Broken Prey

AND JENKINS lied about Biggie’s death.
    Jenkins gave the blow-by-blow. He was a superb liar: “He had his back against the wall. I made a move and he fired at me, six feet away, right through the doorway.” He talked with his hands and eyes as much as with his words. “Goddamn, I’m lucky to be here. Sloan came in low, right under Biggie’s shot, and shot him twice. It was all so fast, not even Biggie knew the gun was empty. I mean, we’re talking Bam! Bam-Bam! ”
    Everybody bought that.
    And why not? All the bullet holes were right there. Besides, the reconstruction of events suggested that Biggie’s .45 had killed three people and wounded three more, including Lucas.
     
    SHRAKE’S DESCRIPTION OF Chase’s death had Chase pointing his weapon at the second woman’s face, ready to pull the trigger. The rescued woman was incoherent for two days after the shootings and kept talking about Chase rolling the other body’s eyes back and forth with his fingers.
    Nobody wanted to know much more about Chase.
     
    LUCAS TOLD THE absolute truth about Taylor and Grant, and blood analysis proved it.
    Later analysis also indicated why the shootings weren’t more deadly than they were. O’Donnell’s guns, used by Biggie and Taylor, were loaded with target loads and cast slugs, apparently homemade by O’Donnell himself, for shooting close range at metal plates. They punched holes in the victims but didn’t expand, and most didn’t penetrate as deeply as combat loads would have. The third gun, a 9mm that did have combat loads, was used by Chase and had only had two or three rounds fired.
     
    SLOAN, DURING ONE OF his visits, reconstructed Grant’s—or Rogers’s, or whoever he was—movements after O’Donnell disappeared. “He killed O’Donnell and dumped him, planted the evidence, and drove up to the airport and left the car where we’d find it,” Sloan said. “Then he took a shuttle back to Mankato and a cab back to his place, and went to work the next day. We know about the cab and shuttle for sure. That night, after work, he actually drove to Chicago, made the call to us, and drove back. The next day, he’s back at work again.”
    “Risky . . . ,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah. He took risks. And there’s no way to prove he drove to Chicago, but we checked the stewardesses, and nobody remembers him on a flight. Also, he had an oil change at a Jiffy Lube a week and a half ago and got a mileage sticker on his window. He’s driven almost two thousand miles in that time.”
    “That’s good,” Lucas said. “You know, if he’d faked a suicide with O’Donnell . . . I don’t know that we ever would have broken it out. He got too complicated for himself.”
     
    THE CRIME-SCENE PEOPLE believed that Angela Larson was killed in O’Donnell’s workshop; they found traces of blood, with indications that somebody had tried to clean it up with commercial liquid cleanser; the cleanser had actually ruined the blood for DNA analysis, but chemical analysis of the concrete dust on Larson’s feet matched the concrete of O’Donnell’s garage floor. O’Donnell, according to the security hospital records, was working the night that Larson was killed but was not working the night that Peterson was kidnapped. Was he involved? Lucas didn’t think so. He thought O’Donnell was probably Grant’s—or Rogers’s—last line of defense, and had been carefully set up.
     
    THE BIGGEST, MOST complicated lie—if it was a lie, and many people would have denied that it was—appeared in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune four days after the shootings, under the byline of Ruffe Ignace.
     
    LIKE THIS:
    The Twin Cities were saturated with media. Reporters were looking for explanations, going to funerals, interviewing people who didn’t know anything.
    Rose Marie called Lucas and outlined the problem: “The media want a public execution. The legislature is behaving with its usual courage, so there’ll probably be one. The only candidates are the Department of Human Services, and us. Some of the DHS guys are semipublicly wondering why you were driving down there to pick up Grant? Why didn’t you call the sheriff and have him grabbed earlier in the day?”
    They talked about it for an hour, and then Lucas called Ignace. Ignace came into the hospital on the evening of the day after the shooting, armed with six steno pads and half a dozen pens.
    “We want to tell the truth before too many innocent people get hurt,” Lucas