCA, except for a dark glass plate in one wall, which hid a camera and microphones; they both looked at it, and Lucas said, “Big Brother.”
    A few seconds later, the door popped open, and a guy stuck his head inside: “Davenport and Sloan?”
    Sloan raised a hand: “That’s us.”
    The man said over his shoulder, “Here they are,” and then, as he stepped inside, “They told us the wrong room.”
     
    TWO MORE MEN and a woman followed the first man inside. They were dressed casually, in white staff coats and pastel shirts, tan slacks, pens in their breast pockets. All four wore the masked expressions Lucas recognized as Prison-Guard Face: tight, watchful, controlled. There was always an edge of fear, held in a mental fist, never allowed to leak out when there was a prisoner around. Fear in a prison was like blood in a shark pen. The four of them shuffled around the conference table, put papers on the table, files. Two of the men had coffee cups. The first man said, “You guys want coffee?”
    “We’re okay,” Lucas said. He said, “I’m Lucas Davenport, with the BCA, and this is Detective Sloan from Minneapolis PD. You guys are . . . ?”
    They introduced themselves: three were psychologists; the fourth, the woman, was an M.D. She was pretty in a careful way, slender, with brown hair, brown eyes, short nose, and a few freckles. She held Lucas’s eyes for an extra second, and he thought, Hmm. Then one of the men said, “Charlie Pope?”
    “Yeah. We got this DNA result . . .”
    Lucas spent ten minutes outlining the details of the case, both of the killings and the DNA match. Prison people liked that—to be treated like brother cops—and they got on a first-name basis.
    One of them, a burly, crew-cut guy named Dick Hart, kicked back from the table and said, “I’ll tell you what, Lucas, you ask me if Charlie could do this, I’d say, ‘Absolutely.’ He was crazy enough. They should never have let him out of here. I knew something would happen. I said so before they let him go.”
    Karen Beloit, the M.D., agreed: “We’d take him for treatment—he had stomach and hemorrhoid troubles—you could watch him watching the women. The doctors and the nurses, watching them. You knew what he was thinking.”
    “But one of the victims was a man,” Sloan objected.
    Leo Grant said, “I was one of his therapists, and, uh, mmm  . . .” He glanced at Beloit, grinned, and said, “Put your fingers in your ears.”
    “Spit it out, cowboy,” she said.
    “You know that movie, American Pie , where the guy puts his dick in the pie ’cause it’s kinda warm? Charlie was like that. But with a mean streak. He’d just go around and he needed to fuck something. You’d see one of the younger guys go by, and Charlie would kinda look at his ass . . . Charlie’d do that. He wouldn’t even consider it gay.”
    Hart agreed with Grant. “It’s pretty common in here for the dominant member of a homosexual couple not to consider himself gay. The, mmm, receiver, everybody agrees that he’s gay. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Charlie had a sexual relationship of that kind. I’m a little surprised by this beating, this methodical torture you’re talking about. Charlie might enjoy hurting people but didn’t seem to me to be the kind who’d be methodical about it. To plan it. He might beat somebody to death or strangle somebody—hell, we’re pretty sure he did —but this is a little different. With Charlie, sex was the thing, the violence was the way he got it. With these killings it seems like the violence is the thing, the sex is an afterthought.”
    Leo Grant was shaking his head, said, “Nah, nah, Dick, that’s not right. The sex is central. The sex is central. The torture is part of the sex act; the actual