Hidden Prey ld-15

by John Sandford

  "What did you tell your mom?" Grandpa asked.

  "I told her I was going to stay over with you, that Grandma had been trying to get up at night."

  "Good. As long as she doesn't call."

  "She was already going to bed when I left."

  Grandpa turned in his seat, looked at the long dark road behind them and said, "Enough. Let's go."

  "I don't know where he is. Dad."

  "I do," Grandpa said. "I had Bob Spivak find him."

  Roger Walther was living in a shack off Old 169 between Hibbing and Parkville; a shack in every sense of the word-old weathered-board siding showing streaks of moss and rot in their headlights, a tumbledown plank stoop, junk in the front and side yards-old washing machines, a junked car, a battered fourteen-foot Lund fishing boat with a thirty-year-old outboard on the back, sitting on a trailer with no wheels.

  A small porch had holes where the screens should have been; there were lights in the windows behind the porch, and when Carl got out of the car, he could smell the smoke from a wood fire, the smoke being pushed down to the yard by the thin drizzle. Grandpa got out of the car and said, "Come on."

  "You sure he lives here?"

  "That's what Bob said."

  "I don't want to talk to the sonofabitch," Carl said. "I would've kicked his ass the last time we met up, except Mom stopped me."

  "I'm not asking you to come in, I'm telling you," Grandpa snarled in the dark. "This is not an option; this is an operation. We are going to try to figure out a way to put an end to this investigation."

  "How're we gonna do that?" Carl asked. The windows in the front had curtains, and now a silhouetted figure parted the curtains and looked out. The silhouette looked to Carl like a woman's.

  "Watch," Grandpa said.

  They walked up to the porch and as they were about to knock on the front door, it opened. A woman was there in a terry-cloth dressing gown, yellow with age; she was forty, overweight, with dark, oily skin; she smelled of bourbon and cigarettes.

  "Who're you?"

  "I'm Roger's grandfather and this is his son. We need to talk to him for a moment," Grandpa said.

  The woman looked them over, then turned and called, "They say it's your kid and your grandpa."

  "I'm coming…"

  She stepped back from the door, and they stepped inside. The place smelled like cheap burning wood and newspaper, and baked beans. Roger came out of the back. He was a tall man, wearing black jeans and a plain white T-shirt; his hair, once blond, was going gray. He was barefoot. "What do you two want?" he asked.

  "We need to talk to you for a moment. It's important, but…" Grandpa looked at the woman, and then back at Roger. "It's private."

  Roger looked at them for a long four seconds, then asked, "Something happen to Jan?"

  "No. It's about the four families," Grandpa said. "We've got a big problem."

  "Fuck that," Roger said. But he turned to the woman and said, "You go on back in the bedroom. I'll be back in five minutes. You shut that door tight."

  She put her hands on her hips and sighed, as if he'd just unloaded the burden of the world on her, then sullenly went back to the bedroom and slammed the door.

  When the door slammed, Roger looked at Grandpa and then at Carl, and said, "Carl knows?"

  "Yes," Grandpa said. He had his hand in his pocket and when he took it out, he had the silenced pistol in it.

  Carl said, "What?" when he saw the pistol coming up, and Grandpa shot Roger in the heart.

  Roger, looking surprised, fell down with a thump. The wooden floor echoed like a drum.

  Carl said, "You shot my dad." Like a slap in the face; it staggered him.

  Grandpa said, "Don't think. Go do the woman." He handed the gun to Carl. "Don't think, don't touch her, don't touch anything. Just go do it."

  "You shot my fuckin' dad," Carl said, and the gun barrel drifted up toward Grandpa's waist.

  "Don't point the gun at me; just take care of the woman."

  "You… Jesus Christ." Carl stared at the old man.

  Grandpa's voice turned to gravel: "Take care of the woman."

  For a moment, everything balanced on a knife. The gun was now aiming at Grandpa's heart, and Carl took up the slack in the trigger.

  "Don't think…"

  They posed for another three seconds, then Carl suddenly turned, walked to the bedroom door, pushed it open. Grandpa heard the woman say, "What?" and then three shots, a quick bap-bap, and then a finishing bap.

  Carl wandered back into the living room, a dazed look on his face. Grandpa said, "Are you all right?"

  "Maybe."

  "Give me the gun."

  Carl handed it over. "Are you going to kill me someday?"

  Grandpa was neither startled nor disturbed by the question. "No." He put the gun in his pocket and took out two black oversized garbage bags. "Help me get Roger in these things. I don't want blood in the trunk of the car."

  "What's going on?" Carl asked, a pleading note in his voice.

  "The cops were breaking us down-they're going to break us down. Unless we give them the shooter. We're giving them Roger."

  "Why would… this is crazy."

  "No. I can't tell you all of it. I can tell you this: from now on, you have to be a kid. You told me about maybe asking this girl to the home-coming. Tomorrow you've got to do it. You have to borrow some money from me for a sport coat and slacks, and you have to go buy them."

  "What…?" Crazier and crazier.

  Grandpa touched Carl on the shoulder, looked straight into his eyes. "There's more on this to do… But listen to me now. You are the last one of us. You have to go underground, and for you, that means that you have to go back to being a kid. A child. You're an adult now, and it'll be hard, but it's critical, Carl. You have to remember what you are, but you have to play at being a high-school boy. Can you do that?"

  Carl shrugged, and said, "I suppose," and a flock of tears trickled down his cheek. He didn't notice.

  Grandpa pointed at Roger's body, and Carl, stunned, helped roll the body into the two bags. When they were done, there was a small blood puddle on the floor, and Grandpa cleaned it up with paper towels and water and found that he'd left a clean spot on a dirty floor.

  They fixed that by dragging a welcome mat across it a few times, until it had blended. That done, Grandpa went in to look at the woman: she was dead, all right. Carl had walked the gun up her body, shooting her first in the stomach and then in the chest, with a final shot in her forehead.

  Okay.

  "Let's get him out to the car."

  The worst of it, Carl thought, was that Roger was still warm. He could still feel his father's body, all the heat, all the still-living cells, that hadn't yet gotten the message from his father's brain, as he staggered out into the rain and put him in the back of the car. The warmth reminded him of the day he'd killed the little dog…

  Inside, Grandpa picked up the first of the nine-millimeter shells, the one he'd used to kill Roger; the others he left. And before walking out of the house, he took a single orange hunter's glove from his jacket pocket, and threw it in a closet.

  "That's like…" Carl started. He looked at Grandpa. "Oh, Jesus, you knew way back when I went after the Russian."

  "I was ready if we needed it," Grandpa said. "Come on. We need to go through the house and find what Roger would have taken with him, running. One suitcase. One duffel bag."

  They actually found a hockey duffel in a closet, and threw everything into it that Roger might have taken-his shaving gear and miscellaneous clean-up stuff, like tweezers, Band-Aids, fingernail clippers, a brush, and comb. They took the best clothes and shoes they could find; they took photographs, including a photo of Carl as a five-year-old, on a park swing being pushed by his mother, both of them laughing; they took cigarettes and a jar of quarters and some cheap jewelry and they dumped the woman's purse and took the money out, seven dollars.

  They did it all hastily, throwing the stuff into the du
ffel; except for the photograph of Carl and his mother, which Carl put in his pocket.

  When they were done, they turned off the lights and tramped back out through the rain and got in the car. "Drive that way," Grandpa said.

  Carl followed the instructions, turning this way and that. At some point, he began to cry, clutching the steering wheel in both hands, trying to stay in the middle of a narrow gravel road track while looking through both tears and the rain.

  "Turn left, right after this tree," Grandpa said.

  "Where are we?"

  "They were logging here last summer. Starts a hundred feet back or so."

  They followed a rough dirt track through the trees, down a gentle slope, around a stump; a hundred feet in, as promised, the forest suddenly ended and the headlights punched into featureless darkness. All the trees were gone. In the near foreground, Carl could see dirt chewed up by bulldozers.

  Grandpa got out of the car, walked around to the trunk. "You'll have to dig," he told Carl.

  Carl dug, in the light of a flashlight; Grandpa was afraid to use the headlights. They found a low spot without any nearby tree wreckage, and cut down through the sandy ground, Grandpa urging him to work faster, Carl working as fast as he could, throwing dirt, fighting through the occasional root. When he was finished, he was covered with mud.

  Together, they lifted the body from the back of the car and dropped it in the hole, and threw the duffel bag on top of it. They stood there for a minute, then Grandpa pulled the pistol out of his pocket and dropped it in the hole. Grandpa shifted the light away, and said, "Fill it."

  Filling the hole took only five minutes. When it was done, they stomped around on top of it, and finally dragged a shredded aspen over the raw dirt. They'd been lucky with the rain, Grandpa said; the rain would take care of the rest of it. By morning, the grave site would be invisible.

  The ride home was long, but not silent. Grandpa said, "This is the worst. This is the worst night of your life, so you never have to worry about that anymore. This is one of the worst of my life, after the death of my son. But I tell you: this is the critical step that we needed to protect the families. And your father… your father was a ruined man, no good for anybody. No good for your mother, no good for you. He was a ruin. His life was already over."

  Carl started crying again, and said, "But he was my dad."

  "I know, I know…"

  And it went like that.

  At Grandpa's, they both stripped down and threw their clothing into the washing machine, and Grandpa washed their shoes in the kitchen sink and patted them dry with kitchen towels and newspapers. "They'll be fine by morning," he said. They took their clothes out of the washer and put them in the dryer, and then Carl made a bed on the couch and Grandpa gave him two of Grandma's sleeping pills.

  "You need the sleep before school," Grandpa said. "These are strong and will take you down for five hours. Try to sleep."

  Carl took the pills, and immediately on swallowing, was struck by the suspicion that he shouldn't have; was he part of Grandpa's plan? But the old man had turned away from him, said, "Try to sleep; try to empty your mind. Try not to cry, because if you do, your eyes will be red. And remember tomorrow, if I forget to tell you, you must ask the girl on the date to homecoming. That's important: you have to go back to being a kid."

  "Okay, Grandpa. We had to do it, didn't we?"

  "We had to," Grandpa said.

  Grandpa hit the lights and said good night, and then Grandma's pills came on, pulling Carl straight down into a pit of darkness.

  As for Grandpa, for Burt Walther, for Sergey Vasilevich Botenkov, he slept quite well.

  Chapter 25

  Lucas and Nadya made their statements, and signed them. No perjury was committed, although an observer from Mars might have observed that not all possible questions had been asked.

  There had been no way, the city attorney said, to completely avoid the question of a relationship between Nadya and Reasons, but the relationship had been disposed of with two questions and two short answers, which had dismissed the possibility that a personal relationship had in any way contributed to the murder.

  Reasons, the attorney concluded, had been killed on the job when a professional assassin, armed with a silenced pistol, had gone to Nadya's room to kill her, and instead, had encountered Reasons, who'd died protecting Nadya. Several throats were cleared, briefcases were stuffed, and the lights turned out.

  Andreno called from Hibbing, said there was no action at Walther's house, and Lucas ordered him back to Duluth to stay with Nadya overnight.

  Kelly, the cop originally assigned to the murder of Mary Wheaton, stopped to chat with Lucas on the way out the door after the statements were given. Lucas mentioned that he was looking for a drunk named Roger Walther, but that Walther had never been arrested, and was no longer living at the house listed on his driver's license.

  "I'll ask around," Kelly said. "Know anything else about him?"

  "Not much… whacked his wife a couple times, no charges. He was the local hockey hero in Hibbing, played with UMD…"

  "Well, shit, I know a guy named Reggie Carpenter who knows every single asshole who ever got ice time up there… He might be able to help you out."

  "Where's he live?"

  "Actually, he plays piano at T-Bone Logan's Lakeside Lumber Emporium and Saloon. He oughta be there now."

  "Place with a name like that, you wouldn't see many tourists," Lucas suggested.

  Kelly snorted: "There never was a T-Bone Logan, it's not on the lakeside, it was built six years ago by a doctor's group from Chicago outa fake logs, never had anything to do with lumber, and they charge nine bucks for a martini which, when they bring it to you, turns out to be purple, or maroon, or some fuckin' thing. What do you think?"

  A gentle drizzle was falling as they drove.

  "Feel the winter coming," Kelly said.

  "This isn't it, though," Lucas said. "Not yet." Sometime in September, a bone-crunching cold front usually came through, pointing at snow, if not actually delivering any. This drizzle still contained a hint of warmth.

  "You ski?"

  "Ah, every once in a while. I've got a place over in Sawyer County, Hayward, I got a couple of sleds…"

  They talked snow and cabins and snowmobiles until they pulled into the bar.

  T-Bone Logan's was as Kelly said, a tourist trap with log walls and, inside, axes and saws and kerosene lanterns mounted overhead, and big photos of lumberjacks in old-timey logging camps. The tabletops were made out of split pine logs with clear finishes; the place smelled of wet-sauce ribs and beans.

  Carpenter, the piano player, was a Dagwood-looking man, pale, slender, balding, with cheap false teeth that tended to clack when he talked, and a sprinkling of dandruff on his black sport coat. Lucas and Kelly got beer from the bar and carried it over to the piano and waited while Carpenter finished wending his way through an overfruited version of "Stardust," Carpenter signaling his friendship to Kelly with his eyebrows.

  When he finished the song, he slid over to the side of the piano bench and said, "How's it going, Officer Kelly?"

  "How many telephones you got now, Reggie?"

  "Just the one cell phone," Carpenter said. "Don't even have one in my house."

  "You're sure?"

  "Absolutely," Carpenter said, beaming at Kelly.

  Kelly said to Lucas, "Reggie used to take the occasional bet."

  "Ah."

  "In the month of November nineteen ninety-nine, he took bets on one thousand seven hundred and fifty-six occasions," Kelly continued.

  "I never would have suspected," Lucas said.

  "I was just… a little thoughtless," Carpenter said. "So what's going on?"

  "UMD hockey," Kelly said. "Do you remember a guy named Roger Walther? Would have been a second-stringer, maybe… what? Twenty-some years ago?"

  Carpenter frowned, tinkled the high C key a few times, then nodded, "Yeah… I do. He played forward, but he was a li
ttle slow with the stick, and about six feet short getting down the ice. But he could play. What'd he do?"

  "Have you seen him?" Lucas asked.

  "No, not for years. I think-I think, but I'm not sure-that he once was selling cars at Landry's, but that would have been years ago."

  "Not since."

  "Nope. What'd he do?"

  "What's he like, physically?" Lucas asked. "Fast? Big? Wide? Strong?"

  "About like you," Carpenter said to Lucas. "Maybe an inch shorter, a couple of pounds heavier."

  "You think he might be a runner?" Lucas asked. "Like to jog, and so on?"

  "I don't know. He was a college-level jock. So probably. What'd he do, anyway?"

  "Thanks for your help," Kelly said. "Stick with the one phone, huh?"

  They had a few drinks, and Lucas eventually got back to the hotel and slept like a rock.

  The next morning, he was in the shower, feeling a little rocky from the alcohol, when the first call came in, from John Terry, the Virginia police chief.

  "We got a line on Roger Walther. He's living with a woman named Kelly Harbinson just out west of town. I got an address…"

  Lucas took the address and said, "Thanks. I'll check it out."

  Andreno and Nadya came over for breakfast. The rain was still falling, and they all looked out over the lake as he told them about the call; there were no boats visible at all, and no separation between lake and sky. "I'm getting pretty damned tired of driving back and forth," Lucas said. "Everything is up on the Range-I'm gonna check out of here tomorrow morning and find a place up there."

  "Me also," Nadya said. "This process feels like it is coming to an end."

  Andreno nodded. "Roger'll give us something. Has to. Did you see the paper this morning?"

  "The Star Tribune," Lucas said.

  "The local paper has a story from Spivak's lawyer. You're gonna take some pressure at the preliminary hearing."

  "We've got enough for the preliminary," Lucas said.

  "Be a pretty fucked-up trial, though," Andreno said.

  "Somebody'll crack before we get to trial. I hope."

  With the focus on Roger Walther, they all rode to Virginia together. Lucas and Andreno chatted about another case they'd worked on, in St. Louis, and they compared promotion and salary practices with Nadya. Nadya's salary was small by American standards, but she paid almost nothing for housing, medical care, insurance, or any of the other dozens of possibilities that Americans dealt with. The one problem, she said, was food. "We don't eat so much in restaurants as you do; and the food in restaurants that I can afford is not so good anyway."