Broken Prey

by John Sandford

  There were eighty files, altogether. Lucas loaded them into the passenger side of the Porsche and hustled them back to the Cities.

  “OKAY,” he told the group, “This is gonna be tedious. But every single anomaly, I want to hear about it. No matter how silly you think it might be. I want to hear about it.”

  THEY CALLED REFERENCES listed in the files, and authors of letters of reference, and doctors, and police stations in towns where the staff members had lived, high schools and colleges and psychiatrists. They found minor crimes, alcoholism, drug abuse, altered academic records, mistakes, friends, and enemies.

  They found one staff member who had apparently lost his foot in an automobile accident but listed “none” under disabilities and distinguishing marks. They found a woman who’d had an abortion but had listed “none” under operations and treatments by physicians; they found a man who was apparently internationally famous for making box kites.

  One man, named Logan, who worked in the laundry and appeared to be immune to embarrassment, sued the manufacturer of a prosthetic pump designed to produce an erect penis, as well as the doctors who surgically implanted the silicone sacs that the pump inflated. He claimed that he’d not been warned that overinflating the sacs could cause his penis to “explode.” The suit added that he and his wife could no longer achieve conjugal satisfaction because the surgical repairs had left his penis looking and feeling like a small cauliflower.

  “Ouch,” said the guy who found the stories about the lawsuit. “Here’s a guy who could have stored up some serious bitterness . . .”

  He gave a dramatic reading of the news stories, taken from the Internet: but the lawsuit was Logan’s only appearance in public print. Lucas agreed that there might have been some pump-related bitterness but noted that Logan had been given a jury award of $550,000, which might well alleviate it; and he couldn’t figure out a way to put Logan and the Big Three together at the critical times.

  ELLE CAME IN LATE in the afternoon, to look at the process, at the three BCA staffers with telephone headsets, sitting in front of computers, looking for all the world like a political boiler room.

  “The quality of information you’re getting is not the right kind to pull him up,” she said. “You would have to be lucky to find him. What we need to do is to set up a whole series of interviews and ask each person to nominate his or her top suspect out of a list of suspects.”

  “The list would include them?”

  “Yes. It would work like one of those market polls, where people make bets on the winners of political races . . . All the suspects know one another, and most of them, given their jobs, are intelligent, so you would wind up with dozens of evaluations that would include all kinds of things that you don’t get on paper. Personal feelings, rumor, gossip, personal encounters . . . you should probably survey the patients, too. They may have psychological problems, but lots of them are actually hyperperceptive, hypersensitive, to the qualities of other people . . .”

  “You might just wind up electing the ten most unpopular people,” Lucas said.

  “Not really—you’d just tell them not to judge on the basis of popularity. Some people would anyway, but you’d get enough hard, honest opinions that it might be very valuable. How many people are you looking at now?”

  “About eighty.”

  “If you were to give questionnaires to all eighty people, and if the killer is one of them, I would bet that his name is in the top five,” she said.

  Lucas scratched his chin. “If we go another day or two without a break, I might do that. Why don’t you put together the questionnaire, have it ready?”

  “Why wait a day or two? If you think this man is really on the staff, and he’s still out there . . .”

  “Because we’d have all kinds of legal and labor problems,” Lucas said. “We’re already working through some pretty questionable territory, calling up friends and relatives and asking about these people. We’re gonna hear from the unions any time now . . . And the media would go crazy about invasion of privacy and all that. I mean, we are on a fishing expedition.”

  “If he kills somebody else . . .”

  “That’s why I say I’ll do it if we don’t get anything in the next day or two,” Lucas said. “Right now, I think he’s hunkered down. He’ll start moving again, if he’s like you say, if he doesn’t have any choice . . .”

  “There’s something else. If you let me do this market thing . . . it would be a wonderful paper. The Journal of Forensic Psychology would be all over it.”

  The problems of a survey and the labor unions became moot the next day.

  THE CO-OP CENTER had pretty much closed down by seven o’clock in the evening. Lucas took home a stack of notes the staff had made on anomalies they’d seen in the incoming data. He read through the notes, sitting in a leather chair in his small library. The anomalies were slight: discrepancies in dates, times, schools; and a few comments by former employers that suggested that this staff member, or that one, hadn’t done well at a previous job.

  Lucas became interested in a staff member named Herman Clousy. He’d been hired as a medical technician, doing routine lab work, including blood tests on Charlie Pope. To get the job, he’d provided a transcript from a “Lakewood Community College” in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, but nobody could find a Lakewood Community College. He’d also provided three references, and none of the three could be reached at the phone numbers he’d listed. On the other hand, he’d worked for the state for fifteen years, and the references were out-of-date.

  The next morning, Clousy was at the top of Lucas’s list for almost fifteen minutes. After the daily chat with Weather, he called Dr. Cale, who said that Clousy was an average performer, one of the shadow people whom nobody paid much attention to. He was married, Cale knew, and lived in Mankato. Was there any special reason why Lucas was interested?

  “He says he graduated from a Lakewood Community College in White Bear Lake, and there isn’t one.”

  “Really? That would have been checked . . . let me ask my secretary, she used to work for the community college down here.”

  Cale went away for a minute, then came back and said, “Sandy says there used to be a Lakewood,” he said. “She says it’s called Century College now.”

  “Ah . . . poop. Let me check that.”

  He gave it to one of the co-op staff, who checked and came back five minutes later: “There was a name change, all right. Still can’t find the references . . .”

  “Take the most uncommon-looking last name in the references and start calling around to all of them you can find,” Lucas suggested.

  THEY SPENT THE REST of the morning tracking more dead ends: the work was tedious and left Lucas feeling stupid. At lunchtime, he went out for a BLT, then returned to his office and told Carol not to let anyone in, short of an emergency.

  He closed the door, put his feet up on his desk, and thought about all the activity in the co-op room. Elle might be right: the kind of information they were getting wouldn’t really pinpoint anyone. The other problem was, when you were dealing with so many possibilities, you tended to forget about the facts you already had.

  For instance, he thought, somebody had passed the information about Peterson to the Big Three. That was a fact, and they hadn’t emphasized it enough. It had to be one of fewer than a dozen people. They were all on tape.

  Did O’Donnell make any small specific move, did he touch all three food trays, did he do anything that might possibly involve the passing of information? How about the guys up in the cage? Was there some way to fiddle with the time code on the tape, or mess with the tape itself, so the guy in the back could have a little chat with Taylor, Lighter, and Chase and nobody would know?

  Lucas couldn’t stand going down to the co-op room again, so he dragged out the tapes of the St. John’s isolation wing. He ran through them at high speed, the people coming and going in their silent-movie way.

  HERE CAME O’DONNELL. Here was the fo
od. He says something to Lighter, and the food goes in. Didn’t touch anything that time. He talks to Chase. Food goes in . . .

  He couldn’t see it. Maybe O’Donnell put the messages in the food in the hallway? Might he have some power over one of the orderlies who delivered the trays?

  He ran back and forth through the tapes, watching people come and go, staffers talking to prisoners, interacting with other staffers. Here’s Beloit, here’s Grant, here’s Hart, here’s O’Donnell, here goes Sennet . . .

  “WHAT’S HE DOING?” Lucas asked himself.

  He was watching Leo Grant. Hard to pick up, if you weren’t running the tapes at high speed.

  Okay: Grant walks down the corridor, dressed in slacks and a sport coat, hands in his pockets. He’s with Sennet. Sennet pushes a button, and they talk to Lighter. While they talk, Grant takes off his sport coat, folds it over his arm.

  Lucas couldn’t make out what the conversation was about, but watched as Grant turned his back to the window where Lighter was standing. Grant was facing both the camera and Sennet. They talked some more, and then Sennet punched the window release, and the window closed, shutting Lighter away again.

  Sennet steps across the hallway. Grant, still with his coat off, steps sideways across the hall, never turning his back fully to the camera or to Sennet. Sennet opens Chases’s window. They talk, Grant turns his back to Chase, as they talk. He’s facing Sennet. Sennet closes Chase’s window. Taylor’s window is down the hall. Sennet heads that way, and Grant slips his jacket on, and follows Sennet, his back to the camera. They talk to Taylor, and Grant casually slips his jacket off again. He turns his back to Taylor, but never to Sennet or the camera . . .

  Sennet punched Taylor’s window when they were finished, and he and Grant walked back toward the camera, Grant a step behind so that Sennet had to turn slightly to talk to him. They disappeared under the camera and, presumably, out the door.

  LUCAS RAN THE SEQUENCE several times. Maybe Grant just couldn’t get the jacket right. Maybe the temperature was uncomfortable. But maybe . . . could he have had something written on the back of his shirt? Or a piece of paper or cloth tacked to his shirt?

  Lucas dug out the anomalies list and found only one short entry for Grant: a Dr. Peter Baylor, from a clinic in Colorado, had mentioned that Grant had gone to a private psychiatric clinic in Cancun after leaving Colorado. The anomaly was that there were three references from Colorado in Grant’s record, but none from Cancun.

  Lucas looked up the telephone numbers for Colorado, called, asked for Peter Baylor, and was told that he wasn’t working that day. “I’m trying to find the phone number for a former staff member of yours, Leo . . .” He flipped through the paper. It wasn’t Leonard, it was . . . “Leopold Grant. He left your hospital and apparently went to Cancun.”

  After being routed around, he talked to a woman in the clinic’s personnel department who didn’t have a number, but had a name: The Coetrine Center. After a hassle with the AT&T operator, he got the place. The woman who answered the phone, in Spanish, switched smoothly to English, then forwarded him to another office. The man who answered the phone there, in Spanish, changed to English.

  Lucas said, “I need some information about a former employee of yours named Leopold Grant . . .”

  “You already have some incorrect information,” the man said, pleasantly enough. “Here, you might as well get it from the horse’s mouth . . .”

  Before Lucas could reply, the man half covered the mouthpiece of the receiver, and Lucas could hear him call out something, but not what he said.

  A second later, another phone receiver rattled, and an American man’s voice said, “This is Leo Grant. Can I help you?”

  23

  FOR A MOMENT, Lucas experienced the kind of disorientation he might have felt in a falling elevator.

  Then he said, “I beg your pardon? Who is this?”

  The Cancun guy said, “Leo Grant. Who are you?”

  “Uh . . . Lucas Davenport—I’m an agent with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. We have had a series of murders here . . . one of the people we’re investigating is a Leopold Grant, a psychologist who works at the St. John’s Security Hospital. He shows references from the West Bend Hospital in Boulder, Colorado.”

  There followed a moment of silence, then a crunching sound, as if the man on the other end of the line had bitten off a piece of celery. Then, “How do I know this isn’t a stupid pet trick?”

  “Do you have a line to the States?” Lucas asked.

  “Well, sure.”

  “Call directory assistance for Minnesota, ask for the number for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Under the listings for the state of Minnesota. Call that number, then ask for me: My name is Lucas Davenport, L-u-c-a-s D-a-v-e-n-p-o-r-t . . . This is critical: do it right away.”

  “I’ll call you right back.” There was a final chewing crunch, and then the line went dead.

  LUCAS, HIS HEART suddenly booming, stuck his head out the office door. “Carol: run down to the co-op center, tell them we need every speck of information we can get on Leo Grant, the psychologist at St. John’s.”

  “Leo Grant . . .”

  “Run.”

  LUCAS TOOK A COUPLE of turns around his office, thinking about Grant. He was well spoken, soft faced . . . but he’d also hung out with Sam O’Donnell, would have known about O’Donnell’s Christmas voice, had worked with Charlie Pope and the Big Three. Could have passed word of Peterson’s murder . . .

  And going way back, he was the one who said that Charlie was smarter than he looked, that Charlie might go for college girls, that there might be a second man or woman. Jesus. He’d been steering them from the start.

  “Ah, man.” He looked at the phone: “Call, motherfucker.”

  A MINUTE LATER, the phone rang. “This is Leo Grant from Cancun.”

  “Yeah, Dr. Grant. This is Davenport. Are you satisfied?”

  “Yes, I guess so,” Grant said. “What’s going on? Murders?”

  “We’ve got a guy who had access to all the major players in a series of murders. He says he’s a psychologist, and that his name is Leopold Grant . . .”

  “That seems unlikely . . .”

  “. . . who did his school at Colorado and then worked at West Bend. He has a set of references from West Bend. Wait, he has a transcript from Colorado that was sent to a 2319 Eleanor Street . . .”

  “You’ve got a fraud on your hands, then,” Grant said. “That was my address when I was a graduate student. I’ve never met or heard of another Leopold Grant. If there was another doc in the field with the same name, I would have heard—if he were legit, anyway. If he contributed to the literature.”

  “Do you have any idea how this Leopold Grant could have gotten his hands on your files?” Lucas asked. He thumbed through the “Leo Grant” file from St. John’s. “There are references here . . . Is Douglas Carmichael a real guy? He’s shown here as . . .”

  “. . . director of psychiatric medicine at West Bend. He’s real. It’s on letterhead paper, I assume.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “If you’ve got a transcript and all that other stuff, then I’d say that somebody probably got to the personnel files at West Bend,” Grant said. “Have you seen this Leo Grant? What does he look like?”

  “He’s a pretty good-looking guy,” Lucas said. “Six feet tall, dark hair, dark eyes. He’s thin—wiry—high cheekbones. He dresses well, he’s well spoken. He seems pretty smart. He uses big words sometimes, I thought maybe he was showing off, but it seems pretty natural . . .”

  “Oh, boy . . . does he have a tattoo on his upper arm? Like a barbed-wire thing?”

  “Ah, shit.” Lucas dropped the phone to his thigh and put his hands over his eyes. The hookers at the Rockyard, they’d mentioned the tattoo. He’d never thought about it again. If he’d lined up all the possibilities, had all the men roll up their sleeves, Peterson would be alive.

  He put the p
hone back to his ear and Grant was saying, “Hello? Are you still there?”

  “I’m here. I just . . . remembered something. Another witness mentioned seeing a man with that tattoo talking to one of the victims. Goddamnit.”

  “If it’s who I think it is, you’ve got a serious problem,” Grant said. “There was a patient named Roy Rogers at West Bend. Roy Rogers wasn’t his real name, but we never found out what his real name was. He killed a man in Denver, a street guy. He’d sat on the guy and nearly cut his head off with a piece of glass. This was over a radio. The cops figured it must have taken five minutes to get the job done: he started around back and sawed halfway through the guy’s neck.”

  “The guy we’re looking for has slashed the throats of all three victims . . . You turned this Rogers guy loose?”

  “No—he turned himself loose. I ran into one of my college pals at a convention in Chicago, and he mentioned it. Roy was supposedly in a secure area, but somebody left a door unlocked, or ajar, and he walked down through a mechanical area and out the other side. The staff thinks he rode out in the back of a food truck. Nobody’s seen him since.”

  “Is he smart? Any connection with California that you know of?” Lucas asked.

  “He’s very bright—his IQ, by the old standards, would have been considered genius level. We don’t call it that anymore, but he’s smart. And he came from California.”

  “Ah. Thank you . . .”

  The Cancun Leo Grant was into it now, his voice intense: Lucas realized that he sounded like the fake Leo Grant: “The thing is, whatever his name is, if his story is true . . . Roy’s the poster boy for unwanted children. He said he grew up locked in his room—he didn’t even have a window. When I pushed him on it, I got the impression that his ‘room’ might have been a walk-in closet. He wasn’t tortured or sexually abused, he was just locked away. His story’s a horror, depending on how much you could believe.”