Broken Prey

by John Sandford

  “Stop laughing and give me a hand,” Lucas said, irritated. Del came over and they managed to wedge their hands into the hole and grab hold of the man’s ankles. There were more muffled comments from inside the hole. “Pull.”

  They pulled, pulled some more, and nothing moved. “We’re gonna hurt him if we pull too hard,” Del said. “We’re gonna pop his knees.”

  “Why can’t anything be easy?” Lucas asked, giving up, dusting his hands together.

  Sloan said, “Anyway, here’re Shrake and the woman.”

  THEY SAW SHRAKE coming down the hill, one hand on the woman’s arm. Jenkins, who had apparently stopped to light a cigarette, trailed unhappily behind.

  The woman, Sandy, was young and round faced, and dishwater blond. She looked concerned in the way that nurses looked concerned when told of pain and illness—a kind of reflexive sympathy.

  “Can you help us?” Lucas asked. “He’s wedged himself inside.”

  “I can try,” she said, looking doubtfully at the soles of the gym shoes. “He gets scared sometimes.” She knelt: “Mike? This is Sandy,” she shouted. “This is Sandy from the cafeteria. The police don’t want to arrest you, they want you to help them. They need you to help them catch somebody else.”

  Nothing.

  “Mike, you’re going to hurt yourself if you stay in there. You’ll run out of air . . .”

  SHE CONTINUED TO TALK, reassuring sometimes, pleading other times. There were muffled replies, but no movement, and nobody could decipher what West was saying. West twisted and retwisted his feet, but gave no sign of giving up. Lucas finally stepped away and asked Shrake, “How’re you guys doing?”

  “Gettin’ tired. I’m too old for this all-night and all-day shit.”

  Jenkins blew some smoke and nodded: “Me too.”

  Shrake said, “Butt me,” and Jenkins held out a pack of Marlboros. Shrake took one and lit it with an antique brass Zippo; the smell of lighter fluid hung in the air for a moment.

  “I really appreciate all this,” Lucas said, gesturing down the hillside. “Put in for every minute of overtime. I’ll sign anything reasonable. And you don’t have to stay here—you can take off if you want.”

  “I’d like to see the little asshole’s face before we go,” Shrake said. “That’s all I’ve seen of him.” He nodded at the hole. “The bottom of his feet.”

  Sandy shouted, “We’re having pumpkin pie tonight, that’s your favorite.”

  “You want me to get him out of there?” Jenkins asked.

  “With whipped cream,” Sandy yelled.

  “He’s really wedged in,” Lucas said.

  “Fuck a bunch of wedges. Let me talk to him for a minute. And get that broad out of there, she ain’t helping the situation.”

  “I don’t want him gassed . . . ,” Lucas warned.

  “I ain’t gonna gas him, for Christ’s sake,” Jenkins said. “Just let me talk to him.”

  “Whatever,” Lucas said. “No saps.”

  “Get the broad out of there.”

  THEY TOLD SANDY that they might have to work on another concept and eased her away from the hole. She went up the hill white-faced, looking back, afraid the cops were going to do something weird, like shoot West in the feet.

  Jenkins did do something weird. He leaned into the hillside, fumbled around West’s shoes for a moment, then started untying one. He took his time getting it loose: West twisted his feet around, trying to get away from the hands, but apparently couldn’t get any deeper into the hole.

  “You know what I’m doing, Mikey?” Jenkins shouted into the hole. “I’ve been looking for you for two days. I’m really tired, and now you’re fuckin’ with me. So I’m gonna take your fuckin’ shoes off, and if you don’t come out of there, I’m gonna throw them in the fuckin’ river. ’Cause I’m pissed off.”

  There was more muffled noise from inside the hole, more foot twisting, and then Jenkins, still taking his time, pulled the first shoe off. There was a sock under it, black and shriveled and wet with sweat or river water. The ankle above it was almost as black as the sock. Jenkins touched neither.

  “That’s one shoe,” he yelled into the hole. “I’m gonna put it right here, until I get the second one. Then I’m going to throw them into the fuckin’ river, I swear to God.”

  He started working on the second shoe, taking time to untie it, and suddenly one of West’s legs extended a few inches, and then the other, and then the first one a few more. Somebody said, “He’s coming,” and with some muffled shouting, Mike West squirmed out of the hole, tears in his eyes, dragging a plastic garbage bag behind him. “Don’t take my shoes, man,” he said to Jenkins. “Don’t take my shoes.”

  “I ain’t gonna take your shoes,” Jenkins said. He sat back and took the Marlboros out of his pocket. “You want a smoke?”

  WEST WAS A PHYSICAL WRECK. He was short, skinny to the point of emaciation. His face was grimed with dirt, both old and new, and his cheekbones stood out like axe edges in a field of blemishes. His hair, a uniform four inches long, looked as though it had been cut with hedge clippers and stuck out from his head in dirty brown clumps. His eyes were wide, blue, and frightened. He was wearing a open long-sleeved flannel shirt, North Face nylon drawstring pants, and a theme T-shirt. The theme was outer space—a small black circle on top, labeled URANUS, with a much larger black circle below it, with the caption, URANUS IN PRISON.

  “I didn’t do anything,” he said to Jenkins.

  “Tell this guy here,” Jenkins said, turning a thumb at Lucas.

  “We don’t think you did anything,” Lucas said. “We just want to get you a shower, maybe get a McDonald’s or something, maybe get your clothes washed, and talk.”

  West wrapped his arms around his garbage bag: “Talk about what?”

  WEST WAS WILLING enough to talk, when he remembered to. He was one of the legion of the lost, a schizophrenic who could tolerate neither his condition nor the drugs that treated it. As Lucas and Sloan talked him along, he’d break off to stare, to mumble, to twitch. He had an uncle, he said, who pinched him. Hard. “I know he’s not really there,” he said to Lucas, “but I can feel him. He hurts. What an ass wipe he is.”

  WEST HAD OCCASIONALLY stayed at the St. Paul Mission. They took him there in the back of a Minneapolis squad, got him a shower. Sandy, his friend, had voluntarily stopped at a Goodwill store and picked up clean clothes. She waited outside while West dressed, and he looked at himself in the mirror—jockey shorts, white T-shirt, plaid shirt, stone-washed jeans. “I look really square, dude,” he said, with an unhappy grimace.

  “Ah, you look okay,” Lucas said. West went away for a minute, mumbled to an unseen presence, flinched, said, “Ow.” Lucas touched him on the shoulder: “You really look good.”

  West came back. “What?”

  “You sure as shit smell better,” Del added.

  “I’m gonna miss my turn at the stoplight,” West said. “And I’m not gonna make a dime dressed like this.”

  “I’ll give you a couple bucks,” Lucas said. “If you’re reasonable.”

  “A couple bucks? Man, I need thirty bucks a day just to make my nut,” West said. He tended to slip into a whine when things weren’t going well.

  Lucas: “You want to eat or what?”

  THEY ATE IN A BAR, Coney Islands and sauerkraut and beer. Sandy wanted to come along, but they thanked her for her trouble and sent her on her way. “He’ll be okay?”

  “He’ll be back on the job tomorrow,” Del said.

  As they were walking over to the bar, Del chatted with West. When they got there, Del hooked Lucas by the arm before they went inside, and he said, “West didn’t kill anybody.”

  “Seems pretty unlikely,” Lucas agreed.

  “It’d be the most unlikely thing I’ve ever run into—he’s scared all the time, he’s got dead relatives plucking at his shirt and his hair, some days the sidewalks melt and get weird and his feet stick in the concrete.”

 
“Ah, man.”

  “With some people I’d say it might be an act; but with him, it’s not.”

  WHEN THEY TOLD WEST what they wanted—explained the situation—he said, “You shoulda come to me first.”

  “Well, Mike, we tried,” Sloan said. “We’ve been looking all over for you.”

  “I’ve been workin’ the same spot every day, six days a week, for a month, dude. Really fuckin’ first-class police work, huh?”

  “So . . . what do you think?” Lucas asked.

  “I woulda told you that it wasn’t Charlie. Charlie might have killed one or two of them, but then he would have hid them and run,” West said, adding more raw onions to the Coney Island. “He would have got scared. He wouldn’t have done anything to them. I mean, except fuck ’em and kill ’em. He wouldn’t torture anybody.”

  “That’s what we’re figuring out,” Lucas said. “We’ve talked to all those guys, you know, the shrinks and the security guards, and they can’t give us a name. I mean, we thought we had a name—Charlie. It turned out it wasn’t him. Then we got another name. Yours. Everybody said you were Charlie’s friend, and you worked down there around the Big Three. So, one way or another, we figured you might know who else was talking to the Big Three.”

  West shuddered. “Those guys. Those guys are really nuts. I mean, all of us were nuts, except maybe Alison. But they were really nuts.”

  Lucas bit: “Alison?”

  West had a mouthful of Coney Island, chewed it, swallowed carefully, and for a moment went someplace else, his mouth half open, three inches from taking a new bite. After a long moment, he suddenly came back, his eyes shifting, and he said, “Yeah. Alison. She wasn’t nuts, she was just in there for the money. She didn’t make any secret of it.”

  Del looked at Lucas, and Lucas rubbed his forehead with both hands: “I don’t want to know.”

  Del said, “I gotta know.” To West. “Okay, what about Alison? What do you mean, she was in it for the money?”

  West looked a little surprised: everybody knew about Alison. He put on a patient voice, as if talking to a village idiot, and said, “Where else are you going to meet rich guys that no other women want? I mean, there are always a bunch of guys in there for evaluation. Some got the big bucks. Especially the obsessive-compulsives; but the paranoids do pretty good, too.”

  “She’s in there . . . to date?” Del asked. This was the kind of informational nugget he treasured.

  “Yeah. What have I been telling you?” West finished the last of the Coney Island, held up a finger to the waitress, pointed at his plate, and mimed, “Another one.”

  LUCAS WRENCHED THE CONVERSATION back on course: “So give me two names,” he said. “Who are two people most likely to have been taken over by the Big Three? Include women—do women work around them?”

  “When they’re not in isolation,” West said. He twitched, said, “Don’t,” and pulled away from his invisible uncle, tears coming to his eyes. Lucas looked away, but then West went on, as if there’d been no interruption. “Okay: Danny Anderson. He got out a couple of months before I did, and he was pretty . . . dim. Like you could take him over.”

  Sloan stirred, and asked, “Who else?”

  West scratched his head with a fork and finally said, “You know what you’re asking is, who knows those guys? The answer is, lots of people. But I don’t know anybody who was likely to get taken over. I tried to stay away from them, and so did everybody else. I mean, those guys weren’t just nuts, they were nasty. They’d yell shit like ‘Hey, ugly boy, hey pimple boy, your dick as big as that pimple on your nose?’ And Biggie was aways yelling at guys to show their asses. Or Taylor would yell at some woman that he had some grease for her pussy, and he’d have like a handful of come. I mean, who is gonna get taken over by somebody like that? When you’re trying to stay away from them?”

  Sloan said to Lucas, “Dan Anderson’s been in California since two days after he got out, living with an aunt. He had to check in with the authorities out there because it was a sex crime, and they’ve tagged him ever since. He’s not the guy.”

  West was disappointed: “Never liked him. He was an ass wipe.”

  “So you got no names,” Lucas said to West. “You’re not helping us much.”

  West was drinking a Budweiser through a straw. “No. That’s not right. I got about a million names. I knew everybody in the place. But I don’t know which one it is. Like I said, it all seems wrong to me. Hardly anybody hung around those ass wipes.”

  They all sat there for a minute, then West said, “What time is it?”

  “Two o’clock,” Lucas said.

  “If somebody gives me a ride, I could still make it over to my light.”

  OUT ON THE SIDEWALK, squinting in the bright sunlight, West burped beer fumes and said, “Sorry I couldn’t help. This guy sounds like a serious ass wipe.”

  “Ah,” Lucas said and stepped away.

  “You know, I do got an idea, when I think about it. Ones who might have got their brains changed,” West said. He said it with the self-conscious smile of a bad comedian about to deliver a worse joke.

  “Who?” Sloan said.

  “Like O’Donnell and Jimenez and Grant and Hart and Sennet and Halburton and Grosz and Steinhammer . . . those are the guys who hung around with the Big Three all the time, talking to them. Docs and guards.”

  LUCAS STARED AT HIM for a long beat, then looked at Sloan and said, quietly, “Oh, shit.”

  Sloan said. “No way.”

  Lucas nodded: “Way. Ah, Jesus, Biggie told us, and I missed it.”

  “What?” Del asked.

  “What?” West said after him. His eyes were sharp and blue: no sign of vagueness now.

  Lucas said to Del, “Take Mike over to Dinky Town or get him a cab or something. Sloan and I gotta talk. Here.” He dug into his pocket, took out two twenties and a ten, handed them to West. “Catch a cab, take a bus, I don’t care, that makes your nut for the day. We gotta go.”

  LUCAS HEADED OFF, hurrying, Sloan jogging after him to catch up. They’d left Lucas’s truck at the mission. Sloan caught up with him and said, “Wait, wait, wait—you think a staff member?”

  “I think it’s possible,” Lucas said. “It’s one thing we haven’t looked at. Goddamnit. When we were talking to O’Donnell and Hart, they made a big deal out of how nothing goes into the cells and nothing comes out. Those guys are supposed to be super-isolated. Total information blackout.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “So Biggie yelled something about arresting the killer for not having a hunting license. Taylor knew it, too, that there’d been a hunter-oriented killing. And they didn’t try to get any details out of us. You know why? Because they had the details. And the staff was specifically forbidden to talk to them about any of the crimes, right?”

  “Yeah, but . . .” Sloan frowned.

  “And down in the isolation wing, nobody goes in but staff.”

  Sloan thought about it, then said, “You know lockups, Lucas. People tip other people off, even when they don’t mean to. Supper comes, Taylor asks the guy if the hunter has killed a woman yet. The guy looks away, and Taylor knows . . .”

  “That’s a possibility,” Lucas admitted. “But the way they were behaving . . . C’mon, Sloan. Think about it. They knew all about it. This wasn’t a tip.”

  Sloan rubbed his head, looked back toward the disappearing figures of Del and West. “Jesus. I hate to think . . . they’re doctors.”

  “Maybe a guard. Maybe a food guy. But we’ve hit a blank wall trying to find another candidate among the inmates . . .”

  “Yeah . . .”

  “We gotta go back there. We’ve got to look at tapes for the last two days.”

  “Goddamn,” Sloan said, more to himself than to Lucas. “Is this possible?”

  18

  DR. CALE WAS WAITING in his office. Their escort dropped them, and Cale shut the door. “All right: What’s going on?”

  “We need
to see the tapes for the isolation cells for the past two days,” Sloan said.

  Cale rocked on his feet, his hands in his jacket pocket: “Why?”

  “We want to see who’s been talking to the Big Three,” Lucas said.

  Cale drifted down his wall of books and papers, looked at a plaque, then said, sadly, “Nobody talks to them but staff.”

  Lucas said, “That’s why we need to see them.”

  Cale continued drifting along the books, turned the corner at his desk, sat in his swivel chair, and turned until his back was toward them, and he was looking out the window at the Minnesota woods and the river valley beyond. “You think a member of the staff might be passing them information?”

  “Something like that,” Lucas said, his voice cool, neutral.

  Cale hadn’t become head of the hospital by being stupid: he swiveled to face them, took off his glasses, rubbed one eye with the heel of a hand, and said, “Oh, boy. Who are you looking at? Grant?”

  “Why do you say Grant?” Lucas asked.

  “He’s the new guy. Been here less than a year. The other guys have been here longer.”

  “Grant would be interesting,” Lucas said. “Any reason to think . . . ?”

  “He sometimes seems a little naïve . . . uncertain of what he’s doing. He seems to struggle,” Cale said. “But that’s often the sign of a good therapist—a guy who doesn’t fall into routine and cliché.”

  “Is he good?”

  “He is good,” Cale said. “He has a fine touch with patients, especially the lost souls. You know, the quiet ones, the helpless ones—well, like Mike West. And I have to say, he came highly recommended.”

  “Doesn’t have to be a therapist,” Lucas said. “Could be anybody who’s had intimate contact with the Big Three.”

  “That’s a lot of people. Until they went into isolation, at least. Dozens of people, including staff members, in here,” Cale said. “Then there are outsiders. We contract for some medical services, for example, and Biggie, in particular, has been having problems. He’s a borderline diabetic, he’s got circulatory problems, and his PSAs are out of sight. He’s gonna lose his prostate in the next few years.”