John Sanford - Prey 12 - Chosen Prey.txt

by Chosen Prey(lit)

  He moved quickly now. He’d had experience with this part. Neumann was dead, there was no question of that. The spade had crushed her skull; he’d felt it, and kneeling by her head, he could see it. She now looked only a little like Charlotte Neumann. There wasn’t much blood, but there was some. Before it could trickle onto the floor, he lifted her head by her hair, and fitted it into the garbage bag, then slipped the bag down the rest of her body; her head felt like a collection of bones and hamburger in an old sock.

  The body went into the trunk of her car with the spade. He went quickly back into the house, got another garbage bag, filled it with the groceries. He had no intent to steal, but simply to obscure any sign of violence.

  Now. Out . . .

  But just a minute. There was no immediate rush. He could take a few seconds to look around. She talked all the time about her dead husband, letting you know about how well off they’d been. There might be something here in the house . . .

  She had twenty-three dollars in her wallet, and he took it all. In her bedroom, he found nothing but cheap costume jewelry in her jewelry box. But in another, smaller box in the bottom of her chest of drawers, he found another three rings, a pair of earrings, and a necklace; they positively thumped with authenticity. These would be worth a few dollars.

  In another drawer, he found two coin cards, and in each card, ten gold American twenty-dollar pieces from the nineteenth century. For the gold content alone, he thought, they should be worth close to three hundred dollars each; and if they were rare at all, maybe much more.

  When he finished looking through the house, he thought himself perhaps fifteen thousand dollars richer.

  A dream, he thought, to get so much by accident.

  The dream quickly turned into a nightmare when he backed her car out of the garage and left for his disposal place. Getting into the countryside was easy enough; getting the body into the ground would be another problem, he thought, with the rain and cold. The leaves would be slippery and the slope was steep . . . although he’d enjoy the time on the hillside, there with his other friends. All the friends of James Qatar, gathered in the dark under the oak trees . . .

  But when he crossed the creek and turned the corner, he was caught in a sudden blaze of light. There was no place to turn: He was stuck with the road. He slowed, but went ahead. They were right by his hill. What were they doing, police in the rain? A car accident?

  As he crept up on the scene, a cop stepped into the road and waved him along. Qatar slowly moved past, lifting his hand to the cop as he went by, but turning his head, so the cop couldn’t see his face. He turned it toward the hill and saw the men working on the hillside, saw a shovel held by a man in the road, saw three TV vans . . .

  He was more stunned than panicked. They’d found his special place after all. The discovery of Aronson had made it possible, but when nothing had appeared in the papers, he’d thought they’d missed the others.

  With his mind moving like mud, he wandered down a series of narrow blacktop tracks. Lights to the sides marked farmhouses; he passed a lonely Conoco station with two trucks in the parking lot, took a left, and faded into the dark countryside again. He finally crossed a highway with a north arrow, and took that: The Cities were north; he could hardly miss them. Then he passed the Conoco station again, and realized that he’d driven in a circle. He pulled in, went inside, and bought two packages of pink Hostess Snoballs and a Coke, and got directions from the kid behind the counter: “Go right straight up the road here, you’ll cut 494 . . .”

  He jammed the Snoballs into his face as he drove, chewing mindlessly through the sugar and chocolate—they tasted pink—and threw the packaging out onto the highway. The body in the back seemed to glow in the dark; he had to get rid of her. Had to.

  That, it turned out, was as simple as the killing.

  He cut I-494 south of St. Paul and took it back west, eventually finding his way to the Ford Bridge over the Mississippi. He parked at the end of the bridge, looked both ways, then carried the garbage sack out over the water and dumped the body into the Mississippi. He started to let the bag go with it, but caught it at the last minute. It was too dark to see the body hit, but it would soon be going over the dam.

  And on the way back to Neumann’s car, he realized what he’d done. He’d faked a suicide. She was certainly moody enough, dark enough. Lonely. Perhaps he could help the idea along.

  He drove Neumann’s car back to his own, took the groceries out, along with the spade, put them in the trunk of his car, then drove the car back to the bridge and left it parked illegally on Mississippi Boulevard. Then he started walking. Four miles to his own car. Four miles in the rain.

  But he needed the time anyway—the time to think. Life was becoming complicated. He hadn’t had any choice with Neumann, but he’d now done something he’d always carefully avoided in the past.

  He’d killed somebody close to himself. The cops could stand in her office doorway and see his.

  As he walked back, he began to weep again. Life was cruel. Unfair. A man like himself . . .

  James Qatar walked along, snuffling in the dark and the rain.

  And he thought about the friends of James Qatar, before tonight snugly buried on the hillside above the creek. Released now. He wondered if they would come to see him.

  11

  LUCAS GOT UP early, kissed Weather goodbye, and went to the telephone. The police in New Richmond knew the dentist used by Nancy Vanderpost, and the cop who answered the phone volunteered to run across the street to see if he had X rays of her fillings.

  Next Lucas called Marcy, who was just out of bed. Del had suggested that there might be something special, or peculiar, about the drawings that were publicly posted, rather than mailed to the victim. Lucas told Marcy to get somebody prying into Beverly Wood’s history. The killer, he thought, was back there somewhere.

  He called Del and made arrangements to pick him up again, and while he was talking, got a beep of an incoming call. He rang off Del and took the incoming call: The New Richmond cop was calling from the dentist’s office. The dentist had X rays, and was offering to scan and e-mail them immediately.

  Lucas gave the dentist his e-mail address, got the dentist’s phone number, then called Larry Lake at Lake’s cell phone number. Lake answered after a single ring: “McGrady decided last night that he wanted one more scan across the bottom of the hill. We think we found another grave. A seventh one. So we’re doing another strip.”

  “Jesus. You sure it’s a seventh? Anything come up yet?”

  “They’re just scraping the leaves off now. These crime guys are pretty fussy about how it’s dug.”

  “Okay. See you in a bit.”

  He called Del back and told him about the seventh, then called Rose Marie. “We’ve got a seventh grave.”

  “Oh, boy. I’ll tell you, the governor called first thing this morning. He wants a federal-state-local task force working on it.”

  “We’re already moving slow enough.”

  “I suggested that he set up a federal-state task force to examine the forensic evidence, which is most of what we’ve got, and to coordinate between the local agencies.”

  “Tell me what that means,” Lucas said.

  “It means that we stay independent, but we send Xeroxes of everything to the task force, if there is a task force. But if there is a task force, it probably won’t get started for a few days, so if we really want to look good . . .”

  “We take the guy before that.”

  “Only a suggestion,” she said.

  “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  LUCAS MADE A half-gallon of coffee and poured it into a thermos, got his rain suit off the nail in the garage, and tossed it into the back of the Tahoe. With little hope, he cranked up his IBM and looked at his e-mail—and found a message from a DocJohn. He opened it and brought up a page of scanned X-ray images. He sent the images to his laser printer and two minutes later had eight life-size X-ray images.

/>   THE WEATHER WAS better: still overcast, but dry. Del was waiting in front of his house. His wife waited with him, and when she saw the Tahoe coming, handed Del a cooler. Del said something to her, and when Lucas pulled into the drive, he sheepishly got into the truck. “No more meat loaf,” Cheryl said to Lucas.

  “I’ll remember,” Lucas said. “Don’t let my meat loaf.”

  “Lucas . . .” A distinct threat hung in her voice.

  “No meat loaf. I swear.”

  “Have Del tell you about his cholesterol.”

  Lucas looked at Del, who seemed to shrink down in his seat, then back to his wife. “We’ll talk about it,” Lucas promised.

  On the way out of town, Lucas asked, “What’s in the cooler?”

  “Bunch of stuff. Mostly cut carrots. Fat-free water crackers.”

  “I like carrots.”

  “That’s fuckin’ great,” Del said. “I’m happy for you.”

  “So are you gonna tell me about your cholesterol?”

  Del shrugged. “It’s been stuck at two fifty-five. The doc wants it down under two hundred, and if I can’t do it by diet, he’s gonna put me on Lapovorin.”

  “Uh-oh. Isn’t that what . . . ?”

  “Yeah. The guy who comes backwards.”

  Long pause. Then Lucas said, “Better than a heart bypass. Or dropping dead of a heart attack.”

  Del said, “Yeah. It kinda scares me, to tell you the truth. The cholesterol does. My mom died of a heart attack when she was fifty-eight.”

  They rode along for a minute, then Lucas said, “So eat carrots.”

  Del cracked a grin. “I’m gonna love getting old.”

  AT THE GRAVEYARD site, there were now a half-dozen TV trucks, along with the line of county sheriff’s cars, state cars, a car with federal government tags, Marshall’s Jeep, Lake’s Subaru, and a few more.

  “A simple cop convention yesterday. Now it’s a full-scale cluster-fuck,” Del said.

  “In which nobody knows exactly who’s doing what to whom, or with what.”

  “Or even why.”

  Lake was waiting on the hillside while his assistant carried the radar along the yellow string. Lucas headed that way first. “Any more?”

  “Just the one I told you about this morning, the seventh one. They’ve got some clothing coming up now.”

  Lucas looked around the hill. “Where’s seven?”

  Lake pointed. “Those guys.” He pointed farther along the hill. “And those guys, I think, are working on a tree hole, but it’s big enough and defined enough that we thought we better dig it out.”

  “How much longer?”

  “This is the last sweep. We’ll have some data in a half hour.”

  Lucas and Del walked up the hill to the command tent. McGrady was still at work, but he looked beat. He peered over his glasses at Lucas. “You’re pretty chipper.”

  “Good night’s sleep, pancakes for breakfast, nice conversation with a pretty woman,” Lucas said.

  “Better’n this, huh?”

  Lucas nodded. “You’ve got seven.”

  “Yeah.” McGrady stumbled backward a step and sank into a canvas field chair. “You know what? The first six didn’t bother me that much. The seventh, finding the seventh . . . that kicked my ass.”

  “I got some X-ray printouts for you. We can get the actual films if we need them. This is for the woman from New Richmond. Nancy Vanderpost.”

  Lucas handed McGrady the printouts, and McGrady looked at them for a long moment, then said, “Four.”

  “What?”

  “They could be number four.”

  He walked across the tent to six long cardboard boxes. Inside each box was a stack of clear plastic bags, with the contents of each bag carefully tagged. He rummaged around in the box numbered four and came up with a bag. Inside, Lucas saw several separate bones, including a lower jaw. McGrady looked at the jawbones for a minute, then at Lucas’s printouts, then at the jawbone, then at the printout. After a minute, he looked up at Lucas and said softly, “Hello, Nancy.”

  “You’re sure?” Del asked.

  “Ninety-nine percent.” He dropped the bag back into the box, pulled off his glasses, and said, “Goddamnit. I’m so fuckin’ tired.”

  “You oughta crash for a couple hours,” Lucas said.

  “Maybe tonight.”

  LUCAS CALLED MARCY and told her about Vanderpost, then told her to start building a file with the cops from New Richmond. She said she would, and added, “Black was over at the archdiocese, and they’re looking for a priest who studied art at UW–Stout in Menomonie, but this monsignor over there said they won’t find one. He says he generally knows the background of all the priests in the area, and none of them went to Stout.”

  “That was thin, anyway,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah, but listen to this. After Black talked to the guy, he noticed that a bunch of these women listed ‘going to Mass’ as one of their social activities, and he started to add them up. Of the seventeen people who’ve gotten drawings so far, eleven are Catholic. That’s way too many. Of the three dead women we know about, two were Catholic.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Interesting, huh?”

  “Push it.”

  “We are.”

  When he got off the phone, Lucas asked McGrady if he’d seen Marshall.

  “He wanders around the hill,” McGrady said. “He was right up on top the last time I saw him. Sitting on a log.”

  He was still sitting on the log when Lucas climbed to the top of the hill. He crossed the lip of the crest, and Marshall said, “More bad news.” Not a question.

  “McGrady says four is Nancy Vanderpost, from New Richmond.”

  “Ah, jeez.”

  “You did a hell of a job, man,” Lucas said.

  “I was nuts for all those years. That’s the answer. I kept hoping she’d show up—you’d see those TV shows on amnesia. I knew it was all bullshit, that she was dead.”

  “You had the guy figured, and that’s—”

  “What the heck is this?” Marshall was looking past Lucas, down the hill. Del was climbing toward them at a dead run.

  “What?” Lucas asked.

  “Eight wasn’t a tree hole,” Del said, gasping for breath.

  THEY WERE STANDING around hole eight, looking at a shoe with a dirty bone in it—with the combination of heavy soil and oak litter, the bones showed an irregular coffee color, with lines and pits of bone white. “We need to find a girl who wore red high-top Keds,” said the cop in the hole.

  “That fad faded a few years ago,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah, well, she’s been here a few years.”

  Below, another federal car crept slowly past the cluster of cop cars on the road, parked, and three men climbed out. “Baily,” Del said.

  Lucas looked down the hill. Baily was the FBI’s agent in charge at the Minneapolis office, a heavyset man who played a mean game of handball. “Better go get him, take him up to the command tent,” Lucas told Del. “I’ll round up Marshall and McGrady.”

  McGrady was at hole six. Lucas said, “The feds are here. Del’s bringing Baily up to the command tent.”

  “Okay. . . . You think they’ll come in?”

  “Does a chicken have lips?”

  Marshall had left his spot at the top of the hill and was wandering past hole three, where the diggers were getting into virgin earth. Lucas caught him by the arm. “Come on and talk to the FBI,” Lucas said.

  McGrady and Baily were shaking hands when Lucas and Marshall got to the command tent. Baily shook hands with Lucas and said, “Eight.”

  “Coming out of the ground now,” Lucas said. “This is Terry Marshall, a deputy sheriff from Dunn County over in Wisconsin. He broke it.”

  Lucas explained, and when he finished, Baily nodded at Marshall and said, “Nice piece of work. I’m sorry about your niece.”

  “I just hope we get the guy,” Marshall said. “If he reads the newspapers, he might’ve taken
off like a big-assed bird.”

  “Got nowhere to run,” Baily said. “We’ve got enough bodies now that we should be able to pinpoint him with victim histories.”

  “Could be tougher than that,” Lucas said. “We’ve been doing histories on all the women who got the drawings, and so far we’ve pretty much come up with zip. We got matches, of course, but nothing that looks likely.”

  “We’re setting up a task force, Wisconsin–Minnesota, FBI. We’ll run down every single possibility. We’ll have all the manpower we need,” Baily said. “I talked to the director this morning, and he made this the number-one priority nationwide. Nothing else comes first.”