Night Prey

to see how the investigation is going. Smits told her that there’d been other killings by the same man. Connell poked around, and came up with a theory.”
    “Of course,” Lucas said dryly.
    Roux took a pack of Winston Lights from her desk drawer, asked, “Do you mind?”
    “No.”
    “This is illegal,” she said. “I take great pleasure in it.” She shook a cigarette out of the pack, lit it with a green plastic Bic lighter, and tossed the lighter back in the desk drawer with the cigarettes. “Connell thinks she’s found the tracks of a serial sex-killer. She thinks he lives here in Minneapolis. Or St. Paul or whatever, the suburbs. Close by, anyway.”
    “Is there? A serial killer?” Lucas sounded skeptical, and Roux peered across her desk at him.
    “You’ve got a problem with the idea?” she asked.
    “Give me a few facts.”
    “There are several,” Roux said, exhaling smoke at the ceiling. “But let me give you another minute of background. Connell’s not just an investigator. She’s big in the left-feminist wing of the state AFSCME—American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.”
    “I know what it is.”
    “That’s an important piece of my constituency, Lucas. AFSCME put me in the state senate and kept me there. And maybe sixty percent of them are female.” Roux flicked a cigarette ash toward her wastebasket. “They’re my rock. Now. If I pull off this chief’s job, if I go four, maybe six years, and get a little lucky, I’ll go up to the U.S. Senate as a liberal law-and-order feminist.”
    “Okay,” Lucas said. Everybody hustles.
    “So Connell came down to talk to me about her serial-killer theory. The state doesn’t have the resources for this kind of investigation, but we do. I make nice noises and say we’ll get right on it. I’m thinking Nut , but she’s got contacts all over the women’s movements and she’s AFSCME.”
    Lucas nodded, said nothing.
    “She gives me her research . . .” Roux tapped a thick file-folder on her desk. “I carried it down to homicide and asked them to make some checks. Connell thinks there have been a half-dozen murders and maybe more. She thinks there have been two here in Minnesota, and others in Iowa, Wisconsin, South Dakota, just across the border in Canada.”
    “What’d homicide say?” Lucas asked.
    “I got the eye-rolling routine, and I started hearing Dickless Tracy comments again. Two of the killings had already been cleared. The Madison cops got a conviction. There’re local suspects in a couple other cases.”
    “Sounds like—”
    He was about to say bullshit , but Roux tapped her desk with an index finger and rode her voice over his. “But your old pal Sloan dug through Connell’s research and he decided there’s something to it.”
    “He mentioned that,” Lucas admitted. He looked at the file folder on Roux’s desk. “He didn’t seem too happy with Connell, though.”
    “She scares him. Anyway, what Connell had was not so much evidence as an . . .” She groped for the right word: “. . . argument.”
    “Mmmm.”
    The chief nodded. “I know. She could be wrong. But it’s a legitimate argument. And I keep thinking, What if I ditch it, and it turns out that I’m wrong? A fellow feminist, one of the constituency, comes to me with a serial killer. We blow it off and somebody else gets murdered and it all comes out.”
    “I’m not sure . . .”
    “Besides, I can feel myself getting in trouble here. We’re gonna set a new record for murders this year, unless something strange happens. That doesn’t have anything to do with me, but I’m the chief. I take the blame. You’re starting to hear that ‘We need somebody tough up there.’ I’m getting it from both inside and outside the department. The union never misses a chance to kick my ass. You know they backed MacLemore for the job.”
    “MacLemore’s a fuckin’ Nazi.”
    “Yes, he is. . . .” Roux took a drag on the cigarette, blew smoke, coughed, laughing, and said, “There’s even more. She thinks the killer might be a cop.”
    “Ah, man.”
    “It’s just a theory,” Roux said.
    “But if you start chasing cops, the brotherhood’s gonna be unhappy.”
    “Exactly. And that’s what makes you perfect,” Roux said. “You’re one of the most experienced serial-killer investigators in the country, outside the FBI. Inside this department, politically, you’re both old-line and hard-line. You could chase a cop.”
    “Why does