Prey 7 - Mind Prey

by John Sandford

  "They must've emptied her out," Sherrill said.

  The mole shook his head. "Not blood," he said. He held the towel between himself and the truck lights and looked through it.

  "Then what is it?"

  The tech shrugged. "Paint. Maybe lawn chemicals. It's not blood, though."

  "That's something," Sherrill said, her face pale in the headlights. She looked down at her shoes. "I hate wading around in it. If you don't clean it up right away, it stinks."

  "But it's blood on the shoe," Lucas said.

  "I believe it is," said the mole.

  Sherrill had been watching Lucas fumble with the whatever-it-was and finally figured it out. A ring. "Is that a ring?" she asked.

  Lucas quickly pushed his hand in his coat pocket; he might have blushed. "Yeah. I guess."

  "You guess? Don't you know?" She handed the shoe bag to Black. "Engagement?"

  "Yeah."

  "Can I see it?" She stepped closer and consciously batted her eyes.

  "What for?" He stepped back; there was no place to hide.

  "So I can fuckin' steal the stone," Sherrill said impatiently. Then, wheedling again: " 'Cause I want to look at it, why do you think?"

  "Better show it to her," Black said. "If you don't, she'll be whining about it the rest of the night…"

  "Shut up," Sherrill snapped at Black. Black shut up and the mole stepped back. To Lucas, "Come on, let me see it. Please?"

  Lucas reluctantly took his hand out of his pocket and dropped the ring into Sherrill's open palm. She half-turned, so she could see the stone in the headlights. "Holy cow," she said reverently. She looked at Black. "The diamond is bigger'n your dick."

  "But not nearly as hard," Black said.

  The mole sadly shook his head. This kind of talk between unmarried men and women was another sign that the world was going to heck in a handbasket; that the final days were here.

  They all started through the drizzle toward the school, the mole looking into the sky, for signs of God or Lucifer; Black, carrying the bloody shoe; Lucas with his head down; and Sherrill marvelling at the three-carat, tear-shaped diamond sparkling in all the brilliant flashing cop lights.

  The school cafeteria was decorated with hand-painted Looney Tunes characters, and was gloomy despite it: the place had the feel of a bunker, all concrete block and small windows too high to see out of.

  Bob Greave sat at a too-short cafeteria table in a too-short chair, drinking a Diet Coke, taking notes on a secretarial pad. He wore a rust-colored Italian-cut suit and a lightweight, beige micro-fiber raincoat. A thin man in a trench coat sat next to him, in another too-short chair, his bony knees sticking up like Ichabod Crane's. He looked as though he might twitch.

  Lucas walked through the double doors with Black, Sherrill, and the mole trailing like wet ducklings. "Hey, Bob," Lucas said.

  "Is that the shoe?" Greave asked, looking at the bag Black was carrying.

  "No, it's Tom's," Lucas said, a half-second before he remembered about Black and had to smother a nervous laugh. Black apparently didn't notice. The man with the incipient twitch said, "Are you Chief-Davenport?"

  Lucas nodded. "Yeah."

  "Mr, Greave"—the man nodded at the detective—"said I had to stay until you got here. But I don't have anything else to say. So can I go?"

  "I want to hear the story," Lucas said.

  Girdler ran through it quickly. He had come to the school to talk to the chairperson about the year's PTA agenda, and had encountered Mrs. Manette and her daughters just outside the door, in the shelter of the overhang. Mrs. Manette had asked his advice about a particular problem—he was a therapist, as was she—and they chatted for a few moments, and he went inside.

  Halfway down the hall and around a corner, he recalled a magazine citation she'd asked for, and that he couldn't remember when she'd first asked. He started back, and when he turned the corner, fifty or sixty feet from the door, he saw a man struggling with Manette's daughter.

  "He pushed her into the van and went around it and drove away," Girdler said.

  "And you saw the kids in the van?"

  "Mmmm, yes…" he said, his eyes sliding away, and Lucas thought, He's lying. "They were both on the floor. Mrs. Manette was sitting up, but she had blood on her face."

  "What were you doing?" Lucas asked.

  "I was running down the hall toward the doors. I thought maybe I could stop them," Girdler said, and again his eyes slid away. "I got there too late. He was already going out the drive. I'm sure he had a Minnesota license plate, though. Red truck, sliding doors. A younger man, big. Not fat, but muscular. He was wearing a t-shirt and jeans."

  "You didn't see his face."

  "Not at all. But he was blond and had long hair, like a rock 'n' roll person. Hair down to his shoulders."

  "Huh. And that's it?"

  Girdler was offended: "I thought it was quite a bit. I mean, I chased after him, but he was gone. Then I ran back and got the women in the office to dial 911. If you didn't catch him, it's not my fault."

  Lucas smiled and said, "I understand there was a kid here. A girl, who saw some of it."

  Girdler shrugged. "I doubt she saw much. She seemed confused. Maybe not too bright."

  Lucas turned to Greave, who said, "I got what I could from her. It's about the same as Mr. Girdler. The kid's mother was pretty upset."

  "Great," Lucas said.

  He hung around for another ten minutes, finishing with Girdler, talking to Greave and the other cops. "Not much, is there?"

  "Just the blood," Sherrill said. "I guess we already knew there was blood, from Girdler and the kid."

  "And the red stuff in the parking lot," said the mole, looking at the napkin he'd used to soak it up. "I bet it's some kind of semi-water-soluble paint, and he painted the van to disguise it."

  "Think so?"

  "Everybody says it was red, and this is red. I think it's a possibility. But I just don't see…"

  "What?"

  The mole scratched his head. "Why did he do it this way? Why right in the middle of the day, and three-to-one? I wonder if it could be a mistake or some spur-of-the-moment thing by a guy on drugs? But if it was spur-of-the-moment, how would he know to take Mrs. Manette? He must've known who she was… unless he just came here because it's a rich kid's school and he'd take anybody, and he saw the Lexus."

  "Then why not just snatch a kid? You don't want the folks if you're looking for ransom. You want the parents getting the money for you," Black said.

  "Sounds goofier'n shit," Sherrill said, and they all nodded.

  "That could be an answer—she's a shrink, and maybe the guy used to be a patient. A nut," Black said.

  "Whatever, I hope it was planned and done for the money," Lucas said,

  "Yeah?" The mole looked at him with interest. "Why?"

  " 'Cause if it was some doper or a goddamn gang-banger doing a spur-of-the-moment thing, and they haven't dropped them off by now…"

  "Then they're dead," Sherrill finished.

  "Yeah." Lucas looked around the little circle of cops. "If it wasn't planned, Andi Manette and her kids are outa here."

  CHAPTER 3

  « ^ »

  The chief lived in a 1920's brown-brick bungalow in a wooded neighborhood east of Lake Harriet in Minneapolis, cheek-by-jowl with half the other smart politicians in the city; a house you had to be the right age to buy in 1978.

  The gabble of a televised football game was audible through the front door, and a moment after Lucas pushed the doorbell, the chief's husband opened it and peered out nearsightedly; his glasses were up on his forehead. "Come on in," he said, pushing open the door. "Rose Marie's in the study."

  "How is she?" Lucas asked.

  "Unhappy." He was a tall, balding lawyer, who wore a button vest and smelled vaguely of pipe tobacco. He reminded Lucas of Adlai Stevenson. Lucas followed him down through the house, a comfortable accumulation of overstuffed couches and chairs, mixed with turn-of-the-century oak, f
urnishings they might have inherited from prosperous farmer-parents.

  Rose Marie Roux, the Minneapolis Chief of Police, was sitting in the den, in a La-Z-Boy, with her feet up. She was wearing a sober blue business suit with white sweat socks. She was smoking.

  "Tell me you found them," she said, curling her toes at Lucas.

  "Yeah, they were shopping at the Mall of America," Lucas said. He dropped into the La-Z-Boy facing the chief. "They're all okay, and Tower Manette's talking about running you for the U.S. Senate."

  "Yeah, yeah," Roux said sourly. Her husband shook his head. "Tell me," she said.

  "She was hit so hard she was knocked out of her shoes and there's blood on one of them," Lucas said. "We've got some eyewitness who says that Andi Manette and the younger of the daughters were covered with blood, although there's a possibility it was something else, like paint. And we've got a description of the guy who did it…"

  "The perp," said Roux's husband.

  They both looked at him. He hadn't seen the inside of a courtroom since he was twenty-five. He got his cop talk from the television. "Yeah, the perp," Lucas said. And to Rose Marie, "The description is pretty general: big, tough, dirty-blond."

  "Damnit." Roux took a drag on her cigarette, blew it at the ceiling, then said, "The FBI will be in tomorrow…"

  "I know. The Minneapolis AIC is talking to Lester," Lucas said. "He wanted to know if we were going to declare it as a kidnapping. Lester said we probably would. We're covering the phone lines at Tower Manette's office and house. The same for Dunn and Andi Manette, offices and houses."

  "Gotta be a kidnapping," Roux's husband said, getting comfortable with the conversation. "What else could it be?"

  Lucas looked at him and said, "Could be a nut—Manette's a shrink. Could be murder. Marital murder or something in the family. There's lots of money around. Lots of motive."

  "I don't want to think about that," Roux said. Then, "What about Dunn?"

  "Shaffer talked to him. He's got no alibi, not really. But we do know it wasn't him in the van. He says he was in his car—he's got a phone in his car, but he didn't use it within a half-hour of the kidnapping."

  "Huh."

  "You don't know him? Dunn?" Rose Marie Roux asked.

  "No. I'll get to him tonight."

  "He's a tough guy," she said. "But he's not crazy. Not unless something happened since the last time I saw him."

  "Marital problems," Lucas suggested again.

  "He's the type who'd have some," Roux said. "He'd manage them. He wouldn't flip out." She grunted as she pushed herself out of the La-Z-Boy. "Come on, we've got an appointment."

  Lucas looked at his watch. Eight o'clock. "Where? I was gonna see Dunn."

  "We've got to talk to Tower Manette first. At his place, Lake of the Isles."

  "You need me?"

  "Yeah. He called and asked if I'd put you on the case. I said I already had. He wants to meet you."

  The chief traded her sweat socks for panty hose and short heels and they took the Porsche five minutes north to Lake of the Isles.

  "Your husband said perp," Lucas said in the car.

  "I love him anyway," she said.

  Manette's house was a Prairie-style landmark posed on the west rim of the lake, above a serpentine driveway. The drive was edged with a flagstone wall, and Lucas caught the color of a late-summer perennial garden in the flash of the headlights. The house, of the same brown brick used in Roux's, was built in three offset levels, and every level was brilliantly lit; peals of light sliced across the evergreens under the windows and dappled the driveway. "Everybody's up," Lucas said.

  "She's his only child," Roux said.

  "How old is he now?"

  "Seventy, I guess," Roux said. "He's not been well."

  "Heart?"

  "He had an aneurysm, mmm, last spring, I think. A couple of days after they fixed it, he had a mild stroke. He supposedly made a complete recovery, but he's not been the same. He got… frail, or something."

  "You know him pretty well," Lucas said.

  "I've known him for years. He and Humphrey ran the Party in the sixties and seventies."

  Lucas parked next to a green Mazda Miata; Roux struggled out of the passenger seat, found her purse, slammed the door, and said, "I need a larger car."

  "Porsches are a bad habit," Lucas agreed as they crossed the porch.

  A man in a gray business suit, with the professionally concerned face of an undertaker, was standing behind the glass in the front door. He opened it when he saw Roux reach for the doorbell. "Ralph Enright, chief," he said, in a hushed voice. "We talked at the Sponsor's Ball."

  "Sure, how are you?" Roux said. "I didn't know you and Tower were friends."

  "Um, he asked me to take a consultive role," Enright said. He looked as though he were waxed in the morning.

  "Good," said Roux, nodding dismissively. "Is Tower around?"

  "In here," Enright said. He looked at Lucas. "And you're…"

  "Lucas Davenport."

  "Of course. This way."

  "Lawyer," Roux muttered, as Enright started into the depths of the house. Lucas could see the light glittering from his hair. "Gofer."

  The house was high-style Prairie, with deep Oriental carpets setting off the arts-and-crafts furniture. A touch of deco added glamour, and a definite deco taste was reflected in the thirties art prints. Lucas knew nothing of decoration or art, but the smell of money seeped from the walls. That he recognized.

  Enright led them to a sprawling center room, with two interlocking groups of couches and chairs. Three men in suits were standing, talking. Two well-dressed women sat on chairs facing each other. They all had the expectant air of a group waiting for their picture to be taken.

  "Rose Marie…" Tower Manette walked toward them. He was a tall man with fine, high cheekbones and a trademark shock of white hair falling over wooly-bear white eyebrows. Another man, tanned, solid, tight-jawed, Lucas knew as a senior agent with the Minneapolis office of the FBI. He nodded and Lucas nodded back. The third man was Danny Kupicek, an intelligence cop who had worked for Lucas on special investigations. He raised a hand and said, "Chiefs."

  The two women were unfamiliar.

  "Thanks for coming," Manette said. He was thinner than Lucas remembered from seeing him on television, and paler, but there was a quick aggressive flash in his eyes. His suit was French-cut but conservative, showing his narrow waist, and his tie might have been chosen by a French president: the look of a ladies' man.

  But the corner of his mouth trembled when he reached out to Roux, and when he shook hands with Lucas, his hand felt cool and delicate; the skin was loose and heavily veined. "And Lucas Davenport, I've heard about you for years. Is there any more news? Why don't we step into the library; I'll be right back, folks."

  The library was a small rectangular room stuffed with leather-bound books, tan, oxblood, green covers stamped with gold. They all came in sets: great works, great thoughts, great ideas, great battles, great men.

  "Great library," Lucas said.

  "Thank you," Tower said. "Is there anything new?"

  "There have been some further… disturbing developments," Roux said.

  Tower turned his head away, as though his face were about to be slapped. "That is… ?"

  Roux nodded at Lucas, and Lucas said, "I just got back from the school. We found one of your daughter's shoes in the parking lot, under her car, out of the rain. There was blood on it. We've got her blood type from medical school, so we should be able to tell fairly quickly if it's her blood. If it is hers, she was probably bleeding fairly heavily—but that could be from a blow to the nose or a cut lip, or even a small scalp wound. They all bleed profusely… But there was some blood. Witnesses also suggest that your daughter and her younger daughter, Genevieve…"

  "Yes, Gen," Manette said weakly.

  "… apparently were bleeding after the assault, when they were seen in the back of the kidnapper's van. But we've also found that
the kidnapper may have tried to disguise his van by painting it with some kind of red water-soluble paint, so that may be what was seen on your daughter. We don't know about that."

  "Oh, God." Manette's voice came out as a croak: the emotion was real.

  "This could turn out badly," Roux said. "We're hoping it won't, but you've got to be ready."

  "There must be something I can do," Manette said. "Do you think a reward? An appeal?"

  "We could talk about a reward," Roux said. "But we should wait awhile, see if anyone calls asking for ransom."

  "Do you have any ideas—anything at all—about what might be going on?" Lucas asked. "Anybody who might want to get at you, or at Miz Manette?"

  "No…" But he said it slowly, as if he had to think about it. "Why?"

  "She may have been stalked. This doesn't look like a spontaneous attack," Lucas said. "But there's an element of craziness about it, too. All kinds of things could've gone wrong. I mean, he kidnapped three people in broad daylight and got away with it."

  "I'll tell you what, Mr. Davenport," Manette said. He took three shaky steps to an overstuffed library chair and sat down. "I've got more enemies than most men. There must be several dozen people in this state who genuinely detest me—people who blame me for destroying their careers, their prospects, and probably their families. That's politics. It's unfortunate, but that's what happens when your side loses in a political contest. You lose. So there are people out there…"

  "It doesn't feel political," Roux said. Lucas noticed that she'd taken a cigarette out of a pocket and was rolling it, unlit, in her left hand.

  Manette nodded. "I agree. As crazy as some of those people may be, I don't think this kind of thing would ever occur to them."

  Lucas said, "There's always the possibility…"

  Roux looked at him, "Political people always leave themselves escape hatches. With this, there's no escape hatch. Even if he just dropped them off on the corner, he'd be looking at years in prison for the kidnapping. A political mind wouldn't do that."

  "Unless he was nuts," Lucas said.

  Roux nodded, and looked at Manette and said, "There is that possibility."