Naked Prey

by John Sandford

  Nobody else remembered talking to him.

  By the time they finished talking with other employees, Les had saved a dozen shots of the man, and two stitched-together composites, to a CD that could be opened on any PC with the Imaging program, which he said was most of them.

  “We still need the actual tapes,” Lucas told him.

  “We’re pulling them; we’ll hang on to them,” he said.

  THEY’D BEEN IN the casino for an hour and a half when Mitford called back. “We’re running with Amex. They accepted a faxed subpoena and they’re putting the list together now. They say they’ll have it in half an hour. I’m having copies faxed to the sheriff’s office up there, and another one down here. They say there might be a couple hundred names.”

  “We’ll head downtown,” Lucas said. “I’ve got a CD with some photos on it.”

  “We’d like to see some down here.”

  “I’ll e-mail them to you. You gonna be there?”

  “Until you guys go to bed,” Mitford said. “Washington just had a press conference in Grand Forks and he says the law enforcement agencies must be complicit in this crime—I’m reading this—either actually or morally. Then . . . ah, blah blah blah. I think he’s on his way up there to have a rally.”

  “Yeah? In Armstrong? Who’s gonna rally?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just telling you what he says.”

  “I’ll get back to you,” Lucas said.

  On the way out, they thanked Hoffman, agreed that Anderson probably hadn’t been playing around on his sister, and made arrangements to have the videotapes picked up by a BCA crime scene man.

  “SO WE GOT a face and a few hundred names,” Del said. He looked at his watch. “You think we’ll get him by midnight?”

  “We’re rolling,” Lucas said. “And I’ll tell you what: he left enough stuff on the bodies that when we identify him, we’ve got him. I’d bet that hair was his, I bet that blood on Warr’s face was his.”

  “Could be Cash’s.”

  “Not dripping down like that. It was fresh when she was hanging.”

  “God bless DNA,” Del said.

  ON THE WAY back to town, Lucas called Dickerson and filled him in. Then, “Did you get anything out of that motel room? Fingerprints, hair, anything?”

  “We’ve got an ocean of fingerprints, but we’ve also got some places that appear to have been wiped,” Dickerson said. “I wouldn’t get your hopes up.”

  “Did you hear anything from St. Paul about tracking down the Cherokee?”

  “If you go back a month, you can find maybe thirty Cherokee transactions in Minnesota. We’ve got the names on those, and we’re working with North and South Dakota, Missouri and Iowa. I think Iowa’s in, haven’t gotten word from the others yet. I’m not sure South Dakota is computerized enough to get what we need that quick.”

  “Let’s get what we can.”

  A BUNCH OF cops were leaning on the wall outside the Law Enforcement Center, smoking, when Lucas and Del pulled into the parking lot. Lucas had just gotten out of the car when his cell phone rang.

  “Yeah?”

  “Lucas, it’s Neil. I got the list on those cards down here, and it’ll be up there in the next couple of minutes. I don’t think you have to waste a lot of time checking it out.”

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause I think I know who it is.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a guy on the list named Hale Sorrell. You remember him?”

  “Sorrell? He’s . . . oh, shit.”

  Del said, “What?”

  Lucas ignored him, and asked Mitford, “Do you know him?”

  “Yeah. I once tried to get him to give some money to our guy, on the basis that our guy was a rational conservative Democrat. Sorrell wasn’t buying; he’s a dyed-in-the-wool Republican. Seemed like an okay guy. Shitload of money from Medlux.”

  “Big guy, but not fat, big shoulders, dark hair, middle forties, glasses, this guy had a recent beard . . .”

  “I don’t know if he wears glasses, but he’s at an age where he might. He’s forty-six. He could grow the beard. Everything else is right on.”

  “I’m gonna e-mail you a photo. Maybe a couple of them,” Lucas said. “Gimme an address.”

  “WHAT?” DEL ASKED, when Lucas rang off. “We got him?”

  “Maybe,” Lucas said. “Hale Sorrell? You remember?”

  Del thought for a moment, then a light flared behind his eyes. “Oh, shit.”

  “That’s what I said. Let’s get this list. Maybe they got a Tl or a DSL line out of here, we can send the photos from here.”

  THEY CROSSED THE parking lot at a half-trot. One of the deputies pushed away from the wall and said, “Chief Davenport . . . you remember me?”

  Lucas slowed down. He did remember the deputy, more or less. He’d beaten up the guy’s partner a few years before, in a different county, but not too far away. “Yeah, I do,” Lucas said. “What happened, you take a transfer?”

  “Moved over here when Sheriff Mason retired. My folks live over here. Anyway, have you seen the TV? The news?”

  “No. Bad?”

  “Pretty bad. That little girl, Letty, she was terrific, but man, they took some pictures of those people hanging in the trees, and they’re everywhere. They were on the CBS and ABC and NBC evening news, and they’re on CNN almost full-time. They got video of the bodies sort of swinging in the wind.”

  “Aw, Christ.”

  “Then that Washington guy gave a talk down in Grand Forks and they had this video picture behind him with the bodies hanging, and it looked like he was standing in there with them, and he was screaming about lynching.”

  “Maybe we better figure this out in a hurry.”

  “I’m pretty sure you can do it,” the deputy said. “I been telling the guys about you.”

  “Not too much, I hope,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah, I told them that part,” the deputy said. “That’s the best part. Uh, whatever happened to the girl? The girl that come up with you?”

  “Marcy Sherrill. She’s a lieutenant in Minneapolis, now. She runs the Intelligence unit.”

  “Really . . . jeez.” The deputy was impressed.

  “Gotta go,” Lucas said. “Nice talking to you again.”

  As he and Del went inside, he heard the deputy’s voice, “. . . got a pair of knockers on her like muskmelons and . . .”

  “You got groupies,” Del said.

  “Groupie with a good eye for knockers,” Lucas said, amused. “Muskmelons . . . those are cantaloupes, right?”

  THE SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT had a fast line out. Anderson and a dozen other cops were in the building when Lucas and Del arrived, and came out to meet them. “Something happen?”

  “We might have a name,” Lucas said. “We need to send some pictures to St. Paul, right now.”

  Anderson’s jaw dropped. He stood like that for a moment, looked at a deputy who’d trailed him in, and then said, “Well, Jiminy, who is it? You mean a name for the killer?”

  “Possibly. Know in a minute, if I can get an Internet connection on a computer with a CD drive.”

  “I got one in my office.”

  Lucas followed him back to a big wood-paneled office with a blue high-pile carpet, seven-foot mahogany desk and a wall full of photographs. The sheriff with local politicians, his wife, his children, other sheriffs, cops. A computer sat on a side-table with an Aeron chair in front of it. Lucas dropped into the chair, brought up the computer, slipped the CD into the CD tray, and called up a Qwest connection. Ten seconds later, the best of the stitched photos was on its way to St. Paul; a minute later, another was on its way. Six deputies were crowded into the office now, and Lucas thought about the other BCA crew. He punched in Dickerson’s number.

  “Dickerson . . .”

  “This is Davenport. Where are you?”

  “Just outside of Armstrong. Thinking about heading home.”

  “We got a name. We’re down a
t the sheriff’s office. If the name is good, it ties together a lot of stuff. The money, the cell in the basement.”

  “What’s the name?”

  “Hale Sorrell.”

  Long pause. “Oh, shit.”

  “HALE SORRELL?” ANDERSON demanded when Lucas rang off. “You mean the Rochester guy?”

  Lucas nodded, leaned back in the chair, crossed his legs. “Daughter was kidnapped last month and never came back,” he said. “We’re not sure yet, but it’s a possibility.”

  “You got pictures of him?” one of the deputies asked.

  “We’ve got these pictures,” Lucas said, tapping a photograph on the monitor screen. “They’re not good, but they might be good enough. Once we get a solid maybe, and some DNA returns back from the medical examiner, then we’ll know.”

  “That means his kid is out at . . . might have been at . . . her . . .”

  “She might still be out there, somewhere, at the house,” Lucas said.

  “Did you know Sorrell was from up here, originally?” one of the deputies asked. “I mean, not right here, but down to Red Lake Falls? His father still lives down there, somewhere. He’s in a nursing home or something.”

  Lucas said: “That’s interesting. Maybe somebody around here set him up?”

  “Could be, I guess.”

  Another deputy said, “Maybe he was fooling around with somebody. Red Lake Falls is pretty much known for its beautiful women.”

  “That’s always a useful piece of information.”

  LUCAS’S CELL PHONE rang and the governor was there. “Lucas. Neil brought me up to date on this Hale Sorrell thing. I know him pretty well, I looked at the pictures.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Neil and I agree. It sure looks like him. Not positive, but boy, it sure looks like him.”

  “We have a lot of DNA, sir. If we can get somebody to officially point the finger, we could get a warrant for some DNA samples and settle it.”

  “The devil’s gonna be in the details. We don’t want to be wrong. If we had to, is there any way you could hang this on the sheriff up there?”

  “The sheriff’s a pretty sharp guy, sir,” Lucas said, looking up at Anderson, who appeared confused, and mouthed at Lucas, Who is it? Lucas went back to the phone. “I think we could probably work something out, if we had to—but before we do anything official, I’d like to get some good photos of Sorrell, put them in a photo spread and show them to a woman up here who actually talked to him. If she IDs him, we’d be on solid ground asking for the DNA.”

  “That sounds good. I’ll get McCord on it right now. There’ve got to be some publicity shots around. He’s served on committees and so forth. Can we transmit them up to you?”

  “I think so. You’ll have to talk to the local people, I don’t know exactly what the printing facilities are here . . . hang on.” He took the phone down and asked, “Do we have a photo printer of some kind?”

  One of the deputies said, “Sure. We’ve got two or three different kinds. Standard stuff.”

  Back to the phone: “We’re good, sir. When your guys find a photo, send it up here to the sheriff’s department.”

  “We can do that,” Henderson said. “Man, you moved fast—this is exactly what I wanted. That asshole Washington hasn’t even gotten out of Grand Forks yet. He’s supposedly going up to the hanging tree to make a speech.”

  “Sir, we can’t let that happen. It’s really a bleak place—it looks like it was invented for a hanging. The image’ll be so strong that nothing else will make any difference, nothing we say. Maybe we could keep him out of there on the grounds that it’s a crime scene.”

  “Can we blame that on the sheriff, too?”

  “I think it could be worked out, sir.”

  “Is he right there, listening?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Let me talk to him. Say something that would lead to me talking to him.”

  Lucas nodded. “I think you should talk to Sheriff Anderson about that, sir.”

  “Good. Give him the phone.”

  Lucas passed the phone to Anderson, saying, “The governor. He needs to speak with you.”

  Anderson took the phone. “Uh, Governor Henderson . . .”

  As Anderson talked, Lucas said to the group of deputies, “Is there somebody here who usually handles photo spreads? We’ll need a half-dozen pictures of white men with dark hair, probably in business suits, looking charming. Like a political picture.” He looked around at the pictures on the walls. “Like these. Like that one.” He pointed a finger at a smiling head.

  One of the deputies said, “We got that.”

  The rest of it took an hour and a half. Lucas was in a semi-frenzy, driven by the momentum of the day, and Dickerson arrived, running hot with lights and siren, wanting to be there if it all cracked open. Forty minutes after Lucas talked to the governor, the sheriff’s ID division took the transmission of two recent photos of Hale Sorrell, one a formal portrait, the other taken at a press conference after the disappearance of his daughter.

  A deputy put together two different photo spreads: one of dark-haired white men in informal situations, another of dark-haired white men in formal poses. Then he retransmitted all the dummy photos to himself, so they’d be printed on the same paper and have the same general look.

  Hoffman was still on the job at the casino. Small Bear was on the floor, he said, pushing her change cart.

  “Keep her there,” Lucas said. “We’re on the way.”

  LUCAS, DEL, AND Dickerson went with Anderson in a sheriff’s truck, a comfortable GMC Yukon XL with a big heater. At the casino, Hoffman met them at the door. “Small Bear’s upstairs,” he said. “How’re we doing?”

  “Gonna find out,” Lucas said.

  Small Bear was sitting at a table in a conference room, her hands folded in front of her, looking a little frightened. Lucas explained quickly: “We have two sets of photos. We’re gonna show you one set, then ask if you see the man who was here last night, and then we’ll show you the other set. Okay?”

  She nodded. Lucas spread the informal photos in front of her. She looked at them, slowly, slowly, pushing one after another away from her, until finally she was left only with Sorrell’s. “I think this might be him. Not a very good picture.”

  “Okay.” Lucas scooped up the deck of photos, put them back in the brown envelope they came in, opened a second envelope, and took out the formal shots. This time, Small Bear didn’t hesitate.

  “I’m pretty sure this is him,” she said, tapping the photograph of Sorrell.

  They all stood in silence, nobody moving, nothing audible but some breathing, and then Anderson groaned, “Jiminy,” and Lucas turned and looked at Del.

  Del nodded. “Got him.”

  8

  Margery Singleton looked like a green heron—a sharp-billed stalking bird with a mouth like a rip in a piece of rawhide, an arrowhead nose, rattlesnake eyes; her eyebrows plucked naked and redrawn with a green pencil. She worked the first shift at Elysian Manor, pushing patients to and fro, cleaning up after them, rolling pills when a registered nurse wasn’t available. Her best friend, Flo Anderson, was a registered nurse, having put in her two years at Fargo, and they’d worked out a system where, if somebody needed a shot or to get blood taken, Margery could do it and Flo could sign. The patients, most of whom had Alzheimer’s, didn’t know one way or the other.

  Margery heard about the hanging of Warr and Cash from a breathless young nurse’s aide who came back from lunch bright eyed with a tale she’d heard from a sheriff’s deputy at the minimart.

  “They’re hanging down there, naked as jaybirds, all purple and frozen. The woman’s tongue was sticking out like this:” She tilted her head, hung her tongue out of the side of her mouth and crossed her eyes. Straightening, she added in a lower voice, “They said that the black guy had a penis that was about ten inches long.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Margery said, her rattlesnake eyes fixi
ng the young woman. “I seen two thousand dicks since I been in this place and there ain’t been one of them more than seven.”

  “How many black men have been in here?” the nurse asked, an eyebrow going up. Had the old bat there.

  “Hanged in a tree?”

  “That’s what they say. Do you think Loren might know more about it?”

  “I’ll find out,” Margery said. She looked at her watch. She had another two hours before she could get off.

  A supervisor named Burt stuck his head into the station where they were talking. “Old man Barrows got shit all over the couch. Clean it up, okay?”

  Burt continued down the hall and Margery muttered, “Clean it up yourself, asshole.” But she went to get her spray bottle and sponge, and the nurse’s aide said, as she left, “If you hear anything from Loren, let me know. I mean, jeez.”

  LOREN SINGLETON FINALLY rolled out of bed at two o’clock. He’d been unable to sleep much, dozing off only to see, in his dreams, Deon and Jane hanging from a tree. He stretched, scratched, went into the bathroom. As he shaved, looking in the mirror, he started thinking about his latest Cadillac restoration. The car was at Calb’s, and that could be inconvenient. The more he shaved, the more inconvenient it seemed. He finished shaving, showered, brushed his teeth, got dressed, and called Gene Calb.

  Calb came on the phone and said, “Katina said you’d heard.”

  “Woke me up on the clock radio this morning,” Singleton said. “I thought it might be a good idea to move the Caddy outa there, you know, until things quiet down.”

  Calb nodded. “Yes. Right away. Where do you want it?”

  “My garage. You got somebody who could drive it down for me? I’ll drive them back.”

  “I’ll get Sherm, he isn’t doing anything. So—what do you think?”

  Singleton shook his head. “I don’t know. I wonder if it has anything to do with Joe? You think they were fighting? I mean, Deon never said anything.”