Mind Prey

by John Sandford

  Elle put down her fork. "Oh, no. You're not going to prosecute."

  "That's up in the air," Lucas said.

  Now Elle was angry. "That's the most primitive law this state has ever passed. We know that people are ill, but we insist on putting them into positions where they can't get help, and they'll just go on…"

  "… Unless we slap their asses in jail…"

  "What about the ones you never find out about? The ones who'd like to get treatment but can't because the minute they open their mouths, the cops'll be on them like wolves?"

  "I know you've got a point-of-view," Lucas said, trying to back out of the argument.

  "What?" Weather asked. "What happens?"

  Elle turned to her. "If a person abuses a child in this state, and realizes he's sick, and tries to get treatment, the therapist is required to report him. If she does that, her records get seized by the state and are used as evidence against the patient. So as soon as the state acts, the patient, of course, gets a lawyer, who tells him to get out of treatment and keep his mouth shut. And if the man's acquitted—they frequently are, since he's admitted that he's mentally ill and that casts doubt on the records, and the therapists are very reluctant witnesses—well, then he's turned loose and all he knows for sure is that he can't ever go back to treatment, because he might wind up in prison."

  Weather stared at her for a moment, then said to Lucas, "That can't be right."

  "Sort of a Catch-22," Lucas admitted.

  "Sort of barbaric is what it is," Weather said sharply.

  "Child abuse is barbaric," Lucas snapped back.

  "But if a person is trying to get help, what do you want? Throw him in a hole somewhere?"

  "Listen, I really don't want to argue about it," Lucas said. "You either believe or you don't."

  "Lucas…"

  "Listen, will you guys let me chicken out of this thing and eat my steak? For… gosh sakes."

  "Makes me really unhappy," Elle growled. "Really unhappy."

  Late that night, Weather rolled up on a shoulder and said, "Barbaric."

  "I didn't want to argue about it with Elle right there," Lucas said. "But you know what I really think? Therapy doesn't work with child abusers. The shrinks are flattering themselves. What you do with child abusers is you put their asses in jail. Each and every one of them, wherever you find them."

  "And you call yourself a liberal," Weather said in the dark.

  "Libertine. Not liberal," Lucas said, easing toward her.

  "Stay on your side of the bed," she said.

  "How about if I put just one finger over?"

  "No." And a moment later, "That's not a finger…"

  CHAPTER 10

  « ^ »

  John Mail watched the late news with a sense of well-being. He was alone except for the wide-screen television and his computers. He had a dial-up Internet link, and monitored twenty-four news groups dealing with sex or computers or both. He had two phone lines and three computers going at once. As he watched the news, he punched through alt.sex.blondes on the 'Net, and now and then pulled out a piece and shipped it to a second computer.

  Mail was a little sleepy, a little burned out, with a pleasant ache in his lower belly and a burn on his knees. Andi Manette was a package, all right: he'd known that when he'd first laid eyes on her ten years earlier. She was everything he'd expected: nice body, and she fought him. He enjoyed the fight, and enjoyed smothering it. Every time he rode her, he finished with a sense of victory.

  And now here he was, on television, dominating the news. Everybody was looking for him—and they might find him, he thought, given a few weeks, or months. He'd have to do something about that, eventually.

  He pushed the thought away and went back to his favorite: Davenport. Davenport was in hiding. Nothing was said about him. Nothing.

  Mail ran through the Internet news groups as he watched TV, sorting the messages by subject. He was tempted to post something about Manette and what he was doing with her. He might do that, if he could get to a machine at the university. Some people on the alt.sex groups who would appreciate what he had to say…

  Maybe just a quick note now, just a hint? No. There was always a path they could get back on, a way to trace him—his Internet link had his real phone number.

  Though not his real name.

  On the Internet, he was Tab Post and Pete Rate, names he got off his computer keyboard. Down at the store, and with the store van, he was Larry F. Roses. The real Larry F. Roses was down south somewhere, Florida, Louisiana. He'd sold the van and its papers for cash, to avoid having to split the money with his ex-wife. To the mortgage company, he was Martin LaDoux. He had Marty's papers—driver's license, with his own photo on it now, a Social Security card, even a passport. He paid Marty's income taxes.

  He wasn't John Mail anywhere. John Mail was dead…

  Mail sat up and pushed away the TV tray with the aluminum foil chicken-pot-pie tin. Chicken-pot-pie and a Coke; just about his favorite. And he thought about Grace. Got up, went to the kitchen, got another can of Coke, and thought about her some more.

  Grace might be good. Fresh. Her body was just starting to turn, and she'd fight, all right. He dropped on the couch and closed his eyes. Still, when he looked at her, he didn't feel the hunger he felt for the mother. That still surprised him. The first time he'd taken Andi Manette to the mattress, he'd almost blacked out with the joy of it. Maybe, Grace. Sometime. As an experiment. Bet she'd freak out when she saw it coming…

  He'd just finished the Coke when the phone rang on the corner table behind his head. He groped for it, found it. "Hello?"

  "Yes, Mr. LaDoux." Mail sat up: this voice he paid attention to.

  "They are looking for your boat. The police know you were watching her from the lake." Click. Mail stared at the phone. Shit. He wished he knew who it was: a face-to-face talk would be interesting.

  But the boat. He frowned. When he'd rented the boat, he'd had to show an ID, the LaDoux driver's license, his home name. The old guy at the rental place had stamped it on the back of a duplicate form. Where he put the form, Mail didn't know. Hadn't paid attention.

  Damnit. That's how Davenport would get him: when he didn't pay attention.

  Mail stood up, got a jacket and a flashlight, and went outside. Chilly. But the clouds had vanished with the sun, and overhead, the Milky Way stretched across the sky like God's own Rolex. Drive up? Nah. Good night for a stroll. Maybe some pussy at the end of it, although his testicles were beginning to ache.

  With the flashlight picking out the bumps and holes, Mail took the driveway down to the gravel frontage road, checked the rural mailbox out of habit. Nothing; the mailman always came before ten o'clock, and Mail had picked up the day's delivery when he'd got up. He shut the mailbox and went down the gravel road.

  To the north, the lights of the Cities were visible as a thin orange glow above the roadside trees. But when he turned south, up the track to the shack where he kept the women, it was as dark as the inside of a bone; and it all smelled of corn leaves.

  Mail lived on what once had been a small farm. A neighbor had bought it when the farm could no longer support itself, had shorn a hundred and fifty acres of crop land from the original plot, and had sold the remaining ten acres containing the original farmhouse and a few crumbling outbuildings. The new owner, an alcoholic slaughterhouse worker, had allowed the house to fall apart before he killed himself. The next owner built a small house closer to the road, and a two-horse stable out back. When his children had grown, he'd moved to Florida. The next owner converted the stable to a garage, got lonely in the country winter, and moved back to the city. The next owner was Mail.

  By the time Mail took the place, the old house was a ruin, a shack. A caved-in chicken coop squatted behind the shack, with the remains of what might have been a machine shed, now reduced to a pile of rotting boards. A still-recognizable two-seater outhouse was out to one side, nearly buried in the corn. Further to the back was the
foundation of a barn.

  If the farmhouse was a ruin, the basement and root cellar were solid. Mail had run a new electrical cable out to the place from his own house, a job that had taken him two hours.

  He had worried, for a while, about keeping the women in the house. A trespassing antique hunter might accidentally stumble over them. Antique hunters were everywhere, stripping old farmhouses of their antique brass doorknobs and doorstops and forced-air register fittings, old pickle crocks—those were getting hard to find—and even nails, if they were hand-forged and in good shape.

  But antique scavengers were a nervous lot. Judges treated them like burglars, which is what they were, so Mail had put in two Radio Shack battery-operated motion alarms and felt fairly safe. Any antique hunter tripping an alarm would be out of the house in an instant; and if it was anybody else, the cops, for instance, the jig would be up anyway.

  The only other danger was Hecht, the neighboring farmer. Hecht was a phlegmatic German, a member of some weird religious sect. He had no television, there was no newspaper box on his mailbox post. He had never shown much interest in anything beyond his tractor and his land. Mail had never seen him near the old house, except at planting and harvest time, when he was working in the adjacent fields. By then, the women would be long gone.

  Mail walked in the thin oval of illumination from the flashlight, smelling the corn and the dust; and when he crossed the crest of the hill and turned the light toward it, the old farmhouse came up like a witch-house in a Gothic novel, glowing with a faint, ghostly luminescence often found in old clapboard houses that had once been painted white.

  As Mail passed the porch, on the way around back, a nervous chill trickled down his spine: a finger of graveyard fear as he passed the cistern. Scratching sounds? No.

  He clumped inside.

  Grace heard him coming and pushed herself against the wall. She wasn't sure that her mother had heard: Andi had been lying on the mattress for hours, one arm crooked over her eyes, not asleep, but not conscious. She had drifted away again, after the last attack. Grace had tried to rouse her, but Andi wouldn't respond.

  Grace had decided to go after Mail.

  Mail had attacked her mother four times now, battering her each time, raping her after the beating. She could hear the crack of his hand through the steel door, and thinner, weaker sounds that must have been her mother's voice, pleading. He slapped, Andi had told her. Hit her with an open hand, but it was like being hit with a board. This last time, something had broken, and Andi was out of it, Grace thought.

  She'd have to go after Mail, even if she had nothing but her fingernails. He was killing her mother, and when he'd done it, she'd go too.

  "No." Andi pushed herself up. Blood ringed her nostrils, a dark reddish-black crust. Her eyes were like holes, her lips swollen. But she'd heard the footsteps, and roused herself, half-turning to croak the single warning word.

  "I have to do something," Grace whispered. He was coming.

  "No." Andi shook her head. "I don't think… I don't think he'll do anything when I'm like this."

  "He's killing you. I thought you were dying already," Grace whispered. She was crouched on the back corner of the mattress, like a cowering dog at the pound, Andi thought. The girl's eyes were too bright, her lips pale, her skin stretched thin like tracing paper.

  "He might be, but we can't fight him yet. He's too big. We need… something." She pushed herself up, feeling the impact of Mail's footsteps on the stairs. "We need something we can kill him with."

  "What?" Grace looked wildly around the cell. There was nothing.

  "We have to think… but I can't think. I can't think." Andi put her hands to her head, at the temples, as though trying to hold her skull together.

  He was close, on the stairs. "You have to lie down, just like you were," Grace said fiercely. "With your hands over your eyes. Don't say anything, no matter what."

  She pushed her mother down, and they heard the slide-lock pulled back. Andi, too weak to argue, and without the time, nodded and put her arm up and closed her eyes. Grace pulled back in the corner, her feet pulled tight to her thighs, her arms around her legs, looking up at the door.

  Mail peered through the crack, saw them, undid the chain, opened the door. "Get up," he said to Andi.

  Grace, frightened, said, "You did something to her. She hasn't moved since you left."

  That pushed him back.

  Mail's forehead wrinkled and he said, harshly, "Get up," and he pushed Andi's foot with his own.

  Andi rolled half over, then pulled herself away from him, toward the wall, like a cartoon woman dying of thirst in a desert. She inched away, pathetic.

  "You really hurt her, this time," Grace said, and she began to bawl.

  "Shut up," Mail snarled. "Shut up, goddamnit, little fuckin' whiner…"

  He took a step toward her, as though to hit her, and Grace choked off the sobs and tried to pull herself tighter to the wall. Mail hesitated, then pushed Andi again. "Get up."

  Andi rolled some more, and began to inch away again. Mail caught her feet and twisted them, and she flipped onto her back. "Water," she whimpered.

  "What?"

  Her eyes closed and she lay limp as a rag. Grace began bawling again, and Mail shouted, "Shut up, I said," and backed away, uncertain now.

  "You hurt her," Grace said.

  "She wasn't like this when I put her back in," Mail said. "She was walking."

  "I think you did something to her… mind. She talks to Genevieve and Daddy. Where's Gen? What did you do with her? Is she with Daddy?"

  "Ah, fuck," Mail said, exasperated. He probed Andi again, pushing her left foot with his own. "You'd best get better, 'cause I'm not done with you yet," he said. "We're not done, at all."

  He backed out of the room, and said to Grace, "Give her some water."

  "I do," Grace sobbed. "But then she… wets on the floor."

  "Ah, for Christ sakes," Mail said. The door slammed, but the bolt didn't slide shut. Grace held her breath. Had he forgotten? No. The door opened again, and Mail threw in a towel.

  Grace had seen it, when he'd taken her mother out of the cell, lying on the floor beside the mattress he used when he raped her. "Clean her up," Mail said. "I'll be back in the morning."

  The door closed again, and they heard his footsteps on the stairs. They waited, unmoving, but he didn't return.

  "That was great," Andi whispered. She pushed herself up and felt the tears running down her face and she actually smiled through her cracked lips. "Grace, that was wonderful."

  "That's once we beat him," Grace whispered back.

  "We can do it again," Andi said. She propped herself up and tilted her head back. "But we've got to find something."

  "Find what?"

  "A weapon. Something we can kill him with."

  "In here?" Grace looked around the barren cell, her eyes wide but not quite hopeless. "Where?"

  "We'll find something," Andi said. "We have to."

  Mail took the van—the van was blue now, and the sign on the side doors was clear: "Computer Roses"—and rode it down to Highway Three and I-494, filled the tank, and put a little more than four gallons in the red, five-gallon plastic gas can in the back. Inside the convenience store, he bought two quarts of motor oil and paid for it all with a twenty.

  He took forty minutes riding out to Minnetonka, thinking it over. Mail thought a lot about crime, about the way things worked. If he were in a movie, he'd break into the boat works, use a flashlight, go through the files, and then play a breathless game of hide-and-seek with a security guard.

  But this wasn't a movie, and his best protection was simply timing and invisibility.

  Irv's Boat Works was tucked into a curve in the road just off the lake, along with a shabby gas station, a grocery store, and an ice cream parlor, all closed. .He drove by once, looking for movement, looking for cops. He saw two moving cars, one in front and one behind, and no cops. Nobody walking. The only light in th
e buildings was in an ice cream freezer.

  He drove a half-mile down the road to an intersection, did a U-turn, and went back the same way. Another car passed; a house a quarter mile past the station was fully lit, although he didn't see anybody around. He drove out to a SuperAmerica store, parked, walked around to the back of the van, and let himself inside. He took just a minute to mix the motor oil with the gas, the fumes giving him a small mental charge: he hadn't done this since he got out of the hospital—he didn't need it anymore—but it still held something for him.

  When he finished mixing, he went into the Tom Thumb and bought a cheap plastic cigarette lighter and a Coke. He already had a role of duct tape in the glove compartment. Back in the truck, he put the tape on the lighter so it'd be ready, opened the Coke and put it in the van's can-holder, and drove back toward Irv's.

  The place was little more than a wooden shack, with a dock, gas pump, and launching ramp out back. Twenty aluminum fishing boats bobbed off the dock. Inside, he remembered a counter with a cash register, a half-dozen tanks for minnows and shiners, a few pieces of cheap fishing gear in wall racks, and a big, loose pile of green flotation cushions and orange round-the-neck life preservers. The whole place smelled of gas and oil, waterweed and rot.

  Mail drove by once more, did his U-turn, looked for cars coming up behind, waited until one passed, and then followed it back to Irv's. Nothing out ahead. He swerved into the parking lot, stopped just outside the dusty picture-window where the fading red stick-up letters said, Irv's boat work with a missing final "s."

  He left the engine running, walked quickly around to the back of the van, took a jackknife out of his pocket, and cut a grapefruit-size hole in the top of the plastic gas can. The smell of gas was thick. He picked the can up, ready to ease it out the door, when headlights came up. He stopped, listening, but the car purred past.

  He climbed out, got the lighter off the passenger seat, turned it up full, taped the sparking-lever down so he had a miniature torch, then picked up the five-gallon jug and heaved it through the window.