“Guaranteed. This doesn’t happen in the Twin Cities. So fuck the crack. I want you on this thing. You’ll work by yourself, homicide will work parallel. The media’ll like that. They think you’re some kind of fuckin’ genius.”

“What does homicide think about me working on it?” Lucas asked.

“A couple of guys will be moaning about it, because they always do, but they’ll go along. Besides, I don’t care what they think. Their asses aren’t on the line. Mine is. I come up for new term next year and I don’t need this sitting on my back,” Daniel said.

“I’ve got full access?”

“I talked to Lester. He’ll cooperate. He really will.” Lucas nodded. Frank Lester was the deputy chief for investigations and a former head of robbery-homicide.

“I’ll want to talk to this artist,” Lucas said.

Daniel nodded. “The woman doesn’t have a pot to piss in. We had to get her a phone two days after she was attacked. Just in case the guy comes back after her. Here’s her number and address.” He handed Lucas a slip of paper.

Lucas tucked the slip in his pants pocket. “They’re processing this Nokomis killing now?”

“Yeah.”

“I better get down there.” He stood and started for the door, stopped and half-turned. “You really didn’t think I did it?”

Daniel shook his head. “I’ve seen you around women. I didn’t think you could do that to them. But I had to know for sure.”

Lucas started to turn away again, but Daniel stopped him.

“And, Davenport?”

“Yeah?”

“Be here for the press conference, okay? Dress just like that, the tennis shirt and the khakis. You got any jeans? Jeans might be better. Those whatdaya call them, acid jeans?”

“I could change on the way back. I got some stone-washed.”

“Whatever. You know how that TV puss goes for the street-cop routine. What’s your title again?”

“Office of Special Intelligence.”

The chief snapped his fingers, nodded, and scrawled “OSI” on his desk pad. “See you at nine,” he said.

Jeannie Lewis lay on the narrow bed with her hands bound up over her head, where they were taped to the headboard. A look of inexpressible agony held her face, her mouth locked open by the Kotex pad stuffed between her jaws, her eyes rolled so far back that nothing but the whites could be seen beneath the half-closed lids. Her back was arched from the pressure of the bonds, the nipples of her small breasts pointing left and right, nearly white in death. Her ankles were bound to the opposite corners at the foot of the bed, but she had managed to roll her thin legs inward, a final effort to protect herself. The knife still protruded from the top of her abdomen, just below the sternum, its handle almost flat against her stomach. It had been slipped in at an acute angle, to more directly penetrate the heart without complications of bone or muscle.

“Pushed it in and wiggled it,” said the assistant medical examiner. “We can tell more after the autopsy, but that’s what it looks like. Just a little entry slit, but a lot of damage around the heart.”

“Professional?” asked Lucas. “A doctor?”

“I wouldn’t go that far. I don’t want to mislead you. But it’s somebody who knows what he’s doing. He knows where the heart is. We want to leave the knife in place until we get downtown and take some pictures, X rays, but from the look of the handle, I’d say it’s about the most efficient knife for the work. Narrow point, sharp, rigid blade, fairly thin. It’d slip right in.”

Lucas stepped over to the bed and looked at the knife handle. It was smooth, unfinished wood. “County Cork Cutlery” was branded on the wood.

“County Cork Cutlery?”

“Forget it. There’s a whole drawer full of it, out in the kitchen.”

“So he got it here.”

“I think so. I did the first woman he killed, Lucy What’s-her-name. He did her with a plastic-handled knife, nothing like this one.”

“Where’s the note?”

“In the baggie, over on the chest of drawers. We’re sending it to the lab, see if they can print it.”

Lucas stepped over to the chest and looked at the note. Common notebook paper. Even if there were six pads of it in a suspect’s home, it would prove nothing. The words were cut from a newspaper and fastened to the paper with Scotch tape: Never carry a weapon after it has been used.

“He lives by those rules,” the medical examiner said. “He didn’t even pull the knife out, much less carry it anywhere.”

“Note looks clean.”

“Well, not quite. Hang on a second,” the medical examiner said. He peeled off the plastic gloves he was wearing, replaced them with a thinner pair of surgeon’s gloves, opened the baggie, and slipped the note halfway out.

“See this kind of funny half-circle under the tape?”

“Yeah. Print?”

“We think so, but if you look, you can see there’s no print. But it’s sharply defined. So I think—” he wiggled his fingers at Lucas—“that he was wearing surgeon’s gloves.”

“That says doctor again.”

“It could. It could also say nurse, or orderly, or technician. And since you can buy the things at hardware stores, it could be a hardware dealer. Whoever he is, I think he wears gloves even when he’s sitting at home making these notes. So now we know something else: he’s a smart little cocksucker.”

“Okay. Good. Thanks, Bill.”

The medical examiner eased the note back in the bag. “Can we take her?” he asked, tilting his head at Lewis’ body.

“Fine with me, if homicide’s finished.” A homicide cop named Swanson was sitting at a table in the kitchen, eating a Big Mac, fries, and a malt. Lucas stepped into the doorway of the bedroom and called across to him. “I’m done. Can they take her?”

“Take her,” Swanson said around a mouthful of fries.

The medical examiner supervised the movement, with Swanson ambling over to watch. They pulled the bag over her head, carefully avoiding the knife, and lifted her onto a gurney.

Like a sack of sand, Lucas thought.

“Nothin’ under her?” asked Swanson.

“Not a thing,” said the medical examiner. They all looked at the sheets for a moment; then the medical examiner nodded at his assistants and they pushed the gurney out the bedroom door.

“Lab’s coming through with a vacuum. They haven’t printed the furniture yet,” Swanson said. What he meant was: Don’t touch anything. Lucas grinned. “They’ll take the sheets down for analysis.”

“I don’t see any stains.”

“Naw, they’re clean. I don’t think there’s any hair, either. Took a close look, but she didn’t have any broken fingernails, didn’t look like anything balled up underneath them, no skin or blood.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah.”

“I want to poke around out here a little. Anything critical?”

“There’s the potato . . .”

“Potato?”

“Potato in a sock. It’s out in the living room.” Lucas followed him into the living room, and Swanson used his foot to point under a piano bench. There was an ordinary argyle sock with a lump in one end.

“We think he hit her on the head with it,” Swanson said. “First cop in saw it, peeked inside, then left it for the lab.”

“Why do you think he hit her with it?” Lucas asked.

“Because that’s what a potato in a sock is for,” Swanson said. “Or, at least, it used to be.”

“What?” Lucas was puzzled.

“It’s probably before your time,” Swanson said. “It used to be, years ago, guys would go up to Loring Park to roll the queers or down Washington Avenue to roll the winos. They’d carry a potato with them. Nothing illegal about a potato. But you put one in a sock, you got a hell of a blackjack. And it’s soft, so if you’re careful, you don’t crack anybody’s skull. You don’t wind up with a dead body on your hands, everybody looking for you.”

“So how’d the maddog know about it? He’s gay?”

Swanson shrugged. “Could be. Or could be a cop. Lots of old street cops would know about using a potato.”

“That doesn’t sound right,” Lucas said. “I never heard of an old serial killer. If they’re going to do it, they start young. Teens, twenties, maybe thirties.”