Mind Prey

by John Sandford

  "The woman on the couch"—Manette tipped his head toward the living room—"the younger one, is Andi's partner, Nancy Wolfe. I'll talk to her."

  "We'd like to start as soon as we can," Lucas said. "Tomorrow morning."

  "I hope it's a kidnapping," Manette said. "I hope it's for profit—I don't like to think of some nut taking them."

  "How about George Dunn?" Lucas asked. "He says he was in his car during the attack. No witnesses."

  "That sonofabitch," Manette said. He pushed himself out of the chair and took a quick turn around the room and made a sound like a clog's growl. "He's a goddamn psycho. I didn't think before tonight that he'd do anything to hurt Andi or the girls, but now… I don't know."

  "You think he might?"

  "He's a cold-hearted sonofabitch," Manette said. "He could do anything."

  They talked about the case for a few more minutes, then the two women came to the door and looked inside. "Tower? Are you okay?"

  "I'm fine," he said.

  The women stepped inside. The younger of the two, Nancy Wolfe, was a slender, well-tanned woman. She wore a soft woollen dress, but no jewelry or makeup, and her auburn hair showed a few threads of gray. Speaking to Manette, she said, "You need some quiet. I'm telling you that as an M.D., not as a psychiatrist."

  The other woman was paler, older, with a loose, jowly face touched expertly with rouge. She nodded, stepped closer to Manette, and took his arm. "Just come on upstairs, Tower. Even if you can't sleep, you could lie down…"

  "I don't go to bed until two o'clock in the morning," Manette said irritably. "There's no point in going up now."

  "But it's been exhausting," the woman said. She seemed to be talking about herself, and Lucas realized that she must be Manette's wife. She spoke to Roux: "Tower's under a lot of stress, and he's had health problems."

  "We wanted him to know that we're doing everything we can," Roux said. She looked back at Manette. "I've assigned Lucas to oversee the investigation."

  "Thank you," Manette said. And to Lucas: "Anything you need, anybody that I know, that you want to talk to, just call. And let me know about that reward, if it would be useful."

  "George Dunn," Lucas said.

  "Get him on the phone, will you, Helen?" Manette said to his wife. "I'll talk to him."

  "And after that, Tower, I want you to kick back and close your eyes, even if it's just for half an hour," Wolfe said. She reached out and touched his hand. "Take some time to think."

  Lucas dropped the chief at her house, promising to call back at midnight, or when anything broke.

  "Lester's running the routine," Roux said as the car idled in her driveway. "I need you to pluck this thing out of the sky, so to speak."

  "Doesn't have a plucking feel about it," Lucas said. "Something complicated is going on."

  "If you don't, we're gonna get plucked," Roux said. Then: "You want fifteen seconds of politics?"

  "Sure."

  "This is one of those cases that people will talk about for a generation," Roux said. "If we find Manette and her kids, we're gold. We'll be untouchable. But if we fuck it up…" She let her voice trail away.

  "Let me go pluck," Lucas said.

  George Dunn's house was a modest white ranch, tucked away on a big tree-filled lot on a dead-end street in Edina. Lucas left the Porsche in the driveway and climbed the stone walk to the front door, pushed the doorbell. A thick-faced cop, usually in uniform, now in slacks and a golf shirt, pushed open the door.

  "Chief Davenport…"

  "Hey, Rick," Lucas said. "They've got you watching the phones?"

  "Yeah." In a lower voice, "And Dunn."

  "Where is he?"

  "Back in his office—the light back there." The cop nodded to the left.

  The house was stacked with brown cardboard moving boxes, a dozen of them in the front room, more visible in the kitchen and breakfast area. There was little furniture—a couch and chair in the living room, a round oak table in the breakfast nook. Lucas followed a hall back to the light and found Dunn sitting at a rectangular dining table in what had been meant as a family room. A large-screen TV sat against one wall, the picture on, the sound off. A stereo system was stacked on a pile of three cardboard boxes.

  Dunn was huddled over a pile of paper, with a crooked-neck lamp pulled close to them, his face half-in and half-out of the light. To his left, a half-dozen two-drawer file cabinets were pushed against a wall. Half of them had open drawers. Another stack of cardboard boxes sat on the floor beside the file cabinets. On the far side of the room, three chairs faced each other across a glass coffee table.

  Lucas stepped inside the room and said, "Mr. Dunn."

  Dunn looked up. "Davenport," he said. He dropped his pen, pushed back from the table, and stood to shake hands.

  Dunn was a fullback ten years off the playing field: broad shoulders, bullet head, beat-up face. His front teeth were so even, so white and perfect, that they had to be a bridge. He wore a gray cashmere sweater, with the sleeves pushed up, showing a gold Rolex; jeans, and loafers without socks. He shook hands, held the grip for a second, nodded, pointed at a chair, sat down, and said, "Ask."

  "You want a lawyer?" Lucas asked.

  "I had one. It was a waste of money," Dunn said.

  Lucas sat down, leaned forward, an elbow on his thigh. "You say you were in your car when your wife was taken. But you don't have any witnesses and you made no calls that would confirm it."

  "I made one call to her, while she was on her way over to the school. I told that to the other guys…"

  "But that was an hour before she was taken. A prosecutor might say that the call tipped you off to exactly where she'd be, so you'd have time to get there. Or send somebody," Lucas said. "And after that call, you were out of your office, and out of everybody's sight."

  "I know it. If I'd done… this thing… I'd have a better alibi," Dunn said. He made a sliding gesture with one hand. "I'd have been someplace besides my car. But the fact is, I spend maybe a quarter of my business day in my car. I've got a half-dozen developments going around the Cities, from west of Minnetonka to the St. Croix. I hit every one every day."

  "And you use your car phone all the time," Lucas pointed out.

  "Not after business hours," Dunn said, shaking his head. "I called the office from Yorkville—that's the job over in Woodbury—and after that, and after I talked to Andi, I just headed back in. When I got here, the cops were waiting for me."

  "Who do you think took her?" Lucas asked.

  Dunn shook his head. "It's gotta be one of the nuts she handles," he said. "She gets the worst. Sex criminals, pyromaniacs, killers. Nobody's too crazy for her."

  Lucas gazed at him for a moment. The gooseneck lamp made a pool of light around his hands, but his pug's face was half in shadow; in an old black-and-white movie, he might have been the devil. "How much do you dislike her?" Lucas asked. "Your wife?"

  "I don't dislike her," Dunn said, bouncing once in the chair. "I love her."

  "That's not the word around town."

  "Yeah, yeah, yeah." He put his fingers to his forehead, scrubbed at it. "I screwed a woman from the office. Once." Lucas let the silence grow, and Dunn finally launched himself from his chair, walked to a box, opened it, took out a bottle of scotch. "Whiskey?"

  "No, thanks." And he let the silence go.

  "We're talking about a major-league cookie, this chick, in my face five days a week," Dunn said. He made a Coke-bottle tits-and-ass figure with his hands. "Andi and I had a few disagreements—not big ones, but we've got a lot going on. Careers, busy all the time, we don't see each other enough… like that. So this chick is there, in the office—she was my traffic manager—and finally I jump her. Right there on her desk, pencils and pens all over the place, Post-it notes stuck to her butt. The next thine I know, she gets her little handbag and her business suit and shows up at Audi's office to announce that she loves me and I love her." He ran his hands through his hair, then laughed, a short, ha
lf-humorous bark. "Christ, what a nightmare that must've been."

  "Doesn't sound like one of your better days," Lucas admitted. He remembered days like that.

  "Man, I wish I hadn't done it," Dunn said. He lipped the bottle of whiskey in his hand, caught it. "I lost my wife and a pretty goddamn good traffic manager on the same day."

  Lucas watched him for a long beat. He wasn't acting.

  "Is there any reason you might've killed your wife for her money?"

  Dunn looked up, vaguely surprised: "Christ, you don't fuck around, do you?"

  Lucas shook his head. "Could you have done that? Does it make sense?"

  "No. Just between you and me—there isn't that much money."

  "Um…"

  "I know, Tower Manette and his millions, the Manette Trust, the Manette Foundation, all that shit," Dunn said. He flicked a hand as if batting away a cobweb, then walked across the room, stepped through a doorway and flicked on a light. He opened a refrigerator door, dropped a couple of ice cubes in his glass, and came back. "Andi gets a hundred thousand a year, more or less, from her share of the Manette Trust. When the kids turn eighteen, they'll get a piece of it. And they'll get bigger pieces when they turn twenty-five and forty. If they were… to die… I wouldn't see any of that. What I'd get is the house, and the stuff in it. Frankly, I don't need it."

  "So what about Manette? You said…"

  "Tower had maybe ten million back in the fifties, plus the income from the trust, and a board seat at the Foundation. But he was running all over the world, buying yachts, buying a house in Palm Beach, screwing everything in a skirt. And he was putting the good stuff up his nose—he was heavy into cocaine back in the Seventies. Anyway, after a few years, the interest on the ten mil wasn't cutting it. He started dipping into the principal. Then he got into politics—bought his way in, really—and he dipped a little deeper. It must've seemed like taking water out of the ocean with a teacup. But it added up. Then, in the late seventies and eighties, he did everything wrong—he was stuck in bonds during the big inflation, finally unloaded them at a terrific loss. Then sometime in there, he met Helen…"

  "Helen's his second wife, right?" Lucas said. "She's quite a bit younger than he is?"

  Dunn said, "I guess she's… what? Fifty-three, fifty-four? She's not that young. His first wife, Bernie—that's Andi's mother—died about ten years ago. He was already seeing Helen by that time. She was a good-looking woman. She had the face and real star-quality tits. Tower always liked tits. Anyway, Helen was in real estate and she got him deep into REITs as a way to recoup his bond losses…"

  "What's a reet?" Lucas asked.

  "Sorry; real-estate investment trust. Anyway, that was just before real estate fell out of bed, and he got hammered again. And the crash of eighty-seven… Hell, the guy was the kiss of death. You didn't want to stand next to him."

  "So he's broke?"

  Dunn looked up at the ceiling as if he were running a calculator in his head. After a moment, he said, "Right now, if Tower hunted around, he might come up with… a million? Of course, the house is paid for, that's better'n a mil, but he can't really get at it. He has to live somewhere and it has to be up to his standards… So figure that he gets sixty thousand from the million that's his, and another hundred thousand from the trust And he's still got that seat on the Foundation board, but that probably doesn't pay more than twenty or thirty. So what's that? Less than two hundred?"

  "Jesus, he's eating dog food," Lucas said, with just a rime of sarcasm in his voice.

  Dunn pointed a finger at Lucas: "But that's exactly what he feels like. Exactly, He was spending a half-million a year when a Cadillac cost six thousand bucks and a million was really something. Now he's scraping along on maybe a quarter mil and a Caddy costs forty thousand."

  "Poor sonofabitch."

  "Listen, a million ain't that much any more," Dunn said wryly. "A guy who owns two good Exxon stations—he's worth at least a mil, probably more. Two gas stations. We're not talking about yachts and polo."

  "So if you took your wife off, you wouldn't have done it for the money," Lucas said.

  "Hell, if anybody got taken off, it should've been me. I'm worth fifteen or twenty times what Tower is. Of course, it ain't as good as Tower's money," he said ruefully.

  "Why's that?"

  " 'Cause I earned it," Dunn said. "Just like you did, with your computer company. I read about you in Cities' Biz. They said you're worth probably five million, and growing. You must feel it—that your money's got a taint."

  "I've never seen any of it, the money," Lucas said. "It's all paper, at this point." Then: "What about insurance? Is there insurance on Andi?"

  "Well, yeah." Dunn's forehead wrinkled and he scratched his chin. "Actually, quite a bit."

  "Who'd get it?"

  Dunn shrugged. "The kids… unless… Ah, Christ. If the kids died, I'd get it."

  "Sole beneficiary?"

  "Yeah… except, you know, Nancy Wolfe would get a half-million. They do pretty well in that partnership, and they both have key-man—key-woman—insurance to help cover their mortgage and so on, if somebody died."

  "Is a half-million a lot for Nancy Wolfe?"

  Dunn thought again, and then said, "It'd be quite a bit. She pulls down something between $150,000 and $175,000 a year, and she can't protect any of it—taxes eat her alive—so another half mil would be nice."

  "Will you sign a release saying that we can look at your wife's records?" Lucas asked.

  "Sure. Why wouldn't I?"

  "Because a lot of medical people think psychiatric records should be privileged," Lucas said. "That people need treatment, not cops."

  "Fuck that. I'll sign," Dunn said. "You got a paper with you?"

  "I'll have one sent over tonight," Lucas said.

  Dunn was watching Lucas's hand and asked, "What're you playing with?"

  Lucas looked down at his hand and saw the ring. "Ring."

  "Uh-oh. Coming or going?" Dunn asked.

  "Thinking about it," Lucas said.

  "Marriage is wonderful," Dunn said. He spread his arms. "Look around. A box for everything and everything in its box."

  "You seem… sort of lighthearted about this whole thing."

  Dunn suddenly leaned forward, his face like a stone. "Davenport, I'm so fuckin' scared I can't spit. I honest-to-God never knew what it meant, being scared spitless. I thought it was just a phrase, but it's not… You gotta get my guys back."

  Lucas grunted and stood up. "You'll stick around." It wasn't a question.

  "Yeah." Dunn stood up, facing him. "You're a tough guy, right?"

  "Maybe," Lucas said.

  "Football, I bet."

  "Hockey."

  "Yeah, you got the cuts… Think you could take me?" Dunn had relaxed again, and a faintly amused look crossed his face.

  Lucas nodded. "Yeah."

  Dunn said, "Huh," like he didn't necessarily agree, and then, losing the smile, "What d'you think—you gonna find my wife and kids?"

  "I'll find them," Lucas said.

  "But you won't guarantee their condition," Dunn said.

  Lucas looked away, into the dark house: he felt like something was pushing his face. "No," he said to the darkness.

  CHAPTER 4

  « ^ »

  The Homicide office resembled the city room of a slightly seedy small-town daily. Individual cubicles for the detectives were separated by shoulder-high partitions; some desks were neat, others were a swamp of paper and souvenirs. Three different kinds of gray or putty-colored metal file cabinets were stuck wherever there was space. Old fliers and notes and cartoons and bureaucratic missives were tacked or taped on walls and bulletin boards. A brown plastic radio the size of a toaster, the kind last made in the sixties with a big, round tuning dial, sat on top of a file cabinet, a bent steel clothes hanger jammed into the back as an antenna. An adenoidal voice squeaked from the primitive speaker.

  "… is one of the most historical of crimes, from
the Rape of the Sabine women to the Lindbergh kidnapping of our own era…"

  Lucas was drinking chicken noodle Soup-in-a-Cup, and paused just inside the door with the cup two inches from his lips. The voice was familiar, but he couldn't place it until the DJ interrupted:

  You're listening to Blackjack Billy Walker, go ahead, Edina, with a question for Dr. David Girdler…

  Dr. Girdler, you said a minute ago that kidnapping victims identify with their kidnappers. All I can say is, that's a perfect example of what happens when the liberal school system shoves this politically correct garbage down the kids' throats, teaching them things the kids know are wrong but they gotta believe because somebody in authority says so, like these union hacks that call themselves teachers…

  Girdler's voice was consciously mellow, hushed, artificially and dramatically deepened. He said:

  I understand your feelings—heh heh—about this, although I don't entirely agree with your sentiments: there are many good teachers. That aside, yes, that identification often takes place and begins within hours of the kidnapping; the victims may actually suggest ways that the police can be more effectively foiled in their efforts…

  Lucas stared at the radio, not believing it. Greave was sitting at his desk, eating a Mr. Goodbar. "Sounds like a fuckin' politician, doesn't he? He couldn't wait to get on the radio. He walked out of the school and drove right down to the station."

  "How long has he been on?" Lucas finished the Soup-in-a-Cup and dropped the cup in a wastebasket.

  "Hour," Greave said. "Lotta newsies have been looking for you, by the way."

  "Fuck 'em," Lucas said. "For now, anyway."

  A dozen detectives were milling around the office—everybody from Homicide/Violent Crimes, more from Vice, Sex, and Intelligence. Some were at desks, others were parked on swivel chairs, some were leaning against file cabinets. A very tall man and a very short one were talking golf swings. A guy from Sex elbowed past with a cafeteria tray full of cups of coffee and Coke. Almost everybody was eating or drinking. The office smelled like coffee, microwave popcorn, and Tombstone pizza.