Secret Prey

chair behind his desk. He picked up the first file, put his heels on his desk, and leaned back. And then let the file drop to his lap for a few seconds. He was not particularly introspective, but he was suddenly aware that the constant mental grinding in the back of his head—the grinding that had gone on for weeks, a symptom of the beast prowling around him—was fainter, barely distinguishable.
    A book project, he thought: Serial Murder: A Cure for Clinical Depression? by Lucas Davenport.
    GEORGE ARRIS WAS KILLED ON A RAINY NIGHT IN SEPTEMBER 1984 while walking down St. Paul’s Grand Avenue toward a restaurant-bar generally regarded as a meat rack. Somebody unknown had fired a single shot from a .380 semiautomatic pistol into the back of Arris’s head, and left him to die on the sidewalk.
    St. Paul homicide investigators had torn the city apart looking for the killer, because Arris was only the last of four nearly identical killings, spaced about two weeks apart.
    All the victims were younger white men, all relatively affluent, all walking alone at night. All of the killings were within twenty blocks of each other. A racial motivation was suspected, and black gang members were targeted as the primary suspects.
    Four different pistols had been used in the killings. Two of the guns had been found.
    The first, a .22-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver which had been used in the second killing, was found by a city work crew trying to open a clogged storm sewer a halfmile from the killing. That set off a general inspection of storm sewers, and the second pistol, a .25-caliber semiauto, was found three blocks from the .22. Neither of the other two pistols was found.
    The lead detective on the case was George Jellman.
    ‘‘JELLMAN WAS RETIRED, AND IT TOOK TWO PHONE calls to locate him. ‘‘He’s out back,’’ his wife shouted. ‘‘I’ll go get him.’’ She must have been shouting. Lucas mused, because they lived in Florida, which was a long way from Minnesota.
    Jellman came to the phone a second later: ‘‘Davenport, you miserable piece of shit. I never thought I’d hear from you again.’’
    ‘‘How are you, Jelly?’’
    ‘‘Well, I’m looking out at my backyard,’’ he said.
    ‘‘There are two palm trees and two orange trees and a lime tree—Denise makes key lime pie from it. It’s just a bit shy of eighty degrees right now, and I can smell the ocean. About an hour from now, I’ll be hitting golf balls on the greenest golf course you ever saw in your life . . . How’s it up there?’’
    ‘‘Cool, but nice.’’
    ‘‘Right. Nice in Minnesota means the snow’s not over your boots yet . . . So what’s happening?’’
    ‘‘You remember a bunch of killings you handled back in ’84, four guys shot in the back of the head?’’
    ‘‘Oh, hell, yes,’’ Jellman said. ‘‘Never got the guys who did it.’’
    ‘‘I’m interested in the last one—George Arris.’’
    ‘‘Why him?’’
    ‘‘We got an anonymous letter with the name of the supposed killer.’’
    ‘‘I bet it ain’t no goddamn Vice Lord,’’ Jellman said.
    ‘‘Why is that?’’
    ‘‘Is it? A Vice Lord?’’
    ‘‘No. It’s a bank vice president.’’
    ‘‘Hah. I knew it. Trust the letter, Lucas—if it was a bullshitter, he would’ve said it was a Vice Lord, ’cause that was on all the media. The Vice Lords did the other three, but that fourth one, that was a copycat.’’
    ‘‘Are you sure?’’
    ‘‘Pretty sure. That was the word on the street, though nobody had any names for us. But the word was, the fourth one came out of the blue. That the Vice Lords who’d done the shooting had split for Chicago before the fourth one ever happened.’’
    ‘‘So it was pretty much street talk about the fourth one.’’
    ‘‘There was something else too—the first three were all up there in the colored section. But the last guy was down on Grand Avenue. You look on a map, it looks pretty close, but you don’t see many blacks over there. Not walking on the street—especially not then, not as tight as everybody was about the first three shootings. And there’s Wylie’s Market used to be over there. You remember Wylie’s?’’
    ‘‘Sure.’’
    ‘‘They had a surveillance camera in the back of the store, looking at the cashier’s cage and the front door, get people’s faces coming in. Anyway, on the film, you can see the street through the window, and we picked out Arris strolling