John Sandford - Prey 06 - Night Prey

by Night Prey

  Lost him in the piles of trash. Old cars, mostly from the sixties, he spotted the front end of a 66 bottle-green Pontiac LeMans, just like the one he'd owned when he'd first been in uniform. Lucas stalked through the piles, taking his time: the guy couldn't have gone over the fence, he'd have made some noise. He moved farther in: wrecks with handF painted numbers on their doors, victims of forgotten county-fair enduro races.

  Heard a clank to his left, felt a wetness in his eyebrow. Reached up and touched it: blood. Whatever had fallen off the shelf had cut him, and he was bleeding fairly heavily. Didn't hurt much, he thought.

  He moved farther left, around a pile, around another pile....

  A thin biker in jeans, a smudged black T-shirt, and heavy boots looked up at the board fence around the yard. He was dark-complected, with a tan on top of that.

  The man goggled at Lucas's bloody head. "Jesus, what happened to you?"

  "You knocked some shit on me," Lucas said.

  The man showed a pleased smile, then looked at the top of the fence.

  "I'd never make it," he said finally. He stepped back toward Lucas.

  "You gonna shoot me?"

  "No, we just want to talk." Lucas slipped the pistol back in its holster.

  "Yeah, right," the man said, showing his yellow teeth. Suddenly he was moving fast. "But I'm gonna kick your ass first."

  Lucas touched the butt of his pistol as the man's long wild swing came in. He lifted his left hand, batted the fist over his shoulder, hooked a short punch into the biker's gut. The man had a stomach like an oak board. He grunted, took a step back, circled. "You can hit me all day in the fuckin' gut," he said. He'd made no attempt at Lucas's pistol.

  Lucas shook his head, circling to his right. "No point. I'm gonna hit you in the fuckin' head."

  "Good luck." The biker came in again, quick but inept, three fast roundhouse swings. Lucas stepped back once, twice, took the third shot on his left shoulder, then hooked a fast right to the man's nose, felt the SeptUm snap under the impact. The man dropped, one hand to his face, rolled onto his stomach, got shakily back to his feet, blood running out from under his hands. Lucas touched his own forehead.

  "You broke my nose," the man said, looking at the blood on his fingers.

  "What'd you expect?" Lucas asked, probing his scalp with his fingertips. "You cut my head open."

  "Not on purpose. You broke my fuckin' nose on purpose," he complained.

  Beneteau ran into the junkyard, looked at them. The man said, "I give up."

  Beneteau stood in the parking lot and said quietly, "Earl says Joe is down at the house." Earl was the man who'd fought Lucas. "He's scared to death Bob'll find out he told us."

  "Okay," Lucas said. He held a first-aid pad against his scalp.

  He'd already soaked one of them through, and was on his second.

  "We're gonna head down there," Beneteau said. "Do you want to come?

  Or do you want to go into town and get that cut fixed up?"

  "I'm coming," Lucas said. "How about the search warrants?"

  "We got them, both for this place and Joe's and Bob's. That's a fine amount of speed back there, if that's what it is," Beneteau said.

  "That's what it is," Lucas said. "There's probably six or eight ounces there on the floor."

  "Biggest drug bust we've ever had," Beneteau said with satisfaction.

  He looked at the porch, where Bob Hillerod and Earl sat on a bench, in handouffs. They'd cut the customer loose, Beneteau was satisfied that he'd been there for cycle parts. "I'm kind of surprised Earl was involved with it."

  "It'd be hard to prove that he was," Lucas said. "I didn't see him with the stuff. He says he was back there getting an alternator when everybody started running. He said one of the guys who went into the woods panicked, and threw the bag toward the toilet as they ran out the back. He might be telling the truth."

  Beneteau looked at the woods and laughed a little. "We got those guys pinned in the marsh over there. Can't see them, but I give them about fifteen minutes after the bugs come out tonight. If they last that longþthey were wearing short-sleeved shirts."

  "So let's get Joe," Lucas said. Beneteau turned the junkyard over to a half-dozen arriving deputies, including his crime-scene specialists.

  They took the same two sheriff's cars and the panel truck to Hillerod's house.

  Joe Hillerod lived ten miles from the junkyard, in a rambling place built of three or four old lake cabins shoved together into one big tar-paper shack. A dozen cords of firewood were dumped in the overgrown back, in a tepee-shaped pile. Three cars were parked in the front.

  love this backwoods shit," Lucas said to Beneteau as they closed on the house. "In the city, we'd call in the Emergency Response Unit.

  ."

  "That's a Minnesota liberal's euphemism for SWAT team," Connell said to Beneteau, who nodded and showed his teeth.

  "... and we'd stage up, and everybody'd get a job, and we'd put on vests and radios, and we'd sneak down to the area, and clear it," Lucas continued. "Then we'd sneak up to the house and the entry team'd go in... Up here, it's jump in the fuckin' cars, arrive in a cloud of hayseed, and arrest everybody in sight. Fuckin' wonderful."

  "The biggest difference is, we arrive in a cloud of hayseed. Down in the Cities, you arrive in a cloud of bullshit," Beneteau said. "You ready?"

  They hit Hillerod's house just before noon. A yellow dog with a red collar was sitting on the blacktop in front of the place, and got up and walked off the road into a cattail ditch when he saw the traffic coming.

  A young man with a large belly and a Civil War beard sat on the porch steps, drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette, looking as though he'd just got up. A Harley was parked next to the porch, and a scarred white helmet lay on the grass beside it 1ike a fiberglass Easter egg produced by a condor.

  When they slowed, he stood, and when they stopped, he ran in through the door. "That's trouble," Beneteau yelled.

  "Go," Connell said, and she jumped out and headed for the door.

  Lucas said, "Wait, wait," but she kept going, and he was two steps behind her.

  Connell went through the screen door like a cornerback through a wide receiver, in time to see the fat man running up a flight of stairs in the back of the house. Connell ran that way, Lucas yelling, "Wait a minute."

  In a back room, a naked couple was crawling off a fold-out couch.

  Connell pointed the pistol at the man and yelled, "Freeze," and Lucas went by her and took the stairs. As he went, he heard Connell say to someone else, "Take em, I'm going up."

  The fat man was in the bathroom, door locked, working the toilet.

  Lucas kicked the door in, and the fat man looked at him and went straight out a window, through the glass, onto the roof beyond. He heard cops yelling outside and ran on down the hall, Connell now a step behind him.

  The door at the end of the hall was closed and Lucas kicked it just below the lock, and it exploded inward. Behind it, another couple were crawling around in their underpants, looking for clothes. The man had something in his hand and Lucas yelled, "Police, drop it," and tracked his body with the front sight of the pistol. The man, looking up, dazed with sleep, dropped a gun. The woman sat back on the bed and pulled a bedspread over her breasts.

  Beneteau and two deputies came up behind them, pistols drawn. "Got em?"

  He looked past Lucas. "That's Joe."

  "What the fuck are you doing, George?" Joe asked.

  Beneteau didn't answer. Instead, he looked at the woman and said, "Ellie Rae, does Tom know about this?"

  "No," she said, hanging her head.

  "Aw, God," Beneteau said, shaking his head. "Let's get everybody downstairs."

  A deputy was waiting for them on the stairs. "Did you look in the dining room, Sheriff?"

  "No, what'd we get?"

  "C'mon, take a look," the deputy said. He led the way back through a small kitchen, then through a side arch to the dining room. Two hundred semiau
tomatic rifles were stacked against the walls. A hundred and fifty handguns, glistening with WD 40, were slotted into cardboard boxes on the floor.

  Lucas whistled. "The gunstore burglaries. Out in the burbs around the cities."

  "This is good stuff," Beneteau said, squatting to look at the long guns. "This is gun-store stuff all the way." Springfield M-is, Ruger Mini-14s and Mini-30s, three odd-looking Navy Arms, a bunch of Marlins, a couple of elegant Brownings, an exotic Heckler and Koch SR9. Beneteau picked up the H&K and looked at it. "This is a fifteenhundred-dollar gun, I bet," he said, aiming it out the window at a Folger's coffee can in the side yard.

  "What's the story on the woman up there?" Connell asked.

  "Ellie Rae? She and her husband run the best diner in town.

  Rather, she runs it and he cooks. Great cook, but when he gets depressed, he drinks.

  If they break up, he'll get steady drunk, and she'll quit, and that'll be the end of the diner."

  "Oh," Connell said. She looked at him to see if he was joking.

  "Hey, that's a big deal," Beneteau said defensively. "There are only two of them, and the other one's a grease pit."

  Joe Hillerod looked a lot like his brother, with the same blunt, tough German features "I got fifteen hundred bucks in my wallet, cash, and I want witnesses to that. I don't want the money going away," he said sullenly.

  Ellie Rae said, "I'm a witness."

  "You shut up, Ellie Rae," Beneteau said. "What the hell are you doing here, anyway?"

  love him," she said. "I can't help myself."

  A deputy helped the fat man into the room. He was bleeding all over his head, shoulders, and arms from the window, and was dragging one leg.

  "Dumb bunny jumped off the roof," the deputy said. "After he crashed through the window."

  "He was flushing shit upstairs," Lucas said. Dumb bunny? The guy looks like a mastodon. "He got some of it on the toilet seat, though."

  "Check that," Beneteau said to one of the deputies.

  Connell had put away her gun, and now she stepped up behind Hillerod and pulled at his hand, immobilized by the cuffs.

  "What the fuck?" Hillerod said, trying to turn to see what she was doing.

  "See?"

  Lucas looked. Hillerod had the 666 on the web between his thumb and forefinger. "Yeah."

  The woman who'd been on the fold-out couch had been watching Connell, taking in Connell's inch-long hair. "I was sexually abused," she said finally. "By the cops."

  Connell said, "Yeah?"

  Lucas was climbing the stairs, and Connell hurried after him. In the bedroom, a decrepit water bed was pushed against one wall, with a bedstand and light to one side and a chest of drawers against the wall at the foot of the bed. Magazines and newspapers were scattered around the room. An ironing board sat in a corner, buried in wrinkled clothing, the iron lying on its side at the pointed end of the board.

  A long stag-handled folding knife sat in a jumble of junk on the chest of drawers. Connell bent over next to it, carefully not touching it, looked at it, and said, "Goddamn, Davenport. The autopsies say it's a knife like this. The blade's just right."

  She picked up a matchbook and used it to rotate the knife. The excitement rose in her voice. "There's some gunky stuff in the hinge or whatever you call it, where it folds, it could be blood."

  "But look at the cigarettes," Lucas said.

  A pack of Marlboros sat on the nightstand. There wasn't a Camel in the house. The Hillerods called a Duluth lawyer named Aaron Capella.

  The lawyer arrived at midafternoon in a dusty Ford Escort, talked to the county attorney, then to his clients. Lucas went to the local emergency room, had four stitches taken in his scalp, then met Connell for a late lunch.

  Afterward, they hung out in Beneteau's office or wandered around the courthouse, waiting for Capella to finish with the Hillerods.

  The crime-scene crew called from the junkyard to say they'd found three half-kilo bags of cocaine behind a false panel in the junkyard bathroom.

  Beneteau was more than pleased: he was on television with each of the Duluth-Superior stations.

  "Gonna get my ass reelected, Davenport," he said to Lucas.

  "I'll send you a bill," Lucas said.

  They were talking in his office, and they saw Connell coming up the walk outside. She'd been down at a coflee shop, and carried a china cup with her.

  "That's a fine-looking woman," Beneteau said, his eyes lingering on her. "I like the way she sticks her face into trouble. If you don't mind my asking, have you two... got something going?"

  Lucas shook his head. "No."

  "Huh. Is she with anybody else?"

  "Not as far as I know," Lucas said. He started to say something about her being sick, hesitated.

  mean, she's not a lesbian or anything," Beneteau said.

  "No, she's not. Look, George..." He still couldn't think of I exactly what he wanted to say. What he said was, "Look, do you want her phone number, or what?"

  Beneteau's eyebrows went up. "Well, I get down to the Cities every now and then. You got it?"

  Aaron Capella was a pro. Beneteau knew him, and they shook hands when Capella walked into the sheriffXs office. Beneteau introduced Lucas and Connell.

  "I've spoken to my clients. Another unconscionable violation of their civil rights," Capella said mildly to Beneteau.

  know, it's a shame," Beneteau said, tongue in cheek. "The right of felons to bear stolen assault weapons while distributing cocaine and speed."

  "That's what I keep telling people, and you're the only guy who understands," Capella said. "C'mon, Bich is waiting."

  They walked through the courthouse, Beneteau and Capella talking about Capella's sailboat, which he kept on Lake Superior. "... guy from Maryland was telling me, A lake just isn't the ocean." So I say, Where do you sail?" and he says, The Chesapeake." And I say, You could put six Chesapeakes in Superior, and still have a Long Island Sound around the edges."

  Bich was the county attorney, a serious, red-faced man in a charcoal suit. "They're bringing your client up now, Aaron," he said to Capella.

  They all followed the prosecutor into his office, settling into chairs, Bich joining the sailing talk until a deputy brought Joe Hillerod down from the lockup.

  Hillerod's lip lifted in an uncontrollable sneer when he saw Beneteau.

  He dropped into a chair next to Capella and said, "How're we doing?"

  Bich spoke to Capella as if Hillerod weren't there, but everything he said was aimed at Hillerod: Capella and Bich had already been over the ground.

  "Tell you what, Aaron, your client's in bad shape," Bich said professorially. "He's got two years left on his parole. Possession of a gun'll put him back inside. There won't be any trial, none of that bullshit. All it takes is a hearing."

  "We'd contest."

  Bich rolled past him. "We found him with a house full of stolen guns. We could try him for possessing firearms as a felon and possession of stolen firearms. Then we could send him to Minnesota, to be tried for burglary. He'd go back to Waupun, serve out the rest of his parole, start his new Wisconsin time after that, and then go to Minnesota to serve out his time over there. That's a lot of time."

  The lawyer spread his hands. "Joe had nothing to do with the guns.

  He thought they were legit. A friend left them there, the same guy you grabbed up in the bathroom."

  "Right." Bich rolled his eyes.

  "But we're not discussing the guns, that's another issue," Capella said. "We can talk, right? That's why Lucas and Ms. Connell are here, right? A little friendly extortion?"

  "If he'll ride along with us," Bich said, poking a finger at Hillerod's chest, "we might be inclined to forget the parole violation, the possession of a gun. That we got him on already."

  "So what are we talking about?" Capella asked.

  Bich looked at Lucas. "Do you want to explain to Mr. Hillerod?"

  Lucas looked at him and said, "I won't bullshit you. There are som
e good reasons to think that you've been slicing up women. Ripping their guts out. Six or more times now. We need to ask you some questions and get some answers."

  Hillerod had known what was coming, having spoken to Capella. He started shaking his head before Lucas was finished talking. "Nah, nah, never did it, that's bullshit, man."