Wicked Prey

by John Sandford

  The van backed out of the driveway, into the street, and turned down the hill. Letty ran parallel, to Seventh Street, saw the van heading into town.

  ***

  AS a young girl, she'd learned that if she decided to do something, it was best to do it immediately: otherwise, somebody would stop you from doing it, or you'd start thinking too much and chicken out. She'd taught herself to drive when she was eight, bumping around the field behind the house, and though the cops would get pissed when they caught her at it, she'd driven herself all over the county by the time she was eleven.

  An old drunk would sometimes lend her his truck in return for a late-night pickup at the town bar; and when her mom got drunk, she'd provided the same service. In her driving years, she'd never had an accident.

  Now, as the van dwindled in the distance, she looked back at the house. How quickly could they get back, anyway? With the snarl of traffic in town, with streets blocked by marches '

  She turned around and pulled up the hill, pedaling hard, straight up the street to Whitcomb's place, down the side, turned the bike so it was facing out the drive.

  The handicapped ramp ended in a newer-looking door with six small panes arranged in a square looking into a mudroom off a kitchen, just like the country farmhouse where she'd grown up. She knocked, loudly, heard nothing. Looked around. She could be seen from the street, but jeez, she was a young girl on a back porch.

  Letty knew about burglary from Lucas and Del and Shrake and Jenkins and all the other cops who hung around with Lucas; and from the reporters and producers at the station. She knew you were allowed one loud noise, or two quiet ones '

  She took the switchblade out of her waistband, flicked the blade out, took another quick look around, and shoved the blade through the glass next to the door lock. The glass dropped inside the door and she had to punch it again to get the last of it out. Then she reached through and flicked the turn-lock.

  The house was quiet inside, smelled of rotten vegetables and dirty diapers and smoke. In fact, it was only half a house-an apartment. The front door led to the porch, but there was no way to get into the other side of the house.

  She went back to the kitchen after the first look, got a dish rag off the sink, wiped the lock where she'd touched it, then moved through the house, looking for targets of interest. She found that there was almost nothing to see-a ratty old couch, two scarred tables, a couple of chairs, a broken-down bed in a room that may once have been a dining room, a new TV set with a cable connection. She found stairs going up to what might have originally been a bedroom, but the bedroom was empty, nothing but a half-dozen Snickers candy bar wrappers on the floor, and three or four cigarette butts.

  Whitcomb had a lot of clothes, and so did the woman, most of them hung in a doorless closet, the others in a plastic-laminate chest of drawers. The woman wore cheap fashion jeans and low-cut blouses and black brassieres and thong underwear. Tucked in the rickety chest of drawers was a box of Reality female condoms. The woman, Letty understood, was a hooker.

  She stopped to listen, heard nothing. Saw a flash of amber on a windowsill, checked it, found five empty pill containers. The names of the drugs meant nothing to her.

  In the whole house, the only new thing was the high-def Sony television with an Xbox 360 game machine and a couple of controllers.

  Then she found Randy's switch.

  She knew what it was, because she'd known a man who'd beaten his children with a switch just like it, until one day, after whipping one of his daughters for some imagined moral infraction, his two older sons had taken him out into the side yard and had beaten him so badly that he hadn't been able to walk for the best part of a year.

  Anyway, she knew what it was, and she took it out from behind the couch, handling it with the dish rag from the kitchen, and she looked at the blood spots. He's a pimp, she's a hooker, and he beats her with it. Letty considered breaking it into pieces, then thought, Huh, and put it back.

  Took a last look around, and backed out of the house.

  Pulled the door shut, got on her bike, and rode away, down the hill, toward town.

  Things to think about.

  Chapter 8

  Lucas talked to every manager, assistant manager, and bellman he could find, in all of St. Paul's hotels, got unanimous head-shakes, and was headed out the door of his last stop when he saw Mitford walking toward the bar with a couple of other guys. "Neil!"

  Mitford turned, spotted him, walked over: "How's it going?"

  "Slowly. I'm walking a picture around…" He showed Mitford the shot of Cohn, told him about the victim interviews, and about Jones's impatience with the victims.

  "You told him about the money?" Mitford asked.

  "He knew about the money. He knew there was something going on." Lucas shook his head. "There're going to be rumors, and when it gets out to the blogs, you'll have some damage control to do."

  "It'll get swamped by all the other noise ' Listen, come on over and meet these guys. They might have some ideas."

  The guys were out-of-towners, professional handlers, Democrats in town to watch the Republicans do their stuff. Ray Landy and Dick

  McCollum were talking about McCain and his vice-presidential pick, the unknown governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin. They couldn't stop talking about her, veering from amazement to ridicule, watching their BlackBerrys as commentary poured in from friends, reading the messages aloud. They got a table in the tiny bar, and Landy said to Lucas: "You're an outside guy. What do you outside guys think about Palin?"

  Lucas said, "I'm mostly a Democrat, so ' maybe I'm not the best judge."

  "Oh, bullshit," Landy said. "What do you think?"

  "I don't know anything about her. What bothers me is that it was a quick decision, I guess-that's what the papers all say," Lucas said. "They say that McCain is rolling the bones. I don't know about Palin, but I'm not sure I want to vote for a guy who'd roll the bones on a presidential election. Doesn't make him seem like a calm, rational decision-maker."

  "Bless you," Landy said. "I hope everybody's thinking that way."

  ***

  The three pols ordered Bloody Marys and Lucas got a Diet Coke. Mitford said, "Guys, Lucas is a big shot in our Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. He's looking into the robberies…"

  McCollum was a pale-eyed man who fiddled with an unlit cigarette, twiddling it like a pencil between his nicotine-stained fingers: "You a cop?"

  Lucas nodded. "Yup."

  "He's handled things for the governor for a while-I asked him to look into these things," Mitford said.

  The drinks came and they stopped talking until they'd all had a sip, and the waitress left, and McCollum said, "There are fifteen guys like them. Well, there were, anyway. Some of them might have taken off."

  "You ever heard of anything like this before?" Lucas asked.

  Both men shook their heads, and Landy said, "You hear about it at a lot lower level-but not at this level. You know, when the money gets down to the street, you'll have robberies, but they're random, small-time stuff. A few hundred here or there. That's what happens when you walk around in a bad area with your pockets full of twenty-dollar bills." He said "bad air-ee-a" in a way that suggested it was a clich`e wherever he came from.

  "I never quite understood where the money was going," Lucas said.

  Landy looked at Mitford, who shrugged, and Landy said, "When you're running a campaign, you've got all these people down at the bottom who need walking-around money. They want to get lunch, or buy lunch for somebody, or catch a cab, or get somebody a cab, or pay for gas, or even get some lawn signs together. These are people who turn out the vote. You can't issue a check to all of them-and a lot of them don't have money to do it on their own. I mean, any money."

  "Say you're working an area with gangs," McCollum said. "There might be somebody who is, like, an officer in a gang. He can turn out a certain vote-fifty people, seventy-five people, a hundred people, maybe even a few hundred people. He needs to get a
round for a few weeks. Somebody might toss him a few hundred dollars, depending on what he does…"

  "A couple grand, maybe," Landy said.

  "And the candidate might not want his name on a check going to a gang leader," McCollum said. "So, the cash is like oil. It greases the wheel."

  "Seems like a lot of money," Lucas said. "A million bucks, more…"

  "It is a lot, at this level, when it's in a suitcase. Once you get down to the street, it's pretty parceled out. You might put a couple of million in a big place like Philly or Dade County, or Cleveland, but it's mostly in handfuls. Mostly, less than a grand. You know, you get two or three thousand people working informally, they need lunch and cab fare and so on ' you can go through a mil pretty damn fast."

  "Inflation," Mitford said.

  "Damn right. Back in "eighty-eight, I bet the dollar amounts were maybe a quarter of what you see now," Landy said. "Gas was cheap, food was cheap, everything was cheap. Now, it's more. Million doesn't go as far as it used to."

  "If it's a million in Philly or Miami, what's it in Chicago or LA?" Lucas asked.

  "Mmm, doesn't really work that way. Pennsylvania's in play, so's Florida," Landy said. "They could go either way, so getting out the street vote is critical. Illinois and California are pretty safe for us, so it's not that critical. Republicans won't spend much, either. There's going to be money, but' maybe not quite as intense."

  ***

  While Lucas was sitting in the bar, sipping on his Coke, talking political money, Rosie Cruz was walking back toward her room from the Coke machine, and saw the cop in the lobby. The cop car was parked a few spaces down from the lobby door, andwitha bad feeling, Cruz pushed through the lobby door and walked up beside the cop, a pudgy young blond guy, who was talking to a couple of desk clerks.

  The cop was showing the clerks a badly colored Xerox printout of a photograph of Brutus Cohn. One of the clerks glanced at her and she asked, brightly, "What time is the shuttle to the airport?"

  The clerk pointed at a sign, which said that the shuttle left every four hours starting at 7 a.m., and turned back to the cop. The other clerk was saying, "It sorta looks like a guy. But it sorta doesn't, too. Let me see, he's in a corner room, let me see…" And he hunched over a schematic of the hotel and the cop crooked his neck to look at it.

  Cruz walked out the door and turned away from Cohn's room, and as soon as she was out of sight, called Cohn on her cell. Cohn's phone rang four times before he answered, and he said, "Yeah?"

  "Get out of there. There's a cop in the lobby with a picture of you and he's coming down to your room. Get out, get out'"

  "How many?"

  "One, here, but he could call in more," she said. "Get out."

  ***

  Then Cohn was gone and she snapped the phone shut and walked up a flight of stairs to an exposed walkway where she could see the parking lot. A minute or two later, she saw the cop, one hand on his gun, walking down the parking lot toward Cohn's room. She punched the speed dial and Cohn came up: "Yeah?"

  "He's walking toward your room. He's alone. He'll be there in one minute," she said. And he was gone again.

  ***

  Brutus Cohn was buck-ass naked, in bed with Lindy, when Cruz called with the warning. He jumped up, looked around: normally neat, he was with Lindy, now, and she was a walking hurricane. Clothes were strewn all over the room, shoes, papers, everything. "Get dressed," he snapped.

  They had a picture of him. They had fingerprints, too, but they'd never taken a DNA sample, because they didn't do DNA samples the last time he was in jail. Now his prints and his DNA were all over the place '

  "What's going on?" But she'd been a criminal's girlfriend long enough not to ask too many questions, and she was already pulling up her underpants and the phone rang again and he said, "Yeah?" listened and snapped it shut.

  "Take your pants off," he said.

  "What?"

  "Take your fuckin' pants off. A cop is coming down here, he'll be here in ten seconds and I want you to answer the door."

  "Naked?" Now she sounded interested.

  "Yeah, goddamned right, naked. Get your goddamned pants off'"

  He looked around, picked up an end table by the legs, and smashed it against the floor. The legs broke, but didn't come completely free, and he flipped the table and wrenched one loose. It was half the length of a pool cue, but shaped like a ball bat.

  "When he knocks, say, "Just a minute," and then pull the door all the way open and step back. Just let it swing. I'll be right behind it. Goddamnit, wake up…"

  ***

  Charles Dee ("call me Charles") was about ninety-eight percent sure that the whole thing was the weekly windup by the guys back at the shop: send Dee around with a Xerox of some weird-looking guy with a red beard-the beard looked like it was painted on-to ask who'd seen him. This was a request, they said, from fuckin' Minnesota. Just about ninety-eight percent that somebody was about to hit him with an air horn or some other joke '

  The fact was, Hudson was too big a town for him. He wasn't a metro cop, he was a small-town guy. He needed to be on a five-man force somewhere where the people liked you. Where everybody knew your name '

  He got down to 120, looked around, sighed, wondered what was behind the door, and knocked. A woman called out, "Just a minute," and he thought, Here it comes '

  ***

  Lindy pulled open the door, and stood there in all her big-boobed and bikini-shaved glory. Dee had time to take a breath and notice how crispy her pubic hair looked, when a big naked guy reached out from behind the door, grabbed him by the shirt and yanked him inside.

  Dee had learned to handle himself in the Hudson bars, the Friday night fights, but he was off-balance and falling into the room and turning and trying to look and he saw the club coming right at his eyes and he never even had the time to yell.

  ***

  Cohn whipped the club through a tight arc and smashed the cop right across the bridge of the nose and he spun as he fell onto his face. Cohn clubbed him at the base of his skull and the cop went flat and Cohn hit him twice more and then tossed the club in the corner and said, "Get dressed."

  "What about him?" Lindy asked, looking at the cop.

  "What about him?"

  "He saw us," she said.

  "He's dead," Cohn said. "Get dressed. Pick up everything. Get the sheets off the bed."

  "He's dead?" She was stunned. Her brother was a small-town cop and she didn't like the look of this. Dead?

  "He's dead," Cohn said. He was half-dressed. "Come on: move."

  ***

  She started crying but Cohn kept her moving. They stuffed everything into their suitcases, dressed, Cohn stripped the sheets off the bed, threw all the blankets in them, tied them tight, called Cruz.

  "Take a walk on the walkway. See if anybody's looking at us," he told her.

  "I'm up there now. I don't see anybody," she said.

  "Let's go," Cohn said. He let Lindy lead the way through the door, propped the door open with the chair leg, walked down to the car, threw everything in the trunk, took out the two-gallon plastic jug of gasoline, said, "Start the car," and walked back to the room.

  Inside, he gave the jug a shake, threw all the dry towels from the bathroom in a heap, soaked them with a half gallon of gas, threw one of the towels on the shower drain, poured the rest of the gas around the two rooms, including the beds, and backed out in a cloud of fumes.

  Two gallons of gas is condensed energy: enough energy to drive a Ford F150 thirty miles or so. The rooms would burn. He picked up the club he'd used to kill Dee, wiped it, just in case, tossed it inside, shook his head: this was bad.

  He trailed the last bit of gas onto the concrete walk, tossed the container into the room, dropped a match on the gas and hurried to the car.

  The flame just sat on the gas patch for a moment, then crept over the door sill and then with a loud, attention-grabbing Whump! blew through the motel rooms.

  They rolled down
the parking lot, around the corner on the back, down a street, and headed back to the I-94 entrance ramp, passing the motel, and saw black smoke boiling from the room and a man running toward the motel office.

  They ran down onto I-94 and saw even more smoke, and Lindy said, "The whole place must be burning down," and then, "What if he wasn't dead?"

  "He was dead," Cohn said, and then they were coming down on the St. Croix River and the bridge to Minnesota and they never heard a fire engine.

  ***

  Lucas got a phone call, saw it was from Carol, pulled his cell and asked, "What?"

  She said, "Something awful happened in Hudson."

  ***

  The fire was gone by the time Lucas got there. An angry Hudson cop lost his temper when he saw the Porsche nosing into the parking lot, past the warning tape, and did a fat man's arm-swinging red-faced tap dance until Lucas stuck his ID out the car window, and then the cop pointed Lucas into a far parking space and Lucas took it.

  The parking lot was full of cop cars, with two fire trucks and two ambulances butted up to the soaking ruin at the corner of the motel. The fire had been intense, and anything wooden was charred, and anything cloth was burned to ash. The body-mound by the door, with the charred and cracking skin on the man's seared back, looked like a dirty roast hog.

  Lucas found the police and fire chiefs, the mayor and a city councilman standing by one of the trucks looking at a couple of medical examiner's investigators, who were standing back away from the body. Lucas nodded at the chief, who asked, "Who're you?" and Lucas said, "Davenport, Minnesota BCA. We put out the request on the photos."