Golden Prey

by John Sandford

  He didn’t want to linger, maybe warn somebody off, so he went back to his truck. As he started it up, he noticed a heavyset woman standing behind a screen door in the house across the street. Her arms were crossed in a defensive pose: either the self-appointed neighborhood watch or somebody to rat him out to the Pooles.

  He drove back to the La Quinta, thinking about food. A couple of Tennessee Highway Patrol cars were parked at the motel entrance, the two troopers talking to a bearded man who stood outside an aged Ford pickup. The pickup had a camper back and a bumper sticker on the driver’s side that said “Vegetarian” over a green marijuana leaf, and on the passenger side, another sticker that said “Can’t we just all get abong?” The bearded man had a battered guitar case at his feet, but was not Willie Nelson.

  Lucas nodded at the cops as he went by and one of the troopers called after him, “Excuse me, sir,” and Lucas turned and the two troopers were looking at him, their hands on their Glocks. The taller of the two asked, “Are you carrying a gun?”

  Lucas’s .45 had printed through the jacket. He said, “Yes. I’m a U.S. marshal. I have an ID in my pocket on the right side of my jacket.”

  The cops nodded and Lucas pulled open his jacket with the fingertips of his right hand, extracted his badge case with his left hand, and dropped it open. The shorter trooper looked at it and said, “Good enough for me,” and then, “Minnesota?”

  “Yeah. I’m down here looking for a guy,” Lucas said.

  The tall trooper hooked a thumb at the guitar player and said, “It wouldn’t be Rory Harris, would it?”

  “Nope. He’s your problem.”

  The bearded man said, “I know my rights.”

  The tall trooper said, “And it’s your right to get stopped every two miles and asked if you got weed in your truck. You oughta lose the stickers. I’m not telling you that’s the law, I’m just saying, make it easy on yourself.”

  “Don’t have that problem down in Alabama . . .”

  The trooper looked up at the sky, around the parking lot, peered at Lucas, lifted an arm and sniffed at his armpit, then said, “You know, I’d swear this was Tennessee.”

  Harris didn’t see the comedy in that and didn’t smile. The short trooper told him, “Get lost.”

  Harris got lost, tooling away in the stink of badly burned gasoline, his marijuana stickers intact. The tall trooper said, “Dumbass,” and asked Lucas, who’d stepped away, “Who’re you looking for?”

  “A guy’s been on the run the last ten years or so. Garvin Poole?”

  Both troopers shook their heads. “What’d he do?” one of them asked.

  “Everything,” Lucas said. “Including killing a little girl and a Mississippi state trooper.”

  “Okay, that’s bad,” said the short guy. “You think he’s close by?”

  “Some of his family are, but Poole himself? I got no idea. I suspect he isn’t,” Lucas said. “I’m just starting on him.”

  “I know this area pretty good, I been out here eight years. I’ll look him up and if I have any ideas, I’ll give you a buzz,” the short guy said.

  Lucas and the troopers talked for a few more minutes—the tall one was curious about how to get to be a marshal, and Lucas told him, “Fill out an application—there’s a whole thing about it online.”

  The trooper said he’d do that and Lucas asked if there might be a decent rib joint around, and they pointed him to a roadside barbeque barn a few miles away. Lucas traded cards with them before they left, then went to eat.

  —

  AT EIGHT O’CLOCK, the barbeque ribs sitting uneasily in his stomach, he was back at the Poole place, still no lights, still the aging Corolla parked in the driveway. Lucas pulled in behind it, got out, walked up the sidewalk. He knocked, got no answer.

  He knocked again, waited, then turned away and saw the heavyset woman across the street, behind her screen door. He went that way and as he walked up her driveway, she called, “Are you the po-lees?”

  “I’m a U.S. marshal,” Lucas said.

  “What do you want with the Pooles?” she asked.

  “I need to interview them,” Lucas said. “Nothing they’ve done wrong, or anything. Have you seen them around?”

  She stood silently for a moment, chewing on her lower lip. Then, “I tell you what, sir, I was thinking I might call the local po-lees. Margery’s car been parked there all day like that and Kevin’s car is in the garage, because I looked in the window and seen it. Hasn’t been moved. They tell me when they go out of town, so I can keep an eye on the place—but I didn’t hear a peep from them. I haven’t seen anything moving over there all day, but they were there last night. I seen them and saw lights. Today, I seen nothing. I knocked, but nobody answered. I’m a little worried.”

  Lucas said, “Huh.” He looked back at the Poole house. “No lights?”

  “That’s another thing. They got those fake anti-burglar lights, you know, that automatically switch on and off with timers? They always use those when they’re gone, and there haven’t been any lights at all.”

  “Okay,” Lucas said. “Listen, I’ll call somebody. See if there’s a way to check.”

  “I’d appreciate that, sir,” she said.

  —

  LUCAS WENT back to the Benz, started it up, and called Adams, the TBI investigator he’d spoken to on the phone. Adams was at home, babysitting for his wife, who was out with girlfriends. Lucas outlined the problem, and Adams said, “You could go into the house without a warrant, on the basis of a neighbor’s legitimate statement of concern . . . but . . . jeez, I can’t leave right now. I’m stuck here with the kids. I could call the office and see if we could get a couple guys down there.”

  Lucas remembered the two highway patrolmen and suggested that he call one of them. “One of them said he lives out here, so he’s probably close by.”

  “That’d work,” Adams said. “They’re authorized to do anything we do.”

  Lucas found the patrolmen’s cards and called the short one, whose name was Manny Dean.

  “Manny? This is Davenport, the marshal you talked to earlier today.”

  “Oh, yeah. What’s up, man?”

  Lucas gave him a quick summary, and Dean said, “I can be there in fifteen minutes. Gotta put some pants on. Meet you out front.”

  —

  LUCAS WENT back to the Poole house. Under the nervous eyes of the woman across the street, he rang the bell again and knocked for a while, but got no response. Dean showed up, wearing civilian clothes but driving his patrol car. He got out with a flashlight and asked, “Nothing?”

  “Nothing. Let’s see what we can see.”

  The drapes had been pulled on the front picture window, so they went around the house to the master bedroom and guest bedroom, where the drapes were open, but both bedrooms appeared to be unoccupied. There was a tiny porch on the back of the house, leading into a kitchen. Dean shone his light through the window, looked around, stepped back, frowned, went back to the window, and said, “Hey.”

  Lucas was on the burnt-out lawn, looking up: “See something?”

  “C’mere. Right over there by the archway going to the front . . . is that a leg?” Dean asked. “There’s no body or anything, but . . . is that a leg going across there? Could be a rolled-up piece of carpet, I guess, but it kinda looks like a leg.”

  Lucas looked, then turned and said, “You got a tire iron in your car?”

  “Yeah, and a crowbar.”

  “I think it’s a leg. We may be too late, but we gotta go in.”

  —

  THEY WENT through the front door. Dean cracked it with the crowbar and Lucas pushed the door open with a knuckle and the smell of death hit them. Lucas turned and said, “Don’t touch anything.”

  The house was dark and Lucas shone Dean’s flashlight across the living room:
a man was lying on the floor, his head propped up against an eighties stereo cabinet, a short-barreled revolver lying on the floor a yard or so from his right hand. There was a bullet hole in his forehead. Scanning across the room, Lucas spotlighted a woman’s body, which had been cut into pieces, fingers, thumbs, both feet, one hand . . . at which point she must have died from shock, before the torturers could get the other hand. They’d quit there, leaving her on a blood-soaked shag carpet.

  Dean said, “That’s not something you see on a routine basis.”

  Lucas glanced at him: “If you’re gonna barf, do it outside.”

  Dean said, “I got a hundred automobile accidents a year. Blood doesn’t bother me none, not anymore.”

  “Okay. Let’s get the local cops over here and the TBI,” Lucas said. “Back out—you get the locals, I’ll call my guy at the TBI.”

  More cops began arriving within five minutes of the call. First the local cops, then the sheriff’s deputies, and finally, a TBI investigator named Lawrence Post.

  Post looked over the scene, asked the La Vergne cops to set up a perimeter, and got a crime scene crew moving. He took Lucas aside and asked, “What’s going on?”

  Lucas filled him in on Garvin Poole, and added, “I think the cartel wants its money back.”

  “If that’s Miz Poole in there, she must’ve told them everything she knew.”

  “Maybe. I’ve got more bad news—Gar Poole has a sister who lives not too far from here, near a place called Beech Grove. She and her husband run a salvage yard . . . I got the details in my briefcase.”

  “We better get some people over there.”

  “It’s not too far,” Lucas said. “I want to walk through here when you’ve finished processing it, but I’m going to run down there now. That’ll be faster than calling in somebody who doesn’t know what’s going on.”

  Dean had drifted up during the conversation and said, “I’m coming with you. I’ve got nothing to do here and I got lights and a siren.”

  “Let’s go,” Lucas said. He got his briefcase from the car and pulled out the paper on Poole’s sister, Natalie Parker, and read the relevant bits to Dean.

  “Hey, I know them. Hardworking, but not entirely on the right side of the law,” Dean said. “They’ve been known to chop a car, now and then. How do you want to do this?”

  —

  LUCAS GOT his iPad from his truck and called up a satellite image of the Parker salvage yard. The yard covered several acres, with three buildings facing the road. The structure farthest down the road, Dean said, was the Parker residence. There were two buildings at the front of the yard—a small office building and a much larger Quonset hut. Dean thought the Quonset hut was a workshop, though he’d never been inside. “I’ve seen welding torches when I’ve gone by.”

  Lucas touched the iPad screen: “We’ll park here by this creek, go in on foot.”

  “You think the drug guys could be there?”

  “Don’t know. The Pooles haven’t been dead all that long—probably killed this morning, or maybe late last night, just on the basis of my nose. Whoever killed them probably isn’t far away. I wouldn’t want to guess wrong about them being at the Parkers’ place.”

  Dean’s eyes drifted back to the Poole house: “Got it.”

  6

  LUCAS AND DEAN made it to the Parker salvage yard in twenty-five minutes, Dean leading with lights but no siren. Off the interstate, they threaded through a maze of rural blacktopped roads, almost like city alleys with trees tight on both sides, with Dean finally coasting to the shoulder. Lucas parked behind him; he could see lights a few hundred yards away, filtering through the roadside brush.

  They got out into the night, eased their car doors shut, locked them. Lucas had a miniature LED flashlight in one hand and his non-regulation .45 in the other. They scuffled two hundred yards down the middle of the beat-up blacktop road; there was no traffic at all. The darkness was thick around them; they couldn’t see their own feet but Lucas didn’t want to use the flash. They could smell water weeds from a roadside creek, and cut grass and oil from the yard; mosquitoes whined past their ears as they walked.

  At the salvage yard, they walked down the drive into a little more light, checked the office, which appeared to be empty. There were lights in the Quonset, and Lucas said, “Stay behind me, but don’t shoot me in the back.”

  “That’d be embarrassing as hell,” Dean whispered. He was nervous, his heavy revolver pointed straight up. “’Course, you are a Yankee, I probably wouldn’t actually get fired.”

  “Shhh . . .”

  They walked around the office and back to the Quonset. An overhead pole light cast an orange sodium vapor glow, giving the leaves from a nearby cottonwood a weird flickering black glow.

  As they approached the Quonset, Lucas held a finger up to Dean’s face, stopping him, and he stepped sideways to a small square window and looked in. A woman and two men were working around what look like a new Corvette, under bright lights, pulling apart the front end.

  He watched for a moment, as the three were apparently arguing about how to dismantle the front fender. Lucas cricked a finger at Dean, who stepped up and looked in for a second or two, then stepped back, whispering to himself. He caught Lucas’s jacket sleeve and tugged him away.

  “Back to the car,” he whispered. Lucas followed him around the office building again and then Dean started jogging back toward their cars. When they got there, Dean pointed at the passenger side, got in the patrol car, and Lucas got in beside him. Dean was on his radio; he’d memorized the tag on the Corvette and asked that it be checked. His dispatcher came back a moment later and said, “It’s on the list, Manny. Belongs to a dentist, got taken out of his parking lot between three and four o’clock this afternoon. The engine alone is worth five grand. You got it?”

  “Yeah, and there’s a lot more going on, too. We could use some help down here. Call the sheriff’s office and tell them to meet us at the Confederate Cemetery.”

  Off the radio, Dean said to Lucas, “The drug guys haven’t found them yet—if that’s what’s going on. But they’re chopping that Corvette. That could give us some weight when it comes to getting Natalie to talk about her brother.”

  “When you’re right, you’re right,” Lucas said.

  —

  THEY DID U-TURNS on the road and Dean led the way to the edge of the town, where he pulled to the shoulder. Lucas turned in behind him and they both got out.

  Dean said, “I’m starting to like this detecting shit. Tell the truth, I’m surprised that the drug guys haven’t found them. They’re supposed to be, like, you know, all-seeing.”

  “They’re not. They’re a bunch of jumped-up gang guys, half of them can’t even read,” Lucas said. “They’re not the FBI. They don’t have the computer backup, the crime files. That’s why they had to cut up Mrs. Poole.”

  “Then how’d they get on to the Pooles in the first place?”

  “The Mississippi cops think Poole was involved in that robbery,” Lucas said. “I heard about it from a marshal in St. Louis and we didn’t have anything to do with the investigation. I suspect the drug guys may have some contacts who told them about it.”

  “You mean . . . among cops?”

  “Yeah. Among cops,” Lucas said.

  “Well, that sucks,” Dean said.

  “It does.”

  Dean thought about it for a moment, then said, “I can’t believe Miz Poole didn’t tell them about Natalie.”

  “That’s the problem with torture—people lie, and there’s no way to tell when they’re doing it,” Lucas said. “If she loved her daughter . . . and she had to know that they were going to kill her, no matter what she said. They’d already killed her husband.”

  “Tell me how you know that.”

  “He had a hideout gun in the house, probably right there in t
he living room,” Lucas said. “He grabbed it and they had to shoot him. Otherwise, they’d have taken him apart like they did his wife. He got lucky, I guess.”

  “Not the kind of luck you hope for,” Dean said.

  “No, it’s not.”

  —

  A SHERIFF’S CAR pulled off the main road, did a U-turn, and pulled up next to Lucas and Dean. The deputy inside the car dropped the passenger-side window and asked, “You here for the goat fuck?”

  Five minutes later another deputy and another highway patrolman had shown up, and the whole group was bent over Lucas’s iPad, which was sitting on the hood of one of the patrol cars. “Manny and I have been down there, so we’ll lead, and we’ll try to get around behind that Quonset hut,” Lucas said, tapping the screen. “There’s gonna be a door back there. We’ll pick up anyone trying to run.”

  “Think we got enough guys?” one of the deputies asked.

  The patrolman said, “As long as they don’t got a machine gun.”

  “In case of that, we ought to let the marshal lead,” the first deputy drawled. “I’ve volunteered to hang back so I can call for help, if needed.”

  —

  TEN MINUTES LATER they were all parked on the side of the road, where Lucas and Dean had parked on the first approach. Lucas and Dean led off, while the rest of the cops waited in their cars. Nothing had changed at the salvage yard: no lights in the office, voices from the Quonset hut. Lucas and Dean went down the right side of the building; there were no windows on the side and Lucas risked using his LED light. As they walked over truck-rutted ground, a dog started to bark inside.

  Lucas muttered, “Big dog.”

  Dean got on his radio and said, “Y’all better come. There’s a big dog down here . . .” As he said it, another dog started barking from the junkyard. “Make that two big dogs . . .”

  “On the way . . .”

  They were behind the Quonset, where a narrow windowless door was set in the back wall. They positioned themselves on either side of the door as headlights flooded the road and then the first of the cop cars swung into the yard, continuing on until the car’s bumper was nearly at the Quonset’s front door.