Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15

by John Sandford

  Dance and comportment lessons began when she was three, singing lessons when she was four. At five, she won the North Central Tap-Fairies contest for children five and younger. That was the pattern: Miss Junior North Country, International Miss Snow (International Falls and Fort Frances, Canada), Miss Border Lakes. She sang and danced through her school days. Miss Minnesota and even—her parents, Lynn and Lil, barely dared to dream it—Miss America was possible. Until she was fourteen, anyway.

  When the breast genes were passed out in heaven, Alie’e had been in line for an extra helping of eyes instead. That became obvious in junior high when her friends began to complain about bra straps cutting into their necks. Not Alie’e. As the Olsons’ best friends, Ellen and Bud Benton, said—Bud said it, anyway—“Ain’t no Miss Minnesota without the big bumpers, y ’know.”

  As it happened, the breasts didn’t matter. In the summer of her sixteenth year, Lynn and Lil took her to a model agency in Minneapolis, and the agent liked what she saw. Alie’e had knife-edge cheekbones and those jade-green eyes. They came straight from God in a perfect package with white-blond hair, a flawless complexion, delicate fuck-me shoulder blades, and hips so narrow she’d have trouble giving birth to a baling wire.

  Between Minneapolis and New York, Sharon Olson vanished and Alie’e Maison stepped into her size-six dress. She was so famous that the second-most-famous person in Burnt River was a lawn-care service operator named Louis Friar. Friar, one night in tenth grade, nailed Alie’e in the short grass beside the first-base line of the American Legion baseball diamond on Bergholm Road, on an air mattress that he’d brought along for that express purpose.

  Louis never talked about it. He never even confirmed that it happened. He held the memory of the event in a beery reverence. Alie’e, on the other hand, talked to everyone; so everyone in Burnt River knew about it, and how, at the critical moment, Louis had cried out, “Oh God oh God oh God oh God,” which was why everybody in town called him Reverend. Friar himself thought the nickname was based on his last name, as if the residents of Burnt River were universally fond of puns; nobody ever told him different.

  “You don’t think they’re getting too close to porno?” Lil now asked, under her breath to Lynn, as they watched Amnon Plain push their daughter around the set. “I don’t want any goddamned porno.” Lil had a thing about porno.

  “You know they’re not going to do any porno,” Lynn said placatingly. He was wearing black-on-black, with wraparound Blades.

  “They better not. That’ll kill you in a minute.” She refocused. “Look at Jax. I think he’s so good for her.”

  Jax—he had no last name—was peering around the set through the viewfinder of a Nikon F5. He thought of himself as a photographer, although he hadn’t yet taken many photographs. But how hard could it be? You look through the hole, you push the button. When Alie’e said, “You got anything?” Jax let the camera drop to his side, tipped his head, and they moved together against the hull of the barge. Jax took a plastic nose-drop bottle from his pocket and passed it to her. Alie’e unscrewed the top, slipped the end into a nostril, and squeezed the bottle once, twice. “Whoa, whoa,” Jax muttered. “Not too much, it’ll kill the eyes.” If you had eyes as green and large as Alie’e’s, you didn’t want them dilated.

  Amnon Plain was moving lights around as his assistants refilled the camera backs with Kodachrome. Alie’e would be wearing a torn pale-blue T-shirt that was meant to show just a hint of rouged nipple within the tear, and the film had to hold the subtlety of the pink-against-blue. With the Kodachrome, the flare of the torch behind her wouldn’t pop as it would on the Fuji, but that wasn’t so important in this shot.

  Plain was juggling the color equities in his mind when Alie’e said, past his head, “Hello, Jael.”

  Plain turned. His sister was standing in the gash in the barge’s hull, just inside the line of lights. “What do you want?” he snapped.

  Jael Corbeau—she’d changed her name with her mother, after their parents split up—was light where Plain was dark, blond against Plain’s deep brunette. Despite their coloring differences, they had faces that were astonishingly alike, wedge-shaped, edgy, big-eyed.

  Jael had once been a model herself; didn’t need the money, found the life boring, and moved on. Although the two of them looked alike, there was a singular difference in their faces. Three long pale lines slashed across Jael’s face: scars. She was a lovely woman to begin with, but the scars made her something else. Striking. Beautiful. Erotic. Exotic. Something.

  “I came to see Alie’e,” she said sullenly.

  “See her someplace else,” Plain said. “We’re trying to work here.”

  “Don’t give me a hard time, Plain.”

  “Get the fuck off my shoot,” Plain said, walking toward her. All other talk stopped, and Clark, the welder, stood up, uncertainly, and pushed his mask back. Plain’s voice vibrated with violence.

  From behind him, Alie’e said, “There’s a party at Silly’s tonight, nine o’clock.”

  Jael had taken a step back, away from her brother. There was no fear in her, but she didn’t doubt that Plain would physically throw her off the barge. He was bigger. “Silly’s at nine,” she said, and left.

  PLAIN WATCHED HER go, watched until she was out of sight, turned back to Alie’e, took a breath, saw Clark hovering in the background like a sumo wrestler. He turned to the couture rep and said, “I’ve got your key shot.”

  The couture rep was a thin-faced German named Dieter Kopp. He had a stubble-cut skull, two-day beard, and gaunt, pale face; his cheeks were lightly pitted, as though he might once have suffered from smallpox. He was the only one not wearing jeans. Instead, he wore a pale gray Italian suit with an open-necked black dress shirt, and a gold tennis bracelet.

  Kopp didn’t want to be in St. Paul, didn’t want to be in America. He wanted to be in Vienna, or Berlin, but he was condemned to this: to sell seventy-dollar male-look underpants, complete with front vent, to American women.

  Like a good German, he would do what was necessary to carry out his orders; but at the moment, he was still vibrating with the possibility of violence against the striking blonde who’d just walked off the barge. He knew her face. She’d been a model, he knew that, but she’d been out of it for a few years. She looked better now; she was stunning, he thought. . . .

  “What?” he asked. He’d missed what Plain said to him.

  “I’ve got your key shot. We move Clark around back and we put Alie’e dead center—Alie’e, come over here.” Alie’e walked toward them, along the plank, as Plain continued: “We light them separately and then jam them together with the long lens. Clark will look like the fuckin’ moon coming over the horizon, and Alie’e will be there in the foreground.”

  “We still need the nipple for the punch,” said the German. “We could lose it with a long lens.”

  “Gotta lose it anyway for the Americans,” said the creative director, a man with a red beard and a bald, freckled head.

  “We can do it both ways,” Plain said. “For the Europeans, we’ll hold it. We’ll stick a snoot over on the left and light it. Alie’e . . .” Alie’e stepped closer, and Plain slipped his fingers into the torn slit in the T-shirt and pulled it wider, to expose her nipple. “We’ll have to tape this back, we’ll have to bring it out a little more. Maybe touch it with a little more makeup.”

  “Not too much. She’s really pale, and too much would look artificial,” the art director said nervously.

  “Artificial would be all right,” Plain said. “What could be sexier than rouged nipples?”

  “In Germany, yes, I think,” Kopp said. “In America . . .”

  “Sexy in America, too, but it’d be too much for the mainline magazines,” Plain said. “For the American shot, we’ll ice her nipple to bring it up, so you can see it through the T-shirt, put a little shading on the side to emphasize it, but we re-layer the rip so there’s more coverage, and drop the snoot. But you’ll still b
e able to feel it there—there’ll be like a mental tit behind the T-shirt.”

  “You’re gonna ice me?” Alie’e asked. “You’re gonna fucking ice me? It’s twelve degrees in here.”

  THE GERMAN HAD closed his eyes. After a moment, he nodded. Plain had worked for eight years in Miami, where he’d developed a reputation for a decadent, sexually charged fashion art, juxtaposing outlandishly disparate characters in variations of the Beauty and the Beast theme. Anyone could do that, and many tried, but Plain had something different, something that nobody else could quite get. Something straight out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Like this shot.

  The German could see it in his mind’s eye, now that all the characters were assembled in this ridiculous hulk, with the lights, the smell of the welder, the roaring propane heater . . . but never could have thought of it. This was why he traveled to Minneapolis and paid Plain as much as he did.

  Plain had vision.

  THEY WORKED THE rest of the morning: hard work, done over and over. Plain had a color card in his brain, and a drama chip. He knew what he was getting, and he pushed it. Shredded the T-shirt, exposed one breast completely. Clark watched from the background, a burning torch in his hand, his cement-block sausage lover’s face fixed by the vision of the woman’s body. Lynn and Lil watched from behind the lights: “You don’t think that’s getting toward the porno . . . ?”

  When they were done, and while Jax was collecting her dressing bags, one of Plain’s assistants walked Alie’e back to a rented Lincoln Town Car. She recovered her purse and the stash of cocaine, caught a little dust under a fingernail, and inhaled.

  “What do you think of that Clark guy?” the assistant asked.

  Alie’e, whose eyes had been closed, the better to experience the rush, now opened one eye, cocked her head, and thought about it: “He’s not bad, for a pickup.”

  “What I meant was, he looked like he had a zucchini stuffed in his pants during that last sequence.”

  Alie’e smiled her wan, coked-up smile and said, “Then it must have been a good sequence.”

  DIETER KOPP HAD seen it; so had Plain.

  “I was afraid I’d lose it.” Plain laughed, brushing the hair back from his eyes. “I was over there waggling that snoot around, trying to get some light on him, hoping it wouldn’t go away, hoping he wouldn’t figure out what I was doing.”

  “Not for the American magazines, I don’t think?” Kopp said. But it was a question.

  “Oh, I think so,” Plain said. “You couldn’t say anything about it. You couldn’t make it too obvious. But a little work on the computer, taking it up or down. We’ll get it in. And people will notice. . . .”

  Kopp bobbed his head, flashed his thin, hard grin. At another time, he might’ve been driving a tank into Russia instead of selling underwear. But that was then, and this was now. He was in underwear.

  THEY ALL WENT to the party that night, at Silly Hanson’s home: Alie’e, Jax, Plain, Kopp, Corbeau, the photo assistants, Alie’e’s parents, even Clark the welder. Alie’e looked spectacular. She wore the green dress from the photo shoot, and hung with Jael Corbeau and Catherine Kinsley, the heiress, the three women like the three fates in the Renaissance paintings, all tangled together.

  Techno-pop rolled from small black speakers spotted around Silly Hanson’s public rooms and Alie’e images flashed across movie-aspect flat-screen monitors. The crowd danced and sweated and drank martinis and Rob Roys and came and went.

  Silly herself got drunk and physical with Dieter Kopp, who left thumb bruises on her breasts and ass. A gambler drifted through the crowd, and met a cop who was astonished to see him.

  And the killer was there. In the corner, watching.

  2

  LUCAS DAVENPORT GOT up that morning at five o’clock, long before the sun had come over the treetops. He ate a bowl of oatmeal, drank a cup of coffee, filled a Thermos with the rest of the coffee, and drove into Hayward. His friend had the boat loaded. Lucas left his Tahoe on the street, and they drove together out to Round Lake on the year’s last muskie fishing trip.

  Cold weather; no wind, but cold. They had to break through a fifteen-foot line of quarter-inch ice at the landing. In another day, the ice would be an inch thick, and out fifty or eighty feet. All along the country roads, guys were pulling ice-fishing houses out of their backyards, getting ready for winter.

  On this day, though, most of the water was still soft. They found a spot off a sunken bar and dropped their baited sucker hooks off the side and waited. Lucas’s friend didn’t talk much, just stood like a moron and bounced a lure called a Fuzzy Duzzit off the bottom, and kept one eye on the sucker rods. Lucas dozed—a quiet, peaceful, unstressed sleep that always left him oddly refreshed.

  They didn’t catch anything—they rarely did, although Lucas’s friend was an authority on muskie fishing—and by noon, stiff with the cold, they headed back to town. Lucas pulled the battery out of the boat, for winter storage in his friend’s basement, while his friend carried nets, oars, a cooler, a piss jug, and other gear into the garage. When it was all done, Lucas said, “See you in the spring, fat boy,” and headed back to his cabin.

  He could have taken a nap. He’d had only four hours of sleep the night before. But he’d been drinking coffee to keep warm, and the caffeine had him jangled; and the nap in the boat had helped. Instead of sleeping, he got tools out of the truck and started working on his new steel boat shed.

  The previous shed had been wired for electricity, and the contractor who built the new shed had left the underground cable coiled next to the foundation. The day before, Lucas had bought four fluorescent shop lights, four outlets, and a wall-mounted junction box, and now started putting them up and wiring them in.

  The job went slowly. He had to run into town for more wire, and he stopped for a late lunch and more coffee. By the time he was finished, the sun was dropping over the lake. He flipped on the lights, spent a few seconds admiring their pink glow—he’d gotten the natural fluorescents—and started filling the place up.

  He backed in two small aluminum boats on their trailers, put a utility trailer in the far corner, a John Deere Gator sideways in front of the trailer, and finally, a Kubota tractor. The Kubota belonged to a neighbor who found he couldn’t fit it in his garage. It wouldn’t start right away, so Lucas had to bleed the fuel line before it would kick over.

  A little after six o’clock, he walked in the dark back to the cabin. Just beyond, down at the lake, a merganser squawked. The edge of ice around the lake had disappeared during the day, but the temperature dropped quickly after sundown. Unless a wind came up to roil the water, the lake should ice over during the night.

  He spent two hours picking up the cabin, vacuuming, collecting garbage and old summer magazines, washing and drying sheets, cleaning out the refrigerator, wiping down the kitchen. Then a shower, with a beer sitting on the toilet stool. Dressed again, he turned off the water heater and water pump, and pushed the thermostat down to fifty. After a last check, he dragged the trash out to the Tahoe and threw it in the back.

  At eight o’clock, he locked the cabin and walked out to the truck. A red and silver Lund fishing boat was parked just beyond the new shed, dropped by another guy the week before. He’d be dragging it back to the Cities. He hooked it up, double-checked the safety chains, checked the trailer lights. Good: They worked, even the turn signals.

  All right. Ready for winter, he thought. A merganser squawked again, and then another: some kind of duck fistfight down at the lake. Or somebody rolling over in bed. And a million stars looking down at him on a moonless night; he looked up through the treetops at the Milky Way, a billion stars like bubbles. . . .

  DAVENPORT WAS A tall man; he drove a Porsche day-to-day, but fit better in the big Tahoe. He had black hair shot through with vagrant strands of gray; he was as dark as a Sicilian, with a permanent outdoor tan. The tan made his eyes seem bluer and brighter, and his smile whiter. Women had told him that his eyes seemed kindly, even p
riestly, but his smile made them nervous. He had the smile, one of them told him, of a predator about to eat something nasty.

  His face was touched with scars. A long thin line crossed his eyebrow into his cheek, like a knife cut, but it wasn’t. Another that looked like an exclamation mark—a thin line from a knife, a round O from a bullet wound—marked the front of his neck, along his windpipe. He’d been shot, and had almost died, but a surgeon had opened his throat with a jackknife and kept him breathing long enough to get him to an operating table. A plastic surgeon had offered to revise the scars, but he kept them, absently traced them with his fingers when he was thinking; personal history, not to be forgotten.

  The road out was narrow and dark, and he was in no hurry. He took Highway 77 into Hayward, dropped down to 70 in Spooner, headed west, across the border into Minnesota, out to I-35. By ten o’clock he was on the far northern rim of the Cities, pulling the boat. The owner of the Lund was a guy named Herb Clay who owned the remnants of a farm south of Forest Lake, not far off the interstate.

  Lucas pulled into Clay’s driveway, bounced past the house to the barnyard, and turned a tight circle. He left the engine running and climbed out of the truck as a porch light came on. A moment later, Clay stepped out on the porch, supporting himself on crutches. “That you?”

  “It’s me,” Lucas said. He started unhitching the trailer. “How’re the legs?”

  “Itch like hell,” Clay said.

  “Got a coat hanger to scratch with?”

  “Yeah, but there’s always a spot that you can’t reach.” Clay’s wife came out on the porch, pulling on a quilted jacket. She hurried across the yard.