Night Prey

crushed by the Minneapolis Police Department’s logrolling? Will other innocent Minneapolis-area women be forced to pay the killer’s brutal toll because of this decision? We shall have to wait and see. . . .”
    “Nobody fucks with me like this,” Roux was shouting at her press aide when Lucas left her office with Anderson. “Nobody fucks with me. . . .”
    Anderson grinned at Lucas and said, “Connell does.”
     
     
     
    GREAVE CAUGHT LUCAS in the hall. “I read the file, but it was a waste of time. I could have gotten the executive summary on TV this morning.” He was wearing a loose lavender suit with a blue silk tie.
    “Yeah,” Lucas grunted. He unlocked his office door and Greave followed him inside. Lucas checked his phone for voice mail, found a message, and poked in the retrieval code. Meagan Connell’s voice, humble: “I saw the stories on TV this morning. Does this change anything?” Lucas grinned at the impertinence, and scribbled down the number she left.
    “What’re we doing?” Greave asked.
    “Gonna see if we can find a guy down in Dakota County. Former sex psycho who liked knives.” He’d been punching in Connell’s number as he spoke. The phone rang once, and Connell picked up. “This is Davenport.”
    “Jeez,” Connell said, “I’ve been watching TV. . . .”
    “Yeah, yeah. There’re three guys in town don’t know who the source is, and none of them are Roux. You better lay low today. She’s smokin’. In the meantime, we’re back on the case.”
    “Back on.” She made it a statement, with an overtone of satisfaction. No denials. “Is there anything new?”
    He told her about Anderson’s information from the Wisconsin forensic lab.
    “Ligatures? If he tied her up, he must’ve taken her somewhere. That’s a first. I bet he took her to his home. He lives here—he didn’t at the other crime scenes, so he couldn’t take them. . . . Hey, and if you read the Mercedes Bey file, I think she was missing awhile, too, before they found her.”
    “Could be something,” Lucas agreed. “Greave and I are going after Junky Doog. I’ve got a line on him.”
    “I’d like to go.”
    “No. I don’t want you around today,” Lucas said. “It’s best, believe me.”
    “How about if I make some calls?” she asked.
    “To who?”
    “The people on the bookstore list.”
    “St. Paul should be doing that,” Lucas said.
    “Not yet, they aren’t. I’ll get going right now.”
    “Talk to Lester first,” Lucas said. “Get them to clear it with St. Paul. That part of the investigation really does belong to them.”
     
     
     
    “ARE YOU GONNA listen to my story?” Greave asked as they walked out to the Porsche.
    “Do I gotta?”
    “Unless you want to listen to me whine for a couple hours.”
    “Talk,” Lucas said.
    A schoolteacher named Charmagne Carter had been found dead in her bed, Greave said. Her apartment was locked from the inside. The apartment was covered by a security system that used motion and infrared detectors with direct dial-out to an alarm-monitoring company.
    “Completely locked?”
    “Sealed tight.”
    “Why do you think she was murdered?”
    “Her death was very convenient for some bad people.”
    “Say a name.”
    “The Joyce brothers, John and George,” Greave said. “Know them?”
    Lucas smiled. “Excellent,” he said.
    “What?”
    “I played hockey against them when I was a kid,” he said. “They were assholes then, they’re assholes now.”
    The Joyces had almost been rich, Greave said. They’d started by leasing slum housing from the owners—mostly defense attorneys, it seemed—and renting out the apartments. When they’d accumulated enough cash, they bought a couple of flophouses. When housing the homeless became fashionable, they brought the flops up to minimum standards and unloaded them on a charitable foundation.
    “The foundation director came into a large BMW shortly thereafter,” Greave said.
    “Skipped his lunches and saved the money,” Lucas said.
    “No doubt,” Greave said. “So the Joyces took the money and started pyramiding apartments. I’m told they controlled like five to six million bucks at one point. Then the economy fell on its ass. Especially apartments.”
    “Aww.”
    “Anyway, the Joyces saved what they could from the pyramid, and put every buck into this old apartment building on the Southeast Side. Forty units. Wide hallways.”
    “Wide hallways?”
    “Yeah. Wide. The idea was,