Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15

by John Sandford

  That had all been years ago.

  Now, he thought, he spent too much time in a chair. In an effort to fight what he saw as sloth, he’d been playing winter basketball with a group of aging jocks from Minneapolis. He was broad-shouldered, quick-moving, and not quite gaunt.

  HE BRUSHED BY a redheaded woman who was leading a muffin-sized red dog in a muffin-sized red Christmas sweater down the sidewalk. The woman smiled and said, “Hi, Lucas,” as they passed. He half-turned and blurted, “Hey. How ya doin’?” and smiled and kept going. Where’d he know her from? Somewhere. He was up the steps, inside the shopping mall that led to the DPS, in an elevator: A bartender, he thought. She used to be a bartender. Where? O’Brien’s? Maybe . . .

  ROSE MARIE ROUX’S office was a twenty-foot square that she’d furnished with her own money: a good cherry-wood desk, two comfortable visitors’ chairs in green leather, a couch, a few prints and photographs of politicians, a bookcase full of reference books and state procedure manuals.

  Rose Marie was sprawled in a chair behind her desk, an overweight woman with improbably blond-tinted fly-away hair, wearing a rumpled blue dress, with an unlit cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth. Word around town was that when she took the job, she’d moved the commissioner’s office across the building so she could get a window that opened. At any time of day, you were likely to see her head sticking out the window, it was said, with a plume of smoke hanging over it.

  “What?” Lucas asked.

  “Sit down,” she said. She pointed at a green leather chair. “The governor’s a couple of minutes out, but I can give you an outline.” She took a breath. “Well . . . ”

  “What?”

  “We’ve had a lynching.” The statement hung in the air like an oral Goodyear blimp.

  “Tell me,” Lucas said after a moment.

  “Up north, a few miles outside of Armstrong. You know where that is?”

  “By Thief River, somewhere.”

  “Very good. A black man and a white woman were found hanging from a tree out in the countryside. They were naked. Handcuffed, legs taped with strapping tape. They’d been living together in some flyspeck town north of Armstrong.”

  “Lynched,” Lucas said. He thought about it for a few seconds, then said slowly, “Lynched means that somebody is suspected of a crime. The townspeople take justice into their own hands and the law doesn’t do anything about it. Is that—?”

  “No. What actually happened is that they were murdered,” Rose Marie said, twisting in her chair. “Sometime last night. But it’s a black man and a blond woman and they’re hanging from trees, naked. When the word gets out, the shit’s gonna hit the fan, and we can say murder all we want, and the movie people are going to be screaming lynching. We need to get some shit up there.”

  “Does Bemidji know?” Lucas asked. The BCA’s Bemidji office handled investigations in the northern part of the state.

  “I don’t know—they don’t know from me. What we’ve got is an informal contact with Ray Zahn, the state patrolman out of Armstrong,” Rose Marie said. “He called in about forty-five minutes ago, and had the call switched to me, at home. He seems to be a smart guy. He was first on the scene, a couple of minutes ahead of the first sheriff’s deputies.”

  “Maybe the sheriff’ll handle it,” Lucas suggested.

  “Zahn says no. He says the sheriff is a new guy who’s scared of his own shadow. Zahn says the sheriff’ll call us as soon as he looks at the scene.”

  “And I’m going.”

  “Absolutely. That’s the first thing the governor said when I called him. We’ve got a National Guard chopper getting ready. You can fly right into the scene.”

  “That’s all we know?” Lucas asked.

  “That’s everything,” Roux said.

  “Then I’ll get going,” Lucas said, pushing up from the green chair. He felt a hum, a little spear of pleasure breaking through the blue. An evil bastard to hunt: nothing like it to cheer a guy up. “You can call me in the air if anything changes.”

  “Wait for the governor. He’s only a minute or two away.”

  WHILE THEY WAITED, Lucas got on his cell phone and called Del: “Where are you?”

  “In bed.” Del Capslock had come over from Minneapolis with Lucas.

  “Get up. I’ll pick you up in fifteen or twenty minutes. Bring some clothes for a couple of days. Bring some boots, too. We’re going up north. We’re gonna be outside.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Yeah. Exactly right. I’ll tell you when I see you.”

  ROSE MARIE’S TELEPHONE rang, and she picked it up, listened for one second, then dropped it back on the hook. “Governor just came through the front door.”

  GOVERNOR ELMER HENDERSON was six feet tall and willowy, with lightly gelled blond hair fading to gray, long expressive hands, and watery blue eyes. He wore narrow, gold-rimmed glasses that gave him a scholarly look, and conservative gray, blue, or black suits handmade in London, over handmade English shoes.

  Henderson’s clan had money and a history in Minnesota politics, but Elmer hadn’t been expected to carry the family banner. He had, in fact, always been the family weenie, with a whiff of sexual difference hanging around him from his college and law-school days.

  He’d been expected to spend his life as a second-stringer in the boardrooms of large Minnesota corporations, while his two brothers grew up to be governors and senators and maybe presidents. But one of the brothers turned to cocaine and multiple divorce, and the other got drunk and powered his antique wooden Chris Craft under a dock and made a quadriplegic of himself. Elmer, by default, was chosen to soldier on.

  As it happened, he’d found in his soul a taste for power and a talent for intrigue. He’d created a cabal of conservative Democratic state legislators that had decapitated the Democratic Party machine, and then had taken it over. He’d maneuvered that victory into a nomination for governor. A little more than a year into his first term, he looked good for a second.

  Henderson was also a northern Catholic conservative Democrat, in his mid-forties, nice-looking, with an attractive wife and two handsome if slightly robotic children, one of each gender, who never smoked dope or rode skateboards or got tattooed or visibly pierced—although a local talk show host had publicly alleged that Henderson’s eighteen-year-old daughter had two clitorises. That, even if true, could hardly be held against Henderson. If the party should choose a southern Protestant liberal for president, and needed some balance on the ticket . . . well, who knew what might happen?

  HENDERSON CAME IN in a rush, banging into Roux’s office without knocking, trailed by the odor of Bay Rum and his executive assistant, who smelled like badly metabolized garlic. They were an odd couple, almost always together, the slender aristocrat and his Igor, Neil Mitford. Mitford was short, burly, dark-haired, badly dressed, and constantly worried. He looked like a bartender and, in his college days, had been a good one—he had a near-photographic memory for faces and names.

  “Has Custer County called yet?” Henderson asked Roux, without preamble.

  “Not yet. We’re not officially in it,” Roux said.

  The governor turned to Lucas: “This is what you were hired for. Fix this. Get up there, let the regular BCA guys do their thing, let the sheriff do his thing, but I’m going to lean on you. All right?”

  Lucas nodded. “Yes.”

  “Just so that everybody is on the same page,” Mitford said. He’d picked up a crystal paperweight from one of Rose Marie’s trophy shelves, and was tossing it in the air like a baseball. “This is a murder, not a lynching. We’ll challenge the word lynching as soon as anybody says it.”

  “They’re going to say it,” Roux said from behind her desk.

  “We know that,” Henderson said. “But we need to kill it, the use of the word.”

  “Not a lynching,” Mitford repeated. To Lucas: “The sooner we can find anything that supports that view, the better off we’ll be. Any little shred. Get it through
to me, and I’ll spin it out to the TV folks.”

  “Gotta knock it down quick,” Henderson said. “Can’t let it grow.”

  Lucas nodded again. “I better take off,” he said. “The quicker we get up there—”

  “Go,” said Henderson. “Knock it down, the word, then the crime.”

  Roux added, “I’ll call you in the air, as soon as Custer County calls in. I’ll get the BCA down here to coordinate you with the guys out of Bemidji.”

  “All right,” Lucas said. “See ya.”

  And as Lucas was going out the door, Henderson called after him, “Great briefcase.”

  ON HIS WAY to Del’s house, Lucas called Weather at the hospital, was told that she’d just gone down to the locker room. He left a message with her secretary: he’d call with a motel number when he was on the ground.

  Del lived a mile east and north of Lucas, in a neighborhood of post-war ramblers and cottages, all modified and remodified so many times that the area had taken on some of the charm of an English village. Del was waiting under the eaves of his garage, wearing a parka and blue corduroy pants pulled down over nylon-and-plastic running shoes. He had a duffel bag slung over his shoulder.

  “Running shoes?” Lucas asked, as Del climbed into the car.

  “Got boots in the bag,” Del grunted. He hadn’t bothered to shave, but his breath was minty-fresh. He was nut-tough, smaller than Lucas, street-weathered, shifty, a guy who could pass as a junkie or as homeless or almost anything else that didn’t involve a white collar. “Does Weather know about this?”

  “Left a message. How about Cheryl?” Lucas asked. Del’s wife was a nurse.

  “Yeah, called her. She’s working the first shift—I told her probably two or three days. What happened?”

  “Interesting problem,” Lucas said. He outlined what he knew about the hangings as they headed to Lucas’s house to pack.

  “A fuckin’ lynching, and we gotta fix it. For our own sakes, along with everything else,” Del said, when Lucas had finished.

  “Not a lynching.”

  “Walks likes a lynching, quacks like a lynching . . . ” They sat silently for a moment, watching the snow come down around a red light. Then, “Could be a good time, you know?”

  LUCAS CHANGED CLOTHES and packed in ten minutes, stuffing underwear, jeans, a laptop, and a cell-phone charger into a black nylon bag. He said good-bye to the housekeeper; kissed the kid, who was taking a nap and who, with a beige blanket folded around him, looked a little like a submarine sandwich; and collected Del, who’d called a cab.

  The cab driver got lost for a while, trying to find the entrance to the National Guard site at Minneapolis–St. Paul International. When they finally arrived, the pilot and copilot, who had become impatient, briskly packed them into the back of the chopper.

  THE FLIGHT WAS uncomfortable: the old military chopper had been built for utility rather than comfort. Conversation was difficult, so they gave it up. Even thinking was hard, and eventually they huddled, nylon-and-fleece-clad lumps, on the bad canvas seats, closed up in the stink of hot oil and military creosote, heads down, fighting off incipient nausea.

  After an eternity, the chopper beat got deeper and they felt the beginning of a turn. Del unbuckled, half-stood, looked forward and then patted Lucas on the shoulder and shouted, “There it is.”

  Lucas pressed his forehead to the icy plastic window of the National Guard helicopter and tried to look forward.

  A THOUSAND FEET below, the Red River plains of northern Minnesota stretched north and west, toward Canada and the Dakotas. Though it was January, and the temperature outside the chopper registered at six degrees below zero, the ground below them was only dappled with snow. The few roads resembled lines on a drafting pad, dead straight across the paper-flat farmscape.

  To the southeast, along the route they’d just flown, the country had been rougher and the snow deeper. Dozens of frozen-over lakes and ponds had been strung like rosary beads on the snowmobile trails; jigsaw-puzzle farm fields, red barns, and vertical streams of chimney smoke had given the land a homier personality.

  Straight east, out of the helicopter’s right window, was a wilderness of peat bog punctuated by the hairy texture of trash willow. To the west, they could just see a shadowy hint of the line of the Red River, rolling north toward Winnipeg.

  They’d overflown the hamlet of Broderick, in Custer County, and were now closing on a line of cop cars parked on what Lucas had been told was West Ditch Road. The roof racks were flashing on two of the cars. To the north of them, in one of the bigger patches of snow, they could see a stand of leafless trees.

  The copilot leaned into the passenger compartment and shouted over the beat of the blades, “We’re gonna put you down on the highway—they don’t want the rotor blast blowing dirt over the crime scene. A state patrol car will come out to get you.”

  Lucas gave him a thumbs-up and the copilot pulled his head back into the cockpit. Del pulled off the Nikes, stuffed them in his duffel bag, and began lacing up high-topped hiking boots. Lucas looked at his watch: 11:15. The flight to Broderick had taken better than two hours. Minnesota was a tall state, and Custer County was about as far from St. Paul as it was possible to get, without crossing into North Dakota or Canada.

  Now the pilot dropped the chopper in a circle, to look at the highway where they’d land. At the same time, a state patrol car, followed by a sheriff’s car, rolled down the side road and, at the intersection, blocked the main highway north and south.

  “Better button up tight,” the copilot called back to them. “It’s gonna be chilly.”

  The chopper put down on the tarmac between the two cop cars, and the copilot came back to slide the door. Lucas and Del climbed out into the downdraft of the rotors.

  The air was bitterly cold. Dirt and ice crystals scoured them like a sandblaster, and, unconsciously ducking away from the rotors, they ran with their bags back to the state patrol car, their pants plastered to their legs, the icy air lashing their exposed skin. The patrolman popped the back and passenger doors, and as they climbed in, the chopper took off in another cloud of ice crystals.

  “That really sucked,” the patrolman said as they settled in. He was in his late forties, with white eyebrows and graying hair, his face as weathered as a barn board. “Didn’t even think about the goddamned prop wash, or whatever it is.”

  He buckled up and looked back at Del, nodded, then held out a hand to Lucas and said, “Ray Zahn. Sorry to get you up so early.”

  “Lucas Davenport, that’s Del Capslock in the back,” Lucas said, as they shook hands. “They haven’t taken the bodies out yet?”

  “No. They’ve been waiting for the ME. Couldn’t find him for a while, but he’s on his way now.” Zahn did a U-turn and they bumped off the highway onto the gravel road, and the sheriff’s car fell in behind them.

  “You know the people? The ones that got hanged?” Del asked.

  Zahn got the car straight and caught up with Lucas’s question. “Yeah. It’s a couple from down in Broderick. We’ve IDed them as a Jane Warr and a Deon Cash. They were living in an old farmhouse down there.”

  “Cash is black?”

  “Yup.” Zahn grinned. “Only black dude in the entire county and somebody went and hung him.”

  “That could piss you off,” Del ventured.

  “Got that straight,” Zahn said with a straight face. “Our cultural diversity just went back to zero.”

  3

  WEST DITCH ROAD was frozen solid, but sometime during the winter there’d been a thaw, and a tractor had cut ruts in the thinly graveled surface. As they bumped through the ruts, now frozen as hard as basalt, Zahn pointed to a house across the ditch and said, “That’s where the girl’s from.”

  “What girl?” Lucas asked. He and Del looked out the windows. A thirty-foot-wide drainage ditch ran parallel to the road and showed a steely streak of ice at the bottom. A narrow, two-story farmhouse, its white paint gone gray and peeling, sat
on the other side of the ditch. The house faced the highway, but was a hundred feet back from it. A rusting Jeep Cherokee squatted in the yard in front of the sagging porch.

  Zahn glanced over at him. “How much you know about this? Anything?”

  “Nothing,” Lucas said. “They threw us on the chopper and that’s about it.”

  “Okay,” Zahn said. “To give it to you quick, a girl named Letty West lives in that house with her mother. She’s this little twerp.” He thought that over for a second, then rubbed an eyebrow with the back of his left hand. “Naw, that’s not right. She’s like a little Annie Oakley. She wanders around with an old .22 and a machete and a bunch of traps. Caught her driving her mother’s Jeep a couple of times. Got a mouth on her. Anyway, last night—she looked at her clock when she woke up, and she says it was right after midnight—she saw some car lights down the road here, and wondered what was going on. There’s nothing down here, and it was blowin’ like hell. This morning, about dawn, she was walking her trapline along the ditch, and went up on top to look at that grove of trees. That’s how she found them. If she hadn’t, they might’ve hung there until spring.”

  THEY WERE ALL looking out the windows at the girl’s house. The place might have been abandoned, but for a light glowing from a window at the front door, and foot tracks that led on and off the porch to the Jeep. The yard hadn’t been cut in recent years and clumps of dead yellow prairie grass stuck up through the thin snow. A rusting swing-set sat at the side of the house, not square to anything, as though it’d been dumped there. A single swing hung from the left side of the two-swing bar. On the far back end of the property, a forties-era outhouse crumbled into the dirt.

  Lucas noticed a line of green-paper Christmas trees taped in an upstairs window.