Broken Prey

by John Sandford

  Elle: “I know.” Pause. “He won’t stop.”

  “No,” Lucas said. “He won’t.”

  A WEEK AFTER THAT CONVERSATION, a few minutes before noon, on a dry day with sunny skies, Lucas sat in a booth in a hot St. Paul bar looking at a lonely piece of cheeseburger, two untouched buns, and a Diet Coke.

  The bar was hot because there’d been a power outage, and when the power came back on, an errant surge had done something bad to the air conditioner. From time to time, Lucas could hear the manager, in his closet-sized office, screaming into a telephone, among the clash and tinkle of dishes and silverware, about warranties and who’d never get his work again, and that included his apartments.

  Two sweating lawyers sat across from Lucas and took turns jabbing their index fingers at his chest.

  “I’m telling you,” George Hyde said, jabbing, “this list has no credibility. No credibility. Am I getting through to you, Davenport? Am I coming in?”

  Hyde’s pal Ira Shapira said, “You know what? You leave the Beatles out, but you got folk on it. “Heart of Saturday Night”? That’s folk.”

  “Tom Waits would beat the shit out of you if he heard you say that,” Lucas said. “Besides, it’s a great song.” He lifted his empty glass to a barmaid, who nodded at him. “I’m not saying the list is perfect,” he said. “It’s just an attempt—”

  “The list is shit. It has no musical, historical, or ethical basis,” Hyde interrupted.

  “Or sexual,” Shapira added.

  LUCAS WAS A TALL MAN, restless, dark hair flecked with gray, with cool blue eyes. His face was touched with scars, including one that ran down through an eyebrow, and up into his hairline; and another that looked like a large upside-down apostrophe, where a little girl had shot him in the throat and a doctor had slashed his throat open so he could breathe. He had a chipped tooth and what he secretly thought was a pleasant, even pleasing smile—but a couple of women had told him that his smile frightened them a little.

  He was wearing a gray summer-weight wool-and-silk suit from Prada, over black shoes and with a pale blue silk golf shirt, open at the neck; a rich-jock look. He’d once been a college jock, a first-line defenseman with the University of Minnesota’s hockey team. Lucas was tough enough, but he’d picked up six pounds over the winter. They’d lingered all through the spring and into the summer, and he’d finally put himself on the South Beach Diet. An insane diet, he thought, but one that his wife had recommended, just before she left town.

  He leaned back, chewing the last bite of cheeseburger, yearning for the buns. He hadn’t had a carbohydrate in a week. Now he held his hands a foot apart, and after he’d swallowed, said, earnestly, rationally: “Listen, guys. Rock and its associated music divides into two great streams. In one, you’ve got Pat Boone, Doris Day, the Beatles, Donny and Marie Osmond, the Carpenters, Sonny and Cher, Elton John, and Tiffany, or whatever her name is—the chick with no stomach. Anybody that you might snap your fingers to. In the other stream, you’ve got Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, the Rolling Stones, Tina Turner, Aerosmith, Tom Petty. Like that.” He touched himself on the chest. “That’s the one I prefer. I guess you guys are . . . finger snappers.”

  “Snappers?” Hyde shouted. A couple of guys at the bar turned to look at him, the bored, heavy-lidded howya-doin’ look. In the back, the manager screamed, “I don’t give a fuck what’s happening on Grand Avenue, I want a fuckin’ truck outside this place in three minutes . . .”

  “If you’re so much against snappers, how come you got the fuckin’ Eagles on your list?” Shapira demanded. “I mean, the Eagles?”

  “Only ‘Lyin’ Eyes,’ ” Lucas said, looking away. “I feel guilty about it, but how can you avoid that one?”

  Hyde sighed, nodded, took a hit on his drink: “Yeah, you’re right about that. When you’re right, you’re right.”

  “A piece of country trash, if you ask me,” Shapira said.

  “About the best song of the last fifty years,” Lucas said. “Rolling Stone had a survey of the best five hundred rock songs. They had ‘Hotel California’ and ‘Desperado’ on the list, and not ‘Lyin’ Eyes.’ What kind of shit is that? Those guys have got their heads so far up their asses they can see their own duodenums.”

  “Duodeni,” said Shapira.

  “You ever hear ‘Hotel California’ by the Gipsy Kings?” Hyde asked. “Now there’s a tune . . .”

  “Goddamnit,” Lucas said. He took a black hand-sized Moleskine notebook out of his pocket. “I forgot about that one. I got too goddamn many songs already.”

  LUCAS WAS LOOKING for the barmaid, for another Diet Coke, when his cell phone rang. He fished it out of his pocket, and Hyde said, “They ought to ban those things in bars. They distract you from your drinking.” Lucas put the phone to his ear and stuck a finger in his opposite ear, so he could hear.

  His secretary said, “I’ve got Gene Nordwall on the line, and he wants to speak to you. He says it’s urgent. I didn’t know what to tell him: You want me to put him through?”

  “Put him on,” Lucas said. He sat through a couple of clicks, and then a man said, “Hello?” and Lucas said, “Gene? This is Lucas. How’s it going?”

  “Not going worth a good goddamn,” Nordwall said. He sounded angry and short of breath, as if he’d just been chased somewhere. Lucas could see him in his mind’s eye, a tall, overweight chunk of Norwegian authority, a man who’d look most natural in Oshkosh bib overalls. Nordwall was sheriff of Blue Earth County, fifty or sixty miles southwest of the Twin Cities. “Can you come down here?”

  “Mankato?”

  “Six miles south, out in the country,” Nordwall said. “We got a killing down here like to made me puke. We called in your crime scene crew—but we need you.”

  “Whattaya got?”

  “Somebody killed a kid and tortured his dad to death,” Nordwall said. “Tortured him and raped him, we think, and maybe cut his throat with a razor. I ain’t seen anything like it in fifty years.”

  Sloan’s case popped into Lucas’s head: “You say it’s a guy?”

  “Yeah, local guy. Adam Rice.”

  “It’s not a gay thing? Or did he screw around with bikers or . . .”

  “He was absolutely straight,” Nordwall said. “I’ve known him since he was a kid.”

  “And he was raped?”

  “Jesus Christ, you want a photograph?” Nordwall said, the anger flashing again. “He was fuckin’ raped, pardon my French.”

  Lucas waited for a second, until Nordwall got himself back together. “Are you right there, Gene?”

  “I’m out in the side yard, Lucas. Came runnin’ out of there, like to strangled myself to death on this old clothesline.”

  “Was the guy’s body, you know, arranged? Or was he just left however he died?”

  A pause, and then Nordwall asked, “How’d you know that? What they did with him?”

  “I’ll be down there in an hour,” Lucas said. “Don’t let anybody touch anything. Get out of the house. We’re gonna work this inch by inch.”

  “We’ll be standing in the yard, waitin’,” Nordwall said.

  “Gimme your cell-phone number, and tell me how I get to this place . . .”

  “WHAT’S GOING ON?” Hyde asked when Lucas punched off.

  “Got a bad killing down by Mankato,” Lucas said. He finished his Diet Coke in a single gulp, dropped a twenty on the table. “Pay this for me, will you, guys? I gotta get my ass down there.”

  “Too bad,” Hyde said. “I’ve got a closing on a shopping center at two o’clock. I thought you might want to see it.”

  LUCAS GOT SLOAN on his cell phone as he went out the door: “Where you at?”

  “Sitting at my desk reading a British Esquire,” Sloan said. “They got nudity now.”

  “You might want to spend some time looking at the clothes . . . Listen, get a squad, lights, and sirens, get down to the top of the Twenty-fourth Avenue off-ramp to the Mall of America. I’ll be down there fast
as I can make it: twelve minutes. You gotta run.”

  “Where’re we going?”

  “Mankato. It’s weird, but we might have something on your nut case.”

  OFF THE PHONE, Lucas jogged down the street to the Marshall Field parking ramp. He’d taken the Porsche to work that morning, which was good. He had a new truck, but the truck was awkward at speed and he was in a hurry. He wanted to see the scene in the brightest possible daylight, and he wanted to see neighbors, rubberneckers, and visitors as they came by the murder scene.

  Rubberneckers.

  “Goddamnit,” he muttered to himself. He slapped his pockets as he jogged, found the slip of paper with Nordwall’s number on it, and called him back.

  “Gene, this is Lucas again. I’m heading for my car. Listen, put a guy down by the road . . . How far is this house from the road?”

  “Couple hundred feet, maybe. Old farmhouse.”

  “Put a guy down by the road and have him take down the license number of every car that comes along. Don’t stop them from coming. Let them go by, let’em rubberneck, but I want all the numbers. Put your guy where he can’t be seen.”

  “How about a photographer?”

  “That’d be good, but don’t put somebody out there who’ll screw it up, so we get a bunch of out-of-focus pictures we can’t read. Better to write the numbers down.”

  “We’ll do both,” Nordwall said.

  THEN LUCAS WAS INTO THE RAMP, into the car, out on the street, slicing through traffic in the C4, to the I-35E ramp, down the ramp and south, running fifty miles an hour above the speed limit, across the Mississippi to I-494, west on 494 across the Minnesota River, and up the Twenty-fourth Avenue ramp.

  The Minneapolis squad was sitting at the top of the ramp, lights flashing into the sunshine. Sloan got out of the squad, jogged around the back end of the truck, and said, “The all-time speed record from the airport to Mankato is an hour and one minute.”

  “Must have been an old lady in a Packard,” Lucas said.

  “Actually, it was myself in a fifteen-year-old bottle green Pontiac LeMans my old man gave me,” Sloan said as he strapped in.

  “Do tell.”

  Lucas blew through the red light and down the ramp and they were gone west and south into the green ocean of corn and soybeans of rural southern Minnesota.

  3

  THEY WERE SLOWED BY ROADWORK north of the city of Mankato, where one side of the divided highway had buckled, and traffic was switched to the east lane.

  “Wonder if they bother to put concrete in the fuckin’ roads anymore,” Sloan grumbled. “Everything falls apart. The bridge over to Hudson was up for what, six or seven years, and they’re tearing the whole thing apart again?”

  “Thinking about it will drive you crazy,” Lucas said. When he had a chance, he pulled the Porsche onto the shoulder of the road, hopped out, stuck a flasher on the roof, and used it to jump the waiting lines of traffic.

  On the way down, Lucas told Sloan what Nordwall had said about the killing, and Sloan had grown morose: “If I’d just gotten a break. One fuckin’ thing. I couldn’t get my fingernails under anything, you know?”

  “Maybe it’s not your guy, or it’s a coincidence. The victim this time is male,” Lucas said.

  “Seen it before, nut cases who go both ways.”

  They talked about serial killers. All major metro areas had them, sometimes two and three at a time. The public had the impression that they were rare. They weren’t.

  “I remember once, I was in LA on a pickup. The L.A. Times had a story that said that the cops thought there might be a serial killer working in such-and-such a neighborhood,” Sloan said. “The story just mentioned it in passing, like it was going to rain on Wednesday.”

  THEY CAME UP BEHIND a pickup struggling through the traffic, and flicked past it. A woman’s hand came out of the passenger-side window and gave them the finger. Lucas caught it in the rearview mirror and grinned. Generally, he felt some sympathy for women who’d give the finger to cops, especially if they were good-looking. The women, not the cops.

  “ONE THING ABOUT THIS GUY—he’s leaving the bodies right in our faces. He took Larson somewhere to torture her, killed her somewhere else, and then brought her back and posed her almost in her own neighborhood . . . the neighborhood where we’re most likely to take a lot of shit, where it’d get the most attention,” Lucas said. “This guy, this Rice guy, he tortures and leaves in his own house . . .”

  “He’s probably scouting locations, putting them where they attract attention, but he feels safe doing it.”

  “For sure,” Lucas said. “None of this feels spontaneous.”

  BESIDES THE SERIAL-KILLER TALK, they argued a little about Lucas’s rock ’n’ roll list. Lucas’s wife, Weather, had given him an Apple iPod for his birthday and a gift certificate for one hundred songs from the Apple Web site. He’d taken the limit of one hundred songs as an invitation for discipline: one hundred songs, no more, no less, the best one hundred songs of the rock era.

  Word of the list had spread through the BCA, and among his friends, and after a month of work, he had a hundred and fifty solid possibilities with more coming in every day. He still hadn’t ordered a single tune. “What bothers me is, I think I’m just about set, and then I’ll hear something I completely forgot about, like ‘Radar Love,’ ” he told Sloan. “I mean, that’s gotta go on the list. What else did I forget?”

  “One thing, since you’re mostly making it for road trips—it can’t be all hard stuff. It can’t be all AC/DC,” Sloan said. “You’ve got to have some mellow stuff. You know, for when you’re just rolling along. Or at night, when the stars are out and it’s cold. Billy Joel or Blondie.”

  “I know, I know. I got that. But right now, the way I’m thinking, you’re going on a road trip—you start off with ZZ Top, right? Gotta start off with ZZ. ‘Sharp-Dressed Man,’ ‘Legs,’ one of those.”

  “I can see that,” Sloan said, nodding. “Something to get you moving.” He turned away, stared at the acres and acres of corn. “Jesus Christ, if I’d just gotten a single fuckin’ break.”

  “COULD BE DRY OUT THERE,” Sloan said, as they came down on Mankato. “Hot and dry.”

  “We’ll stop,” Lucas said.

  Mankato was the site of the largest mass hanging in American history, thirty-eight Sioux Indians in a single drop. The Sioux said that thirty-eight eagles come back to fly over the riverbank site every year on the anniversary of the hanging. Lucas didn’t believe in that kind of thing, but then, one time he’d been in the neighborhood, on the anniversary, and he’d seen the eagles . . .

  “There,” Sloan said. “Holiday store. They got Krispy Kremes.”

  They picked up twenty-four-packs of Coke, Diet Coke, and Dasani water; a throw-away Styrofoam cooler and a bag of ice; a couple of hot dogs; and a couple of Krispy Kremes.

  “I thought you South Beach Diet guys weren’t even supposed to eat the buns, much less a doughnut,” Sloan said through a mouthful of hot dog, as they headed back into the country.

  “Fuck you,” Lucas said. The Krispy Kreme tasted so good that he felt faint.

  THEY FOLLOWED HIGHWAY 169 for three or four miles south of town, turned east across a thirty-foot-wide river, took a narrow blacktopped road out a mile or so, then jogged onto a gravel lane. As soon as they got onto the gravel, they could see a covey of cars, mostly cop cars with light bars, arranged under an old spreading elm tree next to a white clapboard farmhouse.

  The farmhouse, with a detached one-car garage on its east side, sat on an acre of high ground. A grassy lawn supported a dozen old elms and oaks and two apple trees. A tire swing hung from one of the oaks, and bean fields crept right up to the unfenced lawn. A hundred feet out behind the house, a series of old sheds or chicken houses were slowly rotting away, slumping back into the soil. Not a working farm, Lucas thought, just the remnants of one.

  “How’d he find them?” Lucas asked, as they came up. “How’d he pick t
hem out?”

  THEY WENT PAST a mailbox that said RICE, in crooked black hand-painted letters, and spotted a cop up on the lawn, looking at them through a camera lens. Four cops, including the sheriff, were standing on the lawn, just as Nordwall said they’d be. Four more people, including three women, civilians, and a cop sat in an aging Buick on the grass beside the driveway. A red-eyed woman drooped in the backseat, the door open, and looked toward them as they came up.

  “Relatives,” Sloan said.

  Lucas pulled onto the lawn next to the end cop car, and he and Sloan got out.

  “Davenport, goddamnit, you got the crime scene coming?” the sheriff asked. He was a tall man, and wide, with white hair, a red-tipped button nose, and worry lines on a head the size of a gallon milk jug; he was anxious.

  “You call them?”

  “I called them, and they said they were rolling.”

  “Takes awhile,” Lucas said. He turned to the house. “You shut everything down?”

  “Everything.” Nordwall was looking at Sloan. “Who’s this guy?”

  Lucas introduced them, and Sloan told him about Angela Larson. “Ah, jeez, I saw that in the paper,” Nordwall said. “But I don’t remember . . . you must not have given them all the details.”

  “No, we didn’t,” Sloan said. Sloan dropped the cooler on the ground, and said, “Cokes, if anybody’s thirsty,” and started passing around the cans.

  “Might get some to Miz Rice and Miz Carson,” Nordwall said to one of the deputies. He looked past Lucas at the Buick and said, “Rice’s mom, and her sister, and a friend. Miz Rice wants to see them, but I ain’t gonna allow it. Not until after they’re bagged. She’d have that picture in her head until she went to the grave.”