“Well, we checked everybody she could remember,” said Sloan, who had done the Rice interview.

“Nothing?”

“We didn’t actually interview everybody. We checked them. If they were way off the profile, we let it go. You know, women, old men, boys, we let them go. We did interviews with everybody that might come close to the profile, and came up dry. We were going to go back to the rest, but everything slowed down when Jimmy Smithe started to look good. Everything got thrown on that.”

“We should go back for interviews with everybody,” Lucas said, turning to Daniel. “We know that goddamn gun is critical. Maybe somebody bought it and resold it. I say we check women, boys, old men, everybody.”

“Get on it,” Daniel told Anderson. “I assumed it was done.”

“Well . . .”

“Just get it done.”

Lucas sat on the attic floor.

“Wednesday. I didn’t think we’d make it to Wednesday,” said the surveillance man. “He’s overdue.”

“Cold in here,” Lucas said. “You can feel the wind coming through.”

“Yeah. We keep the door open but there aren’t any heating vents. We’re thinking about bringing up a space heater.”

“Good idea.”

“Thing is, downtown doesn’t want to pay for it. And we don’t want to get stuck for the money.”

“I’ll talk to Daniel,” Lucas said.

“Car coming,” said the second surveillance man.

The car rolled slowly down the street, paused beneath them, and then kept going, around the corner.

“Get the plate?”

“Guy at the end of the street’s doing that, one of the cars. He’s got a starlight scope.”

A radio sitting beside the mattress suddenly burped.

“Get him?” the surveillance man asked.

“Yeah. Neighbor.”

“He slowed down outside her house.”

“Guy’s sixty-six, but I’ll note it,” said the radio voice.

“How’s it going?”

“Cold,” the car man said.

They went back to waiting.

“Action stations,” the surveillance man said twenty minutes later. “I get the scope.”

Lucas watched through binoculars. McGowan was wearing a frothy pink negligee and tiny matching bikini pants. She moved back and forth behind the eight-inch gap in the curtain, more tantalizing than any professional stripper.

“She’s gotta know,” the surveillance cop said.

“I don’t think so,” Lucas said. “I think she’s just so used to that gap in the curtains that she doesn’t notice—”

“Bullshit. Look at that, when she stretches. She’s showing it off. But she never shows all of it. She walks around without a bra, but you never catch her without her pants, even when she’s been in taking a shower. She’s teasing us. I say she knows . . .”

They were still arguing about it when the maddog did the cripple.

CHAPTER

18

The maddog got a flier at the county clerk’s office, a piece of pink paper handed to him as he walked out the door. He read it as he stood in front of the bank of elevators.

There was no attempt at a drawing and no real description. They said he was white-collar, possibly connected with the Hennepin County Government Center or Minneapolis City Hall. Fair-skinned. Southwestern accent, possibly Texas. Once seen dressed as farmer, but that was probably a disguise.

The maddog folded the paper and stood watching the lights on the elevator indicator. When it came, he stepped inside, nodded to the other two occupants, turned, and stared at the door. He hadn’t thought that he might have an accent. Did he? In his own ears, he sounded like everybody else. He knew talking to Davenport would be a mistake. Now he might pay for it.

The maddog’s mind slipped easily into the legal mode. What could they make of it? So he had an accent. Hundreds of people did. He was white-collar. So was most of Minneapolis. He frequently passed through the Government Center. So did ten thousand people a day, some with business in the Center, some passing through in the skyways. A conviction? No chance. Or little chance, anyway. Some leeway must be given for the vagaries of juries. But would he take a jury? That was something to be contemplated. If they got him, he could ask for a nonjury trial. No judge would convict him on what they had on the flier. But what else did they have? The maddog bit his lip.

What else?

As he worried, the need for another was growing. The law student’s face floated before him, against the stainless-steel doors. He was so taken with the vision of her that when the doors opened, he started, and the woman standing beside him glanced at him curiously. The maddog hurried off the elevator, through the skyways, and back to his office. His secretary was out somewhere. As he passed her desk, he saw the corner of a pink slip of paper under a file folder. He paused, glanced around quickly, and pulled it out. A flier. He pushed it back in place. Where was she?

He went inside his office, dropped his briefcase beside the desk, sat down, and cupped his face in his hands. He was still sitting like that when there was a tentative knock at the door. He looked up and saw his secretary watching him through the vertical glass panel beside the door. He waved her in.

“Are you okay? I saw you sitting like that . . .”

“Bad day,” the maddog said. “I’m just about done here. I’m going to head out home.”

“Okay. Mr. Wexler sent around the file on the Carlson divorce, but it looks pretty routine,” she said. “You won’t have to do anything on it before the end of the week anyway.”

“Thanks. If you don’t have anything to do, you might as well take the rest of the day,” he said.

“Oh. Okay,” she said brightly.

On the way out to his car, he thought about the innocent conversation. He had said, “Bad day.” He had said, “I’m just about done here, I’m going to head out home.” That’s what he thought he had said. Had his secretary heard, “Bayed day-ee”? Had she heard “Ah’m” instead of “I’m”? Was “head out” a Texas expression, or did they use that here?

Did he sound like Lyndon Johnson?

At his apartment, the maddog looked in the freezer, took out a microwave dinner, set the timer on the oven, and punched the Start button. His face was reflected in the window of the microwave. Lips like red worms. His hand slipped into his coat pocket and encountered the flier. He took it out and read through it again.

The victims, it said, were a type. Dark eyes, dark hair. Attractive. Young to middle-aged.

He thought about it. They were right, of course. Maybe he should take a blonde. But blondes didn’t appeal. The pale skin, the pale hair. Cold-blooded people. And he didn’t want anyone old. That was distasteful. Old women would know too much about their own deaths. His women should be confronting the prospect for the first time.

I won’t change, he thought. No need to, really. There were better than a million women in the Twin Cities. Probably a quarter of a million fit his “type.” A quarter-million prospective Chosen women. From that point of view, the description of a “type” was meaningless. The police wouldn’t have a chance. He felt a surge of confidence: the whole thing was meaningless. Having been fought off by one woman, having been seen at the Brown killing by another witness, he realized the police had less than he had expected. If they were telling everything.

The microwave beeped at him and he took the dinner out and carried it to the table. If they catch me, he thought as he ate the lonely meal, I could use the microwave defense. Like the guy who claimed he was driven crazy by excess sugar from an overdose of Twinkies. The Twinkie defense; his would be the Tater-Tot defense. He speared one of the potato nubbins and peered at it, popped it in his mouth.

Tonight, he thought. I can’t wait any longer.

He called the cripple’s house a little after six but there was no answer. He called again at seven. No answer. At eight there was an answer.