Golden Prey

by John Sandford

  “Thanks,” Lucas said. “I’ll talk to her this afternoon.”

  “I’ll tell her you’re coming around.”

  —

  LUCAS TALKED to Park, and found himself smoothing more ruffled feathers. Park was not being asked to do secretarial-type work because she was a woman, she was being asked to do it because Lucas didn’t know how, she had expertise that he didn’t, and she was working while injured, and because blah blah blah.

  Feathers smoothed, Lucas asked her to dredge up everything she could find in the federal systems on Poole. Park said she would, and would have a brick of paper and a flash drive by the next day.

  —

  THAT NIGHT, Lucas told Weather about Poole.

  “He’s an old-fashioned kind of crook. Guns and holdups, armored cars and banks or anywhere else that has cash—he likes cash. He held up the box office at a country music show one time. Doesn’t have a problem with killing people. Doesn’t do anything high-tech.”

  He told her about the little girl killed in Biloxi, and she shook her head. “Brutal.”

  “Yeah.” They both glanced toward their daughter Gabrielle, who was sitting on a corner chair going through a beginning-reader book with a fierce concentration, paying no attention to her parents.

  “You could be going out of town for a while,” Weather said. They were sitting on the front room couch, her head on his shoulder. Weather was a short woman, a plastic surgeon. Pretty, with cool eyes and a nose she thought over-large but Lucas thought was striking.

  “I could be—no longer than I have to be, but it could be a couple of weeks. I don’t think a month. I’ll probably drive, instead of flying,” Lucas said. He got up and wandered around the living room, looking at books, putting them down, thinking about it.

  “Not your part of the country,” she said. “That Southern thing is different.”

  “I know.”

  “You think this could really interest you?” she asked.

  “If a guy is bad enough . . . he’ll interest me. Poole is bad, and nobody’s been able to lay hands on him.”

  “A challenge,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  Weather said, “I don’t like the idea of you going away too often, but it’s better than having you sitting around, brooding. You’re getting to be a pain in the ass.”

  Lucas nodded: “I get that way when I’m not doing what I’m supposed to be doing.”

  “Hunting.”

  “Yes.”

  —

  LUCAS CALLED Russell Forte the next morning to tell him what he was planning to do. Forte worked at the U.S. Marshals Service headquarters in Virginia, across the Potomac from Washington, D.C.

  “I remember Poole,” Forte said. “He was on our Top Fifteen list for a long time. We let him drift off because we had nothing to work with. If you find him, that’d be a major feather in your cap. All of our caps. Do not try to take him alone. He’s a killer. The first sniff you get, call me and we’ll get you a team from the Special Operations Group.”

  “I will do that,” Lucas said.

  Later, at the federal building, he found Park standing over a hot printer, putting what looked like a ream of paper between hard covers. “There’s more,” she said. “This is the good stuff, so far. I was reading through it while I dug it out, and I’ll tell you, Lucas, Poole started out as a mean kid, and he stayed that way. His father worked off and on for the state of Tennessee, different low-level jobs, but he was also a small-time crook. Got busted for scalping tickets, once for selling driver’s licenses out of the DMV where he worked, but he was acquitted on that and got his job back. Was arrested a couple of times for selling stolen merchandise, but never convicted. His sister supposedly boosted a truckload of racing tires one time, but the charges were dropped, doesn’t say why. Garvin stepped up from that, but he didn’t come from the best of families.”

  “His folks still alive?” Lucas asked.

  “Don’t know, but I suppose so—Poole’s only forty-two, if he’s not dead himself,” Park said. “I could find out.”

  “Do that, and print it all,” Lucas said. “If there’s anything on the parents and any brothers and sisters, I’ll want it. Files on any associates, girlfriends, everything.”

  Park patted the Xerox machine: “I’ll do it, as long as this machine doesn’t break down.”

  —

  WHEN PARK finished, she handed Lucas a couple of reams of paper that must have weighed ten pounds. Lucas took it home and settled into his den to read.

  First up were crime scene photos out of Biloxi. Lucas had seen thousands of crime scene photos over his career, and these were nothing like the worst. All five victims had been shot in the head, and had died instantly. One of them, the little girl, looked like a plastic doll, lying spread-eagled on a concrete floor, faceup, a hole in her forehead like a third eye. She was wearing a white dress with lace, full at the knees. Lucas had seen a lot of pictures of dead kids: he glanced at the photo, and then went on to the next.

  And yet . . .

  He kept coming back to it. The little girl had been connected by DNA to one of the other counting-house victims, a much older man—the DNA analysts said she was his granddaughter. The grandfather may have been a dope-selling asshole, but the girl wasn’t. In the photo she was lying flat on her back, her eyes half-open. They still shone with the innocence of the very young, and with the surprise of how their lives had ended so early.

  The dress had something to do with it, too. It reminded Lucas of the dresses worn by Catholic schoolmates, little girls going off to First Communion. Crime scene techs had found a smear of blood on the dress, where somebody—had to be one of the killers—had ripped off a piece, probably to use as a bandage.

  The girl on the floor began to work on him. He made a call to Biloxi, found that nobody had claimed any of the bodies. “We don’t really expect anybody to show up and say, ‘Yeah, I’m with all those dope guys, we want to give them a nice church funeral.’”

  Now Lucas began to feel something of a personal hook: get the guy who’d killed this little girl. He hadn’t had to, but he’d done it anyway. Why? Maybe simple efficiency, maybe she’d seen the killer’s face and would be able to identify him, maybe because the shooter or shooters just liked killing people.

  Pissed him off, in a technical cop way. At the same time, despite the growing spark of anger, Lucas thought, Good shooting. The killer, whether it was Poole or not, was a pro—efficient, well schooled, remorseless.

  —

  LUCAS PUT the photos aside, all but the one of the girl. He kicked back at his desk, looked at that for a final minute or two, then flicked it onto the pile of other photos. Neither the photos nor the investigation reports told him much, possibly because there wasn’t much to tell, other than what he could see for himself.

  The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation had handled much of the work, and had done it professionally enough. When Lucas had finished reading through the reports, he called the MBI agent who’d signed off on them. It took a few minutes to get through the MBI phone system, then Elroy Martin picked up the phone and said, “This is Martin.”

  Lucas identified himself and said, “I’m looking into this because of his federal fugitive status. I’ve got all your reports, unless there’s something new since yesterday.”

  “There isn’t,” Martin said.

  “So what do you think?”

  “If you can find Poole, the DNA will take him down. I’m positive of that. But finding him is the problem. People have been chasing him for years. Good people. Guys who knew what they were doing.”

  “Your notes say you don’t think he did the Biloxi thing on his own.”

  “That’s right. We don’t know how many were on the job, but I don’t believe it would be less than two or three. The five dead were killed with two different guns, bot
h .40 caliber. All the slugs and brass came out of the same batch, and all were reloads. It seems possible that two shooters would share a batch of ammo, but, you know . . .”

  “Probably not.”

  “Yeah. Probably not. Whoever did this had to spot that drug counting house—that’s what it was—and we don’t think it was Poole. We think it was probably somebody who knew about the counting house from a drug connection, maybe because he lives around there, in Biloxi,” Martin said. “It’s possible that it was a professional spotter, a planner. A setup guy. We know he used a setup guy in the stamp robbery. We don’t think Poole would touch anything where he lives, because he’d know that we’d be all over it. We think he was brought in as the shooter. We don’t have any idea of who the spotter was, though.”

  “Maybe somebody in the cartel who decided he wanted a bigger piece of the action and decided to take it?”

  “We talked about that, but then, why bring in Poole? That Biloxi drug stuff comes through a Honduras cartel, a real professional operation,” Martin said. “If you’re in that cartel, you’d know plenty of guys with guns, but you wouldn’t know Poole. Poole’s not a drug guy, he’s a Dixie Hicks guy. A holdup man. Completely different set of bad guys. They really don’t intersect.”

  “Huh. If we could find the spotter, that’d be a big step,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah, it would, but we haven’t come up with anything yet,” Martin said. “We’d do anything we could to get our hands on Poole. We think he killed one of our guys a few years ago.”

  “I saw that.”

  They talked for a few more minutes, but Lucas got the impression that Mississippi was running out of possibilities. He thanked Martin and went back to the paper on his desk.

  Poole first ran into the law when he was eleven years old, after a schoolyard fight. Unlike most schoolyard fights, this wasn’t two punches with the loser swearing to get the other guy. Poole knocked the loser down, then kicked him in the face and ribs and back, until a teacher dragged him off. The loser went to the hospital in an ambulance.

  There were no more fights until high school. Then, there was only one, with the same result: the loser went to the hospital. A witness told a juvenile court that Poole had “gone psycho.” Poole, who’d been a running back on the junior high and then sophomore football teams, was kicked out of school.

  A few weeks later, he held up a dry cleaner’s with a toy pistol. The dry cleaner had a lot of cash and no protection at all: Poole hadn’t gone after a place that might be ready for him, like a liquor store or a convenience store.

  The holdup also demonstrated his youthful inexperience. Although he’d picked on a store well north of his home in a Nashville suburb, he hadn’t known about video cameras, and two cameras were mounted on a Dunkin’ Donuts store in the same shopping center and picked up Poole’s face.

  He looked very young and the cops took photos around to the high schools and arrested Poole the same day as he’d done the robbery, with most of the money still in his pocket. He was sent to the Mountain View Youth Development Center, where he spent nine months working the woodshop and talking to other teenage felons about the best way to proceed with a life of crime.

  Three years after his release, he was arrested again after he and two other men cut though a roof into the box office of a country music venue and robbed it. They got away with a hundred and ten thousand dollars, but one of the men, Boyd Harper, had an angry girlfriend named Rhetta Ann Joyce, who ratted out Harper to the cops.

  She did that after learning Harper had spent thirty thousand dollars, virtually his entire cut of the country music money, on cocaine and hookers, and she hadn’t been invited. She had, however, contracted a fiery case of gonorrhea, passed on from one of the hookers and not, as Harper tried to tell her, from a toilet seat.

  Harper, in turn, ratted out Poole and an accomplice named Dave Adelstein in return for a shorter sentence. Poole and Adelstein did four years at West Tennessee State Prison. Harper got only a year and a day, at Southeastern Tennessee Regional Correctional Facility, where he studied culinary arts. He’d served only four months when a person unknown stuck the sharpened butt of a dinner fork into his heart. Poole and Adelstein couldn’t have done that themselves, but Tennessee state cops believed that they paid for the killing through a contractual arrangement between Tennessee prison gangs.

  They also believed that Poole and/or Adelstein might have had something to do with the demise of Rhetta Ann Joyce, who either jumped or was thrown off the New River Railroad Bridge a month after the two men were released from prison. They believed she was thrown because of the rope around her neck.

  The rope might possibly have shown some intention to commit suicide, except that suicides rarely use mountain climbing ropes a hundred and ten feet long. Joyce’s neck hit the bottom of the noose so hard that her head popped off. The head wasn’t found until two weeks after the body, a half mile farther down the New River Gorge, washed up on a sandbar.

  Lucas, looking at the riverbank crime scene photo of Joyce’s head, muttered, “That’s not nice.”

  —

  POOLE HAD not been arrested again, but was widely understood by state and federal law enforcement officials to have been a prime mover of the Dixie Hicks, a loose confederation of holdup men working the lower tier of Confederate states.

  He was also believed by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation to have murdered a highway patrolman named Richard Wayne Coones, shot one night on lonely Highway 21 between Bogue Chitto and Shuqualak, Mississippi. The cops got his name from Al Jim Hudson, who said in a deathbed confession that he was in the car when Poole shot Coones. Hudson died shortly thereafter of internal injuries he had suffered while resisting arrest.

  FBI intelligence agents learned from a source unnamed in Lucas’s papers that Poole had eventually accumulated over a million dollars in gold—maybe well over a million—on which he intended to retire to Mexico or Belize. Neither the Mexican nor the Belize cops ever got a sniff of him, not that they admitted to, anyway. Lucas knew nothing about Belize cops, but he’d met a high-level Mexican police-intelligence officer and had been impressed. If the Mexicans didn’t know about Poole, he probably wasn’t in Mexico.

  Then rumors began to circulate that Poole had been murdered by a Dixie Hicks rival named Ralph (Booger) Baca. According to the source, Baca threw Poole’s body into the Four Holes Swamp in South Carolina, from which it was never recovered. A few months after he allegedly murdered Poole, Baca died in a freak accident when he turned the key on his Harley-Davidson and the Fat Bob extra-capacity tanks inexplicably exploded in his face, turning Baca into a human torch. He lingered, but not long.

  Poole had not been seen or heard of again, until the killings in Biloxi. If, in fact, that was Poole at all.

  Whether or not it was, Lucas thought, people died around Poole, both his friends and his enemies, including one little girl who had the bad luck to have a dope dealer as a grandfather. But if the DNA and video-camera connection was correct, Poole wasn’t dead. Not yet.

  —

  IN READING through Poole’s history, Lucas found several notes by a retired MBI investigator named Rory Pratt. Lucas got a number from the MBI and called him.

  “Tracked him all over the South,” Pratt said in a deep Mississippi accent. “We didn’t always know who or what we were chasing, but we weren’t gonna quit after Dick Coones got shot down. That was as cold-blooded a killing as you’re likely to find. We looked at everything, but it was like chasing a shadow. We’d hear rumors that he’d been involved in a robbery at such-and-such a place and we’d be there the next day. Never really got hold of anything solid. We talked to guys who were actually involved in some of these holdups and they always denied knowing Poole—but being of that element, they knew what had happened to people who had talked about Poole.”

  “You get any feel for whether he was actually involved in an
y of the robberies you checked?” Lucas asked. “Lot of people think he’s dead.”

  “He’s not dead. I guarantee that. Not unless someone snuck up behind him and shot him and buried the body in the dark of the moon, and never told anyone. Another thing is, he’s got a girlfriend named Pandora Box . . .”

  “I read that, but I thought it was a joke,” Lucas said.

  “No joke. I mean, I guess it was a joke by her daddy, but that’s where the joke ended,” Pratt said. “There’s a story that Poole once caught up with a guy from the Bandidos who stiffed him on a money deal. One thing led to another and Box cut the Bandido’s head off with a carving knife, for no reason except that she could. No proof of that, no witnesses we know of, but that’s the story. Anyway, Box disappeared at the same time as Poole, but two years ago she went to an uncle’s funeral up in Tennessee. We didn’t find out until a week later, people around there keep their mouths shut. If Box and Poole disappeared at the same time, and she’s still alive, and even looking prosperous . . . you see where I’m going here.”

  “Did anyone check the airlines, see where she was coming in from? Or going back to?”

  “They did. She didn’t fly in or out. She came to the funeral in a taxi and left the same way. We think she probably drove from wherever they’re hiding and then caught a cab so nobody would see her car. The uncle’s funeral was four days after he died, so she could have driven from anywhere in the lower forty-eight.”

  “Gotcha. Listen, if you’d have time, put together an e-mail on what you and your partner did—not every little thing, but in general, and what you think,” Lucas said. “Mostly what you think. Any hints or suggestions about how I might do this.”

  “I got one hint right now: if they get on top of you, you gotta shoot your way through, Marshal. Surrendering or negotiating will get you killed,” Pratt said. “Even get your head cut off. That boy is a gol-darned cottonmouth pit viper and so’s his girlfriend.”