Rules of Prey

were mobile. All of these women could have been to a doctor . . . .
    He walked back to the library and took down a volume on the history of crime and paged through it. Doctors as murderers had a whole section of their own.
    Dr. William Palmer of England killed at least six and maybe a dozen people for their money in the mid-nineteenth century. Dr. Thomas Cream killed half a dozen women withbotched abortions and poison in Canada, the U.S., and England; Dr. Bennett Hyde killed at least three in Kansas City; Dr. Marcel Petiot murdered at least sixty-three Jews whom he had promised to smuggle out of Nazi-occupied France; Dr. Robert Clements of England killed his four wives before he was caught. The “torture doctor” of Chicago, who had studied medicine but never quite became a doctor, killed as many as two hundred young women who had been attracted to the city by the 1893 World’s Fair. The worst of the bunch, of course, were the Nazis. Medical men associated with the death camps had killed thousands.
    The list of doctors who had killed only one or two was lengthy, including several celebrated cases in the United States since the 1950’s.
    Lucas shut the book, thought about it, and looked at his watch. Two-thirty. Far too late to call. He paced and looked at his watch again. Fuck it. He went into the workroom, got his briefcase with Carla Ruiz’ phone number, and called. She answered on the seventh ring.
    “Hello?” Half-asleep.
    “Carla? Ruiz?”
    “Yes?” Still sleepy, but suspicious now.
    “This is Lucas . . . the detective. I’m sorry to wake you up, but I’m sitting here looking at some stuff and I need to ask you a question. Okay? Are you awake?”
    “Uh, yes.”
    “When was the last time you saw a doctor and where was it?”
    “Uh, gee . . .” There was a long silence. “A couple of years ago, I guess. A woman at the clinic over on the west side.”
    “You’re sure that was the last? No visits to hospitals, nothing like that?”
    “No.”
    “How about with a friend, just stopping by, visiting?”
    “No. Nothing like that. I don’t think I’ve been in a hospital since, well, my mother died, fifteen years ago.”
    “Know any doctors socially?”
    “A few come to the gallery, I guess. I don’t really know any personally. I mean, I’ve talked to some at openings and so on.”
    “Okay. Look, go on back to bed. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. And thanks.”
    He dropped the phone back on the hook. “Shit,” he said aloud. It was possible, but a long shot. He made a mental note to check the gallery for regular patrons who were doctors. But it didn’t sound good.
    He looked at the charts for a few more minutes, yawned, turned out the light, and headed for his bedroom. The guy was smart. Nuts, but smart. A player? Maybe.
    Maybe a player.

CHAPTER
7
    Lucas edged into the briefing room, late again.
    “Where the fuck you been?” Daniel asked angrily.
    “Up late,” Lucas said.
    “Sit down.” Daniel looked around the room. A half-dozen detectives peered into their working notebooks. “To sum up, what we got is about three hundred pages of reports that don’t mean diddly-squat. Am I wrong? Somebody tell me I’m wrong.”
    Harmon Anderson shook his head. “I don’t see anything. Not yet. It might be in there, but I don’t see it.”
    “What about this stuff that you got, Lucas?” asked one of the detectives. “Is it reliable?”
    Lucas shrugged. “Yeah, I think so. There’re a lot of guesses in there, but I think they’re pretty good.”
    “So what?” said Daniel. “So we’re looking for a medium-sized white guy who works in an office. That cuts it down to a half-million guys, not including St. Paul.”
    “Who recently moved up here from the Southwest,” said Lucas. “That cuts out another 499,000 guys.”
    “But that could be bullshit. Probably is,” Daniel snorted.
    “We might know a little more in a couple of hours,” Lucas said. Daniel raised an eyebrow. “The gun guy called last night. I know where the gun went.”
    “Well, Jesus!” Daniel exploded.
    Lucas shook his head. “Don’t get your hopes up.” He explained how the gun got to Larry Rice and that Rice was dead. “His wife told my man that she doesn’t know wherethe pistol went. Probably sold. Could have been stolen, I suppose.”
    “Okay, but it’s something,” said Daniel. “He had the gun for what, six months? And he probably sold it to somebody he knew.”
    Daniel pointed at Anderson.