Storm Prey

by Sandford, John

  She was looking right at his eyes and Lucas flinched, and she looked at Jenkins, and she said, looking back to Lucas, “Oh, no.” Then, “What did they do?”

  LUCAS FUDGED, but she got the gist of it, and began sobbing again. They waited until she was rained out, and Jenkins brought up the coffee, still hot, and she warmed her hands around the cup.

  Lucas asked, “Joe’s running, in a car. Or a truck, or something—he’s down I-35. You know where he would have gotten a car? We saw him selling his van, and we can’t find another car registered under his name. We find a couple bikes, but they’re both at his apartment ...”

  “Don’t know,” she said. “But he’s a member of the Seed. So I suppose ... he wouldn’t have any trouble getting a ride, if he wanted to pay for it.”

  Lucas nodded: that made sense. “Okay. So we’ve got to get you out of here. Can you arrange for somebody to feed the horses?”

  “I suppose ... for a couple days. There’s a handyman in town who does that, but I have to find him.”

  “Give him a ring.”

  “You really think it’s necessary? I don’t have a lot of money for hiring people.”

  “Look, these guys, the killers—if they even suspect that you might give them away, that Lyle might have told you something... they’ll kill you. To them, they’ve already killed a bunch of people, one more won’t make any difference.”

  “I don’t have any place to go,” she said.

  “Holiday Inn,” Lucas said. “State’ll pick it up for however long it takes to break this. We should have it in a week or so ... it’s too crazy to keep going.”

  SHE GOT THE HANDYMAN, and he agreed to take care of the horses for thirty dollars a day. As she was packing up some clothes and personal-care stuff, Lucas asked, “Do you have a phone number for Joe?”

  “No, I ... You know who did? Lyle. He had a special phone. They both did.”

  “We’ve got that. Do you have a cell?”

  “Well, sure.”

  “Okay—we may want you to call Joe on it,” Lucas said. “We may need you to vouch for our story—that Lyle was killed. I’m not sure Joe believed us.”

  She stopped: “Why should I believe you? This could be like that moon-landing stuff. A big pack of lies.” She looked at Jenkins. “You guys aren’t lying to me, are you?”

  “Honey Bee, Lyle’s still at the bar. We can stop and look, if you want.”

  Pause. Then, “I’ll think about it.”

  “The thing is,” Lucas continued, “we know that Joe didn’t kill the woman in the van. The Jill MacBride lady. Somebody else did. We got DNA from Joe, and from the killer, and Joe wasn’t the killer.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  She nodded: “That makes sense. I don’t think Joe’s got it in him to kill anybody.”

  “We might need you to tell him that. The thing is, maybe he still kidnapped Jill MacBride, I don’t know. But maybe not. If not, there’s no reason to run. He’d be in a little trouble for running, but that’s minor, compared, you know, to murder.”

  “He could come back and get the bar,” she said.

  “He might do a little time,” Lucas said.

  “But I could run the bar while he was in jail—I mostly run the place anyway.”

  “Works for us,” Jenkins said. “But first, we got to get him back.”

  THEY EXCHANGED cell-phone numbers, and she followed them in her truck, toward town, and halfway in, called and said, “I want to stop at the bar.”

  “You sure?”

  “I want to look at his face,” she said.

  The place was overrun with cops and crime-scene people; Marcy and Shrake had gone. Lucas took her through the cops, to the body, which was still on the floor. He left her with a cop, stepped over to the crime-scene guy and asked, “Could we get a plastic bag or something, over his lower body? We got his girlfriend here to do the ID.”

  When the black plastic bag was in place, Lucas led her over, holding on to her arm. She looked down, nodded, pursed her lips as though she were going to spit, and turned and pulled him away from the body. Turned a bar stool around, sat down, and stared at the bar.

  “You okay?” Lucas asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “I want to get you out of here. Send you into town with one of my guys, get a statement, and get you settled at a motel.”

  She said, “Okay. Okay. Goddamnit, that hurts. If it’s okay, I gotta go to the ladies’.”

  “Sure.”

  She wandered off toward the hallway that led to the ladies’ room, and Lucas watched her until she went through the door, then moved over to Jenkins. “I want her to trust me, so I don’t want to look like I’m watching her. I’m going down to the other end. But keep an eye on the ladies’ can until she comes out. We don’t want her running on us.”

  INSIDE THE BATHROOM, Honey Bee paused for a moment, then dug in her purse and took out a key ring with two keys—one a Schlage and one a Yale. She stood at the sink for a moment, as though she’d been looking at herself, or washing her hands, but she wasn’t: she was listening. After a few seconds, she moved quickly to a fire door set in the wall opposite two toilet stalls, opened it with the Schlage, listened again, then stepped forward to an electrical box labeled “High Voltage,” and locked with a padlock. She opened it with the Yale. Inside were two small brown paper sacks, the kind that doughnuts might have come in. She took them, snapped the lock back in place, wiped it with a piece of tissue paper, pushed the door shut with an elbow, locked it, and scurried into a stall.

  Inside, she dropped her jeans and underpants, sat down, and dug the bags out of her purse. Two solid stacks of currency—mostly twenties, she was disappointed to find. Still: eighteen thousand dollars in a quick count. Homeboy PayPal, for those hard-to-resist items that came in after midnight.

  She put it in the bottom of her purse, stood up, flushed, washed her hands, looked at herself in the mirror, splashed some water on her face, wiped it with a paper towel, and went back into the main room. She saw Davenport down at the far end. He held up a hand and came to get her; brought her to Jenkins, who’d take her to BCA headquarters for a statement.

  Lucas said, as they were leaving, “Hang on to her there, until I get back. Won’t be long.”

  HE TOOK a call from Stephaniak, the Wisconsin sheriff. “Listen, I have what might be bad news for you, but I’m not sure.”

  “I could use some bad news, since all the other news has been so good,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah, well, you might want to get yourself some stainless-steel underwear,” Stephaniak said. “You know, I told you about a bunch of guns and other stuff?”

  “Yeah?”

  “The crime-scene crew got down in there, in the tank, and they found this empty box. Military. There was one empty hand-grenade canister beside it, no grenade. It’s just possible that these guys have a whole box of M67 HE frag grenades.”

  Lucas scratched his head. He didn’t really know what to say.

  “Hello? You there?” the sheriff asked.

  15

  LUCAS DROVE SOUTH on Highway 61, crossed the Mississippi into Hastings, took Highway 55 to the law enforcement center, checked in with the sheriff’s office and was escorted to forensics. A tall, narrow, dark-haired woman met him at the door and stuck out a hand: “Lucas? Nancy Knott. Come on through. What’s up?”

  Lucas followed her to a cubbyhole office, took the visitor’s chair as she settled behind her desk. Lucas asked, “You processed the scene at the Haines-Chapman murder, right?”

  “Basically, Lonny Johnson did, but I was out there for a while,” she said. “Lonny’s off today. I did most of the in-house processing.”

  “So when I read your forensics report yesterday, it said that you found hay—wait, not hay, you said straw—stuck to the back of one of the victims. You thought that he might have died in an agricultural area. I understand the bodies were found in a ditch under a little bridge, in an ag area
. So my question is, so what? Was there something about the straw?”

  “There wasn’t any straw there,” Knott said. “It was one of those seasonal creeks, grown up with dead weeds. There was a bean field up the hill, so no straw there. And the bodies were in plastic bags, and the straw was stuck to the outside of their clothing, inside the bags.”

  Lucas dug in his pocket and pulled several pieces of straw from his pocket. “Hay like this?”

  He dropped it on her desk and she leaned over and looked at it, then took a pencil out of a cup and pushed it around. “Straw. Yeah. Like that. Exactly. See this cut? Cut like that. Same color and texture.”

  “Is there any way to tell if it’s the same straw? Or hay? Like genetically the same?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe the FBI could. Maybe one of the big ag schools could tell you what variety of straw it is, if that would help.”

  “I’m not exactly following—I’m a city kid. Hay, straw ...”

  Hay, she said, was essentially different from straw. Hay was a dried food crop, like alfalfa or clover, heavily fed to cattle, horses, goats, sheep, and sometimes other animals. Straw was the support stalk for cereal grains, like wheat, oats, and rye, didn’t have much nutritive value, but was used for animal bedding.

  “And what we had on Haines’s back was several pieces of straw, not hay. It looked exactly like what you’ve brought in, and I suspect a lab could tell you that they were both, say, oat straw, or not. Or wheat straw, or not. About the genetics, I bet they could figure it out, but I’m not sure.”

  “Bedding material. For what kind of animals?” Lucas asked.

  “Horses. You know, horses in a barn,” she said.

  “Huh.”

  “If you want to leave this, I can check around, see if we can find a place to compare it. If you have a scene where you think they might’ve been killed, well, just me eyeballing it, your samples look identical to what we took off Haines,” she said. “And Haines and Chapman were living in the city, too—they wouldn’t have just picked it up anywhere. So ... I bet you found it. Uh, where was it?”

  LUCAS CALLED JENKINS from the road: “You still got her there?”

  “Yes. Having a nice chat.”

  “Hold her there.”

  GABRIEL MARET pulled the surgical team together outside the operating theater. “One more day. The cardiologists say there could be some benefit by holding off for another twelve to twenty-four hours, but not after that. So tomorrow morning, at seven o’clock, we’re going, and we have to go the whole way, regardless of what happens.”

  Virgil had been leaning against the wall down the hall, and when Weather broke free of the group, asked, “Back home?”

  She said, “I was thinking. About these latest killings. Lucas thinks that the hospital guy has to be involved somehow. He’s one guy they don’t have any ideas about, except for the accent.”

  Virgil nodded. “So?”

  “So they killed this one man last night, and another one probably this morning. Who do we know who has a French accent, who didn’t show up for work today?”

  Virgil’s eyebrows went up. “Not a bad thought. Who’d we ask about that?”

  “Let’s go down to admin.”

  LUCAS GOT BACK to the BCA office and found Jenkins and Honey Bee in a conference room finishing a pepperoni pizza. Lucas took a chair, pulled it close to her, and said, “Ms. Brown. Harriet. Honey Bee. When the bodies of Haines and Chapman were found, some pieces of straw were taken off their backs. I collected some straw from your driveway this morning. I’ve just been down to the Dakota County sheriff’s office and we’ve done a comparison. We think we can prove that Haines and Chapman were killed at your farm.”

  Her mouth dropped open. “What?”

  “We can use genetics techniques to prove the connection,” Lucas said. “Very sophisticated, but they’re better than fingerprints.”

  “I don’t—”

  Lucas beat her down with an angry snap: “Goddamnit, don’t bullshit us. This is way out of control. Do you realize how many people are dead? Somebody’s killed six people.”

  “Not me ...”

  “But you were involved, one way or another,” Lucas said, leaning toward her, looming, tapping on the table with his index finger. “We’ve already got enough to convince a jury: you were intimate with Lyle Mack, you were friends with Joe and Ike, you were friends with the victims, Haines and Chapman, we’ve got the evidence of the straw, taken from your house. Have you helped us? No. You’ve stonewalled. You’ve given us exactly zip.”

  She looked at Jenkins. “I’ve been cooperating ...”

  “You’ve been talking to me,” Jenkins said. “You’ve been nice, I gotta admit. But Honey Bee, you’ve given me exactly no useful information. Not even the simple stuff, like, who’s the ‘doc’ guy?”

  “I don’t know who the doc guy is,” she said. “I think he’s a doper. Joe told me once that the worst doper he knew was a doctor, and I think it’s the same guy. I think that’s how they knew him. The guy was trying to buy dope.”

  “Did Joe sell dope?”

  She looked away, and then said, “He might have, at one time. I don’t know exactly.”

  “Oh, horseshit,” Lucas said. “Did he sell dope?”

  Long pause, then, “Yes. Not so much sell it, as trade it. You know, for stuff.”

  “What kind of stuff?” Jenkins asked.

  “Office equipment.”

  “Office equipment.” The two cops looked at each other.

  “They used to sell a lot of office equipment on the Internet,” she said. “And cameras and stuff,” she said.

  “In other words, hot stuff,” Lucas said. “Stuff from burglaries, stolen stuff from offices.”

  “I guess,” she said.

  “Where’d they keep it?” Lucas asked. “There wasn’t any at the bar, or their houses.”

  She started to cry, and the cops sat and watched. After a minute, she stopped, checking for effects, saw nothing but stone faces. “What?”

  “Where’d they keep it?” Lucas asked again.

  Another long wait, and then, “They have a storage place out in Lake Elmo.”

  “Do you know where it is?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did they put the dope from the hospital robbery out there?”

  “I don’t know about the hospital robbery. ”

  They pushed her around for a while, then Lucas said to Jenkins, “I think we better check her into Ramsey County.”

  “What does that mean?” she asked.

  “Gonna hold you in jail for a while,” Lucas said.

  She thought about the money in her purse and said, “Oh, no. You said we were going to a hotel.”

  “Can’t take a chance that you’d run,” Lucas said. “You’re in this up to your neck.”

  She said, “If you put me in jail, I’ll get a lawyer and I won’t say one more goddamn thing to you. If you need help, you can go fuck yourself. I’m trying to help, maybe I can help if you ask different questions, or maybe I can help some other way. If you put me in jail, I won’t say one more goddamn word.”

  “I don’t know if you can give us any more help,” Lucas said. “You’re looking at a murder one, and you’re still stonewalling.”

  “I’ll help you with Joe,” she said. “Who else are you going to get to talk to him? That he’ll trust? You can go fuck yourself on that one,” she said.

  Lucas looked at Jenkins. “What do you think?”

  Before Jenkins could say anything, Honey Bee added, “I’ve got my truck. I’ve got my horses. I’ve got my farm. I can’t run away. I’m forty-three years old and I got nothing else in my whole life.”

  Jenkins said, “I thought your driver’s license said thirty-seven or thirty-nine. Like that.”

  “I might’ve cut a couple years off,” she said.

  LUCAS CALLED MARCY, told her about the straw from the driveway, about the storage unit, about Honey Bee’s will
ingness to talk to Joe.

  “He’s not answering, but his phone is ringing, still in Kansas, and not moving,” Marcy said. “I got a bad feeling about it. I think they ditched it. Threw it out the window.”

  LUCAS AND JENKINS drove Honey Bee out to Lake Elmo, to a self-storage place, and got the manager to open the unit. The floor was covered by wooden pallets, on which were stacked a couple of dozen TVs and computer monitors, computers, including a half-dozen Apple laptops, a gift box of Wüsthof knives, paper shredders, printers, speakers and audio receivers, Blu-ray and DVD players, a dozen GPS handhelds, fish-finders and marine tracking units, six new-looking Yamaha 25-horsepower outboard motors, and one snowmobile.

  No drugs. Because, Lucas thought, the drugs had been at Ike’s.

  They called the Washington County sheriff, told them about the unit, knotted a piece of crime-scene tape on the lock, and told the manager not to touch anything.

  “Nothing for us,” Lucas said, as they pulled out. To Honey Bee: “We need Joe. We need a different phone, we need the doc, we need you to give us something we can use, or I’m slamming your ass in jail.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Think of something,” Lucas said. “Or else. The doc: is he a French guy? Do you know anything about that?”

  She touched her lips and said, “Oh.”

  “Oh, what?”

  “The doc guy. Joe Mack once cracked some joke about a rag-head. I think he was talking about the doc.”

  “The doc’s an Arab?”

  “Or one of those kinds of people who have, you know, turbans. I think so. But I’m not sure. That’s all I can think of that might help.”

  “What’s his last name?” Lucas asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know anything else. I heard them talking about the doc.”

  “That’s not a hell of a lot,” Jenkins said.