Broken Prey

by John Sandford

  “Could it have been an Oldsmobile?”

  “I don’t know . . . Do they have an SUV?”

  Lucas grimaced. “An SUV? It wasn’t a sedan?”

  “Naw, it was an SUV,” Grass said. “I couldn’t tell you what make, they all look alike.” He picked up Lucas’s look of frustration and said, “I’m sorry.”

  “The driver . . .”

  Now Grass shook his head. “Didn’t see his face. I was going this way, he was going the other way, and he was looking away from me . . . but he came down this street, all right. Early. Before six o’clock. This goddamn dog has a bigger prostate than I do, I think. He starts jumping up and down, yapping, wants to get out and pee first thing.”

  “Mr. Grass, if you can remember anything else . . . this is really critical . . .”

  Grass looked sad; thought and shook his head. “I’m sorry, son. I saw this car go by, all by itself, early, slow, and it just stuck in my mind. But I didn’t pay it any real attention.”

  “Think about it, will you?” Lucas asked. “Any little thing.”

  They talked for another minute, then Lucas got on his phone and called the co-op: “Listen: we’ve got a second guy who says the car may be light, silver or possibly white. But he says it’s an SUV. Put that out: tell everybody not to rely on it, we’re still looking for a white Olds, but if anyone spots a silver or white SUV in a sensitive area, stop it.”

  THE AFTERNOON SLOPED into evening. Lucas felt like he wanted to prop a couple of two-by-fours under the sun to keep it from going down. The crime-scene people arrived, confirmed most of what they already knew: there was blood on the kitchen floor. They also pointed out two small round black marks the size of dimes, on the vinyl floor. Since there were only two marks, there was a good chance they’d been made by the killer.

  “Black-soled athletic shoes,” the crime-scene tech said. “Soft rubber. It rubs off easy, on vinyl. If she’d been wearing them, we’d probably see more of them. It’s almost impossible to keep from rubbing them off . . .”

  “How many people in Minnesota wear black-soled athletic shoes?” Lucas asked.

  “Lots,” the tech said. “Maybe hundreds of thousands.”

  LUCAS WORKED THROUGH the rest of the files in Peterson’s office and learned a lot about Peterson, but nothing helpful. He went so far as to dump her entire e-mail list to the co-op, to have them run against car registrations, looking for a white GM car or a silver SUV.

  Nothing.

  Minnesota is a tall state, Lucas thought, going out into the yard, looking at the half dome of the sun as it sank behind the house next door, but even if he was going all the way north, he’d be there.

  A great summer evening; there’d be a few car deaths and a few more cripplings, a couple of shootings—maybe—and somewhere a woman was waiting to be butchered.

  He couldn’t stand it.

  STANDING IN THE YARD, he talked to Sloan again—Sloan had gone downtown so he’d have access to a police computer—and to Elle, and even to Weather, whom he reached before she went to bed.

  “You say Sloan is going psycho . . . you sound like you’re going psycho,” she said. “I don’t think it’s healthy for both of you to be crazy at the same time.”

  “Sloan says he’s gonna quit. He sounds serious.” Silence, two seconds, five seconds. “You still there?”

  “I was wondering what took him so long,” Weather said.

  “Ah, Jesus, I’m trying to talk him out of it.”

  “Don’t do that. Let him get out.”

  “Gotta find this goddamn woman,” Lucas said.

  “Yes. Do it.”

  HE WENT DOWN to the Northfield police station, a red-brick riverside building shared by the cops and the fire department. Three cops were sitting in a conference room, two city guys and a sheriff’s deputy, Styrofoam cups scattered around, the smell of coffee and old pastry; a police radio burped in the background, a harsh underline to the hunt. The main dispatch center for the region was in Owatonna, well to the south, and the cops inside the station were just waiting for any call that needed a quick reaction. Not what you’d expect, Lucas thought, for a major search operation—but the fact that there was nobody in the office meant that everybody was on the road.

  Stopping white cars. Stopping light-colored SUVs.

  Stopping cars with single men in them. Stopping cars that looked funny; acted funny; might be out of place.

  Glassing hillsides in the woods, as though they were hunting for deer, or elk.

  Fighting the sundown.

  AFTER DARK, the action slowed. Reports came in from the Boundary Waters. Nothing there.

  Lots of cars stopped.

  Lucas watched, waited, and talked. At eleven o’clock, tense but bored, tired of jumping every time one of the radios burped, he borrowed a yellow legal pad and began to copy the names of rock songs onto a piece of paper. One hundred and twenty songs, when he finished. He looked at the list, crossed off two songs, added one that Carol had suggested that morning—Robert Palmer’s “Bad Case of Loving You,” which Lucas thought was on pretty shaky grounds to make the top 100, if not in outright quicksand. Still, a good tune . . .

  He stood up and said, “Jesus Christ, where is she?”

  A half an hour later, he’d rolled and rerolled the paper with the rock list until it looked like a cheap yellow cigar. He finally stuffed it in his pants pocket and was about to go out for a Coke when a Goodhue County deputy was routed through to the dispatcher in Owatonna, and then back out to the countryside. He was breathing hard: “Guy . . . white truck I think, SUV, turned off when he saw my lights, running fast, dumped his lights, I think he cut across a field because I lost him, I don’t know which way he’s heading now, but he was heading west when I first saw him, I’m gonna go another mile or two south, see what I can see, cut my lights and creep back up the road, I think maybe he’s just pulled off, you got somebody west of here on Nineteen?”

  “Yeah, we got a couple guys, I’ll get them headed that way.”

  “Tell them to shut down the flashers, he saw mine and dodged . . . I’m not seeing anything . . .”

  “Jesus Christ,” Lucas said, as the dispatcher talked to cops farther out. “Where is this, where is this . . . ?”

  One of the cops poked a map; his finger touched a spot where Goodhue, Rice, and Dakota counties came together.

  Then another guy came up and shouted, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, guy ran by me moving fast . . . high lights. He was doing eighty-eight, I think it’s the SUV, I’m turning. I’m on Nineteen, Jenny, get me some help up here . . .”

  “C’mon,” Lucas shouted at the radio.

  The deputy shouted, “Ah, shit, he’s gone, he’s killed his lights, I don’t know, shit, don’t know whether he went north, south, or straight ahead. Goddamn . . . I’m going north on Boyd, that was the first turn, but he maybe ditched somewhere, do we have anybody west on Nineteen? Or south, we need somebody south . . . Man, he was moving. Andy, if you’re still around Waterford, get over to Nineteen and head east. He may be coming at you, I don’t know what color the car was, his high lights were on, but I think it was an SUV . . . I clocked him at eighty-eight . . . He could be going south, do we have anybody south . . . ?”

  Lucas listened for another few seconds, then asked, “Where is that?”

  One of the cops jabbed a finger at a wall map. “Tommy was coming west on Highway Nineteen when he saw the guy, and the guy disappeared here. Tommy went north, Andy is coming in this way . . .”

  Lucas looked at it, said, “Maybe he should have gone south here instead of north . . .” He was second-guessing the guy on the scene, and he had absolutely nothing to base it on, except his own case of nerves.

  “Flip of the coin,” the cop said. “It’s all cut up over there, hills and farm plains. We—”

  He shut up for a moment as the dispatcher said, “Manny, are you up?”

  “Yeah, I’m moving, but I’m way over northwest of town.”

  Luc
as looked at the map for another minute, then said, “I’m going out there. South. I can be there in five minutes.”

  “Big chunk of territory.”

  “I’m doing nothing here,” he said. “And there’s nobody out there right now.”

  HE FELT BETTER as soon as he got in the truck. He put the light on the roof and ripped south out of town, working with the navigation system on his truck. If the guy had been going west on 19 and turned south, and was trying to dodge cops by taking a twisty route out of trouble . . . Lucas manipulated the scale of the map up and down, running out to One Hundredth Street at high speed. There were few cars around—more pickups than anything—and few of them were moving fast, as far as Lucas could tell without radar. He punched the number of the Northfield center into his cell phone: “This is Davenport—any action?”

  “Tommy’s coming south again. Andy hasn’t hit anything on Nineteen, he’s going to turn south on Kellogg, but the guy’s gotta be way south of that, if he went south. Most likely, he’s ditched in some woods off Nineteen.”

  “I’m running with a single flasher on One Hundredth Street, I haven’t seen anything yet.”

  “Have you crossed Kane?”

  “About a minute ago.”

  “Then you’re coming up on Goodhue. It’s gravel down there, I’d suggest you head south, then come back west on One Hundred Tenth. There are a bunch of little streets south of there on Kane.”

  Lucas traced the suggested route on his nav system, thought it sounded reasonable. He cut south on Goodhue, spraying gravel.

  The night was hazy, the lights of the surrounding small towns showing up as ghosts on the sky. He took Goodhue across some railroad tracks to One Hundred Tenth, cut west, hesitated at the next crossroad, and turned south again. He zigged back and forth, following the dusty gravel roads, narrow, no shoulders, houses flicking by in the night; some of the houses were old farmsteads, some looked like they’d been airlifted out of a St. Paul suburb. Most showed a yard light; and though the night was deadly dark, it was pierced all around by yard lights, mercury-vapor blue and sodium-vapor orange, and far away, the red-blinking lights of radio towers.

  Hard-surface road now.

  He flicked through the tiny town of Dennison, decided he was getting too far east—the vehicle they were hunting had been heading west—did a quick U-turn and whipped through Dennison again, past the Lutheran church, down a hill, a bank, a Conoco station, a car dealer, all with small lights alone in the night, empty . . .

  His nav system said he was on Dennison Boulevard and then Rice County 31, as though it couldn’t make up its mind. The town lights were fading in his rearview mirror when he saw a car’s taillights flare ahead of him.

  No headlights; just the taillights. He felt a pulse: somebody running?

  “Get the motherfucker,” he muttered to himself.

  He was doing seventy. He shoved the accelerator to the floor, looked at his navigation system. Nothing going south; just a Lamb Avenue going north. He stabbed at the nav system’s scale button, moving it to the largest scale. A thin line came up, heading south, also identified as Lamb Avenue. Had to be a small road, a track. The car without lights, if it was a car without lights, had just turned into the hard countryside. Had he done it because he’d seen the roof light on Lucas’s truck?

  Lucas grabbed the phone, just had time to punch up the Northfield center before he slid into the mouth of Lamb Avenue. “I got a guy running without lights. I still don’t see him. He’s heading south on Lamb off, shit, I think it’s Thirty-One or Dennison . . .”

  “Got you, Lucas. We’ll call dispatch, get some guys down there. Right now they’re all up around Nineteen . . .”

  Lucas punched off and tossed the phone on the passenger seat. He flashed past a bunch of derelict semitrailers, sitting in a farm field, and what looked like an impromptu junkyard. Two green spots came up on the right shoulder, and Lucas had time to pick up the red-striped cat in the weeds, hunting; up a hill, down another, the road narrow, the gravel pounding up under his wheel wells, rattling like hail.

  Came up to the top of a hill and, in his high lights, saw the truck dust. He’d been going through it, but now he realized he could use it to track the man ahead of him. As long as the runner stayed on gravel, Lucas could follow the dust hanging in the still night air.

  A culvert crossing flashed by . . . then a crossroads: which way, left, right, straight? He swung the truck in a circle, realizing that he was losing time, saw the dust hanging over the road to the right, went that way: the nav system said Karow Trail.

  He was pushing the truck as hard as he dared, sliding through curves, flashing past farmhouses and mailboxes; caught in his lights a driveway with four cars parked in front of a metal shed. What if the guy in front of him pulled into a farmyard and just let him roll by? He’d never know . . .

  The nav system was saving him. Without it, he might never have seen the turnoff to the even smaller James Trail. He slowed, went past the intersection, still on Karow, and suddenly was in clear air. He stopped, jammed the truck in reverse, backed up to James, and headed west. More dust, but losing great gouts of time. He needed to call in his location, but the road was so twisty, dark, narrow, that he couldn’t take his hands off the steering wheel.

  Around a bend, around another bend, almost losing it . . . then there, the taillights flickered up ahead, once, twice, then a one-second shot of headlights . . .

  Nothing on the nav system. A driveway? He was coming through a turn, going into another one, and off to the right, he could see vehicle lights of a bigger highway. He didn’t know which one, because the nav-system scale was too large.

  Another flash of taillights, directly north of him, headed toward the bigger highway. He slowed, looking for a side road: and found what looked like a tractor turnoff into an oat field. He pulled into it and saw the tracks cutting across the oats. As his headlights swept the field, he saw another flicker of taillights, and then another . . .

  Somebody out there, running across the open field, heading toward the highway.

  Lucas went after him, bumping now, the truck almost uncontrollable, his speed dropping to twenty-five, to twenty, to fifteen . . .

  BUT THERE!

  Headlights flared ahead of him, then disappeared over the rim of a hill. The guy could no longer run without lights. And whoever it was was only two or three hundred yards ahead of him. Lucas flashed on the chase back at the Martin farmhouse. He didn’t dare to hope that it was Pope. The hope itself would jinx him. A meth distributor? There were dozens of labs south of the metro . . .

  The truck bounced and jounced and struggled along the track, pain banging through his face, spreading from his broken nose: he ignored it, clenched his teeth. He saw movement to his left, quick, jerked his head that way. Gone: a cow?

  “Fence,” he said aloud. He was running parallel to a fence and slightly downhill. Up ahead, his headlights were showing nothing but darkness. Hill coming up, he thought, and a few seconds later, he was over the lip of it.

  Closer now, maybe two hundred yards ahead, he could again see the other vehicle’s headlights bouncing wildly over the countryside, heading down, down toward what looked like a crack in the earth. Still couldn’t make out anything of the car: just the light on the fields it was crossing.

  Moving faster and faster: closing in. Moving faster.

  “Fuckin’ hold on . . . ,” he said.

  Another hill, another lip, even steeper, and the car disappeared again, only to suddenly reappear, bucking wildly, then suddenly heading uphill. The guy had made it to the far side of the valley but was only a hundred yards ahead, his taillights clear ovals now. Lucas groped for the cell phone with one hand, couldn’t find it on the passenger seat.

  “Goddamnit.” The ride had thrown the phone on the floor, and he couldn’t see it.

  Ahead, the other car slowed, made a sharp wiggle, then moved forward again, away from him, only seventy-five yards, less than the length of a footb
all field.

  Just a moment too late, Lucas saw the black line in his headlights. The crack in the earth, and he remembered how the other car had suddenly bucked so wildly. A creek?

  He jabbed at the brake, dropped over a short, steep bank, and hit hard, water splashing on the windshield. He floored the accelerator, and the car bucked and hit something hard, got sideways. He wrenched the steering wheel back to the left, and hit the far bank of the creek with a heavy whack that stopped him dead. He tried to push up it, but he could feel wheels spinning in sand. He reversed, tried to get straight, hit the bank again, stopped. Backed up again, tried again, near panic now: he was losing him. How’d the other guy gotten out?

  Stymied, he groped in the glove compartment, found a flashlight, got out of the truck into ankle-deep water, and looked at the situation. He was stopped dead in the middle of a small creek, a six-foot-wide trickle of water in a bed maybe thirty feet wide. Nothing but sand under his feet.

  When he shined the light on the opposite bank, he picked out two narrow tracks, tractor tracks, going up the far side. He’d simply missed them, missed the alignment when he went into the creek.

  He jumped back in the truck, backed it down, found the two small tracks in his headlights, and pushed up them. As the other car had, the truck bucked up and then he was on dry ground again: but he’d lost three or four minutes.

  He continued up the hill, fast as he could. He saw the track disappear in front of him, remembered that the other car had wiggled up the hill, slowed, spotted the wiggle, and followed it up. A moment later, the track intersected with another highway, the highway where he’d seen headlights.

  There were taillights in sight, both east and west: the nav system told him he was back on Dennison Boulevard.

  Decide.

  He looked both ways, remembered the cell phone. He found it under the front passenger seat, punched up the Northfield center.

  Decide. He said, “Shit,” and turned west, accelerated.

  “The guy took me across a field,” he told the Northfield cops. “I’m on Dennison, but I don’t know exactly where. Near James. I’m heading west . . .”