Golden Prey

by John Sandford

  They were on Rae’s speakerphone and Bob said, “This would probably be a repeat customer, not a one-off. Might have bought a bunch of stuff from you. As we understand it, this guy built quite a few guitars.”

  “That’d narrow it down,” Wynn said. “You know what brand name he sold them under?”

  “There’s really nothing on the guitar like a brand name. He supposedly hand-carved and hand-painted the tops and backs. The one we saw had this kind of distorted checkerboard on it, wrapping around the back, where it narrowed down and twisted into a painted hole . . .”

  “Oh, sure, that’s Chuck Wiggin,” Wynn said. “Like Chuck Wagon, but W-I-G-G-I-N. He does good work, mostly on Les Paul, Tele, and Strat replicas. He’s not in trouble, is he?”

  “You got a name and address?” Rae asked.

  “Yeah, sure, let me look in my Rolodex . . .”

  While he was doing that, Rae muttered to Bob, “He doesn’t have a computer.”

  Bob nodded: “Probably the last guy in the country with an actual Rolodex.”

  Wynn was back in thirty seconds and read off the address where he’d been shipping guitar parts. Easy as that.

  —

  LUCAS CAME to the door in his shorts and T-shirt, yawning, scratching his stomach; somebody had started banging on the door at 9:12. He peeked through the door crack, saw Rae, and said, “I probably ought to put on some pants.”

  “You ain’t gonna impress me, one way or the other,” Rae said.

  “Okay, c’mon in. I’ll go put on some pants anyway.” He yawned again, leaving the door open behind him and asked as he walked away, “Find anything?”

  “Yeah. We got Poole’s address,” Bob said.

  Lucas turned and looked from one to the other. They weren’t laughing, though they might have looked a little smug. “Now I really need my pants,” he said.

  —

  LUCAS HEARD their story, then called Forte in Washington. “We’ve got an address for Poole. Haven’t looked at it yet, but it apparently was good three months ago.”

  “Do not go there,” Forte said. “I got SOG on speed dial.”

  “Got a couple of SOG guys with me now . . .”

  “I know all about Bob and Rae—and I think three more deputies and a couple of technical people would be about right. Listen, this isn’t about some dim-witted gun freak. This guy can shoot and has proven he’s willing to do it. You sit there, I’ll get a SOG team to you before noon.”

  Lucas told Bob and Rae about Forte’s decision and they both nodded and Bob said, “He’s right. Get a big enough team and it’s a lot safer than some knock-on-the-door small-city detective shit.”

  “One thing we have to consider—Poole may know we’re here,” Lucas said. “His folks were tortured to death, and Darling might be down here after the dope guys tried to grab his wife, and TV’s been all over the Arnold murder. He’ll know it’s the cartel. He’ll know about me, too, from Darling. If Janice Darling was lying about him not having a phone, and I believe she was, he might have already run.”

  “I ought to cruise the place,” Rae said. “Get an old car from some crappy rental place, colored girl with a do-rag, he’d see me as a maid.”

  “We’d piss off Forte,” Lucas said. He thought about that for a moment, then said, “What the hell, he needs to get used to it. The sooner the better.”

  “Let’s go,” Bob said. “Hot damn, we’re cookin’ with gas.”

  “Another saying from 1945,” Rae said to Lucas. “The Stump collects them.”

  —

  THEY FOUND the right car near the airport, at Scratch’n Dent Rentals, and a half hour after they talked to Forte, Rae was squeezing herself into a Toyota Corolla with a hundred and ten thousand miles on the clock. The rental agent guaranteed that it would get through the day, at twenty dollars a day, not including gas.

  Lucas and Bob trailed her toward the address they’d gotten from Wynn at Poody Parts, and a minute out of the target, found themselves driving through a low-income shopping area. Bob said, “I got a bad feeling about this.”

  Lucas said, “Uh-huh.”

  A minute later Rae called and said, “The address is a mail drop. U-Postem.”

  “We’re coming in to talk,” Lucas said.

  They sat in the Jeep outside U-Postem, arguing about the next step. Eventually, Rae went inside to see if she could wheedle a legitimate address for Chuck Wiggin out of the clerk. The clerk was willing to cooperate, but didn’t have the information.

  Rae returned to the Jeep and told Lucas and Bob about her talk with the clerk. “He says if they made their customers give them an address and a phone number, they wouldn’t have any customers. He looked at me like I was retarded for asking.”

  “No chance that he’s an alarm? That he’s calling Poole right now?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “I believe him about not having the records, and if he doesn’t have records, why should Poole give him one?”

  Bob said, “Yeah.”

  Lucas called Forte: “That SOG thing? Never mind.”

  “What happened?”

  “I decided Rae should cruise the place in a junker car. Turned out to be a mail drop.”

  “Damnit. I could taste the guy.”

  When Lucas was off the phone, Rae asked, “Now what?”

  “We know he’s around here,” Lucas said. “We have to think. Is there any way we could get at a public record that would take us to him? Anything at all?”

  —

  THEY DROVE back to the hotel and sat around and thought, and called Forte and got him thinking about it: how they could possibly use a telephone, gas company, or power company bill to track down Poole’s house.

  “The problem being, he’s not living there as Garvin Poole,” Rae said. “He’s got a lot of money and for a thousand dollars you can get a perfectly good Texas driver’s license under any name you want, if you know the right guy.”

  “We know he probably came here about five years ago,” Lucas said. “Wonder if he bought a house? Assuming he lives somewhere around his mail drop . . . wonder how many houses sold in this area five years ago?”

  “Thousands,” Bob said. “People were pouring in here like rats around a Pizza Hut dumpster. Besides, I don’t think he bought a house. Ties up too much money and the realtors look at you too close. What I bet is, he found a house to rent and had a quiet talk with the owner. He says, ‘No lease, we’ll pay you three grand a month, and if the tax man asks us, we’ll tell him we pay you fifteen hundred.’ That’s what he did.”

  “You may be right,” Lucas said. “But that doesn’t get us any closer to Poole . . .”

  Rae started talking about checking Texas driver’s licenses with a face-recognition computer at the FBI, but Lucas was skeptical: “He’s got a beard and wears eyeglasses, and the pictures are probably pretty shitty. We’ll get twenty thousand false positives.”

  Bob eventually was the one who had an idea that worked. He’d been in the bathroom taking a leak, came out and said, “That took some pressure off my brain. Look—we’re thinking too much about right now. But if he’s lived there for five years, I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a hardwired phone at the beginning. Most people did. We ought to go back five years with everybody we know who knew him and look at their phone records. See who they called in Dallas.”

  “Can we do that?” Lucas asked. He really didn’t know.

  “Depends on the phone company. AT&T keeps the records for something like seven years. Verizon and Sprint don’t keep them so long, but they keep them for a few years. What I’m thinking is, Box was close to her uncle. She even risked going to his funeral, when a lot of people there knew who she was and the fact that the cops wanted to talk to her. I say, let’s look at the uncle’s phone records . . .”

  They called Washington, and Forte
said, “Yeah, we can do that. You got a name for the uncle, address, whatever?”

  They had some of it, and Forte said he could get the rest.

  Nothing was going to happen for a while, and they eventually drove to a Half-Priced Books and browsed for an hour. Lucas bought a book that told him how to match his personal coloring to the colors of his menswear, Bob bought a book on Leica cameras, and Rae found one on Latin American art. “Now I feel like the dumbshit in the bunch, which definitely isn’t the case,” Lucas said as they checked out.

  “You sure about that?” Rae asked.

  “Who gets you business class airplane tickets?”

  “You’ve got a point,” Bob said. To Rae: “For God’s sakes, don’t piss him off.”

  —

  ON THE WAY BACK to the hotel, Forte called. “Tell Bob he’s a genius. We got an old number in Dallas, with Time Warner Cable, but it’s still working. It goes back to a month after the Chattanooga armored car shootings. For a Marvin Toone.”

  “That’s him,” Lucas said, and, “You’re a genius, Bob.”

  “I knew that,” Bob said.

  “I’ll crank up the SOG team again,” Forte said.

  “Hold on until we cruise it. We’ve still got Rae’s rent-a-wreck,” Lucas said.

  “Call me,” Forte said.

  Rae said, “Marvin Toone. Makes me laugh.”

  “They all do that, guys on the run,” Lucas said. “Pick out a name that sounds sorta like their own. If he’d changed his name to Bob, and somebody called his name, he might not react like a normal Bob.”

  “No such thing as a normal Bob,” Rae said.

  “You got me there,” Bob said.

  “But we knew all that anyway,” Rae told Lucas. “I was laughing because of the Toone thing. You know, a guitar maker, picking out a name like Toone.”

  “Didn’t see that,” Lucas admitted. “Maybe you are smarter than me. And we already know Bob’s a genius.”

  “Could be on to something,” Rae said.

  —

  THE TARGET HOUSE was in the neighborhood called Preston Hollow, homes ranging from nice to jaw-dropping, on quiet leafy streets north of Dallas’s downtown. Bob rode with Lucas in the Jeep, while Rae put the do-rag back on her head and followed them in. When they were a block away, Lucas pulled to the side of the street and watched as Rae cruised the house. She had her telephone set on “speaker,” and told them, “Nice house, but not one of the best. Two-car garage. Got a fence around the backyard, and I think I can see another small building back there. A studio or something. Nothing in the driveway. Nothing moving inside, that I can see. Gonna loop the block.”

  They watched as she did a U-turn two blocks away and came back toward them. “Can’t see much . . . Old guy across the street came out for his mail . . . he’s going back inside now.”

  They watched as she turned into a driveway across from the “Marvin Toone” house. Lucas asked, “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Applying for a housekeeping job,” Rae said, on the phone.

  “She’s being Rae,” Bob said.

  Lucas: “For Christ’s sakes . . .”

  Rae said, “Shut up now, I’m carrying the phone.”

  —

  THEY HEARD her knocking on the door and then a man’s rusty voice: “Yes? What can I do for you, missy?”

  “Sir, I’m a U.S. marshal, and don’t tell me I don’t look like one because I know that. We are doing research on the house across the street, a Mr. Marvin Toone . . .”

  “Don’t know him. Never heard of him,” the man said.

  “The man right across the street.” She pointed.

  “Name isn’t Marvin anything. It’s William Robb. Will. You got the wrong address.”

  “I have a photograph here . . .” Lucas and Bob couldn’t see it, but envisioned Rae pulling out the most recent mug shot they had, printed on a piece of eight-by-ten paper.

  The rusty voice said, “Well, that’s Will, all right. He’s older and he’s been growing out a beard the last few weeks, but yeah, that’s him. I can tell you that he and Lora had a friend come in yesterday, big kind of pickup with double tires on the back, whatever you call those . . .”

  “Dually,” Rae said.

  “Yeah, and the friend stayed over, and this morning they were tearing around in their two pickups, and they had some furniture loaded in one, looked to me like they were moving out.”

  “Yes? Have they been back?” Rae asked.

  “Not that I’ve seen. They have three cars, well, two cars and a pickup, and they left the pickup somewhere, and then they pulled out in two cars and the visitor’s pickup. Exactly what did they do?”

  “We’re not sure he did anything . . . but if you have any way to reach them, don’t do it,” Rae said.

  “I don’t, except for walking across the street and knocking on the door. Are you sure you’re a marshal?”

  “Absolutely. I’m going to walk away, now, and across the street . . . Please don’t come outside until I wave at you.”

  Lucas and Bob saw her walk to the driveway, get in her car, and then she told them, “I’m going to knock on Poole’s door. I’m ninety-nine percent sure that they’re gone.”

  “Don’t do that,” Lucas said. “We need to talk about it first.”

  “I’m gonna do what I’m gonna do,” Rae said. “Might as well get used to it.”

  Bob looked at Lucas and said, “Really—get used to it.”

  Rae backed her car out of the driveway, backed far enough down the street that she could pull into the target house, got out, and said, “I’m doing it,” and they heard her banging on the door. No answer. She said, “There’s a slot in the front drapes.”

  She moved sideways and looked in a window and said, “Looks like a lot of furniture is missing. I’m coming out.”

  Lucas said, “Okay, we’ve got a reasonable ID from that old man, whoever he was, and a telephone number, that ought to be enough for a judge.”

  “Got a mass murderer and a baby killer and a cop killer, ought to be good enough for anybody,” Bob said. “Call your man in Washington and see how fast he can get a warrant.”

  They had the warrant in an hour, delivered by two Texas Rangers who brought a crime scene team with them.

  18

  WHEN KORT fled from the town house shooting scene, she hadn’t done anything clever, because she wasn’t a clever woman. After turning a couple of corners, she ran straight south, as fast as she reasonably could, to I-695 and got lost in the traffic. She’d picked that up from Soto: getting out is almost always the best thing to do. There are more eyes around than you know and if you try to hide, somebody will see you.

  She’d freaked herself out by shooting Soto, though she didn’t regret it. She’d changed hotels, and that night she’d driven carefully out into the countryside and had thrown the black rifle in a roadside slough. She thought she’d done the right thing: the federal marshals would know that she and Soto had killed Poole’s parents, the Bennetts, and Arnold, and Bedsow, the old guy in Roswell, Georgia.

  And Soto had told her he’d give up anybody and everything to avoid the needle.

  Would the Boss accept that? She didn’t know.

  She sweated it out for twenty hours, all the possibilities. Kort wasn’t sophisticated in the ways of the world, but she’d seen Mafia and cartel movies, and accepted the movie premise that organized crime was like a huge FBI or CIA, that they would find you everywhere, that they had eyes on every street corner and every bar. She could imagine somebody dropping a quarter in a pay phone and saying, “I found that broad you been looking for.”

  Ridiculous, but she didn’t know it.

  Twenty hours after the shooting, she’d decided that honesty would be the best policy. She had a phone number that she’d written on a piece of cardboard th
at she kept in a wallet. It was fifteen digits long, all that would fit on the cardboard, to disguise the starting point. She’d never used the number herself, Soto had always done the calling, but now she lay on her stomach, on the hotel bed, and punched the number into her last burner.

  And quickly hung up.

  Lay with her eyes closed for ten minutes, choking with fear. No choice. She dialed it again, and a man answered on the second ring: “Si?”

  “Soto died.”

  “Is this the lady who travels with him?”

  “Yes.”

  “I will pass the message. Is this phone good?”

  “First-time burner,” Kort said.

  “We will call you back at this number in less than one hour.”

  In less than one hour, a different man called back, and she thought it was the Boss himself, the soft, remote voice, the electronic hum in the background.

  “Tell me . . .”

  “On the phone?” Kort asked.

  “It’s safe enough.”

  She told him all of it: she’d been wounded, that they had tracked the marshals, and therefore Poole, to Dallas. That they’d been sucked into a trap set by the marshals, that Soto had been caught. That Soto had told her that he would give up everything to avoid execution. That she thought it best that he not be given the chance. There was no possibility that she could take him away from marshals armed with machine guns, so she’d shot him. They’d been close to Poole, but now she didn’t know what to do.

  When she finished, the man asked, “Where are you now?”

  “A Holiday Inn . . .” She found the address on a room card and gave it to him.

  “You waited to call us.”

  “I was afraid . . . and running . . . and I had things to do. Things to get rid of,” she said.

  “Listen, lady, you have done very well. I am impressed. Stay where you are. Some more ladies will come to see you, today,” the Boss said. “Throw the telephone away and get a new one. When you get one, call this number, let it ring once, and then hang up.”