Prey 25 - Gathering Prey

by John Sandford

  • • •

  AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK that night, Lucas got a call from a Joe Hagestrom, a highway patrolman from Wisconsin, who said he’d spoken to an agent named Bob Stern, from Wisconsin’s Division of Criminal Investigation. “He said you’d called down there earlier today, looking for a beige Winnebago Minnie with a big dent on the back left corner.”

  “You find it?”

  “I’m looking at it right now, or what’s left of it,” the trooper said. “It was back in the woods here . . . you know Northwest Wisconsin?”

  “I’ve got a cabin up there, at Lost Land Lake.”

  “You know where Highway 77 crosses the Namekagon River?” Hagestrom asked.

  “Sure. I drive across there a dozen times a year,” Lucas said.

  “Okay. There’s an informal campground off 77, north along the river. You can get there on a dirt trail, but it’s mostly for canoeists. We got a call that an RV was on fire back there, and the volunteer fire department went back, and it’d almost burned to the ground. The thing is, there was somebody inside.”

  “You mean—dead.”

  “Dead now, for sure. The firemen say the smell is unmistakable. They think the fire was deliberate. They could smell a lot of gasoline and the truck is a diesel.”

  “Have they moved the body?” Lucas asked.

  “Not yet. The metal part of the RV sort of shrank down and encapsulated the living quarters, where we think the body is. We’re waiting for the crime scene crew to get here.”

  “What time did it blow up?”

  “Around nine o’clock—couple of hours ago. The first responders were sheriff’s deputies and the fire department, and they didn’t know we were looking for a Winnebago Minnie with a dent in it. I just got here ten minutes ago, when I heard some guys talking about it on the radio.”

  “All right. I’m coming.”

  • • •

  LUCAS WALKED UPSTAIRS to the bedroom to tell Weather. She was working in the morning, cutting on somebody, he didn’t know the details, but she’d gone to bed early.

  “Don’t take Letty,” she said.

  “I won’t. I’m gonna sneak out,” he said. He stuffed some underwear and socks, a couple of clean shirts, a pair of clean jeans, and his dopp kit in an AWOL bag, kissed Weather, collected his gun, a leather jacket, and a ball cap, and went back downstairs.

  When he rolled out of the driveway in the Benz, he could see Letty’s silhouette in the lighted window of her bedroom, looking out after him.

  Lucas feared that the body in the RV was Skye’s. Some things, he thought, Letty was still too young for: like the photos of Henry Fuller, like the roasted body of a woman she thought of as a friend.

  • • •

  LUCAS RAN STRAIGHT NORTH on I-35 to Hinckley, then east across the St. Croix River to Danbury, Wisconsin, and then farther east on Highway 77. There wasn’t much traffic and he ran with lights, but it still took him more than an hour and a half to get to the scene. A cop car was parked on the shoulder of the highway where it crossed the Namekagon, lights flashing in the night. Lucas identified himself, and the cop pointed him back into the woods, where Lucas could see light shining through the trees.

  When he got there, he found Hagestrom, the highway patrolman, a couple of county sheriff’s deputies, and two firemen looking at the wreck of the Winnebago. The Winnebago had essentially melted around its core and was blackened with soot; but it was cold now, the fire thoroughly doused three hours earlier.

  Hagestrom shook his hand and said, “I talked to Stern again. He said this is getting to be a big deal. He told me about California and South Dakota.” Stern was the DCI agent.

  “It is,” Lucas agreed. “Does this thing have a license plate on it?”

  “Doesn’t have a license plate, doesn’t have a VIN tag. I can see where it was, but somebody yanked the tag off before the fire. There should be a couple more numbers stamped on the frame rails, but we can’t get at those until crime scene is done.”

  As they were talking, Lucas had circled around to the left rear corner of the RV, where he saw a bowling ball–sized and –shaped dent in the rear quarter panel. He took out his notebook, found the phone number for Larry Royce, the man from Duluth, and called him.

  When Royce answered, sounding sleepy and annoyed, Lucas identified himself and said, “We might have found that RV you were talking about. You said there was a dent in the back left panel. The one I’m looking at, it’s like somebody might have whacked it with a bowling ball.”

  “That’s it,” Royce said.

  Lucas rang off and said to Hagestrom, “We need those VINs. They can get us to California plates and that’ll get us to the owner, and that’ll get us driver’s licenses and rap sheets and the whole thing.”

  Hagestrom said, “Let me call the crime scene crew. See what they say.”

  Lucas went and leaned against the fender of the Benz while Hagestrom negotiated. When he finished, he said, “They’re not happy, but I told them that the whole thing had burned, and been saturated with water and foam, and that the firemen had trampled all over the area around it . . . They said don’t mess with anything inside, but it’d be okay if we jacked up the side rails.”

  “You got some jacks?” Lucas asked.

  Between Hagestrom, Lucas, and the firemen, they had four car jacks, and they managed to get the RV’s side rail six inches off the wet ground, along the driver’s-side door. Hagestrom stretched out with an inspection mirror, which he carried in his car, and with a flashlight, looked at the bottom rail for ten seconds or so, then stood up and said, “Waste of time.”

  “What?”

  “Chiseled it off. Looks like a while ago—the chiseled part is rusty, and the number is gone. There’s another number, but we’d have to get under the engine to look at that one, and that ain’t gonna happen with a bunch of little jacks like these,” Hagestrom said. “Anyway, they wouldn’t know about the first number unless they looked it up, and if they did, they’d know about the second one. Bet that one’s gone, too.”

  Lucas walked around the RV one more time, then down to the dark, shallow river flowing past the impromptu campsite. He called back to Hagestrom, “One thing you might do. This is a big canoeing river, there might be more campsites downstream.”

  One of the deputies said, “There are. Half dozen of them, anyway.”

  “Soon as it gets light, you might have somebody down at the different takeout sites, see if anybody saw the RV before it burned. Or people or cars who were with it.”

  The deputy nodded and said, “I’ll get that going.”

  “Good. That could be critical.” Lucas looked over at the RV. It’d be hours before the crime scene crew got inside it. He was fifty miles from his cabin, less than an hour with his flashers, or twenty miles back to a motel in Danbury.

  “Hell with it,” he said to Hagestrom. “I’ll be back tomorrow morning. I’m going to run over to my cabin, get some sleep. I can’t think of anything else I can do here.”

  • • •

  HE MADE THE CABIN by three in the morning, stopping once at an all-night gas station in Hayward for gas, Diet Coke, a quart of milk, and a box of Honey Nut Cheerios. The cabin was dark and absolutely silent as he bounced up the driveway, until he triggered the motion-sensor floodlight on the garage. The only other visible light was on his neighbor’s porch. He was unlocking the front door when the neighbor came out in a T-shirt and underpants and yelled, “Lucas?”

  “Yeah, it’s me.”

  “Good, I don’t have to shoot you. How long you up for?”

  “Just overnight,” Lucas yelled back.

  “Have a good one.”

  He went inside and had a bowl of cereal, the moon hanging low out over the lake, putting a long streak of silver on it. It was cool, almost cold. He got a spinning rod from a closet, went out on the dock and spent five minutes casting a Rapala into the moonshine, trying for bass or pike, but not trying too hard, smelling the North Woods night, l
ooking at all the little dots of light from the cabins around the lake; then he went inside and tried not to dream about Skye, and what might have happened to her.

  • • •

  HE WAS BACK AT the burned RV seven hours later. Hagestrom was gone, replaced by another trooper, more deputies, and a DCI agent named Mike Maddox, who’d come in with the crime scene crew. The crew had cut through the melted side of the RV and a tech in white coveralls and a face mask was inside, working around the body, which was lying on one side in the center of the RV’s cramped living area.

  Lucas knew right away that it wasn’t Skye inside: the victim was male.

  “All we know is that the victim is male, average height,” Maddox told Lucas. “He’s too burned to get anything else, unless we get a DNA hit. No face left, fingers are gone, hair’s gone, eyes are gone, toes are gone . . . We’ll get DNA out of the body, of course, but it’s unlikely we’ll get it from anywhere else, given the fire. Identification is . . . problematic.”

  “Maybe,” said the tech, from inside the van.

  Lucas and Maddox stepped closer. Maddox: “Maybe? I thought you said there was no chance.”

  “That’s before I turned him,” the tech said. “I think I can see the edge of something that might be a wallet. He was lying on it, protected it from the fire.”

  “That would be pretty interesting,” Maddox said. “Fish it out of there.”

  “I’ve got some work to do before I get there,” the tech said. “But I’ll get to it.”

  • • •

  WHILE ONE TECH worked inside, another was working to get at the second VIN number; and when he got to it, found that it, too, had been chiseled away.

  Then they got a break. The inside tech took fifteen minutes to get at it, finally extracting a thin black leather wallet. Another tech took it to a working table and after photographing it, opened it. Inside they found a slightly melted, but still readable, Wisconsin driver’s license for a Neal Ray Malin, showing an address in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, an expired membership card for an Eau Claire gymnasium, an insurance card for a two-year-old Ford pickup, and nothing else.

  “No credit cards, no money. Whoever killed him took the money and credit cards, which means that they might be using them,” Lucas said. “If one of them was a debit card, and they tortured him for the code . . .”

  “We could get a picture,” Maddox said. “Let me get on that.”

  Maddox tracked it all down in five minutes: Malin was no longer living at the address on the driver’s license, but his ex-wife was. She wasn’t home and Maddox spoke to the babysitter. She didn’t know Malin personally, but said the ex-wife was working at a beauty parlor in Eau Claire.

  “I’m going to stick here, but I’ll get an Eau Claire cop to track down his ex and give her the news, and get the credit card numbers,” Maddox told Lucas.

  “Wonder what a Chippewa Falls guy was doing with these L.A. freaks?”

  “A question we’re gonna ask,” Maddox said. “Maybe he was like that guy in South Dakota—picked up and killed for the hell of it.”

  “Don’t think so,” said the crime scene guy inside the RV. “There’s blood everywhere. All over the place. Why would they do that, and wind up having to burn their RV?”

  Lucas stuck his head inside the RV: “Have you checked all his pockets? Did he have a cell phone on him?”

  “I’ve checked all the pockets, no phone.”

  Lucas turned back to Maddox. “Have the Eau Claire cops ask his ex if he had a cell phone. People steal phones—if he had one, and they’re using it, we might get a GPS location on it.”

  A few minutes later, Lucas, watching the slow progress inside the RV, said to Maddox, “If you don’t mind, I’m going to run down to Chippewa, just to . . . observe. You know, if they locate his apartment.”

  “Fine by me,” Maddox said. “I’ll call ahead and tell them that you’re coming.”

  • • •

  CHIPPEWA FALLS WAS an hour and fifteen minutes away, rolling fast across country on back roads, then down Highway 53. When he arrived, he found that the Chippewa cops had waited for Bob Stern, the Wisconsin investigator, to arrive from Madison. Stern had gotten to Chippewa Falls a few minutes before Lucas, had stopped at the courthouse to pick up a search warrant, and then the cops and Stern had driven in a convoy over to Malin’s apartment.

  Lucas followed his nav system up the hill on the west side of town, and caught the Wisconsin cops as they were gathering on the lawn of an old clapboard mansion. Stern saw Lucas getting out of his truck and walked over to shake hands. “How’s the old lady?”

  “Cutting somebody open, about now,” Lucas told him. “You divorced yet?”

  “Let’s not go there,” Stern said. “I think she’s gonna get the season tickets for the Packers.”

  “Man, that’s . . . inhuman,” Lucas said. He looked up at the house, which had an expansive front porch, including a comfortable-looking swing, and a bunch of white, life-sized, wooden-chicken flower boxes showing off bunches of geraniums, marigolds, and petunias. “Nobody’s gone in yet?”

  “Doing that now,” a deputy said.

  They watched as a sheriff’s deputy with the search warrant climbed the porch and knocked on the door. A minute later an elderly woman in an apron answered, nodded a few times, and then pushed the screen door open.

  “Let’s go,” Stern said. As they crossed the porch he said, “Ugly chickens. Ugly.”

  • • •

  THE OLD LADY WAS the owner of the house. Her name was Ann Webster, and she hadn’t seen Malin in two days. Malin, she said, rented the top floor of the house, and had a separate exit out back. One of the deputies was sent around back to cover it, and the rest of the cops climbed a wide oak-floor stairway to a second entry, apparently added when the top floor had been converted into an apartment.

  “I was never using it, the stairs are too high, so I thought maybe somebody would rent it,” Webster told them. “I had the nicest family here for three years, and then Mr. Malin. He’s very quiet. No wild parties or anything like that.”

  She opened the apartment door with a shiny new key, and they all pushed inside. The apartment was huge, as apartments go, and oddly shaped, as it once had contained an oversized master bedroom, with four more bedrooms down a long hallway, plus two bathrooms. The former master bedroom had been converted into a living room, with a cook’s kitchen at the far end, behind a newly built partition.

  One of the four bedrooms had been converted into a den, with a comfortable couch, and a compact bar, a stereo system, and a fifty-inch television; another had been converted into an office. The other two were still used as bedrooms, although Webster said she was unaware of any overnight visitors.

  “Hell of an apartment,” Stern said.

  Webster said Malin paid two thousand eight hundred dollars a month for it, and one of the cops said, “That might be the most expensive apartment in Chippewa.”

  Webster watched as the cops probed the place; she was rolling her hands together as if washing her hands of her tenant. He was a salesman, she said, for horse barns and pole barns, at a place called Collins Metal Buildings in Chippewa.

  Lucas and Stern walked through with the cops, looking behind books and under desks, and then the cops got serious about the search, and began pulling the place apart. They found four guns hidden in various drawers, all compact .38 caliber revolvers, fully loaded; and in one drawer, under the revolver, found a couple hundred packs of orange and double-wide Zig-Zags.

  The main room had wall-to-wall carpeting, but one of the cops found that it hadn’t been tacked down. They rolled it one way, found nothing, rolled it the other way and found several loose floor planks. Under the planks they found twenty tightly sealed, highly compressed bags of marijuana, probably a pound each, and two kilos of cocaine.

  “So it wasn’t entirely metal buildings,” Stern said.

  “This is good,” Lucas said. “This gives us a contact point for Pilate,
a reason for the two of them to be seeing each other.”

  “Wonder if they took his truck?” Stern asked. “We got people looking for it, haven’t heard anything back.” He checked with his office, shook his head, and said to Lucas, “Nothing. If you see a two-year-old blue Ford Explorer pickup . . .”

  The search continued: a half hour into it, Stern took a call, wandered into a corner, looked over at Lucas, hung up.

  “Malin had a debit card with Wells Fargo. It was used twice, once just before midnight last night, then again a little while after midnight. You know, two separate days, maximum withdrawals both times, six hundred bucks each. There are recognizable photos of the woman who put the card in.”

  “Excellent,” Lucas said.

  “Better than that, big guy,” Stern said. “You know where they used them at?”

  “Where?”

  “St. Paul,” Stern said.

  Lucas stepped back: “Ah, man. I probably passed them on I-35 last night. They were heading south and I was going north.”

  “Ships in the night,” Stern said. “Anyway, Wells Fargo moved the photos to the St. Paul cops, and they sent them down to us. Let me get my iPad, we’ll take a look.”

  He was back in two minutes with the slate. “Got her,” he said.

  He passed it to Lucas.

  Skye was looking straight into the ATM camera, hoodie back on her shoulders. She looked scared to death.

  “Skye!”

  “That’s—” Stern began.

  “Oh, boy, oh boy . . . I’m going,” Lucas said.

  The night before:

  Neal Ray Malin felt crowded in the RV, like a big dog in a small kennel. When he shifted his weight, he could feel the RV move. He was on his feet, his hair like a haystack, fat cheeks with a bristling beard, facing Pilate, both of them angry, and he said, “I told you what the terms was: the terms was cash on the barrelhead. I don’t want to hear this bullshit about promising to pay. That’s not how we do business.”