Broken Prey ld-16

by John Sandford

  “They might find signs of Pope or a second person with him, but they won’t help us find Peterson,” Lucas said. “We gotta be careful in here, but I want to go through her personal records. Credit-card bills, that sort of thing. Did you see anything like that?”

  “There’s a little office in the second bedroom.” Goode pointed down a hallway.

  “Then that’s where I’ll be,” Lucas said. “What about Peterson? Single or divorced? Kids?”

  “Divorced two years. No kids. Ex-husband’s a teacher at the high school.”

  “Check him?”

  “At the exact time that call got to your reporter up in Minneapolis, he was halfway through a physics class. It’s not a copycat.”

  “How about Peterson? She good looking? Has she been out on the town?”

  “Pretty average-looking, forty, a little heavy. . Hang on. There’s a photograph.” He stepped over to a kitchen counter, pushed a piece of paper, and pointed at a snapshot. “We’re not touching it, because we thought maybe Pope shot it. Brought it with him. But that’s her.”

  A woman with brown hair, a squarish chin held up a bit, direct dark eyes.

  Goode continued as Lucas looked at the photo: “We don’t know if she’s been on the town. She’s been divorced two years, so she might have been looking around.”

  “Okay. This is critical, because everybody that Pope’s killed has been single, and out on the town at least a little bit,” Lucas said. “It’s about the only thing we can find that all three had in common. Get some guys, talk to the neighbors, talk to the people at Carleton. I want to know who she hung out with, who her friends were. I want to talk to her ex. I want to do this as quick as you can get them here. . Or not here, but someplace close by.”

  “I’ll set something up,” Goode said. He took a calendar out of his pocket, took out a card, and scribbled on it. “My cell phone. You think of a single thing, call me, I’ll be right outside on the street, talking to neighbors.”

  “Okay.”

  Lucas turned away and took a step, and then Goode asked, “What are her chances?”

  “Man. .,” Lucas shook his head. “If he’s telling the truth, and she’s still alive? About one in hundred, I’d say. We’re gonna have to take him while he’s moving her.”

  Goode left, and Lucas went back to Peterson’s home office. Her desk was made of four file cabinets, two each on either side of a knee space, with a red-lacquered door spanning the knee space. A Macintosh laptop sat in the middle of the desk, with a cable leading to a small HP ink-jet printer on the left. A telephone sat next to the printer, along with a radio-CD player; a CD, showing a slender woman standing in the rain with an umbrella overhead-Jazz for a Rainy Afternoon-sat on top of the player. And there were pencils and ballpoints in an earthenware jar, a bottle of generic ibuprofen, a Rolodex, a box of Kleenex, a scratchpad, and a bunch of yellow legal pads.

  The walls around the desk were crowded with cheap oak-look bookcases, six feet tall, the shelves jammed with books. More books and papers sat on top of the bookcases, and more paper was stacked on the floor.

  And he could smell her. She had been in the room not too many hours earlier, wearing perfume, a subtle scent, just a hint of lilacs or violets or lilies of the valley-something woodland, wild, and light.

  The scent caught him by surprise. For a moment, he lay his forehead on the front edge of her desk, closed his eyes. A few seconds passed, and he sat up, pushed the “on” button on the Mac, and began going through the desk litter, starting with the scratchpad, the notebooks, and the Rolodex. Anything that might show a place, or a date, or an appointment.

  He found phone numbers with a couple of first names, some appointment times noted with places that seemed to refer to student meetings. Could the second guy be a student? Seemed unlikely-what student would want to hang with Pope? But everything he found, he set aside.

  When the computer was up, he went into the mail program and started reading down through the “in box,” the “deleted” and the “sent” listings. More names, with e-mail addresses; most of the e-mail was from students, a few from fellow faculty, one from a woman who was apparently a personal friend who wanted to know if she was going up to MOA Saturday. Mall of America? Two e-mails came from a guy with the initial Z who Lucas thought was probably Peterson’s ex-husband, concerning cuts from a jade tree. Most of the rest came from ceramics people scattered around the country. Receipts from Amazon, old travel reservations with Northwest, Hertz, and Holiday Inn, and miscellaneous life detritus made up the rest.

  Nothing leaped out at him.

  He pulled open the file cabinets: she was meticulous about finances, and one cabinet contained file folders of her American Express and Visa bills. Lucas went through them line by line, noting the few times she’d used her credit cards in what appeared to be restaurants. There weren’t many, and most were out of state.

  He made notes on all of it and was still working when Goode called back.

  “Marilyn Derech is a friend of hers,” Goode said. “She lives down the street, three houses down. We can use her family room to talk to people. I’ve got them coming here, we’ve got a half dozen coming so far. There are a couple here now. .”

  “I’ll come down. I’ve got some more names,” Lucas said. “Did you ever find her purse?”

  “Uh. . we tried not to track through the place much, but it seems like I saw a bag by the couch facing the TV in the front room.”

  “Okay. Give me five minutes.”

  He found the bag, pawed through it. Again, her scent hit him in the face. And Jesus, the old cliche about women’s handbags had never been wrong, he thought. She had everything in there but a fishing pole. Lots of paper: receipts from the gas station, notes from students, a withdrawal slip-forty dollars-from an ATM, bundled Kleenex, loose change, glasses, a glasses-cleaning cloth, a billfold with thirty-five dollars in the cash slot and some change in the clip section.

  Car keys in the bottom of the bag. A rock; an ordinary black smooth basaltic stone, and he wasn’t the least bit mystified: Weather picked up that kind of stuff all the time. Lipstick. A ChapStick. Another ChapStick. More ibuprofen.

  Nothing: he felt like throwing the bag through the fuckin’ front window.

  Turned around in the room. She’d just been here, and now, she was God knows where. His eye caught the clock on the stove in the kitchen, through the archway from the living room: as he glanced at it, the display changed, clicking off a minute.

  He could feel the time trickling away.

  He got his notes and hurried outside; a cop was still leaning against the car, designated, he guessed, to keep an eye on the house. “If the phone rings in there. .”

  “It won’t-they’re being routed downtown.”

  “Good. Where’s this place. .?”

  The cop pointed farther up the street and across. “That white house. The one. . There’s Jim.”

  Lucas saw Goode step out on a porch and look down toward him. He went that way, fast.

  “Goddamn time,” he said to Goode as he hurried up. “We’ve got no time.”

  “I know, I know. . I got six people here.” Goode looked at his watch. “We sent a guy downtown to get her ex-husband, he’s been down at the station. .”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Uh, shit-Zack? Zeke?”

  Lucas nodded: “Okay.”

  Marilyn Derech was a plump blond woman who looked scared: wide-eyed and scared. Four other women and a plump man, who all looked scared, sat on the living-room couch and chairs, and two more kitchen chairs Derech had brought into the living room.

  Lucas introduced himself, got their names: “We’re really in trouble here,” he said. “Does anybody know anything about her social life? Who she was seeing, where she went at night? Was she dating, did she go to bars?”

  After a moment of silence, one of the women flipped up a hand. “We went to a restaurant up in the Cities, they have wine and music.” The woman had intro
duced herself as Carol Olson. She looked about forty, with medium-brown hair, a thin nose. “On Grand Avenue in St. Paul, it’s called BluesBerries.”

  “BluesBerries-I know where that is,” Lucas said. “Did you talk to guys, did you. .”

  “We just went up and had some wine and listened to music, and then we had dinner. . we didn’t really talk to anybody.”

  “Only the one time.”

  “I only went the one time, but I think she’d gone up a couple of times.” Then she stopped and put a hand to her lips. “Listen to me. I’m trying to protect her reputation. I don’t think she went up, I know she did. She knew the place pretty well, where the best parking was and everything. She liked it because she thought. . it was interesting and safe and she wouldn’t see anybody from Northfield up there.”

  “Why wouldn’t she want to see anybody from Northfield? She was divorced.”

  “Yes, but Zach is around. He’s not dating anyone,” Olson said. “When they broke up, it was sort of her that did it. She wanted a little. . more.”

  “Adventure?” Lucas asked.

  “More of something,” Olson said.

  “I’m not being cute,” Lucas said. “Was she looking around? Was she hanging out? Was BluesBerries it, or was she hitting the bars? Did anybody ever hear of a place down in Faribault called the Rockyard?”

  The guy, who had introduced himself as Tom Wells, knew about the Rockyard. “I live up the street, my business sells commercial sanitary supplies-toilet paper and paper towels and cleaning stuff. . the Rockyard is one of our accounts. If you were going to pick one place where Carlita Peterson would never go, that’s it.”

  “But would she know not to go there?”

  “She’d know,” he said. “She wouldn’t go there.”

  “If you took Carlita to a strange city and told her to find a place to eat, the first door she walked through would be the best restaurant in town,” said a woman named Ann Lasker.

  “But maybe she’d go there for an adventure? To the Rockyard?’ ”

  “Her adventures wouldn’t come in the form of a biker,” Wells said. “If she was looking for action, it’d maybe be a”-he looked around at the women-“what? A history professor who sailed?”

  A couple of them nodded.

  Lucas worked them through: Where did she go, whom did she see? The answers were “not far, and not many, outside the school.”

  Fifteen minutes in, Zachery Peterson arrived. He was a tall man, too thin, in a pale blue short-sleeved dress shirt, dark blue slacks, and brown thick-soled shoes. He wore tiny rimless spectacles and had a sparse, two-inch ponytail tied with a rubber band. He stood with his hands knotted in his pockets.

  He hadn’t heard from his ex-wife in two weeks: “We talked about once a month,” he told Lucas, looking uncomfortable. “We hadn’t really settled everything from the divorce yet. It was going slow.”

  “Did she mention any kind of relationship with anyone, any kind of relationship?” Lucas asked. “Did she have any new girlfriends? Anybody?”

  They all shook their heads; and they went down his list of questions. Lucas was watching Peterson, caught him once wiping an eye, and wrote him off as a suspect.

  “If he took her, he took her from the house, early. Did anyone see a car? Could you call all your neighbors and ask if anybody saw a strange car. .?”

  Going out of the house, he looked back and caught the kitchen clock in the Derech house: an hour had gone by. Another one. He was nowhere.

  Sloan called: “I can’t find anyone who’ll tell me that Larson was gay, or ever had any gay contacts, or even knew a lesbian, for that matter.”

  “Everybody knows a lesbian,” Lucas said. He was outside on Derech’s lawn, looking at the sun.

  “Everybody but Larson.”

  Lucas went back to Peterson’s house, into the detached garage, pulled her car apart. Nothing to work with. Nothing. Back into the house, into the paper. Desperation pulling at his shirttails. Somebody called, “Agent Davenport?”

  “Yeah. .”

  Back past the stove clock to the back door. A cop was there, in uniform. Another man stood in the backyard, an elderly man, cork shaped, with white-straw hair, wearing a cap that said TOP GUN. He had a small black, brown, and white dog on the end of a thin leash. The dog kept jumping straight up in the air. Lucas thought it might have been a Jack Russell terrier.

  The cop said, “Mr. Grass lives around the block. . well, around two blocks. He was walking Louie this morning and thinks he may have seen a guy around here that he’d never seen before.”

  A pulse of hope.

  Lucas stepped outside, trying to relax his face. “Mr. Grass? Your first name is. .”

  “Louie. . just like the dog.” He frowned at Lucas: “What the hell happened to your face, son? You look like you went three rounds with a better boxer.”

  “That’s about right,” Lucas said, touching the loop of bruised skin under his eye, wincing. “A guy plugged me right in the nose. . Listen, tell me about this car.”

  “Silver car. .”

  “Not white?”

  “Mmm, looked silver. Could have been white, I guess. I saw him down at the bottom of the block going around the corner. I thought he might be lost because he was going slow.”

  “No way you would have seen the plates. .”

  “I did see the plates, but I don’t know what the number was. It was Minnesota, though.”

  “Could it have been an Oldsmobile?”

  “I don’t know. . Do they have an SUV?”

  Lucas grimaced. “An SUV? It wasn’t a sedan?”

  “Naw, it was an SUV,” Grass said. “I couldn’t tell you what make, they all look alike.” He picked up Lucas’s look of frustration and said, “I’m sorry.”

  “The driver. .”

  Now Grass shook his head. “Didn’t see his face. I was going this way, he was going the other way, and he was looking away from me. . but he came down this street, all right. Early. Before six o’clock. This goddamn dog has a bigger prostate than I do, I think. He starts jumping up and down, yapping, wants to get out and pee first thing.”

  “Mr. Grass, if you can remember anything else. . this is really critical. .”

  Grass looked sad; thought and shook his head. “I’m sorry, son. I saw this car go by, all by itself, early, slow, and it just stuck in my mind. But I didn’t pay it any real attention.”

  “Think about it, will you?” Lucas asked. “Any little thing.”

  They talked for another minute, then Lucas got on his phone and called the co-op: “Listen: we’ve got a second guy who says the car may be light, silver or possibly white. But he says it’s an SUV. Put that out: tell everybody not to rely on it, we’re still looking for a white Olds, but if anyone spots a silver or white SUV in a sensitive area, stop it.”

  The afternoon sloped into evening. Lucas felt like he wanted to prop a couple of two-by-fours under the sun to keep it from going down. The crime-scene people arrived, confirmed most of what they already knew: there was blood on the kitchen floor. They also pointed out two small round black marks the size of dimes, on the vinyl floor. Since there were only two marks, there was a good chance they’d been made by the killer.

  “Black-soled athletic shoes,” the crime-scene tech said. “Soft rubber. It rubs off easy, on vinyl. If she’d been wearing them, we’d probably see more of them. It’s almost impossible to keep from rubbing them off. .”

  “How many people in Minnesota wear black-soled athletic shoes?” Lucas asked.

  “Lots,” the tech said. “Maybe hundreds of thousands.”

  Lucas worked through the rest of the files in Peterson’s office and learned a lot about Peterson, but nothing helpful. He went so far as to dump her entire e-mail list to the co-op, to have them run against car registrations, looking for a white GM car or a silver SUV.

  Nothing.

  Minnesota is a tall state, Lucas thought, going out into the yard, looking at the half dome of the
sun as it sank behind the house next door, but even if he was going all the way north, he’d be there.

  A great summer evening; there’d be a few car deaths and a few more cripplings, a couple of shootings-maybe-and somewhere a woman was waiting to be butchered.

  He couldn’t stand it.

  Standing in the yard, he talked to Sloan again-Sloan had gone downtown so he’d have access to a police computer-and to Elle, and even to Weather, whom he reached before she went to bed.

  “You say Sloan is going psycho. . you sound like you’re going psycho,” she said. “I don’t think it’s healthy for both of you to be crazy at the same time.”

  “Sloan says he’s gonna quit. He sounds serious.” Silence, two seconds, five seconds. “You still there?”

  “I was wondering what took him so long,” Weather said.

  “Ah, Jesus, I’m trying to talk him out of it.”

  “Don’t do that. Let him get out.”

  “Gotta find this goddamn woman,” Lucas said.

  “Yes. Do it.”

  He went down to the Northfield police station, a red-brick riverside building shared by the cops and the fire department. Three cops were sitting in a conference room, two city guys and a sheriff’s deputy, Styrofoam cups scattered around, the smell of coffee and old pastry; a police radio burped in the background, a harsh underline to the hunt. The main dispatch center for the region was in Owatonna, well to the south, and the cops inside the station were just waiting for any call that needed a quick reaction. Not what you’d expect, Lucas thought, for a major search operation-but the fact that there was nobody in the office meant that everybody was on the road.