Golden Prey

by John Sandford

  “That would be excellent,” Rosie said. “Move to Palm Springs, play some golf, take it easy.”

  “This is fuckin’ nuts,” Kort said.

  Annie said, “Shut up. You don’t know what you’re talking about. It won’t hurt to look, and if we can find some way to recover Box, that’s all . . .” She groped for a word, and finally said, “Upside.”

  —

  ONCE BOX spoke the “lawyer” word, the questioning had to stop. When he was sure there were no cameras or recording equipment running, Lucas tried non-subtle extortion: “I’m not going to ask any more questions until a lawyer talks to you, but I’ll tell you, Dora. You’re implicated in the murder of five people back in Biloxi. You were living with Poole, you knew he was a fugitive, even if we don’t get him, we’ve got you. We’ll take you back to Mississippi and let those people deal with you—and Mississippi can be pretty goddamn primitive when it wants to be, after a mass murder. You aren’t walking on this one. Not without some help, and that’s help we could give you.”

  Box looked at him, hate in her eyes, and Lucas began to believe that she might once have cut somebody’s head off. She said, “Lawyer.”

  —

  LUCAS, BOB, RAE, and a highway patrol sergeant met outside the interview room and Rae asked the sergeant, “You got her purse?”

  “We do. We’ve got both a purse and a travel bag.”

  Rae said, “Let’s take a look.”

  The purse was a small Louis Vuitton leather satchel and contained a wallet with a driver’s license in the name of Grace Pelham and another in the name of Sandra Duncan. Neither had an address that went back to the house in Dallas.

  The travel bag contained two bottles of water, some tissue, a box of Tampax, some liquid hand cleanser, and in a small side pocket, a legitimate-looking American passport with a two-year-old photo of Box and the name Michelle Martin.

  “These guys were psycho about security,” Bob said, flipping through the passport. There were no visa stamps. “Wonder if they’re running for the border?”

  Lucas asked the patrolman to run the three separate names for connections to vehicle license tags. He nodded, said, “We can do that in a couple of minutes,” and, “We haven’t touched the truck in case you want it processed.”

  “I’m not sure what we’d be looking for, but I’d like to go through it,” Lucas said. “How far is it from here?”

  “Way we fly, another twenty minutes down the highway.”

  “Let’s go take a look at it,” Lucas said. “We’re not going to get anything from Box right now. Major Highstreet said you could run her into Fort Worth for us. She might soften up once we’ve had her inside a federal lockup for a few days.”

  “We can do that. I’ll lead you back to Gordon, I’ll have one of the guys move Box into Fort Worth.”

  They left in a five-car caravan, two patrol cars with Lucas, Bob, and Rae bringing up the rear. As they were leaving, the patrol sergeant told them the two driver’s licenses were legitimate, that there were no tickets issued to either one, and there were no vehicles associated with either name.

  The jail was located in a residential neighborhood and Lucas paid no attention to the RV parked down the street, or to the small red car tucked in behind it. RVs and red cars were a dime a dozen.

  —

  THE FORD pickup truck was exactly where Box had left it, on the side of the road. A bored highway patrolman was keeping an eye on it.

  When they arrived, he came over and introduced himself as Charles Townes, the cop who’d spotted Box’s truck. “I chased her into the trees over on the other side of the interstate. Got hung up on a cut bank and by the time I got loose, I’d lost her. She might have got away if she’d been a little quicker, but we had a chopper out looking for some boy racers on the Fort Worth Highway. I called him in and he came right down and spotted her.”

  “Good work all the way around,” Lucas said. “I’ll drop a note to Major Highstreet, telling him that.”

  “Appreciate it.”

  Rae had a box of vinyl gloves in her gear bag, and they all pulled them on before they started digging through the truck. Bob found one thing of interest in the glove box: there were several insurance certificates made out to a Brian Dumble on the truck, dating back five or six years—and one certificate for a Lynn Marshall on an Audi convertible.

  “They put the Audi certificate in the wrong vehicle,” Bob said. “It’s got the tag number on it.”

  “This is good. Have Townes check on Brian Dumble for a driver’s license, and any cars connected to the name or to the Marshall name. Let’s get that Audi tag number and the other stuff out to the patrol.”

  The truck had furniture in the back, and a suitcase full of women’s clothing, but nothing that gave them anything useful. They were finishing the search when Rae said, “The most important thing is, we haven’t found a single telephone.”

  “I was just thinking about that,” Lucas said. “There’s no way in hell that she didn’t have a phone with her.”

  Townes was standing outside the truck and he said, “The helicopter pilot said she rolled down the window a ways back down the road and waved at him, like she was giving up. I wonder if she might have been throwing something out, instead of waving at him?”

  “Good thought,” Lucas said. “Can you call the guy?”

  “Yup. I’ll go do that,” Townes said, and he went back to his car.

  Lucas, Bob, and Rae had given up on the truck when Townes came back. He said, “I talked to the pilot, he said it wasn’t too long before she pulled over. Probably less than a hundred yards.”

  “We need to look,” Lucas said.

  They had six people to walk the roadside ditch. Lucas wanted to start back farther than indicated by the pilot, so they wouldn’t worry about whether they were cutting it too close. There was a dead tree on the far side of the ditch, halfway to their starting point, and the sergeant said, “Let me break some branches off that tree. Use them for pokers.”

  “Probably won’t find it, if we have to poke around for it,” Bob said.

  “I’m not thinking about the phone, I’m thinking about snakes,” the sergeant said, with a grin.

  “Tell you what, I’ll supervise the search from up here on the road,” Rae said. “I don’t do snakes.”

  The side of the road was a crush of dry yellow grass, some of it with nasty little yellow burrs; a perfect hiding place for snakes, in Lucas’s opinion, though, being from Minnesota, he had no idea where a rattlesnake might hide in real life. In movies, they were usually coiled on a rock, where they were easy to spot; here, they’d come out of foot-high grass and nail your ankle. He worked his stick assiduously, and other than a bunch of grasshoppers, disturbed no wildlife.

  They were sixty yards from Box’s truck, snake-free, when the sergeant spotted the phone.

  —

  “A BURNER,” Lucas said, as he squatted over it. “Cheapest one you can buy.”

  “Might as well pick it up—we know who had it, we’re not losing anything by smudging up her prints,” Rae said.

  Lucas nodded, picked it up, turned it on. There was only one number in the file of recent calls. He looked up at Bob and Rae and said, “Now we’re cooking with gas.”

  —

  LUCAS CALLED Forte in Washington, gave him the number for the phone and the number that had been called on it. Forte said he’d track it and get back to them.

  The truck, Lucas told the patrolman, should be taken to wherever the highway patrol took seized vehicles. “Somebody will get back to you about it, but I don’t know who,” he said. “There’s gonna be a blizzard of paperwork starting about tomorrow.”

  “Where are we going?” Bob asked.

  “Back to Fort Worth. They’re running, and if they’ve gotten a long way down the road, we’ll want to be close to an
airplane.”

  “You want to go back in a hurry?” the sergeant asked.

  “That’d be terrific,” Lucas said.

  Rae: “Should we stop in Weatherford, see if Box has changed her mind?”

  Lucas asked the sergeant how long it would take to get from the jail to the airport: “Less than an hour,” the sergeant said.

  Lucas looked at the others, and Bob said, “I don’t think we’ll get anything more from her. Like you said, she might soften up if she’s locked up for a couple of days. If you call Forte and tell him we need a chopper or a plane, it could be waiting for us when we get there . . .”

  “Let’s go to the airport,” Lucas told the sergeant. “Lights and sirens.”

  —

  LUCAS CALLED Forte and told him what they were doing; Forte said the phone search was under way. Forte called back a half hour later as they circled north of Fort Worth: “Okay, the target phone is down south of you, on Highway 84 near McGregor. You got a road map?”

  “I got an iPad,” Lucas said. “But I can’t look at it right now . . . Just tell me.”

  “McGregor is well down south and it looks to me like they’re headed for I-10, which will take them west into New Mexico, Arizona, and California. I-10 runs along the border with Mexico, so it could be they’re planning on crossing.”

  “Box had a good-looking passport in her purse, under a different name,” Lucas said.

  “Okay, so there’s that. Anyway, Box was on I-20, which also intersects with I-10 near El Paso,” Forte said. “Maybe they were planning to get together in El Paso—after that, it’s a coin toss.”

  “They don’t seem like people who’d be comfortable down in Mexico,” Lucas said. “Though that’s just a guess. Nothing in our paper suggests that either one of them speaks Spanish, or has ever been there.”

  “So what do you want to do?” Forte said. “I have a plane, if you want one. You could be in El Paso four hours before Poole gets there.”

  “Ah, Jesus,” Lucas said. And, “All right. Let’s do it. Tell us where to go.”

  —

  THEY FLEW out of DFW an hour later, in an aging Learjet. Lucas knew it was aging because of the worn paint around the door and the worn seats in back. “How old is this thing?” he asked the copilot.

  “Don’t know exactly,” said the copilot, who looked like he was twelve. “It’s a good, reliable aircraft most of the time.”

  “Wait a minute . . .”

  “Pilot joke,” the copilot said. “But I really don’t know how old it is.”

  “Were you born when it was made?”

  The copilot said, “Better question would be . . . was my mom born? Just kiddin’. But really, I’ve flown this thing all over Texas and it’s solid.”

  “If it starts to crash, I’m going to shoot you before we hit the ground,” Lucas said. “Try to keep that in mind.”

  “You got guns?”

  “Yeah, we got guns.”

  “That shooting thing . . . that was a marshal joke?”

  Lucas gave him a hard look: “Maybe.”

  —

  LUCAS STRAPPED himself into one of the worn seats and cursed himself once again for not going to Mass more often than Easter Sunday. He braced himself for the crash as they lifted off, and when there wasn’t one, tried to sleep but failed. He wound up rereading the paper on Poole. Bob did sleep and Rae took a compact camera out of her gear bag and took some photos of the landscape below and one of Lucas reading the paper. “You are a picture of diligence,” she said.

  “I’m a picture of abject fear. If I had my choice between flying to El Paso or getting a colonoscopy, I’d have to think about it.”

  “Oh, my,” she said.

  They were on the ground, still alive, in El Paso at one o’clock on a hot October afternoon. Lucas had been there once before, when one of his men at the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, Del Capslock, had been shot by elderly gun smugglers.

  Bad history.

  Bad omen?

  He wasn’t sure.

  None of them had looked at their phones while they were in the air. On the ground, Lucas looked at his and found a message from Highstreet, the highway patrol major, that said only “Call me immediately.”

  22

  THE WOMEN were not getting along.

  Annie and Rosie were not exactly fashionistas, but they had style. Tight black jeans and high-tech boots, silky-looking blouses, Rosie in pale blue and Annie in coral. They both wore expensive, masculine-but-feminine Aviators. Even the prison tats were keys to a hipness unachievable by the likes of Kort.

  Kort, on the other hand, looked like she’d just been wheeled out of a Salvation Army store, after cutting her own hair with a jackknife. She could have spent three days in a beauty salon and it wouldn’t have changed her face, her body, or the scowl she’d worn since birth—part of the burden she’d carried with her. The sadness and unfairness of her plight was somewhat understood by Rosie and Annie, who had had harsh upbringings of their own—Rosie had been turned out by her stepfather when she was fourteen, Annie had simply been kicked out by her parents when she was eighteen—but living with Kort’s constant complaining, her fundamental evilness, her joy at seeing other people suffer, and her chain-saw voice, was becoming a trial.

  The complaints never stopped: “What happened to the fuckin’ air-conditioning? Must be a hundred degrees in here . . . The coffee really sucks, you think you might stop somewhere? I’m getting sick riding sideways . . . Can’t believe you’re doing this, you’re dragging me into this . . .”

  They’d driven from Dallas to Weatherford, where Box was supposedly being held in the county jail. They had towed Kort’s rental car to Weatherford; it made them look even more harmless than the RV did, and they had the towing equipment to do it. At Weatherford, they’d looked at the situation, and then Annie and Rosie had cooked up what Kort called a harebrained scheme, and the other two women admitted that it might be.

  On the other hand, it seemed like it might work.

  They were watching the jail from the RV, and at that point, hadn’t seen much except a lot of cops coming and going. Kort continued to bitch, and Rosie finally said, “You don’t want to be part of it, we’ll drop you off at a bus station. We do need your car. And if the Boss asks about you, we’ll have to tell him that you split.”

  Kort thought about walking away, decided that as crazy as the rescue attempt might be, she’d rather not have the Boss on her neck, especially not if he had another Kort stashed away.

  Still, it was worth arguing about, and Kort was still doing that when they saw Davenport leave the jail, trailed by two other plainclothes cops—“Those are the marshals from the parking lot where Soto got shot,” Kort blurted.

  “You mean, where you shot Soto?” Annie asked.

  Kort didn’t say anything and they watched the marshals and some highway patrolmen roll out of the parking lot in a convoy.

  “Didn’t have Box,” Rosie said. She turned and looked at Annie. “Maybe you guys should unhook the car and stow the hitch.”

  “I can’t believe this,” Kort moaned.

  She and Annie unhooked the rental car and stuck the hitch equipment back in the RV’s cargo hold. When the car was free, Kort got behind the wheel while Annie rode shotgun. Not literally shotgun: literally fully automatic M16 with two thirty-round mags, purchased new from the Mexican Army and extensively tested in the swamps east of Houston.

  When they were set, Rosie drove away and began rolling the RV slowly around the suburban roads on the east side of Weatherford, never straying too far from the cluster of roads that led from the jail to I-20.

  —

  LUCAS, BOB, AND RAE had just gotten up in the air when the College-Sounding Guy called Rosie and said, “They’re checking her out. They’re moving her.”

  The C
ollege-Sounding Guy was now an uninvited guest in the Parker County computer system, which, he said, was wide open. “They made it easy to get into, because they got so many dumbasses who need to get into it. Their security stuff dates to about, oh, the moon landing.”

  Rosie called Annie, and Annie said to Kort, “You fuck this up, honest to God I’ll shoot you in the back of the head. I got two felonies on my card, and if I get busted for this, I’m going away forever, so it won’t make any difference if you’re the third one.”

  Kort began to tear up: “You’re so fuckin’ crazy, you’re both so fuckin’ crazy . . .”

  “Shut up and drive when I tell you.”

  —

  KORT AND SOTO had had a good photo of Dora Box, so when Box was brought out of the jail, cuffed, and stuck in the back of a patrol car, they both recognized her.

  “Okay, here’s a problem,” Annie said, looking at the highway patrol car. “That’s a Dodge Charger, a totally hot vehicle. If he cranks it up, you’re gonna have to jump all over the gas pedal. I don’t think he’ll do that, but he could.”

  “You fuckin’ bitch, you fuckin’ bitch . . .”

  Annie popped the passenger door, went around and got in the backseat, got comfortable, took the M16 off the floor, and touched the back of Kort’s head, just behind her right ear. “Get ready.”

  The patrol car rolled out of the parking lot, and Kort, staying well back, followed.

  —

  THEY DIDN’T HAVE the local knowledge to tell them how the highway patrolman would get to Fort Worth, but had guessed it would be one of three alternatives: straight south to I-20, diagonally east to I-20 on East Bankhead Highway, or diagonally east on Fort Worth Highway. They’d studied all three, working out possibilities, and guessed he’d most likely take Bankhead, with the Fort Worth Highway as the second choice. The south route probably the third choice.

  They were hoping for Bankhead, and when the patrol car made the right turn onto it, Annie, in the backseat, said, “Yes!” and called Rosie and said, “Bankhead, be ready.”