Chosen Prey ld-12

by John Sandford

  Marshall scrambled out onto the carpet at the top, and he was shouting, "Living room is clear, I don't see him."

  Another BANG from the back, and Lucas shouted, "He's in the back, it sounds like he went out." He heard somebody screaming, "Watch it, watch it, coming your way, watch it…"

  Allport, he thought, and then he was at the top of the stairs and saw Marshall, now up and moving in a crouch, headed toward a hallway leading toward the back. He did a peek as Lucas came up and said, "Clear, I think."

  Lucas did a peek and heard more shouting from the back, and ran down the hallway just in time to hear a fusillade of shots, and more yelling. He was coming up on a room to his right and a closed door on his left. He did a quick peek into the bedroom, saw nothing, continued through a small kitchen, saw broken glass, shouted back, "Watch the rooms, they're not clear, they're not clear," saw Del behind Marshall, got to the window, and looked out.

  Randy Whitcomb was lying faceup, spread-eagled on the grass below the back deck. His shirt was soaked with blood and one hand was flapping convulsively, as though he were fanning himself with a broken arm.

  Lucas turned, saw Del and Marshall in the hallway, and said, "He's down out back. Check the rooms." Allport and the hammer cop loomed from the living room. To Allport, Lucas said, "Get an ambulance moving." Then he was out and down the stairs onto the lawn, where the St. Paul uniforms, guns still drawn, had gathered around Randy.

  Randy had been hit four times, twice in the legs, once in the stomach, and once in his left forearm, the arm that had been flapping. One of the uniform cops was now holding it to the grass so he couldn't flap it. Randy wasn't saying anything, not a sound: no whimpers, nothing. His eyes rolled, rolled, rolled, from this side to the other, up and down; and his mouth strained, not to say something, but as if it were trying to escape his face.

  "Got an ambulance coming," Lucas said to him. He didn't hear it.

  One of the St. Paul uniforms said, "He had a gun."

  "Yeah, he let go a couple of times inside," Lucas said.

  The cop said, "He had a gun. Up there, we heard it."

  "Yeah, he did."

  One of the other cops said, "I think it's in the bushes. He had it in his hand when he came out."

  "Find it," Lucas said. "Don't touch, just find it."

  Del came out on the deck. "Nobody in the house. But, uh…" He looked back into the condo, and Lucas could hear Marshall talking. Then Del turned back to Lucas and said, "There's a lot of blood up here."

  "Nobody shot at him up there."

  "No, no, I mean, somebody else's blood. He was trying to clean it up with paper towels, but it's kind of splattered on the couch and there are little droplets on the wallpaper."

  Now Randy moaned, just once. Lucas looked down at him and said, "What'd you do?" But Randy didn't hear him; he just rolled his eyes again.

  From the corner of the house, one of the St. Paul uniforms said, "There it is." To Lucas: "Got the gun, Chief."

  "Just stay right next to it. Keep an eye on it until the crime-scene people get here. Don't let anyone get near it."

  Allport came out on the deck and asked, "Everybody okay?"

  "Everybody except Randy. He's hit pretty hard." Lucas looked down at him again. Randy's shirt was soaked with blood, and Lucas noticed that even with the convulsions running through his upper body, his lower body never moved. Spinal, he thought.

  Allport yelled at one of the uniforms: "Freeze everything, John. Don't let anything move." Then, to Lucas: "You oughta come up and look at this mess."

  Lucas said, "Okay," then looked down at Randy again. "What the fuck did you do, you little asshole? What'd you do?"

  16

  MARSHALL AND DEL came down from the apartment to watch the paramedics working over Randy. Whatever they did brought the pain on, and the kid started a cowlike lowing that seemed to inhabit all the air in the common area. He was still doing it when they strapped him on a gurney, ready to move him.

  Two dozen kids, half of them white, the other half Hmong or black, most of them serious but a few cutting up, milled in a wide semicircle around the shooting scene, kept back by uniforms. Somewhere in the crowd was a young girl who'd periodically call out in her high-pitched TV-whore voice, "That motherfucker dead?" or "You shoot that motherfucker?" When the paramedics started wheeling the gurney toward the ambulance, she cried out, "Put him in the 'fridge, he dead."

  When he was gone, the cops on the original blocking squads were isolated to make statements, and Randy's revolver was photographed, measured, and carefully plucked out of the weed bed where it had fallen. The crime-scene guy who lifted it popped the cylinder and said, "Four rounds fired."

  "That's about right," Allport told him.

  "Can't tell when," the crime-scene guy said.

  "About a half an hour ago, dickhead," Allport said.

  Lucas, Del, and Marshall clustered around the bottom of the apartment steps. Marshall said, "He doesn't look that bad, considering."

  Lucas nodded. "If they get him to Regions alive, he'll make it-as long as he doesn't have too much shit in his bloodstream."

  "I told the paramedics about the crack," Del said. "They'll watch out for it."

  "I want to know what the heck happened," Marshall said. "Why'd he open up? Because we took the door down?"

  Lucas rubbed his head, looking up at the apartment, and said, "I don't know. He's always been a crazy sonofabitch, and he never worried about getting hurt. Not brave, just nuts. I never really thought about him being suicidal."

  "It's that blood," Del said. He looked up, where Lucas was looking, and continued, "Something happened up there."

  "He couldn't be our guy," Marshall said. "You didn't have any goddamn twelve- or thirteen-year-old traveling around the countryside picking up women in their twenties. I mean, I don't know what it means."

  "He was probably just a connection," Lucas said. "But he knows our guy."

  "We could get a name tonight, then," Marshall said. "They sew him up-"

  "If he'll talk," Del said. "He's a little asshole, and he'll be pissed."

  "More pissed than you might think," Lucas said. "His legs weren't moving when he was on the ground. The slug that took him in the stomach might have clipped his spine."

  Marshall winced, and Del said, "Ah, shit."

  The crime-scene people were taping the apartment when the three of them climbed back up the stairs and tentatively stepped inside. Allport spotted them, shook his head: "Quite a bit of day-old blood. We don't think it was his."

  "Is someone dead? That much blood?" Lucas asked.

  Allport relayed the question to somebody out of sight. A second later, a cop in a tweed jacket and golf slacks stepped into the hallway and looked down at Lucas and said, "Not that much. I'd say it's gotta be maybe a pint, give or take. Of course, we don't know how much he cleaned up."

  "Doesn't look like he'd done much cleaning," Del said. "There was still some blood on the wallpaper."

  "You find any jewelry?" Lucas asked. "Good stuff?"

  "Haven't looked yet," the cop said. "Would that be a priority?"

  "Yeah, it would be," Lucas said. "Get the sequence of events on the entry nailed down first, though. We don't want that to get confused."

  The cop nodded and dropped back out of sight. Allport said, "Give us half an hour. Then I'd appreciate if you could slow-walk through the place, see if anything catches your eye."

  Lucas nodded. "We'll be back." To Del and Marshall, as they stepped back out onto the deck: "The day started so pretty that I drove the Porsche."

  "Still not a bad day," Marshall said, looking up at the sky. "Still pretty. Even smells good, once you get away from the blood."

  THEY WASTED THE half hour and a little more at a bagel shop on Grand Avenue, drinking coffee and trying to figure out the next step. They were still shaky from the shooting: talking too fast, digressing into stories, arguing the Aronson case.

  "The woman over at the Catholic schoo
l, the museum lady-we gotta talk to her some more," Marshall said. "She comes up four times on our lists, and she takes you right over to that wall in Laura's pictures. That place has gotta be involved, and it's gotta be somebody close to her. Maybe somebody who works at the museum. People come to see her, and he picks them up there."

  "Black's running down all the names in the museum and the art department-everybody over twenty-five," Lucas said.

  "I'm supposed to go to this task force meeting tomorrow with Marcy," Marshall said. "I'd rather hang with you guys, but if you want, I could go over there and tell them about St. Patrick's and what we've seen so far, and maybe… I don't know, maybe we could get them to do research on everybody in the whole school. Everybody. Maybe there'd be some way to hook up the records from the school computer with the FBI, and run them all off in an hour or something."

  "That's a thought," Lucas said. "I just can't figure out what a guy at St. Pat's is doing with a pimp like Randy."

  "Just a fence," Del said. "The guy's a sex freak, so maybe they got hooked up that way, and then he started fencing stuff through Randy."

  "You know what we should have done?" Marshall said. "When we had that woman over at DDT's place this morning, the one that used to work with Randy, we should have showed her the picture of the guy from the movie."

  "Goddamnit," Lucas said irritably. "I should have thought of that."

  "I'll get back to her," Del said. "Maybe I can hook up with some of Randy's other girls, too."

  Still cranked, they all went back to Randy's. Allport was in the living room with two other cops, and said, "We gotta guy coming down with a recorder and some forms, if you guys could make a preliminary statement before you take off."

  They all nodded, and Lucas asked, "Anything new?"

  "Can't find his stash."

  "Gotta be one," Lucas said. "He was weird about all that English shit-he had a walking stick, and he used to stroll around in riding boots and breeches and hats with feathers. You oughta look behind mirrors and paintings and check for hollowed-out banisters and all that. Look in the clocks."

  He was standing at the top of the entry stairs, next to a banister knob, and tried to turn it; it was solid.

  "What'd you hear from the hospital?" Del asked.

  Allport shook his head. "He's in surgery, and they're giving us about the usual: Nothing, fuck you very much."

  "How about the spine thing?"

  He shook his head again. "I haven't heard a thing."

  The crime-scene people found Randy's stash in a hardbound copy of Bulfinch's Mythology, one of a line of what looked like decorator books in a built-in bookshelf over the television. The pages of the Bulfinch had been haphazardly glued together, and then a hole cut out of the middle. The hole was just big enough to hold a couple of ounces of grass-it didn't, but it did hold a chamois bag.

  The cop who found the book shook the bag into the palm of one hand, and out tumbled two rings, one diamond and one emerald. Lucas, Del, and Marshall had seen pictures of them.

  "Sonofabitch," Del said.

  "Now we know for sure," Lucas said. "He's the link."

  They spent another hour at the apartment, giving brief statements to a St. Paul investigator who would be looking into the shooting. When they were done, Marshall asked, "Where can I hook up with this Anderson guy? He's never around when I come through your office."

  "He basically works with the computer system," Lucas said. "I'll take you around."

  "Got an idea?" Del asked.

  "No. I just want to look at all these lists he's making. Have we called these women up, the women in the drawings, to see how many of them have a connection with St. Patrick's?"

  "Yeah. Many of them do-I mean, everybody in town is gonna know somebody from the place; it's a big school. But direct connections are pretty thin."

  "Four hits with this old lady Qatar is a lot," Del said.

  "Gotta be something there," Marshall said.

  "Just like there is with Randy," Lucas said. "But how do you connect an elderly museum lady with an asshole like Randy? I looked at her, and I couldn't tell you."

  BACK AT CITY Hall, Lucas dropped Marshall with Anderson, the computer guy, and Del headed back to DDT's: "I'll show her the pictures, and maybe Charmin' can give me the name of some of his other girls," he said.

  Lucas went back to the office, where Marcy was talking with Lane and Swanson. "Did you hear about Randy?" she asked.

  "What?" He stopped in his tracks. "He died?"

  "No, but he won't be walking anywhere for a while. Allport just called and said the surgeons are trying to fix his lower vertebrae so he doesn't do any more damage to his spinal cord, but there's already been some damage and they don't think he's gonna have full use of his legs. Not right away, anyway. He'll have to do rehab, and you know how that goes."

  "Ah, shit." Lucas shook his head and said, "Nobody knows what happened. He just opened up."

  "You don't look too shook," Marcy said.

  "I didn't even see anything, until it was all over," Lucas said. "We came in the front, he ran out the back and opened up." He told them the story in detail, and about the rings.

  "Allport told me about the rings," Marcy said. "Christ, if Randy hadn't had a gun, we'd have the guy now."

  "Did Allport say if he was conscious?"

  "Docs have really cut him up-they figure it'll be the day after tomorrow before he makes any sense, and maybe longer than that. They had to go into his gut and he's gonna have a lot of pain, so they're pouring the drugs into him." They all looked at Marcy: What happened to Randy seemed like a replay of what had happened to her. She picked up the vibration and said, "I didn't get the spine. But he's gonna be hurting, I can promise you that."

  Swanson had been sitting with his head propped on his hands, and now he looked up at Lucas and said, "Damn good thing you weren't doing the shooting."

  "Yeah. The thought's occurred to just about everybody," Lucas said. He looked at the three of them, huddled around Marcy's desk, and asked, "What's going on? You got something?"

  "Just trying to figure out this Catholic and St. Patrick's business," Lane said. "To tell you the truth, we've got too many names. We've got connections running all over the place. We've got so many, we don't know what we're doing anymore."

  "On the other hand," Marcy said, "I looked at the Minnesota Almanac and guess what? There's a whole bunch of Catholics among the women who got drawings and the dead ones we've identified, BUT…" She dug around in a mess of paper and pulled out a slip with penciled numbers. "We don't have a lot more than the percentage of Catholics in the Minnesota population as a whole. In fact, if the rest of the dead ones turn out not to be Catholics, we'll be a Catholic short."

  "In other words, the Catholic thing just went up in smoke," Lucas said.

  "There's still St. Patrick's," Lane said.

  Lucas pulled up a chair. "Let me look at this stuff, okay? Where're the names of the people on the faculty? Have you run them past the women who got drawings? We're gonna have to do that."

  THEY WERE STILL deep into the papers when Marshall came back, with Anderson a few feet behind. They were an odd pair: Harmon Anderson, an aging computer geek, pale as a boiled egg, and Marshall, as weather-beaten and brown as last year's oak leaf. "Might have something to look at," Marshall said gruffly. "Maybe you already thought of it."

  "I don't think so," Anderson said. To Lucas: "Terry's smarter than he looks."

  Marshall grunted, maybe in amusement, then pushed the paper at Lucas. "I wanted to know which women named Mrs. Qatar as an acquaintance, so Harmon wrote them down for me. He has a chart on his wall that shows when the women got the drawings, and when he wrote down the ones who knew Mrs. Qatar, I couldn't help noticing that they were all listed next to each other on the chart. They all got their drawings over a two-month period, a year and a half ago."

  Lucas said, "Huh. So what…?"

  "They say they don't know each other, but they seem to be conn
ected somehow with Mrs. Qatar. I started to wonder, could they have been at the same place, at the same time-like just before the first drawing came in? Some kind of public event? These four drawings were just about two weeks apart, so if it takes two weeks to do one, is it possible that they were at an event two weeks before the first one came in?"

  Lucas leaned back in his chair, thinking about it. Then he looked at Lane, who said, "Could be something."

  "I wonder if Helen Qatar's secretary keeps a calendar," Lucas said. "Let me check." He stepped into his office, rummaged through his collection of business cards, found the card he'd collected from Qatar's desk, went back to the main bay, and used Marcy's phone to make the call.

  Qatar's secretary picked up and said, "Wells Museum, Helen Qatar's office."

  "This is Lucas Davenport, the Minneapolis police officer who was there the other day…" He explained what he needed.

  "Let me check with Mrs. Qatar," she said.

  Qatar picked up a moment later and said, "We're looking. You think this could be significant?"

  "It would explain a lot," Lucas said. "We can't figure how you hook into it, but if you were all at the same place, especially if you were one of the main people…"

  "A year and a half ago? In August?"

  "August, early September… couldn't be any later than September fourteenth," Lucas said. He heard the secretary talking in the background, and then Qatar came back.

  "I think…" Then she was gone again, talking to the secretary. A moment later: "We had a preterm gala for alumni and friends of the museum, to try to raise a little money for our museum fellowships." She was gone again, then back. "August twenty-ninth. We invited six hundred people. We don't know how many came, but all the food was eaten, and the party was crashed by a number of students coming back to school."

  "These other women who identified you as an acquaintance. Would they have been invited?" Lucas asked. Marcy whispered: "Guest list." "Do you have a guest list?"

  "We wouldn't have a guest list anymore," Qatar said, a tingle of excitement in her voice. "But we invited everybody on our contacts lists, and I think all four of them are on it. When officer Black gave me the four names, I knew three of them as acquaintances, but the fourth one didn't ring a bell. When I looked in our files, though, there she was."