Prey 7 - Mind Prey

by John Sandford

  What?

  "… believe they are closing in on the kidnapper or kidnappers…"

  "That's bullshit," Mail said. But as he watched the video of the group crouched over their screens, he envied them. Good equipment, good group. They were all dressed informally, and two of the men were holding oversized coffee mugs. They probably all went out at night for pizza and beer and laughed.

  The reporter was saying, "… but everybody just calls her by her last name, Ice." A startlingly attractive young woman with a punk haircut and a nose ring grinned out at Mail and said, "We've almost had him twice. Almost. And it's really a rush. I never worked with the cops before—I mean, except for Lucas—and it's pretty interesting. Totally better'n programming some pinball game or something. Totally."

  "Do you think you'll get him?" the reporter asked.

  Ice nodded. "Oh, yeah, if the cops don't get him first 'cause of some routine f—mistake." She'd been about to say fuck-up, Mail thought. And he liked her. "Right now, over there"—she pointed at two women huddled over keyboards—"we're keying in everything we know about the guy, and we know quite a bit. We include a list of all the possible suspects, you know, like profiles of previous offenders from the police department, Andi Manette's patients, and so on. Not too long from now, we'll push a button and some names'll come out, cross-referenced by the other things we know. I'd bet my [beep] that our guy's name's like totally on the list."

  When the story ended, Mail went into the kitchen and pulled out a phone book, looked up Davenport's company. He found it on University Avenue, in Minneapolis, down in the old warehouse and rail yard district west of Highway 280. Huh. Probably cops all over the place.

  Back in the front room, a different talking head was going on about a troop movement in the Middle East, and Mail picked up the remote and surfed.

  Ice came up again—Channel Three. "The guy has shown a certain crude intelligence, so we think it's possible that he wore a wig or colored his hair during the actual attack. One of the witnesses mentioned that his hair didn't look quite right. If he's really dark-haired, he'd look more like this…"

  The TV went to a composite. Mail was riveted: the computer composite didn't look exactly like him, but it was close enough. And they knew about the van, and about the gaming.

  He nibbled nervously on a thumbnail. Maybe these people really did amount to something.

  This Ice chick: she was as good as Andi Manette. He'd like to try her sometime.

  But Davenport and this computer operation… something should be done.

  Andi and Grace had lost their grip on passing time: Andi tried to keep them alert but found that more and more they were sleeping between Mail's visits, huddled on the mattress, curled like discarded fetuses.

  Andi had lost count of the assaults. Mail was becoming increasingly violent and increasingly angry. After the episode with the witch-woman, Mail had beaten her with her arms overhead, and she'd been unable to protect herself; that night, she'd found blood in her urine.

  She was disappointing him, now, but she didn't know what he had expected and so couldn't do anything about it. He had begun talking to Grace—a word or two, a sentence—when he took Andi out and put her back in. Andi could feel his interest shifting.

  So could Grace, who hid from it, in sleep. And sometimes, in nightmares, she'd groan or whimper. Andi first held her, then tried to cover her own ears, then got angry at the girl for her fear, then was washed at guilt because of her anger, and held the girl, and then she got angry again…

  When they talked, Andi had little to suggest. "If he takes you, wet yourself. Just… pee. That's supposed to turn off a lot of people like this."

  "God, mom…" Grace's eyes pleaded with her to do something: a nightmare of Andi's own, but she couldn't wake from it.

  The nail in the overhead beam was perhaps half-exposed, and was as unmovable as before. They'd given up working on it, but when Andi rolled onto her back, she could see the nail head glowing faintly in the dark wood. A reproach…

  She and Grace hadn't spoken for two hours when Grace, exhausted but unable to sleep, rolled from her left side to her right, and a spring-tensioner broke in the mattress. The spring pushed up into the pad that covered it, and thrust a small, uncomfortable bump into Grace's cheek.

  "God," was all Grace said.

  Andi: "What?" She rolled onto her back and looked up at the light bulb. Sooner or later, it'd burn out, she thought, and they'd be in the dark. Would that be better? She tried to think.

  "Something broke in the mattress," Grace said. She pushed herself up with one hand and punched the bump with the other hand. "It makes a bump."

  Andi turned her head to look: the bump looked like somebody were gently trying to push a thumb through the pad. "Just move over…" Then, suddenly, she sat up. "Grace—there's a spring in there."

  Grace said, "So?"

  "So a spring is as good as a nail."

  Grace looked at her, then at the mattress, and some of the dullness seemed to lift from her face. "Can we get one out?"

  "I'm sure."

  They crawled off the mattress, flipped it over, and tried to scratch through the fabric. The fabric was as tough as leather; Andi broke a nail without even damaging it.

  "We're trying to go too fast," Grace said. "We've got to go slow, like with the nail. Let me chew on it."

  Grace chewed on it forever—for five minutes—then Andi chewed on it for another two, and finally cut through. The hole was small, but with a little worrying, they opened it enough that Grace could get a finger through. Tugging on the hole, she started to split the fabric, and then Andi could get fingers from both hands through at once, and she ripped a two-foot hole in the bottom of the mattress.

  The springs were coiled steel, both tied and sewn in. They took another twenty minutes working one free, using their teeth.

  "Got it," Andi said, lifting it out of the hole. Grace took it, turned it in her hands. The spring had a sharp, nipped-off tip. She used it to pick at the stitching around another spring, and in a minute had the second one free.

  "I bet we could get the nail out with these," Grace said, looking up at the overhead. Her face was grimy, with dirt grimed into wrinkles around her eyes.

  "We could try—but let's see what happens when we stretch these things out. Maybe we won't need it." Andi rubbed the end of the spring on an exposed granite rock in the wall, the concrete floor: after a moment she looked at it, and then at Grace. "It works," she said. "We can sharpen them."

  A moment later, they heard the feet on the floor above. "Back in the mattress," Andi snapped. They put the springs back in the hole, flipped the mattress over, shoved it against the wall, curled up on it.

  Grace's back was to Andi, so she whispered to the wall, "Be nice to him. Maybe he won't hurt you."

  "I… can't be," Andi whispered. "When he takes me out there, something turns off."

  "Try," Grace pleaded. "If he keeps beating you, you'll die."

  "I'll try," Andi said. As the steps got closer, she whispered, "Head down. No eye contact."

  CHAPTER 24

  « ^ »

  Roux had her feet up in the half-dark of her office. She was looking pensively out at the night street, the glow of her cigarette like a firefly.

  "I made nice with Stillwater," she said without turning her head.

  "Thanks." Lucas popped the top on a Diet Coke and sat down. "What about Dunn? Are the feds gonna charge him with anything?"

  "They're making noises, but they won't. Dunn's already talking with Washington," she said. She blew a smoke ring toward her curtains.

  "We should have known that it was too easy—that Mail was jerking us around," Lucas said. "By the way, I don't know if Lester told you, but Crosby was killed before she ever got to the loft. We didn't kill her."

  "He told me. You looked great on the tube, by the way. You almost might've been telling the truth, about figuring out the trap business," Roux said.

  "The feds are goin
g along," Lucas said.

  "Not much choice. If they don't, they look like fools." Roux turned to tamp the cigarette out in an ashtray, fumbled another one out of the pack, and lit it with a plastic lighter. "Are you sure we're looking for this Mail guy?"

  "Yeah. Pretty sure," Lucas said.

  "But you don't want to go out with it."

  "I'm afraid it might trigger him. If we put his actual face on the air, he'd have to run for it. He wouldn't leave anybody behind."

  "Huh." Roux tapped ashes off the cigarette. "I could use something that would look like progress."

  "I don't have anything like that."

  "Mail's name is gonna get out," she said.

  "Yeah, but maybe not for a day or two. I don't see it going much longer than that."

  "I wonder if she's still alive? Manette."

  "I think so," Lucas said. "When he kills her, we won't hear from him any more. There wouldn't be any point. As long as he's fucking with us, as long as he's calling me, she's alive. And I think one of the girls."

  "Christ, I'm tired," she said.

  "Tell me," Lucas said. He yawned. "I'm sleeping at the company tonight. On a cot."

  "Who's with you?"

  "Intelligence guys. And Sloan is over there tonight."

  "You still think he'll come in?"

  "If he's watching TV, he might. He'll be curious. And in the meantime, we're trying to nail down his friends."

  A few clouds had come through in the late evening and dropped just enough rain to clear the air. Now they'd gone, and the brighter stars were visible through the ground lights. Lucas got the car and cut across town to University Avenue. He noticed a van in his rearview mirror and thought about it: there were tens of thousands of vans in the Twin Cities. If Mail showed up at the company during the day, and they flooded the area with squads, as they were planning, how many vans would be in the net? A hundred? A hundred might be manageable. But what if it were five hundred, or a thousand?

  Maybe the techies at the office had some kind of statistics software that would tell him how many vans he could expect in, say, a ten-minute period in a square mile of the city. Would the density of vans be higher in an industrial area than in a suburb?

  He was still mulling it over when he pulled into a Subway shop off University. He could see two young sandwich makers through the front window, both red-haired, maybe twins. Nobody else was in the shop. He yawned, went inside. The place smelled of pickles and relish; the clean, watery odor of lettuce mingled with the yeast smell of bread.

  "Give me a foot-long BMT on white, everything but the jalapeños," he said.

  One of the redheads had disappeared into the back. The other started working on the sandwich. Lucas leaned on the counter and yawned again and turned his head. A van was parked across the street. As Lucas turned his head, the taillight flickered. Somebody inside the dark vehicle had stepped on the brake pedal. The van looked like the one he'd seen in his rearview mirror.

  "Hey, kid," Lucas said, turning back to the sandwich man. "I'm a cop and I've got to make a cop call. I don't want you to look up while I'm talking. Just keep working on the sandwich, huh?"

  The kid didn't look up. "What's going on?"

  "There's a van across the street, and it might be trouble. I'm gonna call in a squad car to check. Hand me one of those large root beer cups and keep working on the sandwich."

  "I'm almost done," the kid said, glancing up at Lucas.

  "Make another one. Same thing. Don't look out the window."

  Lucas carried the root beer cup to the soda machine, where he was out of sight, took the cellular phone out of his pocket, and called in. "This is Davenport. I've got a van tailing me out to a Subway on University Avenue, I need a couple of cars here quick." He gave the dispatcher the address and asked that the cars come in at the corners on either side of the van. "Get one guy out of each car to walk to the corner on foot. Let me know when they're in position, and I'll come out."

  "Hang on." The dispatcher was back fifteen seconds later. "Two cars on the way, Lucas. They'll be there in a minute or a little more. Stay on, and we'll let you know."

  "Do they know what they're supposed to do?"

  "Yes. They'll wait until they see you moving out of the Subway."

  The kid was finishing the second sandwich when Lucas moved back to the counter with the cup full of cellular telephone.

  "We gonna get robbed?" the kid asked, keeping his head down.

  "I don't think so," Lucas said. "I think this is something else."

  "Been robbed twice, this place has," the kid said. "I wasn't here. My brother was."

  "Just give them the money," Lucas said, handing the kid a ten-dollar bill.

  "That's what everybody says." The kid handed him some change, and the cellular scratched from the cup. Lucas put it to his face and said, "Say that again?"

  "We're all set."

  "I'm on my way out."

  A hell of a way to end it, Lucas thought as he walked toward the entrance. He was tight: something was wrong at the van. Something was about to happen. Anyone who had been on the streets would have seen it, would have felt it coming.

  At the door, the sandwich bag in one hand and the cup and cellular phone in the other, he paused, put his hand in his pocket as though fumbling for car keys, and checked the van. It was older, with rusted-out holes on the fenders, side panels, and around the taillights. The cup said something to him, and he put it to his mouth. "What?"

  "Two men just got out of the other side of the vehicle where you can't see them. They may be armed."

  "Okay." Two men?

  Lucas pushed through the door and started toward the Porsche. He was halfway to the car when the two men came around the back of the car and started toward him. One was tall and thin, with a thin goatee; the other short and muscular, with long, heavy arms. The tall one wore a thin cotton jacket; the short one wore a high school letter jacket without a letter. They were pointing toward him, and he thought: A mugging? Maybe nothing to do with Mail?

  They were twenty yards away and walking fast, hands in their pockets, looking at him, cutting him off from the car. Lucas stopped suddenly, and they changed direction toward him, and he stooped and put the sandwiches on the blacktop and drew his pistol in the same motion, pointed it at them.

  "Police. Stop right there. Get your hands in the air, get your hands up."

  And two uniformed cops came running in from behind, guns drawn, and one shouted, "Police."

  The van tried to leave—the driver, unseen behind the dark glass, cranked the engine, gunned it forward, and a squad popped out of the street halfway down the block, and paused. The van driver stopped, then pulled to the side of the street. The two men in the street were looking around, uncertainly, and one pulled his hands from his pockets slowly and said, "What? What do you want?" The other slowly lifted his hands.

  "On the ground," Lucas shouted. "C'mon, you know the routine: on the ground."

  And they knew. They dropped to their knees, then lay on the ground with their hands behind their heads.

  Lucas moved in close and asked, "Is that Mail in the van?"

  "Don't got no mail," the taller of the two men said. "What're you doing to us?"

  "You know what the fuck I'm talking about," Lucas said harshly. "You've sot Andi Manette and her daughters, and if we don't find out real fuckin' quick where they're at, we're gonna turn you over to the feds. The federal penalty for kidnapping is the electric chair, my fine friends."

  The shorter man now turned his eyes up. He was scared and puzzled. "What? What're you talking about?"

  The two cops on foot had arrived, while the two squads boxed the van. "Cuff 'em," Lucas said.

  He walked down to the van, where the driver was slowly climbing out, keeping his hands in sight. He was black. Lucas said, "Shit," and walked back to the two men on the ground. The uniforms had frisked them and had come up with a Davis .32 and a can of pepper gas.

  "So what are we doing?"
asked one of the uniforms, a sergeant named Harper Coos.

  "Aw, they were gonna mug me," Lucas said. "Probably picked up on the car. I thought it might be the other thing."

  The cops at the van called, "We got a gun."

  "Run 'em, and if you can do a gun charge, do it," Lucas said. "Otherwise, you're gonna have to cut them loose. I never gave them a chance to actually start mugging me."

  "Too bad," Coos said.

  "Yeah," Lucas said. "Fuckheads had me excited."

  There were a half-dozen cars in the parking lot outside the company, and almost every light in the building was turned on.

  "Bring me a sandwich?" The voice floated down out of the sky.

  "Who's that?" Lucas looked up, but with the brightly lit windows couldn't see anything in the dark along the roof line.

  "Haywood."

  "I got an extra sub."

  "I'd pay a hundred bucks for a sub."

  "I'll run it right up."

  "How about, uh, three bucks? Which is what I got."

  "You can owe the ninety-seven," Lucas said.

  Sloan and three young programmers were staring at a single screen, when one of the programmers saw Lucas come in. He prodded the guy working the keyboard, who turned and said, "Ah. Hi." The screen in front of him went blank.

  "Hey. I'm gonna run this sub up on the roof. What you got going?"

  "Um, just messing around."

  "Show him," said Sloan. "He'll probably make another million with it."

  "Yeah, show me," said Lucas, walking over to the group.

  The programmers were all grinning at the guy in the chair, who shrugged and started tapping on keys. "You know those screen-savers? The flying toasters, and the tropical fish that swim around the screen, and all that?"

  "Yeah."

  "And you know how some of the magazines put out, uh, pinups as screens avers?"