Twisted Prey

by John Sandford

  He was aware that he had driven past the place where Smalls had gone off the road, but he ignored it—he wanted to start from the cabin and experience the drive out as Smalls and Whitehead had.

  The cabin sat a hundred feet back from the road, hidden by a screen of trees, which opened to a grassy lawn that spread up a short slope to the cabin. And it was, indeed, a cabin—bronze-colored logs with pine-green-painted steps leading to a front porch. A pickup had backed up the driveway with a flat trailer behind it, and an elderly woman with tight white hair was riding a John Deere lawn mower around the yard. When Lucas got out of the Evoque, she turned the mower off, took off her earmuffs, and asked, “Y’all lost?”

  “Not if this is Senator Smalls’s place.”

  “It is,” the old woman said. “But he ain’t here.”

  “I know. He’s in Minneapolis,” Lucas said. He showed her his marshal’s badge, and said, “I’m a U.S. Marshal, working on a case with Senator Smalls. He gave me a key.”

  “You investigating that wreck?” she asked.

  “Yeah, checking it out.”

  “Tell you what, marshal, that was one fucked-up Cadillac. I went over to Bill Bunson’s yard and took a look at it.”

  “Where’s that at?” Lucas asked.

  “Up to Green Spring,” she said.

  “Still there?”

  “Unless the cops hauled it away. Or the senator did,” she said.

  “Maybe I’ll go up and take a look,” Lucas said.

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS WENT into the cabin, which was hot and stuffy, punched Smalls’s code into the security system, turned on the air-conditioning, peeled off his jacket, got a bottle of Fat Tire from the refrigerator and a sack of pretzels from the cupboard, and went back out and sat on the porch.

  The old woman had moved around behind the cabin, still mowing, and five minutes after Lucas got outside she drove the mower back around to the front lawn and onto the trailer behind her pickup truck. She killed the mower’s engine, pulled up the loading ramp, and locked it, and said to Lucas, “Good hot day for a beer.”

  “There are a few more in the refrigerator. Help yourself.”

  “I’m not sure the senator would be okay with that.” But she didn’t walk away from the offer.

  “I’ll tell him I drank two,” Lucas said.

  The old woman nodded, and said, “My name’s Janet Walker, and I thank you kindly.”

  She went inside and a minute later came back out with another Fat Tire, sat down on a wicker porch chair. “You getting anything good on the accident?”

  Lucas shook his head. “Got to Washington about three hours ago, from Minnesota. I’m waiting for a West Virginia highway patrolman to show up. He’s gonna tell me all about it.”

  “The rumor around here is, the senator got drunk and drove off the side of the road and blamed it on his dead girlfriend,” Walker said.

  “Girlfriend? I thought she was a political aide.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t doubt she was aidin’ the senator, one way or the other . . . Don’t tell the senator I said that, I need the work.”

  “You’re safe with me,” Lucas said. “You know anything about the accident?”

  “Not a fuckin’ thing,” Walker said. She tipped her head back and took a generous swallow of beer, and when she took the bottle down she said, “Nothing like an ice-cold beer after you mowed yourself some weeds . . . Don’t know nothing about the accident, but I heard that the senator told the cops that they was run off the road by a pickup truck. There was a couple of strange guys going through here with a pickup that weekend. Seen them around the day before the accident and not seen them since.”

  “Is that unusual?”

  “Well . . . no, maybe not. Maybe you remember that kind of thing when something like the accident sets you off. These guys seemed to be looking around, but not doing anything in particular. Saw them myself, and my boss saw them, too. The kind of guys who are in really good shape. Those black razor sunglasses and ball caps, squared-away, military-looking.”

  “Huh. Anybody tell the cops?”

  “Tell them what? That we saw some guys in a pickup truck?”

  “What kind of truck?” Lucas asked.

  “Black Ford F-250. New,” she said. “Or almost new,”

  “Local plates?”

  “Didn’t notice.”

  * * *

  —

  WALKER DIDN’T HAVE much else to say. She finished the beer, and headed up the road in a cloud of yellow dust.

  Lucas went back inside the cabin and poked around for a while. There were four smallish bedrooms, the master with a king-sized bed, the other three with two beds and bathroom each.

  Lucas owned a cabin himself and recognized the layout: it was more or less a dormitory meant to sleep as many people as possible inside a fairly spartan envelope. The living room was separated from the compact kitchen by a breakfast bar, with a dining table and eight chairs parallel to the bar. A poker table was sitting in a corner, and there were scratches on the plank floor where it’d been pushed into the middle of the room when needed. A couch and four overstuffed chairs faced a sixty-inch TV.

  He’d been looking around for ten minutes—he’d spent two of those minutes with The Joy of Sex, which he found under the bed—when a car pulled into the driveway. He went back out on the porch as Carl Armstrong was climbing out of a state police vehicle, a blue-and-gold Chevy SUV. Armstrong was Lucas’s age, a heavyset man with a red face and a gray flattop haircut, wearing tan slacks and a blue dress shirt. He raised a hand to Lucas and walked around to the passenger side, popped open the door, and came out with an old-fashioned leather briefcase.

  “You Marshal Davenport?” he asked, as he came up to the porch steps.

  “That’s me,” Lucas said. “You’re Carl?”

  “Yup. Damn, it’s hot.”

  “I got a key from the senator, turned the air-conditioning on. Come on in. You want a beer?”

  * * *

  —

  ARMSTRONG DIDN’T drink on duty, so Lucas got them two Diet Pepsis. They sat at the dining table, and Armstrong produced an accordion envelope from his briefcase that contained a stack of paper, several sheaves held together with spring clips.

  He peeled them apart and shoved them across the table at Lucas. “Photos of the car, reports from the lab, photos and reports from the scene, transcripts of interviews with Senator Smalls, a transcript of the 911 call. It’s all yours.”

  “Senator Smalls said you seemed competent,” Lucas said. “I’ll go through the paper inch by inch, but what I want is your best judgment . . . off the record . . . What happened here?”

  Armstrong had an accent that Lucas could only think of as wiry, something like an early Hank Williams recording on vinyl. He said, “I do appreciate the senator saying that. He can be scary if you’re sitting on the far end of some federal funding, you know what I mean? Wouldn’t want him pissed off at West Virginia ’cause of something I said.”

  Lucas nodded. “I was with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension for years before I took this job. People would get seriously puckered up around federal grant time.”

  “Exactly,” Armstrong said. He put his elbows on the table and linked his fingers. “Anyway, nineteen out of twenty accident investigators would give you the same story about what happened that night: maybe the senator’s girlfriend got careless, or maybe there was another pickup that scared her and she drove off the road. Or—don’t quote me on this—the senator reached over and gave her a little pluck, and over the side they went. Because there’s no physical evidence of anything else.”

  “She wasn’t on her cell phone?”

  “No—one of the first things we checked. The senator wasn’t, either. They both made calls earlier in the afternoon, but nothing after
about four o’clock, when the senator made a call to a woman in Washington who works as an aide.”

  “A Kitten Carter?”

  “Yes. Miz Carter said it was a routine business call. I didn’t ask what it concerned because that has no connection with the accident.”

  “So, nineteen out of twenty would say Senator Smalls’s story about the other truck was wrong, one way or another. That nothing hit them. And what would the twentieth accident investigator say?” Lucas asked.

  “That would be me,” Armstrong said. “I’ve filed all these reports, and if anybody looks at them, they’ll get the same conclusion as the other nineteen. But I’ll tell you, marshal, there’s something not right about it. They went off the road where it’s perfectly straight, at the top of a hill, at a place with the biggest drop into the river. Wasn’t any reason for Miz Whitehead to jerk the steering wheel to the right. Not unless she was trying to kill them both. The way she fought that truck going down the hill, it sure don’t look like she was trying to kill herself. If somebody was trying to kill them, and if they tried to do it by ramming that Caddy, that’s the exact spot they would have picked. The road is narrow, and gravel don’t give the best footing, and if the truck was overtaking them and gave them a good whack . . .”

  “Over they’d go,” Lucas suggested.

  Armstrong bobbed his head. “Senator Smalls’s story felt strong to me. You couldn’t fake a story like that and sell it to me: I’d sniff it out, if he was lyin’. With the senator, I had the feeling that he was telling the truth. Or, at least, thinks he was. Why would he lie? Neither one of them was drunk, and she was driving. No crime there. Now, he says that when they left the cabin, he sort of dozed off. He woke up when Miz Whitehead said something about the jerk coming up behind them. Is it possible that he thought they were hit, that he believes they were hit, when what actually happened is that Miz Whitehead got scared and yanked the wheel over? I mean, there’s no physical evidence that they were hit by another truck. How do you pull that off?”

  “Don’t know, off the top of my head. If they were professionals . . .”

  “That’s where I get off the bus,” Armstrong said. “I don’t believe in that kind of thing. Professional killers.”

  “I understand that,” Lucas said. “Look, I don’t know anything about accident investigation, but you’d say . . . that it seems completely unlikely, that there are much better alternative explanations, but your gut tells you something unusual happened.”

  “That’s it,” Armstrong said. “My gut don’t write the reports, though.”

  “Let’s go look at the scene,” Lucas said.

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS TURNED ON the security system, locked the cabin, and on the way out to their vehicles he told Armstrong about his chat with Janet Walker, about the men with the sunglasses and the black Ford F-250. “If one turns up with some unusual dents . . .”

  “I’ll make a note,” Armstrong said. “Maybe even spend a couple of hours sniffing around.”

  * * *

  —

  ARMSTRONG LED HIM up the track that went out to the state road and down that road to the point where Whitehead and Smalls went over the side. They pulled well off to the left, and Lucas got out and looked down toward the river.

  “South Branch of the Potomac—real nice river,” Armstrong said. He pointed to a notch in the thin roadside berm. “That’s where they went over. You can still see the busted-up brush, and the tracks where Miz Whitehead steered along the hillside until they hit the trees.”

  Lucas looked down the hill, at the tracks. A hundred and fifty feet down, the hillside suddenly steepened, not quite to a ninety-degree drop, but close enough. If they’d gone over, they might have bounced once, but they would have been mostly airmailed right into the river.

  “Hell of a job, getting over to the trees,” Lucas said.

  “Almost saved them. Should have,” Armstrong said. “Car rolled over . . . We think that’s when Miz Whitehead was killed, at the very end of the incident. They were crashing down through those trees, some of them pretty big—it looks to me like she was deliberately trying to hit them, to slow the car down—and a branch or part of a tree come through the driver’s-side window and hit her in the temple, poked a hole right through her skull and into her brain. The medical examiner found pieces of bark inside her skull. His report is in the file.”

  He went through the sequence as reported by Smalls, and he and Lucas walked down along the hillside through knee-high weeds and grass to the spot where the Cadillac rolled over. Lucas could still see black patches of dried oil on the pale grass. “According to Senator Smalls, he crawled out of the pickup, which was upside down, got a pistol out of the back, because he thought the people in the truck might be coming down after them, and then dragged Miz Whitehead out. Nobody came down the hill. If there was a truck, it kept going. Sheriff’s deputies took about eleven minutes to get here, from the first 911 call. The ambulance got here a minute later. First state police car got here ten minutes after that.”

  “Is that fast or slow?” Lucas asked.

  “Not real quick . . . probably average. The deputies got a lot of territory to cover out here.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS WALKED SLOWLY back up the hill, along the scarred earth and brush left behind by the Escalade, and asked, “No sign of another vehicle’s tracks?”

  “Not in the loose gravel,” Armstrong said. “If there were any, the responding deputies drove over them. Didn’t find any broken glass, either.”

  “How far to the nearest highway from here?”

  “Couldn’t tell you precisely. Maybe a few miles. Maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less. We could do a Google Earth, if you want.”

  “I can do that,” Lucas said, “if I need it.”

  * * *

  —

  THEY WERE BOTH sweating heavily by the time they got back to the cars, and Armstrong asked Lucas if he’d be staying overnight at the cabin. Lucas shook his head: “I’ve got some interviews to do in Washington. I’ll give you my cell phone number in case you need to reach me.”

  “Wouldn’t count on us coming up with anything new,” Armstrong said. “With the senator involved, we pulled out all the stops on this one.”

  “I’d like to look at the Cadillac myself,” Lucas said. “I understand it’s still around.”

  “Yeah, the truck was pulled up the hill by the local towing service. Hell of a job, too: took two trucks four hours. If you want to follow me, it’s probably twenty minutes from here.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS FOLLOWED.

  Bunson Towing was run out of a junkyard set in a patch of trees that butted up against a railroad right-of-way. The truck had been parked under a tin-roofed shed and wrapped in a blue plastic tarp. A man Armstrong introduced as Lawrie Bunson came out of the yard’s office and helped Armstrong pull the tarp off.

  The truck hadn’t been cleaned up, and the blood on the front seat had gone seriously bad in the heat. Flies were crawling all over it, buzzing around them after the tarp was off. Lucas didn’t look, but he was sure that if he stuck his head inside, he’d find a mother lode of maggots.

  “Stinks,” Bunson said. To Armstrong: “When you think they’re going to move it?”

  “You seen an insurance agent yet?”

  “Not yet. Some chick called from Washington and said State Farm would be out, but I ain’t seen hide nor hair of nobody from State Farm,” Bunson said.

  “You will, I’m sure,” Armstrong said. “This machine is too pricey to let it go.”

  “I’ll talk to somebody, get them out here,” Lucas said.

  “Don’t make no nevermind to me,” Bunson said. “I get twenty dollars a day for storage.”

  They walked around the Escalade, looking at the damage, which was
worse than Lucas had imagined it. The truck had probably sustained fifteen or twenty separate impacts, both sides, the front and the back, even the roof, had taken a pounding. The left front wheel had folded under the truck, with the frame sitting on the side of the tire, and the driver’s-side window had been smashed entirely out of its frame. All the rest of the glass was cracked, including the glass in the mirrors, as well as the head- and taillights.

  Lucas checked the side, where there were four wide marks that looked like they could have been made by trees. Armstrong said, pointing them out, “We took biological samples off here . . . and we matched them to the trees down the hill. The bark is right.”

  Lucas walked to the Evoque, got the Sony camera, and took several shots of the Cadillac’s driver’s side.

  “All right,” he said after a few more minutes, brushing a fly away from his face, “I’m done here. Thank you both. Carl, you see or hear anything more, or figure anything out, call me. About anything, no matter how small, anytime.”

  Lucas gave Armstrong a card with his cell phone number on it, they shook hands, and Lucas headed back to Washington. He was sure he was imagining it, but the stink of the rotting blood seemed to cling to his clothing, maybe permanently. He pushed a few buttons until he found the one for the sunroof, opened it wide, and breathed in all the great weed- and flower-scented country air.

  5

  Lucas checked into the Watergate Hotel because Smalls owned a condo in one of the Watergate complex buildings and Kitten Carter had an apartment in another. The hotel was okay, if a little heavy on the sixties décor in the lobby. Lucas got a small suite, jumped in the shower, brushed his teeth, put on slacks, a pink golf shirt, and a blue jacket, and called Carter.

  “Are you available?” he asked when she’d answered the phone and he’d identified himself.