“Jesus Christ, calm down,” Shrake said, from where he was leaning on the porch rail. He blew a stream of cigarette smoke at the kid. “We’re really important state cops and you’re just a kid who’s not important at all.”
That confused the deputy, and slowed him down. “Where are the casualties?” he asked, no longer shouting.
“There are two dead bodies inside: Hale Sorrell and, we think, his wife,” Lucas said.
“Oh, God.” The kid jumped back inside the car and they could see him calling in.
Lucas’s cell phone rang, and Rose Marie was on the line. “You gotta be kidding me.”
He moved down the walkway under the eaves. “We’re not. We don’t know anything except that there’s probably nobody inside the house, except the dead people. I haven’t had a chance to think about anything.”
“Sorrell for sure?”
“Yeah. You ever meet his wife?”
“A time or two—Sorrell’s age, mid-forties, probably, dark hair, a little heavy, short.”
“That’s her, ninety-nine percent,” Lucas said.
“Do I need to be there?”
“No. The locals are arriving, and I’ve got Henderson’s direct line. If I were you, I’d get next to the governor and guide his footsteps, so as to avoid the dogshit.”
“I’ll do that. Call if you need anything,” she said, and was gone.
THE SHERIFF’S NAME was Brad Wilson, and he arrived ten minutes after the first car came in. By that time, there were four sheriff’s deputies on the scene, two of them on the porch, two more sent around to “cover the back—just in case,” but mostly to get them out of Lucas’s hair.
The sheriff was an older, barrel-chested man wearing a pearl-handled .45 on a gunbelt. He and Lucas had met once, when Lucas was working with Minneapolis. Lucas thought him competent, and maybe better than that. “You attract more goddamned trouble, Davenport,” the sheriff said as he came up. “Hale’s dead? And Mary?”
“Come on and take a look. We’ve been keeping everybody out so the crime scene guys’ll have a chance.”
The sheriff nodded and followed Lucas inside, stepping carefully. They stood back, but the sheriff, leaning over Sorrell, said, “That’s Hale. And that’s Mary. God bless me. How’d you come to find them?”
“We came up here to arrest him on murder charges,” Lucas said. “Sorrell’s the guy who hanged those two people up north.”
The sheriff’s mouth dropped open, then snapped close. After a moment, he said, “You wouldn’t be pulling my leg, would you?”
“No. The two people he hanged were probably the people who kidnapped his daughter.”
“You better tell me,” the sheriff said. He looked a last time at the two figures on the floor. “Holy mackerel.” And, “I got to call the feds. They are going to wet their pants.”
AFTER THE SHERIFF called the FBI, Lucas got him to dispatch pairs of deputies to local homeowners. “We want to know if anybody saw a car or any other kind of vehicle here, this morning or late last night. Or anything else, for that matter. Ask them if they ever saw Sorrell in a red Jeep Cherokee.”
The first media trucks from Rochester began arriving fifteen minutes later. Twenty minutes after that, a Twin Cities media helicopter flew over. Hale Sorrell’s parents and Mary Sorrell’s mother were notified of the deaths by the sheriff’s chaplain, and said that they would notify other family members. Lucas called Henderson. “You’re good to go. Next of kin are notified.”
“Excellent. How are things down there?”
“We’re just mostly standing around, waiting for the medical examiner. He was off somewhere, but he’s on his way now.”
AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK, still waiting for the medical examiner, they filed into a home theater, turned on the fifty-inch flat-panel television, and watched Henderson do the interview with CBS. Somebody—Mitford, probably—had roughed him up. His hair wasn’t quite as smooth as it usually was, and a fat brown file envelope sat on the table in front of him. He looked like the harried executive with bad news, and he delivered it straight ahead, no punches pulled.
“Jesus, he looks almost . . . tough,” Del said.
Washington came on, a moon-faced black man with a dark suit and white shirt, a man who knew he’d been seriously one-upped. The dead people were dope dealers and kidnappers? The hangman and his wife had been executed in their hallway?
“I feel there were some serious investigative shortcomings in Custer County, and I’m calling on the federal government to blahblahblahblah . . . ”
“Bullshit bullshit bullshit,” Del said. “It ain’t workin’.”
Fifteen minutes after they were off the air, Henderson called. “Anything new?”
“No. You looked pretty good.”
“Thanks. We heard Washington is on his way home to Chicago.”
“God bless him.”
JENKINS AND SHRAKE were in the media room, watching the playoff from premium leather–paneled theater seats. Del was prowling the house, checking desks and bureaus and calendars and computer files. Twenty minutes after he began, he handed Lucas a piece of paper: an Iowa title transfer application from a Curtis Frank, of Des Moines, to a Larry Smith, of Oelwein, Iowa, on the purchase of a 1996 Jeep Cherokee, dated three weeks earlier.
“Check the Oelwein address?” Lucas asked.
“No, but I will. Bet you a buck it’s fake.”
THE ME HAD arrived, and after fussing around, checked the blood puddles and body temps. Sorrell and his wife had certainly been killed sometime after midnight, he said, and after he got some weights and checked the accuracy of the house thermostat and the floor-level temperatures, he said he could probably do better than that.
“Off the top of my head, I’d say they were killed this morning,” he said. “They’re a little too warm to have lain on the floor all night, and the blood is a little too liquid. But we’ll have to do the numbers before we know for sure.”
Sheriff Wilson was standing by the door and said, “Here come the feds. Just what we needed.”
“Who?”
“Lanny Cole and Jim Green. Pretty good guys, actually.”
“Mmm. I know Cole, I don’t know Green.”
Del came back and said, “There’s no such address in Oelwein. It’s fake. There is a Curtis Frank, and he says he sold the truck for cash. I talked to Des Moines homicide cops and they’ll take a picture of Sorrell down to his house for an ID.” He saw the men in suits coming up to the door and said, “Feebs.”
COLE, THE FBI agent, shook hands with the sheriff and said, “How ya doing, Brad?” and nodded at Lucas and asked, “They got any more jobs over there at the BCA?”
“I got a slot for a female investigator,” Lucas said.
“I can investigate females,” Cole said. “So what happened here?”
Wilson and Lucas took him through it, Lucas connecting Sorrell with the hangings in Custer County. “I gotta call in on that,” Cole said, squatting next to Sorrell. “We got civil rights guys on the way to take a look at it. You say Hale did it?”
“Most likely.”
Cole nodded, and looked at his partner who said, “We knew something was seriously screwed up.”
“Didn’t know it was that screwed up,” Cole said. He looked down at the body again and said, “Goddamnit, Hale. What’d you do?”
“You guys want in on this act?” Lucas asked.
Cole shook his head. “We’re gonna want to know all about it, if you could forward your findings . . . but we’re not going to get directly involved. We just don’t have the manpower, what with discovering Arab terror plots at the Washington County courthouse.”
Sheriff Wilson looked at Lucas and said, “Doesn’t make any sense for us to do it—it doesn’t sound like the killer’s from around here. So you got it. I’ll call John McCord right now, and ask you in.”
“Good enough,” Lucas said. “If your guys come up with anything, they can pass it up to me, and I’ll coordinate with Lanny a
nd Jim.” To the feds: “Any problem getting your files on the kidnapping?”
“I’ll talk to the SAC from here. We should be able to give you the file this afternoon.”
Back to Wilson: “Can you handle the press down here?”
“I can do that.”
“So we’re set.”
THE FBI AGENTS visited, nothing more, and at noon they left. A BCA crime scene crew arrived from the Twin Cities, and Lucas eventually joined Del in turning over the house, looking at pieces of paper. They found nothing of interest, but couldn’t get into three of the Sorrells’ four computers.
The two desk-top machines, one in a library and another in a home office, and a laptop in Sorrell’s briefcase, were password-protected, and would have to be cracked by computer people. A fourth laptop, apparently belonging to Mary Sorrell, was not protected, but contained nothing but letters, a personal calendar, and a few documents relating to a heart disease research foundation.
Lucas was returning Sorrell’s machine to the briefcase when he found an envelope with a bank letterhead. Inside were twenty separate receipts for bank drafts, each for $50,000, with each check made to a different, major Las Vegas hotel.
“A million dollars,” Del said. “High roller. Maybe that had something to do with the kidnapping? Gambling debts or something?”
“These can’t be all for him,” Lucas said, looking at the receipts. “Every one of the hotels is different.”
“Maybe it’s a business thing, a convention.”
“It’s weird. We oughta look at it.”
AT ONE O’CLOCK, with Del getting restless, Lucas was ready to leave. He turned control of the house over to Carl Driscoll, the head of the BCA crime scene crew, who said he’d get the computers to St. Paul. “If anything comes up, call me,” Lucas told him. “All the routine stuff, get it in your own computer—I think Del and I are probably headed back to Custer County, and you can e-mail it to me.”
The sheriff had just come back up the hill, after talking with reporters, shook his head and said, “This is gonna get goofy. The governor’s statement . . . it’s gonna get goofy.”
“Never was gonna be any other way,” Lucas said. “Not after those two people went up in that tree.”
Lucas got his coat, collected Del, and as they headed for the door, saw a fortyish man in a gray overcoat walking around the line of cop cars in the driveway, closely trailed by a deputy. He was carrying a wallet-sized box, and when he saw the sheriff step out on the porch with Lucas, he called, “Hey, Brad.”
“George . . . you heard about Hale, I guess.” Wilson said to Lucas, “Hale’s lawyer.”
“My God. I was at a wedding, Ken Hendrick’s kid,” the lawyer said, as he came up to them. He looked back down the hill—“I got here as fast as I could, but I had a heck of a time getting through your boys down there.”
“Not much for you to do, here, George.”
“Yes, there is. A week ago, Hale gave me a box . . . ” He handed the box to the sheriff. It was about four inches by five, an inch thick. A tough-looking lock was set flush to the polished steel surface at one edge. “He said, I swear to God, that if he should die, I should give this to the authorities. I asked him if it was anything illegal, and he said no, it’s just some information that he felt should come to official attention. I thought maybe it was business, but now . . . ”
“What’s in it?”
“I don’t know,” the lawyer said. “He gave it to me, told me to file it and forget it. He said it couldn’t be opened without destroying the contents, unless you used a key. He said the key was on his key ring with his car keys.”
Wilson looked at the box, then handed it to Lucas. “Ever see anything like that?”
“Yeah. It looks like a magnetic-media safe, for carrying around computer Smart Cards and so on. It’s bigger than most of them, and I’ve never seen a lock before.”
“His key ring is on the bedside table,” Del said. “I checked to see if there was a Jeep key on it.”
“Let’s go look,” Lucas said.
“Maybe we ought to do it in a lab,” Wilson said doubtfully.
“It’s not a bomb. It’s something he wanted us to get,” Lucas said.
DEL RETRIEVED THE key ring, which contained one key with a circular blade. Lucas popped the top on the safe, and inside was an old-fashioned 3.5-inch computer floppy disk.
“Laptop,” Del said.
They took Mary Sorrell’s IBM laptop out of her briefcase, put it on the floor of the home office. The base unit had no floppy drive, but they found the drive in a separate pouch and plugged it in. Lucas brought the laptop up, slipped the floppy into the drive, and found one file. He clicked on the file. Microsoft Word began opening on the screen, and then the file itself.
A note—a brief note.
Tammy Sorrell was kidnapped by Joe Kelly, Deon Cash, and Jane Warr. Cash is a driver for the Gene Calb truck rehabilitation service in the town of Broderick, near Armstrong, Minnesota. Jane Warr is a card dealer at the Moose Bay casino near Armstrong. Warr and Cash live together in a farmhouse in Broderick. They killed Tammy on Dec. 22 and buried her somewhere nearby. The exact location is unknown. This information has been confirmed.
“Jeez. There it is,” Wilson said, looking up at Lucas. “Where did he get the information? The FBI says that the kidnappers never called. The feds even started looking at Hale’s background to see if he might have had something to do with Tammy . . . you know.”
Lucas touched the computer screen. “He says Kelly, Cash, and Warr did the kidnapping, and that Cash is a driver for the truck place. He doesn’t say anything more about Joe. I think he must’ve got the information from Joe. Where else would he get it?”
Wilson pursed his lips. “So Joe . . . ”
“I think Joe’s outa here,” Lucas said. “If Sorrell was Special Forces . . . maybe he had some training with pliers and fingernails.”
“You don’t think Joe did this?” Wilson gestured out toward the kitchen, where the two bodies still lay on the floor.
“It’s possible—but how the hell would Sorrell know about Cash and Warr? I think he probably grabbed Joe when Joe came for the money,” Lucas said. He looked at the note again, frowned. “I thought all the stories were about the rich girl being kidnapped on Christmas Eve, and all the gifts around the tree . . . ”
“She was . . . ” Wilson shook his head. “Maybe it’s a typo. Maybe he meant the twenty-fourth, and typed the twenty-second.”
“Pretty unlikely,” Del grunted. “That’s one thing you’d get right, in that kind of note.”
“Those bank draft receipts, the ones that went to Vegas . . . ” Lucas had returned them to the briefcase where he found them, to have them checked later. Now he retrieved them, and looked at the dates. “They’re dated December twentieth. He took a million dollars in cashier’s checks to Las Vegas on the twentieth.”
“What do you think?” Wilson asked.
“Could you get one of the bank managers to check on when the drafts were cashed?” Lucas asked.
Wilson looked at his watch. “It’s Saturday. Maybe. Let me call somebody.”
“Maybe . . . ” Lucas scratched his chin and looked at Del. “Maybe he was collecting money in Vegas. He got drafts from his bank, then spent three days withdrawing the money from his Vegas accounts. He was collecting cash to pay the kidnappers.”
Del nodded. “Couldn’t just walk into a bank and ask for a million in cash. How else would you get it? But a bunch of bank drafts for Vegas hotels . . . He could’ve even passed it off as a business thing, with the banks.”
“So Tammy wasn’t kidnapped on the twenty-fourth,” Lucas said. “They got her sooner than that. Huh.” They’d been squatting next to Mary Sorrell’s computer, and now they all stood up. “But there was something that Sorrell didn’t get from Joe or Cash or Warr. There must be a fourth man. Or woman. Or maybe a fourth, fifth, and sixth. Somebody who knew what it meant when Cash and Warr got hanged.”
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“And didn’t want Sorrell talking about it,” Del said. “Couldn’t risk it.”
“Why couldn’t he risk it?” Wilson asked.
Del said, “Because he didn’t know if Sorrell was finished—didn’t know whether or not Sorrell had his name. Didn’t know what Jane and Deon might have told him.”
Wilson scratched his head and said, “Shoot,” and a moment later, “Goldarnit.”
Lucas said to Del, “We better get back up north.”
Del nodded. “But we wouldn’t get up there before dark, if we left now. We should catch a nap this afternoon, leave really early tomorrow. Three in the morning. Get there when the sun comes up. Take that little town apart.”
11
SATURDAY AFTERNOON, JUST after dark, Loren Singleton rolled along Highway 36, listening to the radio. He was tired, despite a long nap, from the overnight round trip to the Sorrells’ and back. A snow squall bothered his windshield, little pecks and flecks of ice whirling down from the north.
He’d been horrified by the shooting, as he hadn’t been by the killing of the little girls. The little girls just seemed to go to sleep—and he hadn’t really done that. He’d just been there.
At the same time, there was something about the Sorrell killings that left him feeling . . . larger. Tougher. He tried to find the exact word: studlier? That embarrassed him, but it might be close.
The lights of Broderick came up through the blowing snow, the cafe, and the gas station, two dimly lit windows at the church, a beer sign in the bar—and then he noticed the light in the back of Calb’s. The office was lit up, as though there were a meeting going on.
He pulled the Caddy into the parking lot, watched for shadows on the window—somebody looking to see who’d pulled in—and when he got none, climbed out of the car and walked over to the shop and tried the door. The door was locked, as it should be after dark on Saturday.
Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15 Page 119
