Broken Prey

by John Sandford

  “I think so. I am starved to death.”

  But he kept his nose in the book, not quite ignoring her. She crossed her legs and put them across his. He said, “Pizza,” and dropped the book on the floor, and brushed his hands up and down her legs. “Mmm. You’re sticky.”

  “Haven’t shaved my legs in a week,” she said.

  “Don’t shave your legs until I come back,” he said. “Tomorrow. Tomorrow I will shave your legs for you.”

  “Really.” Sounded okay.

  “I am very good with a razor. You will see.”

  “Mmm.”

  THE NEXT EVENING, the roommates were gone, and they moved into the shower.

  Mihovil told her that the first great thing he’d experienced in the States was the shower in their apartment in New York. They hadn’t had running water in the refugee camp, and when his family got to New York, got the small apartment in Brooklyn, it had been like heaven.

  “Wasn’t heaven—was the fucking Yugoslavian ghetto, but it seemed like heaven, and all this hot water from the shower. I could stand in the shower for an hour—I took a shower every morning before school and every day when I came home and every night before I went to bed. You cannot understand hot water coming from the wall until you haven’t had it.”

  When he got his residency and moved into his own apartment in downtown Mankato, he’d unscrewed the showerhead and replaced it with one he bought from a local hardware store; a showerhead that produced a torrent of water.

  “My mother always said the best thing about America was a kitchen with a real stove and a real sink and everything works; I always thought the shower. And the toilet, of course.”

  HE GOT HER IN the shower and said, “First we soap your legs. Huh? We need some nice shaving soap.”

  He’d brought it with him. He shaved from an old-fashioned mug, with a shaving brush; but the thing that really turned her crank was the razor.

  He produced an ancient-looking leather-covered box and from it extracted a straight razor with a mother-of-pearl grip. “From my homeland,” he said. “My father gave it to me when I came old enough to shave.”

  The hot water was pouring down over her belly and legs, and Mihovil lathered her legs with the brush—the brush felt amazing, the brush was something she decided she couldn’t live without—and then began carefully shaving her legs, carving his way upward, kneeling on the dirty old tiles, his hands soft and the blade like a piece of light cutting through the prickly leg hair . . .

  Like any number of college students with good bodies, Millie liked to lie in the summer sun in a bikini; and a bikini required the removal of patches of pubic hair, left and right. The problem was that when you shaved, you often got nasty red bumps from ingrown hair. The idea of shaving off all her public hair had never appealed to her, because she suspected that she’d turn into one gigantic infected red bump.

  But Mihovil, shaving up her legs, simply didn’t stop. He just kept going. And the brush felt so good . . .

  Mihovil could feel her trembling as he played with the razor and then with the brush, with the razor and the brush, razor and brush . . .

  Millie began to whimper, and she knotted her hands in his long Jesus hair, and she began to cry out . . .

  20

  WEATHER CALLED AT eight o’clock. Lucas fumbled the phone receiver and hit himself on the nose, which hurt.

  “How are you?” he asked. He couldn’t feel blood moving, but he could taste something in the back of his throat.

  “A little tired,” Weather said. It was two o’clock in the afternoon in London. “After I talked to you yesterday, we had a six-year-old girl come in. She was hurt in a car wreck. I assisted. There were only two of us on the plastic-surgery staff still around; I was about to leave when she came in. Wound up staying until midnight, and we were working again this morning at seven.”

  “Get her fixed?”

  “Yup. Looked bad, but kids heal, if you get them fast enough.”

  “Her face?”

  “Yes. She was in the front seat of one of those tiny cars they have here.”

  The girl, belted in, had been playing with a toy laptop with a plastic screen. The car she was riding in was rear-ended and jammed into the car in front of them. The air bags went, and they punched the laptop into the girl’s face, Weather said. “The plastic shattered, and she had ten or fifteen cuts, three bad, up and down the right cheek and temple.”

  “Ah, man.” Lucas could imagine it: he’d seen similar stuff when he was in uniform with the Minneapolis cops.

  “She’ll show the cuts for a while,” Weather said. “In a couple of years, you’ll have to know her to see the scars.”

  “And you only assisted.”

  “Well, technically. I’m not licensed here, so Jerome was the lead surgeon—but on the tricky bits, he stepped back and let me do the work.”

  “Smart guy.”

  “Yes. He is. And really, really good-looking,” Weather said. “Have I mentioned that? He’s like a rock ’n’ roll surgeon, you know? Big muscles, good shoulders, nice tan, except for the little white circles around his eyes. We women get really excited when he’s around. Did I say excited? I meant aroused.”

  “Thank you. I needed that, I’m feeling so good anyway.”

  The light tone went way: “No luck, huh?”

  “No.”

  “You’re stuck?”

  “Pretty stuck . . . maybe gaining a little ground.”

  “How long?”

  “Soon—I’m not so worried about how long, as how many,” Lucas said. “Elle says he’s manic, that he’s moving really fast, he’s like a smart killing machine.”

  He told her about looking at the tapes, about Sloan’s increasing gloom, about Mike West burying himself in the hillside, about Chase’s descent into a rabid lunacy . . . He told her about not being able to see what was going on in the isolation cells.

  “Something happened, but I couldn’t see it. That’s the second time I’ve had the problem, of knowing something was there but not being able to see it.”

  “What’s the other thing?” she asked.

  “There’s something in the notes that this reporter took the last time he talked to the killer. I can feel it, but I can’t figure out what it is. Sloan doesn’t even feel it.”

  “Want to read it to me?”

  So he got the papers, read through it, aloud. When he finished, she was quiet for so long that he said, “Weather? You still there?”

  “Just thinking. You say there’s something in there? You mean, his syntax, or the facts of what he’s saying, or what?”

  “I don’t know,” Lucas said.

  “I could see only one thing, but it’s probably just a mistake . . .”

  “What?”

  “He said he was taking this Peterson woman up I-35, but he said the 35. I’ve never heard anybody from the Midwest say that. The 35. I’ve only heard that in Los Angeles.”

  There was an almost audible bing in the back of Lucas’s brain, and a little cloud lifted off his cerebral cortex. He laughed and said, “Hey. That was it. I could hear it, but I couldn’t see it.”

  “You think it’s important?” She sounded pleased with herself.

  “Could be. The guy could come from California,” Lucas said.

  “Maybe he’s just a fan of Boob-Watch reruns.”

  “Maybe. And maybe not. Maybe he’s from California. If this pans out, I might have sex with you when you get back.”

  “That’s so good of you.”

  “By the way—the rock ’n’ roll surgeon. The reason the guy’s got white circles around his eyes is he spends all of his spare time in a tanning booth . . .”

  “I knew that . . .”

  LUCAS SPENT THE DAY working with the co-op group. They didn’t have much to coordinate, so he had them review records on the St. John’s staff members picked as most-likelies. One of them, an orderly, had a felony record, but from thirteen years earlier. He’d done a year in Still
water for a pharmacy break-in, had gotten Jesus while he was inside, and hadn’t been arrested since.

  Three more, also orderlies, had minor criminal records, misdemeanors, one apparently as a result of mental problems that had been treated with drugs. He had good performance reports; of the other two, one had been arrested for a gross violation of fishing laws—caught with 532 bluegills in an oil barrel, which was roughly 500 over the limit, Lucas thought—and the other had been arrested for shoplifting at Target.

  None of the four had a record of violence.

  Lucas looked for California and found it three times. An orderly named Lee Jones had gone to CalArts in Valencia, California, for two years. He looked in an atlas and found it at the north end of the San Fernando Valley, exactly the kind of place that they would say “the 35.”

  Jones had no record; he had a citation for painting a mural-sized landscape in the cafeteria.

  And two of the docs had connections with California: Sennet and O’Donnell had both worked at psychiatric clinics, O’Donnell in San Francisco and Sennet in San Diego. Lucas wasn’t sure whether they would say “the 35” in San Francisco but thought they probably would in San Diego, since it was so close to LA.

  Hart had been born, raised, and educated in Minnesota. No California connection at all. Grant was from a town called Holcomb in Colorado, had been educated at the University of Colorado, and worked at a private hospital in Denver before moving to Minnesota. Beloit was born in Chicago, did her undergraduate work at Illinois, got an M.D. at Iowa, and was married to a professor of anthropology at Mankato State.

  Hmm, he thought. He’d known that Beloit was married, but he’d gotten a distinct not-very-married vibration from her. Then he thought: So what?

  He combed the files, looking for something, anything . . . took a call from Sloan: “I’ve gone over these files until my eyes bleed,” Sloan said. “I don’t see much.”

  Lucas told him about “the 35,” and Sloan snorted: “You give me a hard time about my ideas. That’s the weakest thing I ever heard of.”

  “Yeah? You ever heard ‘the 35’ from a Minnesotan?”

  “Jesus, Lucas, I wouldn’t even notice . . .”

  Lucas sighed. “It’s a little light. Keep plowing: something will pop. We gotta get the files on the outsiders, too. The docs they bring in.”

  Sloan said, “How about this: Why don’t we get search warrants for, say, the top five suspects? Everybody who’s been to California? Or everybody who’s smart enough, and we can’t otherwise eliminate? We’ve got the group narrowed down.”

  “Ah, jeez, I don’t know,” Lucas said. “It’d be tough; I’m not sure you’d find a judge who’d go for it.”

  “Not up here, maybe. So we call around to all the sheriffs, find one with a district court judge who’s a friend—there’s gotta be something going on in all those small towns. We could get a bunch of warrants all at the same time and serve them all at once. Nobody would have time to appeal, to get the warrant thrown out. And the warrants would hold up in court if we found anything, even if they later decided the grounds weren’t too good.”

  Lucas considered: “The judge would have to be either crooked or a moron . . .”

  Sloan said, “Or a friend. If we used every little stick of information we’ve got that points toward the top five, say, along with the pictures of Peterson and Rice and Larson as convincers . . . I’d bet we could get it.”

  “One problem,” Lucas said. “Who are the top five?”

  “Or six or seven or eight . . . we keep going through these lists, we’ve gotta start eliminating some of them.”

  LUCAS WAS STILL RELUCTANT: “If we don’t get the guy the first try, and we all get hit with a shit storm . . . what’re we gonna do when we really need one, and the grounds are still pretty shaky?”

  “All right. Let’s do this—we keep working the files, we keep talking to people here and at St. John’s. Tomorrow or the next day, if we’re not making any progress, we go for it. See if we can get the warrants. We gotta do something before we have another horror show.”

  AT NOON, Lucas got a call from Nordwall.

  “We found the gut dump, right in a dry creek bed, like he said it would be. The GPS says it’s four miles from the hanging post. By road, maybe six.”

  “Anything?”

  “One thing: we think we found a footprint. He’s not a huge guy: he has smaller feet, maybe size ten.”

  “Okay. That’s good.”

  “Crime Scene is coming, maybe they’ll find more.”

  LATER THAT DAY, the co-op got another batch of files from Cale—all the contract people who had substantial contact with the Big Three. Too much paper; too much. Too many little facts crawling around Lucas’s head. At the end of the day, he was more confused than when he started.

  HE HAD TWO CALLS the next morning. “Hey. Closing in?” Weather asked.

  “Not exactly.” He yawned, and rubbed the stubble on his cheek. He told her about the warrants idea.

  “As long as you won’t get in trouble . . .”

  “Ah, I’ve been in trouble. They keep giving me better jobs.”

  “So I had another thought . . .”

  “What?”

  “Lynyrd Skynyrd, ‘Gimme Three Steps.’ The perfect cop song.”

  “How would you know about Lynyrd Skynyrd?” Lucas asked.

  “They were playing it in the operating room this morning . . .” Weather operated a lot, sometimes two or three times a day, two hundred and fifty times a year. Most of the operations were small—scar revisions, excisions of various undesirable lumps and bumps—and some were enormously complicated, done only after weeks or months of study.

  “I thought you guys listened to Mozart,” Lucas said.

  “Not when the rock ’n’ roll surgeon’s working . . . So everything’s okay there? With you personally?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “Things are a little tense here,” Weather said. “We’ve just heard that France has raised its terror-alert level. They think something’s going on.”

  “Really?” Something else to worry about.

  “Yes. They’ve gone from Run to Hide . . .”

  The joke was so unexpected that Lucas snorted, and hurt his nose again. He said, “Oh, Jesus, don’t make me laugh . . .”

  “The only two higher levels are Surrender and Collaborate,” Weather said.

  “You’re killing my nose, goddamnit,” Lucas said. “Davenport’s a French name, by the way . . .”

  THE SECOND CALL came a few minutes after nine o’clock as Lucas stood naked in front of his chest of drawers, digging around, certain that there was one more pair of clean shorts. He’d seen them the day before . . .

  He ran the washer according to a severely logical schedule based on need: he had, he thought, perhaps twenty pairs of shorts. Why wash after only five or ten pairs have been used, as Weather would, thus putting all that extra water down the drain and through the sewage plant, when you could wait the whole twenty days and only have to wash once? Of course, if you miscalculated . . .

  He had just found the pair of shorts when the phone rang; he stepped over to the table and took it.

  Dr. Cale, from St. John’s. “We’ve, uh, had what is sort of an anomalous situation out here. I really feel stupid for calling you, but I decided it was best not to put it off.”

  “What?” Lucas asked; he felt a tingle.

  “Well, uh, after you left here, uh, the word that you were looking at staff members got around pretty quick. Not from Jansen. Apparently, somebody in the security booth overheard enough to understand what you were looking at, and the gossip got started . . .”

  “What? What happened?”

  “Sam O’Donnell didn’t show up for work this morning,” Cale said. “He’s an hour and a half late. Nobody knows where he is—he’s not at home, we checked. At least, he doesn’t answer when we knock. Doesn’t answer pages or his phone. Nobody’s seen him.”

  “Okay, ok
ay—this is something. I’m coming down there,” Lucas said. “If he shows up, call me on my cell phone. I’ll be there in an hour.”

  HE AND SLOAN did the running hookup, taking the Porsche back through the bean- and cornfields, past the truck gardens and river-bottom fields; there’d been a bug hatch of some kind, and they started picking up serious splatter every time they crossed a bridge. On the way down, they called Nordwall, the Blue Earth County sheriff, and arranged for a search warrant.

  The sheriff called back: “Thought you’d want to know. He drives a gray Acura MDX.”

  “Excellent!” Lucas said.

  SLOAN HAD A LAPTOP with him. He called Cale, got O’Donnell’s address, plugged it into a Microsoft map program, and took them through St. John’s into an exurban neighborhood between St. John’s and Mankato. They cleared the top of a hill, where Lucas expected to find the house, but then twisted down a narrow blacktop road into a deep creek-cut valley, and along the creek for a half mile. They spotted a sheriff’s car at the bottom of a gravel driveway, slowed, and turned in. A deputy came over and said, “Davenport? The sheriff’s up at the house. They haven’t gone in yet. They’re waiting.”

  Lucas took the Porsche up the drive, found a modern redwood-and-stone house set to look down the valley; the slope behind the house was heavily wooded, burr oaks with fat dark leaves. A separate building, a workshop or second garage, was visible behind the residence. A blue Buick and a patrol car were parked in front of the attached garage. Nordwall was standing next to the Buick with a deputy, who was swinging a wrecking bar like a baseball bat. Lucas and Sloan got out of the Porsche and walked over.

  “Get the warrant?” Lucas asked.

  Nordwall nodded: “Yup. Hope he didn’t go out for a loaf of bread . . . you think he’s the second man?”

  “Uh, we gotta talk about that,” Lucas said. “Let’s take a look inside.”

  The deputy said, “The sheriff wanted to wait for you, but I looked in the back window. This guy might be running. There’s a whole pile of clothes on one bed, and a suitcase, like he left it behind.”