Broken Prey

by John Sandford

  “We got guys on the way, but they’re east of you, we’ll vector them in there.”

  He gave it everything the truck had, blowing by two pickups and a Toytota Corolla before coming back into the lights of Northfield.

  “Shit. Shit.” Lucas pounded the steering wheel with the heels of his hands. Northfield was a big town, crowded with every kind of car. The guy was gone.

  THEY DID HEAR from the driver, though.

  At two-thirty, Lucas had just gotten back to the Northfield center when Ruffe Ignace called, freaked: “Pope just called again. He wouldn’t talk to me. He wants your cell-phone number. He didn’t say why. I lied and told him I didn’t have it but I might be able to get it. He said he would wait five minutes and then he was going to throw the phone in a ditch. You’ve got four minutes to decide.”

  “Give him the number,” Lucas said.

  LUCAS CALLED THE co-op center on one of the Northfield center’s phones and told them about the cell-phone call. “Find the cell,” he said. “He’s gonna call me. You got my number. He’s probably using Peterson’s phone again. Find the fuckin’ cell. Find the fuckin’ cell.”

  AND THEN POPE CALLED.

  “Agent Davenport,” he drawled. He spoke slowly, with the same whispery voice that Ignace had described. Lucas tried to penetrate it: husky, a middle tenor. Could it be a woman? “That was you that chased me through that crick, wasn’t it?”

  Lucas was astonished. The question froze him, and he asked, inanely, “Where are you?”

  “Out here in the woods where I always am. Miz Peterson is still okay. Well, she wouldn’t say that, I guess. I had me a little pussy before dinner. And after dinner. And for dessert. She’s right here. You want to talk to her?”

  Not a woman. A woman wouldn’t talk like that—unless she were very, very manipulative. “Listen, man, you really need our help . . .” Lucas felt absolutely stupid as he said it.

  “Nah. I’m doing okay. I thought you had me there for a minute, those first two cops, and then you. When I got loose I heard them talking about you on my scanner, said you almost wrecked your truck in that crick. I wondered what happened to you. I hit that sonbitch just right, I guess. Never saw it—nothing but luck.”

  “Listen, Mr. Pope . . .”

  “Didn’t call me no Mr. Pope when you had my ass in St. John’s. But listen, don’t you want to talk to Miz Peterson? She was in the back the whole time. Here . . . Miz Peterson. This is the law. Talk to him . . .”

  There was the sound of flesh against flesh, as though somebody had been slapped, the tenor, “Talk to him, bitch,” and then a dry, ragged woman’s voice, “Help me . . .”

  “That’s good enough,” Pope said in his whisper. “We gotta go.” And then: “Well, it’s been fun, but I gotta say good-bye, Agent Davenport.”

  “You gotta . . .”

  Click.

  LUCAS WAS SCREAMING at the co-op center, and they came back: “The cell’s in Owatonna. It’s Peterson’s. He got around you and went straight south.”

  “Get the goddamned people moving around there, get them moving . . .”

  “They’re moving now, everything we’ve got.”

  Five hours later, Lucas was on a dirt road west of Owatonna when he got a call from the Blue Earth County Sheriff’s Department. There were a couple of clicks and he was patched through: “Lucas, this is Gene Nordwall, I’m down south of Mankato, little west of Good Thunder.”

  “Gene, you heard?”

  “Yeah. We found her,” he said.

  “You found her?” Lucas asked. “She’s alive?”

  15

  WAYNE’S FOUR CORNERS INN was a rambling white structure that sat on top of a ridge where Blue Earth County 122 and County 131 crossed each other. There were two nonfunctional gas pumps out front, with crown-shaped glass globes on top, left over from the 1950s, and left in the parking area as a statement of the inn’s antiquity. To the left side of the inn, just outside the gravel parking area, was a pi-shaped structure that might have been a medieval gallows, built of rough four-by-four lumber.

  Lucas recognized the structure as soon as he pulled into the parking lot, outside the collection of cop cars. They were rare, in recent times, but as recently as the 1960s and 1970s they had been ubiquitous in the countryside. They were hanging bars, meant to display the carcasses of the biggest local bucks taken during deer season.

  Carlita Peterson’s body hung by the neck from the crossbar.

  Not so much a body, as a carcass; Lucas had already been told, and walked toward the hanging bar with his eyes averted, not wanting to look.

  A cop was there, and said to Lucas, “This is awful.”

  Lucas looked now: no way to avoid it.

  Peterson’s throat had been slashed; that had been the killing stroke. But after she’d been killed, she’d been gutted, and her empty body, slashed from throat to anus with a cutting tool, hung in the cool still morning air.

  LUCAS LOOKED AWAY, then stepped away, shaking his head, his hands trembling. He’d thought that they might get her back.

  NORDWALL SCUFFED UP in his cowboy boots, not looking: “He fuckin’ gutted her.”

  “You gotta get some people out in the woods, looking for the . . .” Lucas stopped. He knew the phrase, but he didn’t want to say it.

  The sheriff said it for him. “The gut dump.”

  “Yeah. I would think it would be close by,” Lucas said. “He chose this place for display. Look for crows. You should see crows flocking around.”

  “I’ll put it out right now.”

  “Tell everybody to walk easy. When we find it, we’ll backtrack to where he held her, we gotta see if any of the neighbors saw cars in the night, anybody coming or going . . .” The sheriff nodded, and Lucas finished: “Shit, Gene, you know the routine. We know Pope is involved, somehow, so processing isn’t so important . . . unless we can come up with a second name. What’s important is the car—what are they driving, where were they headed?”

  “I’ll put it out. You gonna be here?”

  “No. I’m going home for a while.”

  LUCAS WAS WALKING back down the hill to the parking lot when he saw a brown Chevy slowing at the turnoff; the man inside showed an ID to the cop at the corner, and then the car continued into the parking lot and pulled in a slot down from Lucas. Sloan got out.

  “How’re you feeling?” Lucas asked, automatically.

  “Tell you in a minute,” Sloan said. He looked pale, and drawn, but he often did, especially in the morning. He headed up the hill toward the hanging bar. Lucas leaned against the truck, watching him go, waited.

  AS HE WAITED, another familiar face came up. Lucas searched for a name, and the man helped him out: “Lucas—Barry Anderson, Goodhue.” He was the sheriff of Goodhue County, wearing tired civilian clothes, tan slacks, and a red plaid shirt. Like Lucas, he’d been up all night; the chase the night before had started just inside Goodhue County.

  “I know where he was going last night,” he said grimly, looking up the hill. “We got a bar at a place called Old Church—there’s no church anymore, burned down twenty years ago, but there’s a bar and they’ve got a deer rack. Wasn’t five miles from where that first deputy jumped him.”

  “Ah, jeez . . .”

  “Wonder what made him pick the one up there?”

  Lucas thought about it for a moment, as he watched Sloan sloping back down the hill. “He was going for a deer rack, like you say. He went for the one that was closest to Northfield. Try to increase the shock. Hang her right up in front of her neighbors. When we closed him out of there, he came down here.”

  Anderson’s head bobbed. He said, “You know, I’m a good Christian, born again. I accept Jesus Christ in my life and know I will face him at judgment time. But if I caught this . . . this cocksucker . . . I would cut his head off.”

  SLOAN WAS BACK: “Not something I’d want to see a second time,” he said softly.

  “Shouldn’t have come out,” Lucas said. H
e introduced Sloan and Anderson, and Anderson said, “I better go up.”

  Lucas and Sloan stood there for a few seconds, for ten seconds, and then Sloan said, “Now what?”

  “Same thing we’re doing. Full-court press. He’s working fast now,” Lucas said. “I called Elle on the way over here, she said he’s breaking, he’s losing control of his own actions. We’re gonna see another dead one in the next few days.”

  “If it’s like we think . . . if it’s two people . . . she thinks they’re both breaking?”

  “She doesn’t think it’s two people. Or if it is, they’ve somehow meshed their personalities. One of them has taken over the other.”

  ANOTHER LONG SILENCE, cops trudging by, up the hill or down. Lucas said, “I can’t figure out how he’s avoiding us.”

  “He’s not. We almost caught him last night,” Sloan said.

  “We didn’t,” Lucas grunted.

  Sloan said, “Here’s a possibility: suppose he’s in some kind of closed van. The driver is a woman. They come up to a checkpoint, he hides—under a rug, or somehow, so nobody sees him just looking in the window. In the meantime, the woman shows the cop her ID, and they wave her through. We were moving so fast that we don’t know who we stopped; we must’ve stopped ten thousand people last night, all over the state.”

  “Wasn’t a van. It was a small SUV. A Subaru, like that. Had vertical taillights.”

  After another pause, Sloan said, “I don’t know what to tell you,” and a moment later he added, “I’m talking bullshit. I’m babbling.”

  “The next time, we not only stop people, we jot down every single license plate, and run them to see who we get,” Lucas said.

  Sloan shook his head: “Man . . .”

  “What the fuck else are we gonna do?” Lucas demanded, the anger riding on top of his voice. “Look at that fuckin’ woman hangin’ up there. What the fuck are we gonna do?”

  Sloan said, “I hate to think that we’re waiting for the next one, to start writing down numbers. There’s gotta be something better than that.”

  ON THE WAY HOME, Lucas’s cell phone rang. The incoming call was from a BCA number, and he flipped it open: “Yeah?”

  “John Hopping Crow says he’s got to see you, right now,” Carol said, emphasizing the right now. “I told him that you were under a lot of stress, and didn’t sleep last night, and were heading home. He said, quote, ‘I don’t give a fuck if he’s been shot in the balls, tell him to come here before he goes anywhere.’ Unquote. He wouldn’t tell me what about.”

  “They got DNA on a second guy?” It was the only thing Lucas could think of that might be important enough. None of the other catalog of current cases amounted to much.

  “I don’t know,” Carol said. “He says he’ll be waiting in his office. He sounded scared.”

  “Scared?”

  “That’s what he sounded like,” Carol said. “And you know how polite he is. He’s never said ‘darn’ around me before, and now I’m getting ‘shot in the balls.’ ”

  “Tell him twenty minutes,” Lucas said. “I do feel like shit.”

  “With your poor nose, and this poor woman . . .”

  “Let’s talk about it some other time,” Lucas said. “Like next year.”

  WEATHER CALLED: he told her about Peterson. “Oh, my God. I wish I was there to help you. Do you want me to come . . .”

  “No. Won’t help. Right now, I just gotta get some sleep.”

  LUCAS FELT LIKE his ass was almost literally dragging up to Hopping Crow’s small office: getting too old for this all-night shit, living on coffee and vending-machine cookies.

  Hopping Crow’s office door was closed, and Lucas knocked. He heard a chair scuff back, and the door opened a bit. Hopping Crow’s dark eyes peered out. When he recognized Lucas, he pulled the door open, his eyes flicking up and down the hall.

  “Come on in.”

  “Jesus, man, you’re in a sweat,” Lucas said.

  Hopping Crow pointed at a chair and moved around behind his desk and sat down.

  “We’ve got a big, big problem.” He said it with a dark urgency.

  Lucas shrugged. Whatever the problem was, it wasn’t as big as Carlita Peterson’s had been. “Well?”

  Hopping Crow pushed his chair back to the wall, then sat on the front edge of it. “Three days ago, a couple of guys were fishing for mud cat down in the Minnesota River by Mankato. North of Mankato. Downstream, by the County Eighteen Bridge, wherever that is. Anyway, they hooked onto something. They were using these big hooks and heavy line, and they yanked it up, and they came up with part of a man’s decomposing hand.”

  “Surprised that there was anything left, if there’re mud cat in there,” Lucas said.

  “Shut up. Just listen,” Hopping Crow snapped. “Anyway, they brought in a dive team, and they looked around, and they found a decomposed body wrapped in a logging chain. They fished it out and sent us some samples for DNA and the medical examiner did some dental X rays, I understand. They’ll be looking for a match. The medical examiner says the body was in there for maybe a month.”

  He dropped his head and, with both hands, slicked back his long black hair.

  “And?” Lucas was leaning forward now, truly curious.

  “We got a match on the DNA. Nobody knows but me and Anita Winter. I shut her up, told her if it gets out, I’d fire her ass. I just . . .” He stopped, as though unable to continue.

  “Who the fuck was it?” Lucas asked.

  Hopping Crow looked up. “Charlie Pope.”

  LUCAS DIDN’T REGISTER the name for a half second: the words were something like another punch in the nose, leaving him stunned and disoriented. He opened his mouth, realized what he was about to say was stupid, and closed it.

  “Say something,” Hopping Crow said.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Lucas shouted.

  “Don’t yell—it’s not us. We didn’t fuck up. The DNA matches both our bank and the blood we took off Rice’s fingernails. We’re going back right now . . .” Hopping Crow snatched the phone off his desk and hammered in a few numbers, listened, and then said, “It’s me. You see anything yet? Well, what do you think you see? Well, when can you confirm that? How much? Call me back.”

  He slammed the receiver back in the cradle: “Okay. When we do DNA, we don’t examine the blood cells. That’s not part of the deal. You just don’t do that.”

  “So?”

  “So I had Anita take some of the back sample from Rice’s fingernails and put it under the ’scope. She says she can see blood cells that have burst.”

  “I don’t know what that means. Burst?”

  “That means that they could have been frozen. That means that the guy killed Pope, took blood from him, and planted it on the body.”

  LUCAS LOOKED AT Hopping Crow for a long three seconds: “You gotta be shitting me.”

  “I shit you not.”

  “Charlie Pope was never out there to find,” Lucas said.

  “That’s right. The medical examiner says he’s been dead for at least a month,” Hopping Crow said. “How long ago did he disappear?”

  “Little more than a month, now.”

  “There you are.”

  LUCAS CONSIDERED THE PROBLEM for another long minute, then he leaned forward and tapped Hopping Crow’s desk with his index finger: “If this gets out, there’s going to be hell to pay. The media will look for somebody to drop a brick on. Me, or, maybe, you. Or both of us, or all of us.”

  “I know that.”

  “So you tell Anita that her job’s on the line,” Lucas said. “Sooner or later, somebody will find out that we didn’t look at the blood cells under a microscope.”

  “We never look at them. Nobody does. DNA’s a whole different thing.”

  “Think that’ll make any difference to the TV stations?” Lucas asked.

  Hopping Crow thought about it for a moment, then said, “If it was presented exactly right . . .”

&nb
sp; “Bullshit. There’s no way to present it. There’s a kind of Occam’s razor that applies to TV: the simplest answer is the best,” Lucas said. “The simplest answer is we fucked up. People can understand that. All this science shit, they don’t understand. It might as well be magic.”

  “So what are we gonna do?” Hopping Crow sounded a little desperate.

  “Gotta find this cocksucker.”

  “Yeah, right. I can see us holding off on mentioning this for a day or two, but what if he grabs somebody else like this Peterson woman?” Hopping Crow asked. “What do we do then, tell a million cops to look for Charlie Pope? And what do I tell the medical examiner?”

  “Tell him you came up negative. That’s what he expects, anyway.”

  “Ah, man.” Then: “What are you going to do?”

  “I gotta talk to Rose Marie and maybe the governor. Figure something out. In the meantime, you get Anita and you tell her that I personally will run her out of the state if she says a fuckin’ thing to any-fuckin’-body.”

  LUCAS STOPPED AT his office and made a call to Del Capslock, his lead investigator. Del was working dope with a task force from the suburban town of Woodbury, trying to figure out who was putting methamphetamine into the high school. Lucas called him: “What are you doing?”

  “Reading a magazine and watching a house.”

  “Could you break off?”

  “If I had to.”

  “Get in here, quick as you can. I’ve gotta go talk to Rose Marie, just wait in my office. Get Jenkins and Shrake, too.”

  ON THE WAY TO Rose Marie’s office, Lucas thought: What about Mrs. Bird, the old lady from Rochester? She’d identified Pope as making the call to Ruffe Ignace. She’d seen him, on the phone, she said. She’d picked him out of a photo lineup . . .