Prey 7 - Mind Prey

by John Sandford

  "I think it's eight thousand," Sloan said.

  "Does she make your dick hard?" Lucas asked.

  "No-no," Sloan said. He pushed through the door outside. "She's the one with the hard-on, and it ain't for me." After a moment, Sloan said, "Where now? Manette's?"

  "Yeah. Jesus, I can feel the time passing." Lucas stopped to look at the koi, hovering in the pond, their gill flaps slowly opening and closing. Mellow, the koi: and he felt like somebody had stacked another brick on his chest. "Manette and the kids… Jesus."

  Tower Manette again said that Dunn would get everything unless he was convicted of a part in the crime.

  "Do you think he could do it?" Sloan asked.

  "I don't know about the kids," Tower said. He took a turn around the carpet, nibbling at a thumbnail. "He always acted like he loved the kids, but basically, George Dunn could do anything. Suppose he hired some cretin who was supposed to… take Andi. And instead, the guy takes all of them because they're witnesses in this screwed-up kidnapping. George would hardly be in a position to tell you about it."

  "I don't think so," said Helen Manette. Her face was lined with worry, her eyes confused. "I always liked George. More than Tower did, anyway. I think if he was in on this, he'd make sure that the kids weren't hurt."

  Manette stopped, turned on a heel, poked a finger at Lucas. "I really think you're barking up the wrong tree—you should be out looking for crazy people, not trying to figure out who'd benefit."

  "We're working every angle we can find," Lucas said. "We're working everything."

  "Are you getting anything? Anything at all?"

  "Some things: we've got a picture of the kidnapper," Lucas said.

  "What? Can I see it?"

  Lucas took the picture out of his pocket. The Manettes looked at it, and both shook their heads at the same time. "Don't know him," Tower said.

  "And nobody benefits from her death, except George Dunn…"

  "Well," Helen Manette said hesitantly. "I hate to…"

  "What?" Sloan asked. "We'll take anything."

  "Well… Nancy Wolfe. The key-man insurance isn't the only thing she'd get. They have a partnership and six associates. If Andi disappeared, she'd get the business, along with the insurance money."

  "That's ridiculous," Tower Manette said. "Nancy's an old friend of the family. She's Andi's oldest friend..."

  "Who dated George Dunn before Andi took him away," Helen said. "And their business—they've done very well."

  "But Dr. Wolfe says that if Andi was gone, she'd just have to hire another associate," Sloan said.

  "Sure, she would," Helen said. "But instead of a partnership, she'd be a sole owner and she'd get a piece of everybody's action." The word action tripped easily from Helen Manette's mouth, out-of-place for a woman in this house; too close to the street. "Nancy Wolfe would… make out."

  "Another happy couple," Sloan said on the way to the car. "Helen is a tarantula disguised as Betty Crocker, And Tower looked like somebody was pulling a trotline out of his ass."

  "Yeah—but that partnership business. Wolfe didn't exactly tell us everything, did she?"

  George Dunn had two offices.

  One was furnished in contemporary cherry furniture, with leather chairs, a deep wine carpet, and original duck-stamp art on the walls.

  The desk was clear of everything but an appointment pad and a large dark wooden box for cigars.

  The other office, in the back of the building, had a commercial carpet on the floor, fluorescent lighting, a dozen desks and drafting tables with computer terminals, and two women and two men working in shirtsleeves. Dunn sat at a U-shaped desk littered with paper, a telephone to his ear. When he saw Lucas and Sloan, he said a few last words into the phone and dropped it on the hook.

  "Okay, everybody, everybody knows what to do? Tom will run things, Clarice will handle traffic; I'll be back as soon as we find Andi and the kids."

  He took Lucas and Sloan down to the green-leather office, where they could talk. "I've turned everything over to the guys until this is done with," he said. "Have you heard anything at all?"

  "We've had a couple of odd incidents. We think we have a picture of the kidnapper, but we don't know his name."

  Lucas showed the picture to Dunn, who studied it, scratched his forehead. "There was a guy, a carpenter. Goddamn, he looks something like this. He's got those lips."

  "What's his name? Any reason to think… ?"

  "Dick, Dick, Dick…" Dunn scratched his forehead again. "Saddle? Seddle. Dick Seddle. He thought he ought to be a foreman, and when he didn't get a job that opened up, he got pissed and quit. He was mad—but that was last winter. He went around saying he was gonna clean my clock, but nothing ever came of it."

  "You know where we could find him?"

  "Payroll would have an address. He's married, he lives over in South St. Paul somewhere. But I don't know. He's an older guy than what you were talking about. He's maybe thirty-five, forty."

  "Where's payroll?" Sloan asked.

  "Down the hall on your left…"

  "I'll get it," Sloan said to Lucas.

  As Sloan left, Dunn picked up his phone, poked a button, and said, "A cop is on his way down. Give him whatever he needs on Dick Seddle. He's a carpenter, worked on the Woodbury project until last winter, January, I think. Yeah. Yeah."

  When he hung up, Lucas said, "We're talking to everybody, all over again. We're asking who'd win if Andi Manette's dead. Your name keeps coming up."

  "Fuck those people," Dunn snarled. He banged a large fist in the middle of the leather appointment pad. "Fuck 'em."

  Lucas said, "They say that Andi was going after a divorce…"

  "That's bullshit. We'd have worked it out."

  "… and if you were divorced, you'd lose at least half of everything. They say you started this company with some of her money, and having to pay out half could be pretty troublesome."

  "Yeah, it would," Dunn said, nodding. "But there's not a dime of her money in this place. Not a goddamn dime. That was part of the deal when I married her: I wasn't gonna owe her. And it would take a fucking lunatic to suggest I'd do anything to Andi and the kids. A fuckin' lunatic."

  "Then we got a bunch of fuckin' lunatics, 'cause everybody we talked to suggested it," Lucas said.

  "Yeah, well…"

  "I know, fuck 'em," Lucas said. "So: who else would benefit?"

  "Nobody else," Dunn said.

  "Helen Manette suggested that Nancy Wolfe would pick up a pretty thriving business."

  Dunn thought for a moment, then said, "I suppose she would, but she's never been that interested in business… or money. Andi's always been the leader and the businesswoman. Nancy was the intellectual. She publishes papers and that. She's still connected to the university and she's a bigwig in the psychiatric society. That's why they're good partners—Andi takes care of business, Nancy builds their reputation in the field."

  "You don't think Wolfe's a candidate?"

  "No, I don't."

  "I understand you dated her."

  "Jesus, they really did dump it on you, didn't they," Dunn said, his voice softening. "I took Nancy out twice. Neither one of us was much interested in a third try. So when we were saying good-bye that second time, the last time, she said, 'You know, I've got somebody who'd be perfect for you.' And she was right. I called up Andi and we got married a year later."

  Lucas hesitated, then said, "Does your wife have any distinguishing marks on her body? Scars?"

  Dunn froze: "You've got a body somewhere?"

  "No, no. But if we should contact the people who have her, if there's a question…"

  Dunn wasn't buying it. "What's going on?"

  "We got a call from a guy," Lucas said.

  "He said she's got a scar?"

  "Yeah."

  "What kind of scar?"

  Lucas said, "He said it looked like a rocketship…"

  "Oh, no," Dunn groaned. "Oh no…"

  Sloan came i
n, looked at the two men facing each other. "What's going on?"

  Lucas told Dunn, "We'll get back."

  Dunn swung a large workman's hand across the cherry desk, and the cigar safe flew across the room, the fat Cuban cigars spraying out like so much shrapnel. "Well, fuckin' find something," Dunn shouted. "You're supposed to be the fuckin' Sherlock Holmes. Quit hanging around my ass and get out and do something."

  Outside the office, Sloan said, "What was all that?"

  "I asked him about the rocketship."

  "Oh-oh."

  "Whoever it is, he's raping her," Lucas said.

  As they stood talking in the parking lot, Greave called from the Minneapolis Public Library. "It's the Bible," he said. "The Nethinims are mentioned a bunch of times, but they don't seem to amount to much."

  "Xerox the references and bring them back to the office. I'll be there in ten minutes," Lucas said. He punched Greave out and called Andi Manette's office, and got Black: "Can you bring a batch of the best files downtown?"

  "Yeah. On the way. And we got another problem case. A guy who runs a chain of video-game arcades."

  "So what're we doing?" Sloan asked.

  "You want to work this?" Lucas asked.

  Sloan shrugged. "I ain't got much else. I got that Turkey case, but we're having trouble getting anybody who can speak good Turk, so it's not going anywhere."

  "I've never met any Turks who didn't speak pretty good English," Lucas said.

  "Yeah, well, you oughta try investigating a Turk murder sometime," Sloan said. "They're yellin' no-speaka-da-English when I'm walking down the street. The guy who was killed was outa Detroit, he was sharkin', he probably had thirty grand on the street and nobody was sorry to see him go."

  "Talk with Lester," Lucas said. "We need somebody to keep digging around the Manettes, Wolfe, Dunn, and anybody else who might make something out of Andi Manette dying…" He flipped the engagement ring up in the air and caught it, rolled it between his palms.

  Sloan said, "You're gonna lose that fuckin' stone. You're gonna drop it and the ring is gonna bounce right down a sewer."

  Lucas looked in his hand and saw the ring: he hadn't been conscious of it. "I gotta do something about this, with Weather."

  "There's pretty general agreement on that," Sloan said. "My old lady is peeing her pants, waiting for you to ask. She wants all the details. If I don't get her the details, I'm a dead man."

  Greave was waiting with a sheaf of computer printer-paper and handed it to Lucas. "There's not much. The Nethinims were mostly just mentioned in passing—if there's anything, it's probably in Nehemiah. Here, 3:26."

  Lucas looked at the passage. Moreover the Nethinims dwelt in Ophel unto the place over against the watergate toward the east, and the tower that lieth out.

  "Huh." He passed the paper to Sloan and walked down the office to a wall map of the Metro area, traced the Mississippi with his finger. "One thing you can see from the river is all those green water towers," he said. "They're like mushrooms along the tops of all the tallest hills. The water gate could be any of the dams."

  "Want me to check?"

  Lucas grinned. "Take you two days. Just call all the towns along here." He snapped his finger at the map. "Hastings, Cottage Grove, St. Paul Park, Newport, Inver Grove, South St. Paul, like that. Tell them you're working Manette and ask them to swing a patrol car by the water towers; see if there's anything to see."

  Black showed up ten minutes later, morose, handed Lucas a file and a tape. "Guy's messing with kids. Somebody ought to cut his fuckin' nuts off."

  "Pretty explicit?"

  "It's all there, and I don't give a shit what the shrinks say. This guy likes doing it. And he likes talking about it—he likes the attention he's getting from Manette. He'll never stop."

  "Yeah, he will," Lucas said, flipping through the file. "For several years… I'll take it to the chief. We want to hold off until Manette's out of the way."

  Black nodded. "We got some doozies in the files." He sat down opposite Lucas, spread five files on the desk like a poker hand, pushed one toward Lucas. "Look at this guy. I think he may have raped a half-dozen women, but he talks them out of doing anything about it. He brags about it: breaks down for them, weeps. Then he laughs about it. He says he's addicted to sex, and he's coming on to Manette… right here, see, she mentions it, and how she might have to redirect his therapy."

  They were reading files an hour later when Greave hurried in. "They've got something in Cottage Grove."

  Lucas stood up. "What is it?"

  "They said it's like an oil drum under one of the water towers."

  "How do they know?"

  "It's got your name spray-painted on it," Greave said.

  "My name?"

  Greave shrugged. "That's what they said—and they are freaked out. They want your ass down there."

  On the way down to Cottage Grove, the cellular buzzed and

  Lucas flipped it open. "Yeah?"

  Mail cooed, "Hey, Davenport, got it figured out?"

  Lucas knew the voice before the third word was out. "Listen, I…"

  But he was gone.

  CHAPTER 9

  « ^ »

  Six blocks from the water tower, Lucas ran into a police blockade, two squad cars V-ed across the street. The civilian traffic was turning around, jamming up the street. He put the Porsche on the yellow line and accelerated past the frustrated drivers, until two cops ran toward him waving him off.

  A red-faced patrolman, one hand on his pistol, leaned up to the window. "Hey, what the hell…"

  Lucas held up his ID and said, "Davenport, Minneapolis PD. Get me through."

  The cop ran back to one of the squads, yelled something through an open window, and the cop inside backed it up. Lucas accelerated through the gap and up toward the water tower. Along the way, he saw cops in the streets, two different sets of uniforms. They were evacuating houses along the way, and women with kids in station wagons hurried down the streets away from the tower.

  A bomb? Chemicals? What?

  The water tower looked like an aqua-green alien from War of the Worlds, its big egg-shaped body supported by fat, squat legs. Three fire trucks, a cluster of squad cars, a bomb squad truck, two ambulances, and a wrecker were parked a hundred yards away. Lucas pulled into the cluster.

  "Davenport?" A stout, red-faced man in a too-tight cop's uniform waved him over. "Don Carpenter, Cottage Grove." He wiped his face on his sleeve. He was sweating heavily, though the day was cool. "We might have a big problem."

  "Bomb?"

  Carpenter looked toward the top of the hill. "We don't know. But it's an oil barrel, and it's full of something heavy. We haven't tried to move it, but it's substantial."

  "Somebody said my name is on it."

  "That's right: Lucas Davenport, Minneapolis Police. Standard bullshit graffiti-artist spray paint. We were gonna open it, but then someone said, 'Jesus, if this guy's fuckin' with Davenport, what's to keep him from putting a few pounds of dynamite or some shit in there? Or a gas bomb or something?' So we're standing back."

  "Huh." Lucas looked up toward the tower. Two men were there, talking. "Who are those guys?"

  "Bomb squad. We were all over the place before somebody thought it might be a bomb, so we don't think it's dangerous to get near. A time bomb doesn't make sense, because he didn't know when we'd find it."

  "Let's take a look," Lucas said.

  The bottom of the tower was enclosed by the hurricane fence, with a truck-sized gate on one end. "Cut the chain on the gate and drove right in," Carpenter said. They were at the crest of the hill, and below them a steady stream of cars was leaving the neighborhood.

  "But nobody saw it."

  "We don't know—we were talking about a door-to-door, but then the bomb idea came up, and we never got to it."

  "Maybe later," Lucas said.

  The two bomb squad cops walked over and Lucas recognized one of them. He said, "How are you? You were on that case out in
Lake Elmo." The guy said, "Yeah, Bill Path, and this is Jesus Martinez." He threw a thumb at his partner, and Lucas said, "What've we got?"

  "Maybe nothing," Path said, looking back at the tower. Lucas could see the black oil drum through the hurricane fence. It sat directly under the bulb of the four-legged water tower. "But we don't want to try to move it. We're gonna pull the lid from a distance and see what happens."

  "We've drained the tower," Carpenter said. He wiped his sweating face on his sleeve again. "Just in case."

  "Can I?" Lucas said, nodding at the oil barrel.

  "Sure," said Path. "Just don't kick it."

  The barrel sat in the shade of the tower, and Lucas walked over to look at it, and then around it: a standard oil barrel, with a little rust, and a lid that looked professionally tight.

  "One of the first guys knocked on it, and nothing happened; so we knocked on it when we got here," Martinez said, grinning at Lucas. He stepped up to the barrel and knocked on it. "It's full of something."

  "Could be water," said Path. "If it's full, and it's water, it'd weigh about four-fifty."

  "How'd he move it?" Lucas asked. "He couldn't use a fork lift."

  "I think he rolled it," Path said. "Look…"

  He walked away from the barrel, peered around, then pointed. There was a deep edge-cut in the soft earth, then a series of interlocking rings along with a wavy line. "I think he rolled it to here, then tipped it up, then rim-rolled it to the middle."

  Lucas nodded: he could see the pattern in the dirt.

  "Hey, look at this, Bill," Martinez said to Path. He pointed at a lower corner of the barrel. "Is that just condensation, or is there a pin-hole?"

  A drop of liquid seemed to be squeezing out of the barrel. Path got to his knees, peered at it, then grunted, "Looks like a pinhole." He picked up a dandelion leaf, caught the drop on the leaf, smelled it, and passed it to Martinez.

  "What?" Lucas asked.

  Martinez said, "Nothing—probably water."

  "So let's jerk the lid."

  Path fixed a block to an access ladder on the water tower, while Martinez fitted a harness around the lid. Then he tied a rock climber's rope to the harness, ran it up through the block and down to the tow truck. The truck let out all of its cable, and when they finished, they were a hundred and fifty yards from the barrel.