22

ON THE MORNING of the third day, Lucas, after a restless night, heard the alarm go off, shut it down, waited; and the phone rang.

"Catch him yet?" Weather asked.

"Not yet. Still thrashing around," he said. "How're you doing?"

"Had an interesting case early this morning," Weather said. "A man was shot in the face. I assisted, putting things right."

"That sounds British: putting things right."

"I think I'm becoming British. I like it here."

"Wish I were there… sort of," Lucas said. "So: You fixed the guy?"

"Oh, yeah. He wasn't that badly hurt-depending on how you define 'hurt,' I guess. But what struck me as strange was that in the whole time I've been working here, that was the first gunshot wound I've seen. In Minneapolis, as quiet as it is, it's an odd week when we don't have two or three."

"You're starting to sound like a liberal: Want to take away our God-given right to bear arms?"

"No, no. But it's weird: there are no guns…"

HE WAS SHAVING, a half hour later, when the phrase struck him: There are no guns.

Huh.

He finished shaving, got in die shower, thought about it some more. No guns.

HE CALLED THE airport cops and asked them to round up all declarations of handguns made the night O'Donnell flew. There were only a half dozen: he got the names and addresses, and phoned them to the co-op group, had them check the people behind the names.

When he got downtown, the co-op people reported that three of the men who checked guns were members of a shooting team who were on their way to a match in Virginia. The co-op had talked to sponsors and spouses of all three men, and then to the men themselves.

"They aren't O'Donnell," the co-op guy said.

Two of the other three were going prairie-dog shooting with hybrid single-shot pistols, not the.40 and.45 that Lucas was looking for. The co-op had interviewed a woman in the apartment complex where the two men lived. They were told that neither man looked like O'Donnell, that they lived full-time in the apartment complex, and that they were both members of a gay shooting-sports group that often traveled to Wyoming for prairie-dog shoots. The last guy hadn't been found, but one of the gun inspectors at the airport said that he was a lawyer and a black guy and that the gun he had checked was an antique.

Lucas called Sloan. "Remember when we found that pistol brass in the basement, I think it was.40 and.45, and the gun safe was open, like something had just been taken out?"

"Yeah?"

"If he flew, if he knew he was heading for the airport to fly, what happened to the guns? He couldn't get on the airplane with them. He didn't declare them. The guns weren't in the car. Where are they?"

"I don't know."

"Okay- now try this. What is the great similarity between Sam O'Donnell and Charlie Pope?"

Sloan thought for a few seconds, then said, "They both spent a lot at time in St. John's…"

"Something more basic than that," Lucas said. "We can't find him. Not only that, nobody's seen him. He's invisible, but everything we've got points directly at him. Just as everything pointed at Charlie-the DNA, the past record, the calls to Ignace. We even had a witness who thought she saw him, but now we know she didn't."

"Yeah. But it wasn't like the killer was trying to lead us to Charlie. The lead to Charlie came from that Fox guy, the parole officer..

"That was not quite a coincidence," Lucas said. "A guy who is suspected of killing women after raping them, and who has been treated and released, disappears, and suddenly a sex killer is on the loose. What parole officer wouldn't make a call? Then, because we'd figured that out on our own, when the DNA came in-there was never any doubt. No doubt in anybody's mind, except maybe Elle's, until the cat fisherman brought up Pope's hand."

Lucas continued: "Now, we have the same situation. Guy disap-pears. Evidence is found both in the refrigerator and in the car. Charlie Pope's frozen blood and Carlita Peterson's blood, not frozen. But nobody ever sees the guy. Nobody sees his face. Nobody sees him anywhere… and Elle says he doesn't fit."

"You think we're being conned?"

"I'm forty-six percent sure of it," Lucas said.

"Forty- six percent. You gotta go with that."

"Listen, this is what I think: the guns thing was a fuckup. He's still out there, and he's still got the guns."

"Who?"

"Somebody on the staff," Lucas said. "Somebody medical. Somebody who could get to Pope, and then get to O'Donnell. I mean, the guy was using O'Donnell's play voice when we were still looking for Pope."

"Jesus. I can't even think about that," Sloan said. "All the way back then, he was faking us out on something we might not ever figure out."

"Yeah."

Sloan said, "But."'

"But what?"

"But all this only works if it really isn't O'Donnell. Do we stop looking for him?"

"I will bet you one hundred depreciated American dollars right now that it's not O'Donnell," Lucas said. "We'll keep looking-but I think we go back to square one with the staff. Let's get everybody together again and start tearing up the staff backgrounds. There's something in there."

"The guy from California, huh?"

"Yup. The guy from California."

LUCAS HIMSELF CLEARED Dr. Cale, while the coordination staff worked on the other staff members whose records they had. When Lucas was convinced that Cale was clear-he never seriously suspected him, he was too old for a new serial killer-he drove to St. John's, and he and Cale spent two hours in the personnel office Xeroxing staff records for anyone who might have even an indirect connection to the Big Three.

There were eighty files, altogether. Lucas loaded them into the pas-senger side of the Porsche and hustled them back to the Cities.

"OKAY," he told the group, "This is gonna be tedious. But every single anomaly, I want to hear about it. No matter how silly you think it might be. I want to hear about it."

THEY CALLED REFERENCES listed in the files, and authors of letters of reference, and doctors, and police stations in towns where the staff members had lived, high schools and colleges and psychiatrists. They found minor crimes, alcoholism, drug abuse, altered academic records, mistakes, friends, and enemies.

They found one staff member who had apparently lost his foot in an automobile accident but listed "none" under disabilities and distinguishing marks. They found a woman who'd had an abortion but had listed "none" under operations and treatments by physicians; they found a man who was apparently internationally famous for making box kites.

One man, named Logan, who worked in the laundry and appeared to be immune to embarrassment, sued the manufacturer of a prosthetic pump designed to produce an erect penis, as well as the doctors who surgically implanted the silicone sacs that the pump inflated. He claimed that he'd not been warned that overinflating the sacs could cause his penis to "explode." The suit added that he and his wife could no longer achieve conjugal satisfaction because the surgical repairs had left his penis looking and feeling like a small cauliflower.

"Ouch," said the guy who found the stories about the lawsuit. "Here's a guy who could have stored up some serious bitterness…"

He gave a dramatic reading of the news stories, taken from the Internet: but the lawsuit was Logan's only appearance in public print.

Lucas agreed that there might have been some pump-related bitterness but noted that Logan had been given a jury award of $550,000, which might well alleviate it; and he couldn't figure out a way to put Logan and the Big Three together at the critical times.