Broken Prey

by John Sandford

  “How much did you believe?” Lucas asked.

  Grant considered for a moment, then said, “About the growing-up part, I believed most of it. He says the cops came and got him when he was nine or ten—he didn’t actually know how old he was—and put him in a foster home. He might have been in the closet from the time he was a baby. He said he ran away from the foster home after a while and grew up on the beach at Venice. The thing about Roy was . . .”

  Grant paused again, and Lucas prompted him, “Yeah? What?”

  “Roy has no real personality of his own,” Grant said. “That’s not exactly right, but you can think of him that way. He takes on the personality of the people he’s most impressed with. That’s how he pulled off this fraud at your security hospital. At West Bend, during treatment sessions, he talked and behaved like a staff member. But if you saw him around the orderlies, he acted and talked like an orderly. Once, in a group-therapy session, with a man who’d been accused of killing his wife . . . I saw him take on the other man’s personality in just a matter of a couple of sessions. He picked up the other guy’s mannerisms and way of talking, his gestures, facial tics . . . It was like the other guy had been poured into him.”

  “That explains a lot,” Lucas said. “Listen, Dr. Grant, I’m gonna pick this guy up, right now. We’d appreciate it if you’d come up, help us talk with him. The state will pay all your expenses and a fee, of course . . .”

  “I can do that,” Grant said. “This is a shock, of course. I’d like to talk to the hospital staff up there, and I’d like to see Roy again. Just to hear his story.”

  “Yeah, well . . .”

  “You know where he got the name? Roy Rogers?” Grant asked.

  “From the cowboy guy?”

  “Nope. Well, indirectly. He got it from a fast-food restaurant. Said it was the best place he ever ate, until he went to jail.”

  LUCAS CALLED SLOAN: “It’s Leo Grant. I’ll tell you on the way down to get him.”

  JENKINS ANSWERED HIS cell phone and said he was just getting a bite to eat. Shrake was with him. “We’re heading down to the security hospital,” Lucas said. “I want you guys with us.”

  “We got a break?”

  “Yeah. I’m gonna run over to Minneapolis and pick up Sloan . . .” They agreed to meet at a gas station in the town of Shakopee, on the edge of the metro area.

  “Listen, Shrake and me have been talking,” Jenkins said. “That list of yours . . . It’s gotta have “Fuck the Police,” right? NWA?”

  THE MINNEAPOLIS CITY HALL was an ugly building, a pile of purple stone almost exactly the color, Lucas had once realized after a hunting trip, of fresh deer turds. Sloan was standing on the sidewalk outside. Lucas pulled up beside him, and he jumped into the truck.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  So Lucas told him, and Sloan was properly astonished. He said, “I forgot all about those hookers, and the tattoo. It all seemed so . . . distant.”

  “There ought to be some kind of cop computer program,” Lucas said. “Like a spreadsheet. You’d put in all the facts that you have, all the suppositions, and rank the suppositions by credibility. Then you’d put in all the suspects, and the program would remind you of what you need to do. If we had something like that, that never forgot anything . . .”

  “We’d spend all of our time typing shit into it,” Sloan said.

  “Yeah, but we would have had everybody rolling their sleeves up . . . Goddamnit.”

  THEY TALKED ABOUT the details of the case on the way out of town; stopped at Shakopee and waited for five minutes until Jenkins and Shrake arrived, filled them in, and headed south again. Twenty miles out, Sloan asked, “You think we ought to call the sheriff?”

  “No. This kind of thing gets around too fast. I want to have Grant on the ground, with cuffs on him, before anybody even knows we’re coming.”

  Sloan looked at his watch. “His shift is gonna be over about now.”

  “Ah . . . ,” Lucas glanced at his own watch. “Call Dr. Cale. Ask him to find out if Grant’s gone yet. Tell him not to be obvious about it.”

  Sloan dialed, got Cale, asked, listened, and said, “Just a minute.” He took the phone down and said, “Grant left early—half an hour or forty-five minutes ago.”

  “Uh-oh. Does Cale know why?”

  Sloan asked, listened, then said, “No. He doesn’t know why. He just saw him going out through the security wall, and he was carrying a briefcase and looked like he was in a hurry. Cale assumed he was leaving.”

  “Get a home address. Tell Cale not to mention this, in case he comes back there.”

  WHILE SLOAN GOT THE address, Lucas pulled out his cell phone and tapped the speed dial for the office. Carol answered: “Carol, check with the co-op guys. When I told them to get every speck of information on Grant . . . did they call the hospital directly?”

  She called back: “Yes. They talked to a couple of people. They got the name of a Mrs. Hardesty in Personnel.”

  Lucas hung up and looked at Sloan. “He might know we’re coming.”

  SLOAN CALLED JENKINS and Shrake in the trailing car, and they pulled into a gas station. The software on Lucas’s navigation system wouldn’t allow an address to be entered while the truck was moving; he punched it in, got a map, and they took off again.

  “Maybe we better call the sheriff now,” Sloan suggested, when they were back on the road. “Get somebody looking for his car.”

  “Do it,” Lucas said.

  Sloan called the Department of Motor Vehicle Registration, identified himself, and gave them Grant’s name and address. A moment later he had the car and the tag number. He caught Nordwall in his office, and Lucas listened as Sloan outlined the situation. Then Sloan said, “I’ve got the car, tag, and his address. We’re coming up on the address, we’re just outside of Mankato, now. We’re only about a mile out . . .”

  He gave Nordwall the description of the car, the tag number, and the address, listened for a moment, said, “Yeah, I can hold. What’s going on?”

  Lucas glanced at Sloan, who shrugged, then the sheriff came back up and Sloan, suddenly intent, “Uh-huh, ah, jeez, it’s gotta be related. We’re gonna be there in a minute. See you there.”

  “What?” Lucas asked.

  “There’s been some kind of hassle, some kind of attack on a college kid, right there at Grant’s address. There are a couple of cars on the way, nobody on the scene yet. The sheriff heard the call through his nine-one-one monitor, less than a minute ago. The address rang a bell.”

  “Goddamnit . . . Call the city cops. Tell them we’re coming in.”

  24

  THE MAN WHO CALLED himself Leopold Grant lay writhing on his bed, pale and naked, in a steaming mix of odors, sweat, semen, tobacco, and bed-sheet starch, plugged into a stethoscope. The black sensor cable led from his ears to a hole in the bedroom wall; in the slanted white light knifing across his body from the half-turned slats in the Venetian blinds, he looked like a movie cyborg recharging its batteries.

  He was, in a way. On the other side of the wall, Millie Lincoln was enjoying a visit from Mihovil. Grant was only two feet from her, just on the other side of the wall. With the stethoscope’s sensor duct-taped to the back side of the Sheetrock above Millie’s bed, he could hear every gasp, groan, giggle, and lick.

  He lived for them.

  An hour earlier, he’d run out of the security hospital. One of the nondangerous patients, who worked in Personnel, had tracked him down to tell him that they were pulling all the information on him; that they were calling all his references; that the cops had called from St. Paul and asked for every speck of information.

  Not for everybody—just for Grant. So they had him.

  His first impulse had been to run. He’d run most of his life, it was nothing new. Get back to his apartment, take everything of value, load it into his car, get it up to the Twin Cities, rent another car, run to Chicago, dump the rental . . . He could see himself arriving in Miami, a roll of
cash in his pockets, white teeth through a new beard, a new name, a new profession, a Hawaiian shirt.

  That had been the impulse; and he’d left the hospital in a shit-faced panic.

  But the Gods Down the Hall had gotten to him in some elemental way. They didn’t let go; they tried to pull him back. That talk of a glorious Armageddon. And then when he got back to his apartment, that goddamned Millie Lincoln was at it again. Didn’t she ever study? Didn’t she ever do anything but fuck?

  She’d stopped the flight in its tracks, put him on his bed, sweating, writhing, his imagination gone amok.

  He’d first heard her three months earlier, and had heard her three or four afternoons or nights every week, with an eager lover, probably another college kid. He thought it was the same guy every time, because the voice had a distinct, baritone vibration.

  But it wasn’t the guy who did it to him. It was Millie. Millie didn’t just have orgasms. She worked up to them slowly, and she gave directions: “Oh, do that again, oh, do that. Oh, oh. Ohhhh, c’mon, slow down, go up a little, oh, oh, God, oh . . .”

  Grant had at first heard her only faintly. He’d heard her bed knocking on the wall, a rhythmic bump-bump-bump that could be only one thing. He’d pressed his ear to the drywall, and first heard her groans along with some unintelligible words.

  He’d tried pressing a glass against the wall, the better to hear. There was some marginal improvement, but not enough. Then, at the hospital, one of the docs had left a stethoscope lying unattended at a nurses’ station, and he’d stolen it. He cut a hole in the wall behind the headboard of his bed, and taped the sensor to the wall on the other side. The stethoscope made a major difference. He could hear individual words; he learned her name; and he soon understood that these were modern children, who had an idea of what they wanted and were clear in their requests, which really turned him on . . .

  He’d gone looking for her, then.

  They lived in an apartment complex. Their building had two floors, with eighteen pairs of back-to-back red-brick units on each floor, like an old army barracks but new. Millie’s entrance was on the opposite side of the building from Grant’s. When he checked the mailboxes, he found four female names.

  He watched their doors when he could do it without being obvious. Two of the women were blond, one was fairly dark. The fourth was a bit overweight, chubby but attractive, with fair skin and reddish-brown hair. He thought she might be the one, but he wasn’t sure.

  Millie . . . Millie was causing him trouble this afternoon. He’d come home, planning to run, and had then heard the bumping on the wall. Ten minutes later, she was pounding away, and here he lay, naked, writhing with her, eyes clenched, ears plugged into the stethoscope, riding with her . . .

  Remembering the first woman, Angela Larson:

  The first woman hadn’t been very interesting. He’d noticed her in an art store six or seven months before the killing and had gone back a few times, just to look. She was a tall, dark-haired woman, but with pale eyes and a kind of wide Slavic forehead and sensuous lips. The first night, while he was still developing into a god on his own, he waited until the shop closed, planning to follow her to her car, and then to her home. The lights went out, and he waited, but she never came out.

  The next night, he found her going out the back. He watched her as she walked down to the bar, which had a bigger parking lot than the craft store, slipped into her car. He followed her efficiently, using techniques learned from Robert Ludlum, and was disappointed to find her going into an apartment building. Lots of lights, lots of people around, and since it was mostly students, a lot of awareness.

  But that moment in the alley . . . did she always do that? He watched three more nights, and her routine never varied.

  On the night he became a god, he’d waited until she started turning out the shop lights, had pulled into the alley that led to the bar parking lot, and then pulled into a space between her and her car. There was some ambient light from the bar, but not much. He could see her coming as he got out: he was humming a snatch of song, which he later remembered as “Danger Zone” from the Top Gun movie. And that’s what he felt like, like the top gun . . .

  He walked around to the back of the car, checking that nobody else was in the alley: here was the danger zone, at least for him. He messed around in the trunk, as if he were opening a suitcase or something, and watched her with his peripheral vision. He could see by her hesitant step that she thought about turning, and walking away from him, out there alone in the dark, but that would have been embarrassing, and so she came on, angling a bit away from him, but she was still within a step or two as she went by, watching him out of the corner of her eye.

  He let her get another step, to relax just that fatal notch, then with a quick two-step approach, hit her with a dowel rod. The dowel was a little more than an inch thick, sold as a clothes-closet rod, and five feet long. He meant to stun her with it: but in the excitement and fear of the moment, he hit her too hard. She went down, he scooped her up, dumped her in the trunk of the car, tossed the stick in after her, slammed it, ran around to the door, jumped inside, and was rolling.

  The first time, he’d been intensely frightened. What if a taillight went out? What if he forgot to signal a turn? What if somebody hit him, an accident, and the cops found the body in the trunk?

  All kinds of things could happen.

  None of them did.

  And then the disappointment: he’d hit her too hard.

  When he opened the trunk, she moaned but never seemed aware of what he was doing. He picked her up, and her head rolled, and her eyelids fluttered, and he thought she might be faking. She wasn’t.

  He was careful, in handling her, to never let her get in a position to slash at him . . . but she never even stiffened as he hauled her into O’Donnell’s shed. O’Donnell was in Madison, seeing his mother. The availability of his car shed had been the key to launch the attack. He’d gotten the shed ready before he went after her—had laid down a plastic painter’s drop cloth that he’d bought from Home Depot. He’d hung a piece of nylon anchor rope over one of the exposed ceiling beams, designed to hold the weight of an automobile engine. He tied Larson’s hands and lifted her with the rope.

  She was absolutely slack, all her weight on her shoulder joints, but she never protested, never made a sound other than the low gagging moan.

  “Angela,” he called to her. He’d gotten out his wire flail. “Angela, can you hear me?”

  She couldn’t. He snapped the flail at her; the wire cut into her back, and blood seeped out of the cuts. Nothing but the moan, the fluttering eyelids.

  He hit her again and then a kind of blankness descended on him, and he began beating her with a fury, hitting her, hitting her, until a misstep sent him skidding across the plastic sheet; he dropped to his hands and knees in the blood, gasping for breath. Looked up at her: she hardly looked human, except for her untouched face. He’d shredded her.

  He tried calling to her again, but she was no longer home. Finally, in disgust, he’d cut her throat with a carpet knife. Not a straight razor, but a carpet knife from a Hardware Hank store, stood there and watched the blood pumping out of her throat until her heart stopped, and her blood with it.

  THEN RICE. That had been different; and Peterson . . .

  In the room next door, Millie reached a climax and cried out, and Grant cried out with her.

  He lay on the bed for a moment: everything was coming down on him now. Everything. He’d never make it to Miami. They’d pull him down, lock him down the hall with Biggie and Taylor and Chase.

  Grant staggered away from his bed, sweating, his heart still pounding. Into the bathroom: he felt weird, looked at himself in the mirror. His face was bright pink: his blood pressure must be out of sight, he thought. Had to calm down . . . he splashed a double handful of water into his face, patted his face dry with a towel. Looked at his watch. What? He’d been on the bed for forty minutes. It had seemed like only a moment . . .


  What to do, what to do . . . He paced his apartment, gnawing on a knuckle until it was raw. They were coming, and he was getting nowhere.

  He went into his bedroom again, opened the closet door, pushed away some shoes. Three guns there. Two from O’Donnell, one of his own. One 9mm, one .40, and a .45.

  He picked up the guns, looked at them for a moment, then went back to the living room and got his briefcase. The first briefcase of his life. All done now. He poured out the papers inside and threw in the guns. And the razor. Back to the bedroom, he got the straight razor he’d used on Peterson and slipped it into his pocket. He and Biggie and Chase had figured out how to get them inside—as long as he was coming in on a weekday, and on the second shift . . .

  Which was where they were now.

  And Justus Smith had to be in the control booth. Smith always worked the second shift, on weekdays; but what if he was sick? Or if he’d taken a vacation day? If they were actually going to execute the Armageddon, they’d always talked of it, Lighter, Chase, Taylor, and himself, as being carefully planned ahead of time, with proper options that would allow them to wait until conditions were perfect.

  Now it was all ad hoc. Nothing was perfect . . .

  GRANT LOOKED AT his watch. The first shift had just ended. He went to the phone, dialed in to the hospital, and asked for Smith.

  A moment later, “Cage—this is Smith.”

  Grant hung up. “All right,” he said to himself. Justus was in the cage, and God in his heaven. He looked around the apartment. He didn’t have to pack: fuck all this stuff. He picked up the briefcase, focused now, ready to make his run. Ready to go down with the Gods Down the Hall.