Lucas Davenport Novels 16-20

by John Sandford

  “Alaska, I guess,” Clanton said. “They rented us this place, and they went to Alaska. They aren’t coming back until November.”

  “How long you been here?” Youngie asked.

  “Since March,” Clanton said. Then, “I want a fuckin’ lawyer. I ain’t sayin’ no more, but there wasn’t no fuckin’ Charlie here.”

  Lucas turned back to Sandy Martin: “Is that right? The brothers are up in Alaska?”

  “I can’t prove it, but they said they were going there,” Martin said. “They bought a new truck for the trip.”

  “And you never met Charlie Pope.”

  After a moment of silence, Martin said, “Look, I’m just watching the house, okay?”

  Not a denial. Lucas looked at Youngie, who raised his eyebrows. “Sandy, this is a murder charge we’re talking about here,” Lucas said. “You give Charlie Pope one ounce of cover, man, you’re right in it with him.”

  Another moment of silence, then, “He was up here. A month ago.”

  “A month ago. With Bobby here?”

  “Yeah.” Martin looked uncomfortable.

  “You’re fuckin’ lyin’,” Clanton said. He was angry, turning to face down Martin.

  “You were talking,” Martin said to him.

  “You’re full of shit, you little asshole,” Clanton shouted. “They’re gonna find out . . .”

  “He was here,” Martin insisted. “He was that guy who walked up the hill, he had that bag of doughnuts . . .”

  LUCAS WAS LOOKING at Clanton’s face as he absorbed what Martin had said. His expression shifted from anger to confusion and then to disbelief. He said, “That retard? The retard with the smiley T-shirt?”

  “That’s him,” Martin said.

  “I didn’t know who he was,” Clanton said, lifting his head to look at Lucas. And, “We ran that asshole off. He wanted to pick beans or some shit. We told him we didn’t have no fuckin’ beans, and to go the fuck away.”

  Clanton told the story, and it was short: Pope had been at the farmhouse for ten minutes, having hitchhiked out from Austin. When he found out there weren’t any beans, he walked back down the hill with his bag of doughnuts.

  “What’s this about the doughnuts?” Youngie asked.

  “It was like he thought he might be camping out, and he needed food, so he bought doughnuts,” Martin said.

  Clanton said, “He’s a fuckin’ retard. He can’t be the guy who did all that shit. He walks around in a smiley shirt with a bag of doughnuts, for Christ’s sake.”

  Lucas pressed the pad to his face and said, “Jesus.”

  THE DEPUTIES CLEARED the farmhouse and found a hundred and fifty gallons of agricultural precursor in the kitchen—so much for Sandy Martin’s tale of checking the house. With cops all over the place, and no real information about Pope, Lucas decided to head back home. He washed his face in the farmhouse kitchen sink, got a new first-aid pad from Youngie, and climbed into his truck.

  “You oughta stop at the hospital,” Youngie said.

  “I’m only an hour and a half from home.”

  “There’s gonna be a report, the gunshots . . .”

  “You can do most of it. I’ll either send you an affidavit or come down and talk to your county attorney, whatever you want . . . Now I just want to go home,” Lucas said.

  Youngie grinned: “Man, you look like shit.”

  “One of your guys already told me,” Lucas said. He started the truck. “Thanks for the reminder.”

  THE DAY WASN’T QUITE DONE. He could feel his nose swelling, and blood still dribbled from one nostril. He stopped at a convenience store, paid five dollars for a bag of ice and some Ziploc bags to hold it, showed his ID to a gawking counter girl so she wouldn’t call the cops, put a Ziploc bag on his face, and wheeled onto I-35.

  Clanton, Lucas thought, had called Pope a retard. That was after a ten-minute acquaintance, if Clanton was to be believed. And Lucas believed him, on that much, anyway. Then he thought, What if Pope was really this sophisticated Cary Grant kind of guy who for years . . . He almost smiled to himself, but when he started to smile, pain arced down through his face.

  That was Charlie Pope’s fault, too.

  HE SAW THE HIGHWAY PATROL car when he topped a hill. He went for the brake but knew it was too late: he could feel the radar waves passing through his nose. He was doing eighty-eight, and when the lights came up behind him, he pulled over. The patrol car idled in behind him, the patrolman calling in the Lexus’s tag number. When the patrolman got out of his car, Lucas hung his ID out the window.

  “Lucas Davenport, BCA,” Lucas called back to him.

  The cop stepped closer, looked at Lucas’s shirt, soaked with blood: “What the hell happened to you?”

  “I busted a meth lab with the Mower County sheriff ’s guys about an hour ago. One of the dopers knocked me on my ass and broke my nose. You can call the Sheriff’s Department, if you want to check.”

  The cop took Lucas’s ID, looked at it, handed it back. “You know how fast you were going back there?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Man, I’m just trying to get home,” Lucas said. “I’m really messed up.”

  “Jeez, you’re gonna have a shiner, Davenport,” the patrolman said with great sincerity. “You look terrible.”

  “Thank you,” Lucas said. “That makes it fuckin’ unanimous.”

  13

  LUCAS WENT TO the Regions Hospital emergency room, where a doctor with warm soft fingers pushed his nose around, said the bleeding seemed to have stopped, and asked how Weather was doing in England.

  “You know her?”

  “I used to talk with her when I was doing my surgical rotation over at the university,” the doc said. “She’s got some amazing skills.”

  “I’ve seen her work,” Lucas said.

  The doc smiled at him and said, “I know. The famous tracheotomy. She used to tell us that if we really wanted to impress our boyfriends, we’d cut their throats.”

  She smiled; but Lucas thought of Angela Larson and Adam Rice, and grimaced. The doc, whose hands had been on his face, said, “Ooo—did that hurt?”

  “No—so what’s the diagnosis?”

  She crossed her arms and looked at him with what might have been skepticism. “You got punched in the nose. It looks likes your poor nose has been through the routine before, I could feel some scar tissue on the bone . . .”

  “Yeah, playing hockey . . . and one time . . . never mind.”

  “This time, it’s only a crack, not a clean fracture. Best thing to do is to leave it. I’ll put a plastic protective cup on it and give you a prescription for some pain medication. You may need it to get to sleep.”

  EVEN WITH THE PAIN MEDICATION, he couldn’t sleep; but because of the pain medication, his brain got foggy and he couldn’t think about the case, either. The protective cup drove him crazy, and at two A.M., he got up, pulled it off, and threw it away. He spent the rest of the night sitting in a leather club chair, semiupright, vacillating between slumber and stupor.

  He did get a few hours: he last looked at the clock at five A.M. When Weather called at eight, he was asleep. The phone rang a second and a third time before he got to it; his back hurt from the unaccustomed position in the chair, and his face and neck hurt from Clanton’s punch.

  He picked up the phone: “How are you?” she asked.

  WHEN HE GOT OFF THE PHONE, he went into the bathroom and looked at his face. He had a bruise the size of a saucer, a stupendous black eye; rather, a purple eye, with stripes of crimson and yellow-gray.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” he muttered.

  He went back to his chair, closed his eyes. Another hour of unconsciousness, and the phone rang again. Sloan said, “I heard you got your nose busted.”

  Lucas groaned and looked at the clock. Time to go. “Yeah. My whole goddamn head hurts. I gotta sleep sitting up.”

  Sloan might have choked back a chuckle. “They splint it? Your nose?”

  “Naw. They pushed i
t around a little and gave me some pills.”

  “Got a shiner, huh?”

  “You’re a ray of sunshine,” Lucas said. “How’s the disease?”

  “I’m dying. Every hole in my body’s got junk running out of it.”

  “I’d rather have the busted nose.”

  “I’d have to think about it for a while . . .”

  LUCAS FILLED HIM IN on the meth-lab bust. Sloan summed it up: “You got nothing but hit in the face.”

  “No. I got something,” Lucas said seriously.

  “Yeah?”

  “This Clanton guy, the guy who knocked me on my ass. We were on the lawn after we busted him, and I was pushing him on Pope. He didn’t know who I was talking about. I was looking at his face when he figured it out—and, man, he couldn’t believe it. He called Pope a retard.”

  “Mr. Politically Correct.”

  “Hey—we’ve been fighting the same thing. We’ve got all these really smart professionals at St. John’s talking about Pope in a professional way. They’d never call him a retard. What they know about Pope is too complicated. But Clanton made it simple: he knew a retard when he saw one. And he’s right.”

  “Huh.” Sloan knew what Lucas was saying. “You think we’re chasing the wrong guy.”

  “We could be,” Lucas said.

  “What about the DNA?”

  “Oh, Pope was there, all right,” Lucas said. “He did it, some of it. But he’s not setting it up. Maybe he does the act, but somebody else does the directing. Somebody else has a car, somebody else has the money, somebody else does his shopping for him—Christ, the guy can barely feed himself. There’s gotta be somebody else.”

  “We need to find this Mike West guy.”

  “We need to find everybody who might ever have talked to Charlie Pope,” Lucas said. “We need to get back to St. John’s, talk to people.”

  “Not me,” Sloan said. “I’m out of it for a while. I can barely fuckin’ walk. I walk across the house, I get so dizzy I wanna puke.”

  “Hey—I’m not saying you gotta do it yourself, but that’s what’s gotta be done. I’ve got to talk to Elle some more. She was right from the beginning—it’s not Charlie Pope.”

  WHEN HE GOT OFF THE PHONE, Lucas went into the bathroom to look in the mirror again. His face hadn’t changed: it was still the color of an eggplant. The pain had changed: though it was duller than it had been, it had spread all through his skull, and he felt as though his front teeth might come out.

  He couldn’t use the pain pills. They kicked his ass. Instead, he took two Aleves, got a drawing pad from the study, along with the all the paper and reports generated so far, and headed back to the chair.

  He was trying to get comfortable when the phone rang again.

  Sloan said, “Me again. You got me thinking.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “You say there’s gotta be another guy.”

  “Yup.”

  “Then where do the Big Three come in? We know they’re involved. Somehow. Who did they influence, Charlie Pope or this other guy?”

  Lucas thought about it for a moment. A puzzle. “I dunno. We come back to Mike West again.”

  “Or somebody like Mike West,” Sloan said. “I can’t believe that they made a robot out of Charlie Pope, and then he just went out and found some brains for himself. You know, a smart crazy guy to manage him.”

  “Maybe . . . maybe it was somebody one of the Big Three knew before he went inside. Did any of those guys have accomplices? Did they work with anyone?”

  “I don’t know. I can get Anderson to pull all those old records, if you think it’s worth doing.”

  “It is. We don’t want to miss anything.”

  “I’ll call him. Like, in ten minutes. Right now, I gotta get back to my toilet.”

  LUCAS PUT HIS KNEES up and propped the drawing pad against it, stared at the blank page. Got on the phone again, called Shrake, the BCA muscle who’d gone after Mike West. Shrake picked up on the first ring.

  “You get even a sniff of him?” Lucas asked.

  “Not even a sniff.”

  “What’s his history? Does he wander all over the country, or does he stay close?”

  “He’s got family here, and they say he’s generally around somewhere,” Shrake said. “They do know he goes out west from time to time. Washington, Oregon, California.”

  “Look, call Minneapolis and St. Paul, and all the burbs. Tell them we need to drag the streets—this is a big priority now. This is right there with finding Charlie Pope.”

  IN THE SKETCHBOOK he wrote,

  1. DNA

  2. Kills in Minneapolis, Mankato

  3. Prison in St. John’s

  4. Positive visual ID in Rochester, positive phone ID

  5. Mother in Austin, worked in area, seen in July

  6. Worked Owatonna; meet somebody there?

  7. Rice goes to Faribault bar

  8. Pope told Ignace that he’ll kill somebody in the Boundary Waters . . .

  How in the hell would somebody like Charlie Pope know anything about the Boundary Waters? Pope was a pickup guy, not a canoe guy. The second man again? He had to force himself to think or woman.

  THE ALEVE WERE TAKING HOLD. He pushed himself out of the chair, found a Minnesota road map, and unfolded it. If you drew a cross made up of major highways south of the Twin Cities, he realized, you would encompass Charlie Pope’s world.

  Pope had killed Angela Larson at the northern point of the cross, a couple of miles from I-35 in Minneapolis. He’d been living in Owatonna, which was right on I-35, halfway between Minneapolis and the Iowa border. That was the center point. And he’d grown up in Austin, Minnesota, just a few miles from the Iowa border and not far east of I-35. That was the southern point.

  The east-west arm of the cross ran through Owatonna, with Rochester on the east, where he was seen making a phone call, and Mankato to the west, where he’d killed the Rices. All three towns were linked by Highway 14.

  As a matter of fact, it was almost perfect. He drew a circle connecting the four outlying cities, with Owatonna in the middle. The circle together with the highways looked like the crosshairs on a rifle scope.

  HE CARRIED THE MAP back upstairs to the sketchbook:

  9. Must limit exposure; short drives?

  10. Too dumb to act alone; must be second guy . . .

  Lucas thought about (10) for a moment, then added,

  . . . who knows the Big Three.

  HE WENT INTO the bathroom and shaved; the warm water felt good, but his nose was still clogged with blood, and he could only breathe through one side. That fuckin’ Clanton . . .

  In the shower, he decided that Pope was in his circle. Not for sure, but 80 percent. Somewhere, in a rough circle maybe a hundred miles across. He tried to do the math with the water pounding on his back. Something like 7,800 square miles, he thought. Lots of rabbit holes in 7,800 square miles of corn and beans.

  With the water pouring on his head, he thought, forlorn hope? And then he thought, beans?

  HE GOT OUT OF the shower, toweled off, went back to the bedroom, and sorted through the case reports. When they’d talked to Ruffe Ignace after the call from Pope, Ignace said a couple of times that he’d taken down everything Pope said “verbatim.” He’d emphasized his own precision.

  Lucas found the Ignace/Pope transcript in the report, and thumbed through it. According to the transcript, Pope had used the words forlorn hope. The words rattled around in Lucas’s brain because he’d seen them in a Richard Sharpe novel by Bernard Cornwell. In the novel, the words had referred to a group of men who volunteered to be the first to attack a breach in a city wall during a siege. The survivors got otherwise impossible promotions . . . but they were also unlikely to survive.

  Lucas put on shorts and a T-shirt and went down to the study, opened his Oxford Encyclopedic English Dictionary. Forlorn hope meant, exactly, a “faint remaining hope” or a “desperate enterprise.”

  H
e snapped the dictionary closed: Charlie Pope, the retard, had used the phrase precisely. And something else . . . He ran back up the stairs, still carrying the dictionary, and picked up Ignace’s transcript. Didn’t Pope say he’d thrown the baseball bat into a field of “whatever-it-is?”

  Lucas found the line. Yes, he had. The whatever-it-is was beans.

  Charlie Pope spent his entire life in a sea of soybeans, and he didn’t know what a soybean field looked like when he was standing next to it? Now that was stupid, something you might expect from Charlie Pope.

  He went back over the transcript. The language was what he’d expect from Charlie Pope, except for the “forlorn hope.” And, come to think of it, Ruffe had him referring to a razor strop. Maybe he’d said strap and Ruffe had misspelled it.

  Back to the dictionary: strop meant “a strip of leather for sharpening razors.” Huh. Again, the precision. He’d have to talk to Ruffe . . .

  HE FINISHED DRESSING, picking out a good-looking Versace blue suit and tie, a subtle Hermès necktie, blue over-the-calf socks with small coffee-colored comets woven into them, and soft black Italian loafers. He looked at himself in a mirror, took a pair of sunglasses out of his pocket, and tried a smile.

  Fuckin’ Jack Nicholson, he thought. Except taller and better-looking. He tried to whistle going out the door, but his face hurt when he pursed his lips.

  RUFFE IGNACE TOOK two big phone calls.

  The first was from Davenport. Ignace was sitting in the basement of Minneapolis’s scrofulous City Hall, reading about the New York Yankees—his team—when his phone rang.

  Davenport: “You sure he said ‘forlorn hope’ and ‘razor strop’?”

  “Hey. How many times do I explain the word verbatim to you?” Ignace asked. “That’s what he said.”

  “But maybe he said strap, instead of strop.”

  “Sounded like strop to me. I don’t even know what a strop is. It’s like a sharpening stone, right?”