Golden Prey

by John Sandford

  “Gotta check,” Lucas said.

  “We will.”

  —

  CAMPBELL’S HUSBAND, Andy, and her son, Doug, came back as Lucas was talking to Post, and when Lucas rang off, Marilyn introduced them. Andy, a tall, rawboned man with hard hands, asked, “You think they’ll be back?”

  “I doubt it. We’re hot after them—we’ve got good descriptions, your son here shot up the car pretty good, and they know the cops will be keeping an eye on you.” Lucas turned to the kid: “That was good work, by the way. Saved your mom’s life, for sure.”

  Andy Campbell said, “I wish I’d been there. If they come back, I’ll kill them.”

  Lucas shook his head: “Don’t even try. These guys are professionals. No matter how good you are with a gun, these guys are probably better, and not only that, they are used to doing this kind of thing. Best thing you could do is get a steel-core door on a bedroom, keep a shotgun and a cell phone in there, and if there’s even a hint of these people coming, get your family in there, lock and barricade the door, and call the cops. You really don’t want to shoot it out with them. Too much can go wrong.”

  They talked about that for a while, the realities of gunfights and home invasions, and then moved on to the question of Marilyn’s brother John.

  “Marilyn still thinks that John is okay, but he isn’t,” Andy said. “He was a wrong one right from the start. I knew him in high school. Rest of the family was fine, but not John. From what I hear about Gar Poole, they are two of a kind.”

  “Some cops think Gar Poole may have killed more than a dozen innocent people, and God knows how many rivals,” Lucas said to Marilyn Campbell. “He’s killed eight people that we know of, including a little girl, whom he shot in cold blood. We need to stop him. If John ran with him, he’ll know things that I need to know. I have to get in touch with him, right now.”

  Andy opened his mouth to say something, but Marilyn said, “When we talk, it’s always one-way with John. He calls us from public phones. I don’t know how to get in touch, not from my end.”

  Andy said, “For God’s sakes, Marilyn . . .”

  “I don’t,” she protested. “I used to know how to call him, but that phone hasn’t been good for two or three years.” She turned back to Lucas and said, “John has a straight job now. He got all messed up on drugs for a while, that’s why he did some bad things. But he got off the drugs, he’s trying to straighten himself out. He’s not like Gar Poole—he’s never killed anyone. I made him tell me and I know when he’s lying.”

  Lucas got her to give up an old cell phone number for John Stiner, but she insisted that it no longer worked.

  “What about the fact that these two people even found you?” Lucas asked. “Did you know Miz Poole?”

  “I never met her—but I knew of her, her family, Gar and Natalie mostly.”

  “So she would have known of you,” Lucas said.

  “Yes.”

  “Can you think of anybody else she could have given up?” Lucas asked.

  “Well, Natalie . . .”

  “She didn’t do that. Anyone else?”

  She couldn’t think of anyone.

  —

  THEIR SON, Doug, had taken a chair in a corner and had listened to the conversation, and when Marilyn Campbell said she had no more to give, Lucas turned to him and said, “Tell me what you did this morning.”

  “I’m still kinda scared,” he said.

  “That’s normal. Sounds to me like you did a heck of a job,” Lucas said.

  Doug Campbell told about being awakened by his mother’s screams, about rolling off the bed, about getting the gun, about loading up the rifle, about going to the balcony above the living room and opening up on the man and woman who were hurting his mother, and about chasing them out of the house and down the road.

  Lucas: “They never fired a gun at you?”

  Doug shook his head and said, “No . . .” but then touched his lips and said, “Oh my God. They did. I never thought about it—the guy shot his gun. I think, only one time.”

  “At you?”

  Doug frowned. “Sort of at me. Didn’t hit me or anything. Might have hit the house.”

  He didn’t know for sure if he’d hit either of the killers, but thought he might have shot the woman in the butt. “She was trying to get away and I was tracking her with the gun, but I couldn’t keep up, but this one shot, she sorta . . . jumped . . . and I think I might have hit her.”

  Andy reached over and scrubbed his kid on the head: “I’m proud of you, Dougie.”

  Marilyn jumped in: “You know what? I thought of another name . . . another person, anyway, who Margery Poole might have known.” She looked at her husband and asked, “What was the name of that guy that came up to John’s party, the guy from down in Alabama? The farmer guy with the cowboy hat? He had a nice wife, I remember. I think her name was Janice.”

  Andy turned his head to one side and squinted out the window, thinking, then said, “I can’t . . . was it Steve?”

  Marilyn shook her head. “Not Steve, but like that . . . it was something a little unusual.” They stared at each other for a moment, then Andy snapped his fingers and said, “Sturgill? Was it Sturgill? Like the country singer?”

  Marilyn pointed a finger at him: “Yes. I think it was. I don’t remember his last name.”

  Andy said to Lucas, “John told us that Sturgill and Gar were ‘asshole buddies.’ Those were his words. He said that Sturgill had never been arrested for anything, though. He was more of a thinker.”

  Lucas thought, Ah.

  He needed to talk with Sturgill.

  —

  A COUPLE OF MINUTES LATER, a Franklin deputy chief showed up and introduced himself as Chuck Lamy, the head of the Criminal Investigation Division. He said to Lucas, “We oughta talk, if you got a minute.”

  “I’m pretty much done here,” Lucas said. “Let’s find a place to sit.”

  —

  MARILYN CAMPBELL had told him that her leg had been stabilized by an orthopod when she came into the emergency room that morning, but that she’d be undergoing another procedure in the next day or two to repair her lower leg bone. She wouldn’t be back home for several days.

  Lucas said good-bye, and Lamy led him to the hospital café, where they got coffee. As they sat down, Lucas said, “Before we do anything else . . . would I talk to you or the TBI about getting a pen register on Miz Campbell’s room phone?”

  “We can do that, if you tell me why,” Lamy said.

  Lucas explained about her brother John. “I could see the way that Andy was acting that Marilyn knows how to get in touch with him. She’s going to do that. I suspect she’ll wait until her husband and the kid are out of the way. I don’t think she’ll use her cell phone, and she can’t get out of bed.”

  “Let me make a call,” Lamy said, and he went off to do it. A pen register would only give them the phone numbers called from the phone, but that was much easier to get approved than the search warrant needed for a full phone tap.

  Lamy came back ten minutes later and said, “We’re getting it done. Now, tell me everything. What in the hell is a federal marshal doing down here?”

  Lucas outlined the situation, and Lamy said, “So you got two sets of maniacs chasing each other around the countryside.”

  “That’s about it,” Lucas said. “In a nutshell, so to speak.”

  —

  BY THE TIME Lucas and Lamy had finished talking, it was nearly six o’clock. Lamy said they’d have hospital security watching Campbell’s room and they’d have a squad car make a direct check of the Campbells’ house every half hour or so for the next couple of days.

  Lucas got a recommendation for a motel, found it on his iPad, off I-65, wandered through a California-style outdoor shopping area, looking for food, wound up at a ste
akhouse, and had a decent steak. Back at the motel, he called Weather and they talked for a while, and he told her about the attack on Marilyn Campbell.

  She had no trouble imagining people as bad as the attackers: she’d encountered some very bad people since marrying Lucas. Before they hung up, though, she said, “Don’t forget.”

  “I’m careful.”

  “But are you enjoying yourself?”

  “Hey . . .”

  “I know. You wouldn’t admit it, because it doesn’t seem . . . normal. But you are, aren’t you?”

  “Maybe,” Lucas said, smiling into the phone. “Progress has been a little slow so far, but it’s picking up. Yeah. It’s getting interesting.”

  —

  THERE WAS not much in the way of football on television, so he read through his Gar Poole files, including known associates—nobody named Sturgill—and then caught a movie.

  The movie was old—the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading. He’d seen it before, so it gave him some space to think as he watched.

  One thing he thought about was the difference between his new job and his old one. He’d already realized that he was now a small fish swimming in the ocean—and now, he thought, he hadn’t realized how different the various parts of the ocean might be.

  He didn’t know Tennessee or any of the territory worked by the Dixie Hicks. The culture was different, attitudes toward cops were different, and even the food was strange. He’d already crossed grits, collard greens, okra, and black-eyed peas off his menu possibilities, and suspected he’d find others.

  There were more guns around than in Minnesota—two cold-blooded killers had been chased off their target that morning by a grade-school kid who had access to a gun and knew how to use it, and was willing to use it. The last time he’d looked, less than four percent of the Minnesota population was licensed for concealed carry. In Alabama, twelve percent of the population was licensed for concealed carry, a half-million permits, more than twice as many as in Minnesota, with a smaller population.

  He didn’t know if that was good or bad: concealed-carry people actually committed fewer felonies per year than cops did . . . Still, the mid-South and South had a gun culture stronger than Minnesota’s, which he’d always considered pretty tough.

  If he stayed with the Marshals Service, in his current job, he might find himself working in the Pacific Northwest, New England, the desert Southwest . . . it was going to be strange. Even unnerving; part of him was looking forward to it. Part of him was already missing Weather and the kids, on his third night alone.

  He went to sleep thinking about grits and especially okra. Who in God’s name was the first guy to stick an okra in his mouth? Must have been a brave man, or starving to death . . .

  Lamy called him at eight o’clock the next morning. “Miz Campbell made one call, to a phone we don’t know. Looks like it’s down in Orlando, Florida.”

  “Wonderful,” Lucas said.

  9

  LUCAS GOT a late morning flight out of Nashville to Orlando on Southwest Airlines. As he was driving to the airport, he called Russell Forte, his contact in the Washington office, and gave him a full report.

  “We’ll look at the phone right now,” Forte said. “Your tickets will be waiting for you when you get to the airport.”

  “Hope there’s space,” Lucas said.

  Forte laughed: “There’s always space, if you’re the federal government.”

  And there was: Lucas checked his bag, collected his tickets, and while he was waiting in the gate at the airport, he got a call back from Forte: “We don’t know that phone. Either doesn’t have a GPS or the GPS is turned off. It’s almost certainly a burner, and it’s used only rarely, a couple times a month. We’ve got a list of numbers that the owner’s called and we can tell you that the outgoing calls have been made from Orlando Fashion Square. He probably lives around there, and he’s probably calling out from the mall in case somebody comes looking for him. Like us. Hard to spot him in a place where two thousand people are on their phones, all at once.”

  “Where did Campbell’s call go?”

  “Can’t tell you precisely, but generally, through a cell tower in the same general area of Orlando. We’ll e-mail you a map. We’ve talked to the Orlando FBI. When you get there, they’ll launch a plane with a Stingray unit and when you call Stiner’s phone, they should be able to spot it.”

  “We gotta get the FBI involved?” Lucas asked.

  “If we want the Stingray. We don’t have our own in Orlando. You got a problem with them?” Forte asked.

  “Sometimes I prefer to be a little more informal than they are . . .”

  “Huh. Well, what do you want to do?”

  Lucas thought a moment, then said, “Let’s go with the Stingray, but tell them I don’t need any help on the ground.”

  “Okay. Stiner has two federal warrants on him, by the way, both for interstate flight,” Forte said. “You’re good there, but I got to tell you, the underlying warrants aren’t worth much. One for assault in Nashville—a street fight—and another for a bus theft . . .”

  “He stole a bus?”

  “Yeah, in Montgomery. He used it as a getaway vehicle after his own car broke down after a burglary. They found it in Tennessee somewhere. He’d sold it to a bunch of hippies for cash. The guy seems to run across a state line every time somebody comes looking for him. Which technically makes it federal, every time.”

  “Does he shoot people?” Lucas asked.

  “He’s carried a gun, but there’s no evidence that he in particular has ever shot anyone.”

  “Okay. I gotta go, they’re calling the plane. How about this guy named ‘Sturgill’? The thinker?”

  “Nothing so far, but we’re working it. There’s more Sturgills out there than you’d think.”

  “Okay,” Lucas said. “If I get Stiner, I’ll push him on a better name.”

  “Good hunting, man.”

  —

  THE FLIGHT was an hour and a half of white-knuckled terror, though the crazy old lady in the adjacent seat seemed to enjoy it thoroughly, drinking coffee, gazing out the window at the landscape while never quitting her knitting, apparently unaware of the fact that they were thirty-five thousand feet up in the air in a mechanical device over which they had no personal control. The flight attendant, a motherly woman, stopped twice to ask Lucas if he was feeling okay, and he’d nodded, “Just fine,” thinking, for somebody about to be torn to bits in a plane crash.

  Then Lucas was on the ground in Orlando, in a Jeep Compass, the best Hertz could do on a busy day with no reservation—the Hertz agent told him it was International Food and Wine Festival at Disney World that week.

  Before he left the airport, he checked his e-mail on the iPad, found a note from the FBI agent-in-charge, who said Forte had sent him an e-mail summary of what Lucas was doing. Lucas sent a note back with his phone number and told the AIC that he was on the ground and rolling. He pulled up a map of east Orlando and went that way.

  The Jeep would eventually drive him crazy, he thought, as he headed north. The thing was rattling like a Brazilian maraca, tracking like an aluminum fishing boat. The steering wheel wasn’t adjustable and threatened to crush Lucas’s chest even without an accident.

  He was sitting at a stoplight when the AIC called: “We’re putting a plane in the air. Do you have a nav system in your car?”

  “I’ve got an iPad with Google Maps.”

  “Good enough. Find the Orlando executive airport and get over, say, a half mile east of it and give us a call,” the agent said. “We’ll place the call to Stiner from here, make a pitch for a Visa card, and vector you in to wherever the phone is.”

  “Got it.”

  Lucas worked his way north, following his progress on the iPad, and when he was east of the airport, spotted a high school parking lot and pulled in
to the driveway. He called the feds, and the AIC took the call and said, “Sit right there. We’ll try to sell him that Visa card.”

  As he was talking, a security guard appeared from between the cars farther down the lot, heading toward Lucas in a fast walk. Lucas said, “Hang on a second, I’ve got a high school security guard who’s going to try to roust me.”

  The security guard came up and asked, “You got a problem?”

  Lucas hung his ID out the window and said, “Yeah. I’m a federal marshal and I’m on a call to the FBI. I might need some directions from you, so go stand on the other side of the road. I’ll wave you back over in a minute.”

  The guard, an older man with expansive nostril hair, said, “Oh.” He hitched up his pants and said, “Okay,” and walked to the other side of the driveway.

  Lucas got back to the AIC and said, “Sell the Visa card.”

  “Doing it now.”

  Dead air for fifteen seconds, then the AIC said, “No answer on the phone, but we hooked up to it and we’ve got a close location but not exact. It’s a little shopping mall not more than a mile or so from where you’re at, off Goldenrod Road. Here’s the address . . .”

  Lucas wrote the address in a notebook and said, “I hope he’s not just shopping . . .”

  “Well, you said it was a burner. You think he’d be carrying it all the time?”

  “Don’t know. Could you keep the plane around until I get there? In case he moves.”

  “Sure. Call me when you get there,” the AIC said.

  —

  LUCAS RANG OFF and waved the security guard over and asked, “What’s the fastest way to Goldenrod Road?”

  The guard rubbed his chin and then said, “Jeez, I know where it is, but I don’t think you can get there from here. It’s complicated.”

  Lucas pulled up the high school location on the iPad, and the guard traced out a route that went west, north, east, and finally south on Goldenrod to the mall.

  When they’d worked it out, the guard asked, “What’s going down?”