Chosen Prey

by John Sandford

  WHEN HE WAS gone, Lucas turned to Marcy and said, “Kidd ever call back?”

  “Like it’s any of your business,” Marcy said.

  “Please tell us,” said Black, her former partner. Black had given up any effort at work, and was punching a lemon-colored Gameboy console with his thumbs. “If you don’t, we’ll start rumors that it was Carr who caught your eye.”

  “Asshole,” Marcy said. To Lucas: “He did. We agreed that it might not be a bad idea to have dinner sometime.”

  “So it’s a little indefinite,” Lucas said.

  “If you want to call getting picked up at seven o’clock tonight indefinite,” she said.

  “Be nice if the rain stopped. You know, big date and all,” Lucas said.

  “We can always find a place to get warm,” she said.

  He never won.

  LUCAS TALKED TO the Goodhue County sheriff. He promised he’d get permission to enter the property around the Aronson grave site.

  “It’s probably nothing,” Lucas said. “But if it is something . . . it’s gonna be ugly.”

  “Glad you called.”

  When he’d set up a rendezvous by the Goodhue grave site, Lucas called around until he found an engineering consultant who used ground-penetrating radar to look for pipelines, missing utilities, old cemeteries, and ancient campgrounds. The guy’s name was Larry Lake, and he ran a three-man company called Archeo-Survey, Inc.

  “Last time I worked for you guys, it took two months to get paid,” Lake said. “I had to threaten to have your patrol cars attached.”

  “That’s ’cause you didn’t find anything and nobody wanted to be blamed for the bill when you didn’t find anything. It was a pretty big bill.”

  “I’m a certified civil engineer, not a burger flipper,” Lake said. “If I bring fifteen thousand or twenty thousand bucks’ worth of equipment out in the rain, I need to get paid.”

  “I promise you,” Lucas said. “You’ll get the money in a week. If it pans out, of course, you’ll be famous. Probably get on one of those forensic TV shows.”

  “You think?”

  “It could happen.”

  THAT EVENING, WEATHER showed up with a big black leather Coach travel bag for her sixth consecutive sleepover. Lucas dropped The Wall Street Journal on the floor next to his chair and said, “I’ve figured it out. You hate me and you’re trying to fuck me to death.”

  “In your dreams,” she said. “The fact is, I’m gonna get pregnant. You volunteered. The second fact is, I’m right around my fertile period and I’m trying to blanket it.”

  “Blanket it.”

  “Yes. So if you don’t mind, bring yourself back to the bedroom. It’ll all be over in a few minutes.”

  THE RAIN CONTINUED overnight, spitting against the windows, but by morning had changed from a steady pelting storm to a steady miserable drizzle. Weather left early, as usual, and Lucas got another hour of sleep before he climbed out of bed, cleaned up, and rolled out of the driveway in his Tahoe.

  Del was waiting in his driveway, under the eaves of the garage, already dressed in a rain suit. His wife stood beside him, wearing a heavy sweater. “You guys be careful,” she said. “The roads are slippery. Get some decent lunch somewhere. Eat something with vegetables, like a salad or something.”

  In the truck, Del said, “Jesus Christ—vegetables.”

  The drive to south Dakota County took forty-five minutes, a slow trip against rush traffic, “Money, Guns, and Lawyers” bumping out of the CD player, the wipers beating time. The roadside ditches were showing long strips of water, and Del told a story about a Caterpillar D-6 that once sank out of sight, was never recovered, and was presumably on its way to China after encountering a bog in weather just like this.

  When they arrived, they found a green Subaru Forester parked on the shoulder of the road, with a magnetic door-sign that said Archeo-Survey, Inc. Just beyond were three sheriff’s cars and a battered Jeep Cherokee. One of the cars had its light bar flashing out a slow-down warning. A half-dozen men in slickers turned to look at them as they pulled off the road.

  “Cop convention,” Del grunted.

  Lucas parked, got out of the truck, walked around to the back, lifted the hatch, found his rain suit, and pulled it on. Del waited until he’d pulled the hood tight around his face, then they walked down the road to introduce themselves to the others.

  “Don Hammond, chief deputy down here,” said the largest of the cops. “These guys are Rick and Dave. You know Terry Marshall.” Marshall nodded at Lucas; little flecks of rain speckled his steel-rimmed glasses, and he looked tough as a chunk of hickory. Hammond continued: “The sheriff’ll stop out later. You sure picked a good morning for it.”

  “It’s all I had,” Lucas said. They all looked up at the sky, then Lucas asked, “Where’s the radar guy?”

  “He’s up in the woods with his helper,” Hammond said. “They’re setting up reference points. We were waiting for you.”

  “What do you think? Bunch of bodies?” asked the deputy named Dave.

  “I can’t take the chance,” Lucas said. “I’d say it’s about one in ten.”

  “Good. We got, like, two shovels, and I got an idea who’d be using them.”

  “LARRY LAKE?” LUCAS asked. He was struggling up the steep hillside, slipping on the oak leaves, Del, Hammond, and Marshall trailing behind.

  “That’s me.” Lake was a lanky man with an uncontrolled beard and aviator-style glasses. He wore a red sailing-style rain suit with green Day-Glo flashes on the backs and shoulders. His face was wind-tanned, and two pale blue eyes peered out from behind the glasses. He was standing beside a yellow metal box on a tripod, which was set up over Aronson’s grave. As Lucas came up, he saw that the metal box housed a lens. “Are you Davenport?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I better get paid. This is miserable.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. How long is it gonna take?”

  “I got my guy over there setting up the last of the reference pins, so we’ll start the survey in ten minutes or so. I’m gonna get a cup of coffee first.”

  “How long is it gonna take after that?”

  Lake shrugged. “Depends on how much you want surveyed. We could show you some of it in a couple of hours, a lot more this evening, more tomorrow . . . whatever you want. We could do the whole hill in about three days. We’re using this grave as a center point. . . .” He touched his ear, and Lucas realized that what looked like a plastic tab near his mouth was actually a microphone. Lake, talking to the mike, said, “Yeah, Bill. Yeah, the cops came up. Just a sec.” To Lucas and the others: “This’ll take a second, then we’ll go some coffee.”

  He looked through the lens on the survey instrument, sideways across the hill to where Bill was holding a red and white survey rod with a knob on top. Lake said, “Two forward, a half left. A half forward, one inch right. Two inches back, one half inch right. You’re good—put in a pin. Yeah. Yup. Down at the truck.”

  AT THE TRUCK, Lake’s assistant got a gallon thermos out of the Subaru and started pouring coffee into paper cups, as Lake explained what he’d been doing. “We set up four control points around the center, which is at Aronson’s grave, so we’ve got a big rectangle laid out on the hillside. The next thing is, we stretch lines from the pins at the top of the hill to the pins at the bottom. Those lines are marked at one-meter intervals. Then we stretch another string across the hill, between the vertical lines, as a guide. We’ll walk back and forth with the radar, along the string, and move down the hill one meter with every sweep. We can probably get you a fifty-meter-square block in about two hours.”

  “If there’s a grave, how do you find it later?” asked Del.

  “Our computer’ll actually generate a map, to scale,” Lake said. “If we find a possible site fifteen yards north and five yards east, it’ll show on the computer plot, and then I’ll just use the total station—”

  “The total station’s the box on the tripod,” one o
f the deputies said.

  “—I’ll just use the total station to spot the center of the suspected site, and you guys—not me—start digging.”

  “How accurate is it?” Lucas asked.

  “At that distance?” Lake looked up the hill. “A couple thousandths of an inch.”

  THE WORK WAS even more miserable than it looked. Lucas and Del, alternating with Hammond and Marshall, stretched a long piece of yellow string between the corresponding one-meter markers on the vertical strings of the survey box, so it resembled the letter H. The cross string had to go around trees, got caught in branches; whenever it got tangled, whoever went to untangle it inevitably slipped on the sodden leaves and slid in the mud down the hill.

  Lake, in the meantime, walked back and forth across the hillside, straddling the yellow string, with two boxlike radar units hanging down from one shoulder. After the cops figured out the routine, the work went quickly, except for the falls. An hour into it, Lucas noticed that neither Lake nor his assistant ever fell down.

  “How come?” Lucas asked.

  “We’re wearing golf shoes,” Lake said. He picked up his feet to show Lucas the spikes.

  “You’ve done this before,” Del said.

  “Once or twice,” Lake said.

  LAKE HAD EXPECTED some results in two hours, but the rain, the falls, the jumble of trees stretched the two hours into three. When they’d run the last line between the bottom points of the survey box, Lake said, “Let’s throw the gear into the truck and run into town. Find a café.”

  “How long will it take you to process?” Lucas asked.

  “We’ll dump the information into the computer on the way into town. We’ll pull up some preliminary results right there.”

  They went to the High Street Café in Cannon Falls, took over the round booth by the window, and dragged some chairs around the open side. A half-dozen coffee drinkers sat down the length of the breakfast bar, farmers waiting out the rain. They made no attempt not to stare as Lake produced a fifty-foot extension cord, got a waitress to plug it in, and started the computer. “Data looked pretty good going in,” Lake muttered. “It’s not like we came up dry.”

  “Can you actually see bodies?” asked Marshall.

  “No, no. Nothing like that. What we see are soil changes. They’ll look like grave shapes.”

  “Trouble is,” his assistant chipped in, “sometimes you see a lot of grave shapes, especially in the woods like that. If a tree tipped over fifty years ago, and its roots pulled up a hole in the ground, the radar’ll see it.”

  Lucas looked at the screen. One word: Processing.

  They all ordered pie and coffee, and Del leaned over and said, “Still processing.”

  “Takes a while,” Lake said. He said that two months before, he’d been in North Dakota looking for a graveyard that was about to be flooded by a dam. “They knew pretty close where it was, but they thought it was a family thing. Five or six graves. Turned out that there were a hundred and seventy graves in there. They were pretty unhappy. They had like X number of dollars budgeted for moving graves, and they had to come up with like twenty X. People get pretty cranked up about moving granddaddy’s bones. On the screens, the graves looked like holes in one of those old IBM punch cards.”

  As he said it, the screen blinked: Processing Complete.

  “Here we go,” Lucas said.

  Lake pushed his pie away, pulled the laptop closer, tapped a few keys, and a new message came up: Generating Plot. The new message lasted only a few seconds, then changed to Plot Complete. Lake tapped a few more keys, muttered, “There’s Aronson’s grave, that’s the midpoint. Let’s go up to the Number One point and scan east.”

  He manipulated the built-in pointing stick on the keyboard and began scrolling. “There’s one,” he said after a few seconds.

  “A grave?” Lucas asked. He could see the deeper gray-shaded form on the plot.

  “Don’t know,” Lake said. “Looks pretty small. This is all to scale, and it’s less than a meter across.”

  “Pretty round, too,” his assistant said.

  They were all pressing in behind Lake now, watching the screen, which was showing a flat field composed of various shades of gray. The possible graves showed up as a darker gray in the background. They scanned across the hillside, then back, and across again, moving down the field in one-meter increments.

  “Another one,” Lake said.

  “That could be one,” his assistant said. “Let’s get the coordinates.”

  “Let’s just scan the whole thing first,” Lake said. “That looked like a tree hole to me.”

  “There’s one,” Lucas said.

  “ ’Nother tree hole,” Lake said.

  “How can you tell tree holes?” Del asked.

  “They got a certain kind of oval shape, egg shape, with the wide part uphill. . . . There’s one,” Lake said.

  Two more scans, then Lake said, “Uh-oh.”

  “What.”

  He stopped the scan. “Look at this.” He was talking to his assistant. “That looks artificial.”

  “Just like a grave,” his assistant said. “Let me get the coordinates on this one.”

  He jotted the coordinates down, then Lake resumed scanning, stopping only a few meters farther along. “There’s another one. . . . No wait, we’re at zero, zero.”

  “What’s that?” Lucas asked.

  “That’s the center point. That’s Aronson.”

  “So the first thing you thought maybe was a grave, that was on this same level?” Lucas asked.

  Lake nodded. “Yup. Five meters east.”

  “Goddamnit,” one of the cops said. Marshall humped forward, pressing close to the computer. “A grave looks different from anything else?”

  “Yeah. For some reason, people have always made them rectangular, even though the bodies don’t go in the ground that way. You can pick them out by the squared corners.” Lake manipulated the pointing stick, continued scanning, then stopped again. “Holy ducks, there’s another one.”

  “Grave?”

  “It looks artificial,” Lake said. He looked at Lucas. “I’ll tell you what. You can never tell what’s underground, but . . . if that’s not a grave, I’ll kiss your Aunt Sally on the lips.”

  He found a third, on the same line, a moment later, then scanned back and found the lower portions of the three possible graves. “They’re not only rectangular, they’re just about five feet long. Something less than two meters.”

  “Keep going,” Lucas said.

  “Ah, look at this,” Lake said a moment later. “We’ve got another one. Let me look at this. . . . Look, it’s right between two of the graves above, but one level down. It’s plotted out like a graveyard.”

  In the end, they found two dozen anomalies, including all the tree holes and natural gullies that had refilled with sediment. Six, Lake said, could be graves.

  “Better get the sheriff right now,” Hammond said. “If these things really are graves, it’s gonna be a bad day at black rock.”

  Lucas looked at Del and said, “Six.”

  “Maybe they’re tree holes.”

  Lucas looked at Lake, who shook his head. “I’m not saying for sure that they’re graves, but they’re artificial, and Aronson’s grave fits right in the pattern.”

  THEY WENT BACK to the hillside site in a convoy, and within ten minutes, as Lake was setting up his total station, a half-dozen more cars arrived. Sheriff’s deputies were scattered around the hillside in yellow rain slickers, four or five of them with shovels. Lake used the total station to guide his assistant across the hillside with the reflector pole. “There,” he called. “You’re standing on it.”

  Lucas stepped over to look: just another piece of hillside covered with leaves, with two small tree seedlings sticking out of it. Neither of the trees was bigger in diameter than his index finger. “No hole,” he said.

  A couple of cops had come over, bringing shovels. “Let us in there,” one
of them said.

  He and the second cop began scraping at the surface, cleaning away the leaves, and the air was suffused with the scent of wet spring mold. “Scrape it, don’t dig down,” Hammond said, standing off to the side.

  “Take it real slow,” Marshall said. “Ain’t no hurry now.”

  Lake spotted the other suspected sites as the cops scraped at the first one, but they held off digging the others to concentrate on the first. Less than six inches down, one of the cops grunted and said, “This is a hole.”

  “What?” Lucas peered into the muddy gap in the ground. He couldn’t see anything but dirt.