Mind Prey

by John Sandford

  "My mother's dead."

  "Yeah? How'd she die?"

  "She drowned."

  "Huh," Mail seemed about to say something else, but then he rolled to his knees, looming over her again. "Well, then, maybe it's your partner. Maybe it's your father."

  She took the risk. "John, I think you're making it up."

  For a moment, she thought he might strike her—his eyes widened in instant, unreflective anger, and he seemed to pull within himself, as when he beat her. But then he smiled, slightly, and said, "Yeah, I'm bullshitting you. There really is a spy. But I don't know who it is."

  She shook her head.

  "Called me up out of the blue," he said. "Said, 'Remember Andi Manette who sent you away? She talks about you all the time.' "

  "Somebody said that?" She believed him now—and she was appalled.

  "Yeah. Said you thought I was some kind of devil. Pretty soon I couldn't get you out of my head. I never forgot you, but you were in the back of my mind some place. I didn't have to deal with you. But the spy called…"

  "Yes?" A psychiatrist's prompt, and she felt a little thrill of power.

  "I can remember sitting in that detention room, and you always sat there in these… dresses… you had these tits, you wore this perfume, I could see up your legs sometimes, I used to think I could see your pussy in there; I'd lay up at night and think about it. Could I see it? Or maybe not…"

  "I didn't realize…" Another prompt.

  "You never knew what made me work, and I couldn't explain it," Mail said. "After a while I'd just sit there and look at your tits and burn."

  "Somebody kept calling you?"

  "I don't wanna talk any more," he said, the anger suddenly back. And his eyes turned inward, jelled over. "I want to fuck…" He swatted at her and hit her on a shoulder. She quailed away, and he said, "Get over here, or I'll really fuckin' beat your ass."

  Later she said, "Can I call somebody? My husband, or somebody, to tell them that we're alive?"

  He was irritated. "Fuck no."

  "John, pretty soon they'll think we're dead. Pretty soon all this activity will die down, and it'll just be one long grinding hunt, and they'll get you and lock you up forever. If they know I'm alive, you might be able to… move better. There might be a deal somewhere, something you can work."

  Again, talking almost like lovers: she concerned for his future. He shook it off. "There won't be any deal. Not with me."

  "It gives you more power," she said. "If they convince themselves that I'm dead, they can do anything they want. If they know I'm alive, things'll be more awkward for them. As a gamer, I'm sure you can see that. And I just want people to know that I'm still out here. I don't want them to forget me."

  Mail stood up, began to dress, kicked her clothes at her. "Put them on." And when she was dressed, he said, "I'll think about it. You can't call direct, but maybe we could tape something. I could call the tape in from somewhere else."

  "John, that would be…" She almost laughed. "That would be great."

  He reacted to that: he puffed up, she thought. He liked the flattery, especially from her. "I'll think about it."

  Back inside the cell, after the door had closed and his feet had thumped away, she said to Grace, "We've got to think of a message to tape—he might tape a message for us. We have to figure out a code, or something."

  She was excited, and Grace watched her, her young face solemn, withdrawn, and Andi finally said, "What? What?"

  And Grace said, "You've got blood all over your face, Mom. It's all over."

  Grace pointed to the right side of Andi's face and suddenly her hand began to shake with fear, and she began to cry, backing away from Andi, and Andi scrubbed at the side of her face and the blood from her nose that had dried there, after Mail, excited, had begun slapping her during the last sexual frenzy.

  She hadn't noticed the blood, she thought, as Grace huddled in the corner. She was becoming used to it; a condition of her servitude.

  But things had changed this time. Things had changed.

  CHAPTER 14

  « ^ »

  Rose Marie Roux, looking too tired to be a chief of police, her purse dangling from her hand, struggled up the stairs and through the open door.

  Lucas followed the chief and T. Conrad Haward—Dumbo—into Manette's house, to a gathering in the ornate living room. Dunn was there, tense, unhappy, hair in disarray, eyes heavy; he had his back to a cold fireplace, a heavy crystal liquor glass in his hand. He looked past Roux and Dumbo to nod at Lucas.

  Helen Manette perched on an antique chair, mouth too wide and too tight, and Lucas thought she might be drunk, although she wasn't drinking anything. Nancy Wolfe, in a soft, moss-colored suit, glared at him from across the room. When he looked steadily back, she bounced her hair and looked away. She was sipping from a small cognac glass, and posed in front of a nineteenth-century oil painting of a woman with cold, dark eyes, a coal-black dress, and a surprisingly sensual lower lip.

  The gofer attorney was getting drinks; a Minneapolis Intelligence cop in a plaid sportcoat and t-shirt, with a bump on his hip that was probably a large automatic, leaned in a doorway and gobbled popcorn from a plastic sack. He was waiting for the phone call that had never come, and looked bored.

  Manette stood in the center of the circle, wearing a gray suit with an Italian necktie, the knot tight at his throat. He was worn and older than he'd looked only the day before. But somehow, down in his soul, Lucas thought, watching him, Manette also enjoyed being at the center of a tragedy.

  "No-go," the chief said to Manette, shaking her head. "I'm sorry."

  "Shit." Dunn turned away from them, and Lucas thought he might chunk the bourbon glass into the fireplace. Instead, he leaned against the rock-facing, head down.

  "Not a complete loss," Dumbo said. A fine patina of sweat covered his forehead. He hated dealing with the rich, people who knew U.S. Senators by their nicknames and toilet habits. "We had him on, but we couldn't hold him long enough. We had him for twenty seconds and he figured it out. We've got an idea where he is: south of the rivers, down in Eagan or Apple Valley."

  "You've got projects down there," Manette said to Dunn.

  Dunn turned around, his face sullen, a little heat lightning in his eyes. "Yeah, but I wasn't answering any telephones down there tonight," he growled.

  "That's not what I meant," Manette said, squaring off to Dunn. "I meant, you know the area."

  Nancy Wolfe caught Tower's jacket sleeve and pulled him back an inch, and Dunn said, "Yeah, and I know there're three hundred thousand people in the fuckin' area…"

  "Watch your mouth," Manette snapped. "There are women here."

  Lucas, now watching Wolfe, behind Manette, her hand on his sleeve, thought: Huh.

  "He, uh, mentioned Davenport," Dumbo said, looking at Lucas. "He apparently, uh, feels Chief Davenport is"—he groped for a word, finally found one—"responsible for the"—he groped for another one—"radio procedure."

  "Well, he is," Dunn said to Dumbo. "He's the only cop I've talked to so far doesn't have his head up his ass."

  "George…" Manette said, his face still red under his shock of white hair. Dunn ignored him and stepped closer to Lucas. "I want to put up a reward. I don't care how much. A million."

  "Not that much," Lucas said. "We'd have freaks coming out of the woodwork. Start at fifty thousand."

  "Good. I'm gonna announce it right now," Dunn said. He looked at Manette, but Manette said nothing, just shook his head with a sour, skeptical smile and turned away from them all.

  On the way out, the chief said, "Happy little family."

  "Nancy Wolfe, Tower Manette, what do you think?"

  Nothing surprised Rose Marie Roux: she'd been in politics too long. After a moment of silence, she said, in a voice that was almost pleased, "It's possible. When we briefed them last night, she touched the back of his hand."

  "And tonight, she tried to stop him from fighting Dunn… or made a move that way
. Protective."

  "Huh," the chief said. Then, "You know, Lucas, you have a strong feminine side."

  "What?"

  "Never mind," she said.

  "No, what'd you mean?" Lucas was amused.

  The chief said, "You're more willing than most men to rely on intuition. I mean, you suspect that Nancy Wolfe and Tower Manette are having an affair."

  "There's no question about it," he said. "Now that I think about it."

  "Because she caught his sleeve." Now Roux was amused. "That's a pretty good leap."

  "It was how she touched his sleeve," Lucas said. "If that's feminine, I accept the label."

  "What'd you think I meant?" Roux asked.

  "I don't know," he said vaguely. "Maybe, you know—I had nice tits."

  Rom started to laugh: "Christ, I'm running a fuckin' zoo, the people I've got."

  The middle of the night, all foul-mouthed, their shirts seeming to pull willfully out of their pants and rumple on their own, they stood around a six-by-five Metro wall map and looked at the red-crayoned box southeast of the airport.

  "It's something," Lester insisted. "He was smarter than we gave him credit for. Christ, another minute. One more minute and we've got him."

  Lucas threw a paper coffee cup at a waste basket, the old coffee like acid in his mouth. "We gotta go for the full-court press. He'll be calling back. I'm surprised he hasn't already."

  "We can do it with the next shift," Anderson says. "Right now, we'd be eighty percent. By tomorrow morning, we'll be at full strength."

  "We gotta be ready to do it now," Lucas said.

  "We are—just not a hundred percent. It's a matter of getting people through the shifts," Anderson said.

  "We should flood the 494 strip, and extra people down I-35 all the way through Apple Valley," Lucas said.

  "Smart little fuck," Lester said, staring moodily at the map.

  Weather was asleep and moaned softly when he slipped into bed. He needed to wake her up to talk, but she would be cutting on someone in the morning, and he didn't dare do it. Instead, he lay awake for an hour, plotting the twists and turns of the day, feeling the warmth from Weather seeping over him. He finally slept, one arm at her waist, the smell of Chanel around him.

  Weather was gone, and Lucas was just out of the shower when the cellular phone rang. He stopped, listening, then hurried into the living room, trailing streams of water. He'd left the phone on the dining room table, and now he picked it up and clicked it on.

  "Lucas, how they hanging?" Mail sounded unnaturally cheerful.

  "Are they still alive?" The squad cars should be rolling, Thirty seconds.

  "Are you trying to trace me?"

  Lucas hesitated, then repeated his original question: "Are they alive, or not?" Lucas asked.

  "Yeah, they're alive," Mail said grudgingly. "In fact, I've got a message for you from Andi Manette."

  "Let me get a pencil," Lucas said.

  "Oh, horseshit, this is all recorded," Mail said impatiently. "Not that it's gonna do you any good. I'm using the cellular, but this time I'm riding around, a long way from anywhere."

  Shit. "Go ahead: I've got a pencil."

  "Here it is. I don't know how clear it'll be…"

  George, Daddy, Genevieve, Aunt Lisa, this is Andi. We're okay, Grace and me, and we hope Genevieve is back and everything is fine with her. The man with us won't let us say anything about him, but he was good enough to let us send this. I hope we can talk to you again, and this man with us, please give him whatever he wants so we can come back safely. That's all I can say…

  Andi Manette's voice was plaintive, fearful, trembling with hope; cut off with a click of a recorder button.

  "That's all for now, sports fans," Mail said cheerfully. "I have to say, though, I liked the disk-jockey thing. It really woke me up. Tell the guy I'm gonna stop by his house and visit his family some day while he's gone. I'm gonna bring a pair of wire cutters with me. We're gonna have a lot of fun."

  When Mail hung up, Lucas turned the phone off, laid it on the table, and stared at it like an ebony cockroach; fifteen seconds later, Martha Gresham called from the communications center and said, "We got it all."

  "Excellent. Is Lester there?"

  "No, but Donna's talking to him now, so he knows."

  Lucas hurried back to the bedroom and dressed, waiting for the phone to ring. It rang as he was knotting the tie: "Yeah, Frank. Was it her?"

  "It's her. And she's trying to tell us something, but we don't know what," Lester said.

  "How do you know?"

  "Because she said hello to her aunt Lisa."

  "Yeah?"

  "I talked to Tower Manette one minute ago," Lester said. "Her aunt Lisa's been dead for ten years."

  "Get somebody going: we need everything we can get on the aunt."

  "We're going, but I want you looking at it," Lester said. "Goddamnit, Lucas, we need somebody to pull a rabbit out of a hat."

  Lucas said, "You gotta cover Milo, over at the station. And his family. He's got two kids himself."

  "We're on the way. But what about Genevieve?"

  "Genevieve's dead," Lucas said. "We know that, but Andi Manette doesn't."

  They did a group therapy with Manette and Dunn, in Roux's office: why Aunt Lisa?

  "Lisa Farmer was my first wife's sister," Manette said. "She had this big place out in the country, with horses, and when Andi was a kid she'd go out and ride. Maybe she's telling us that the guy's a farmer—or that he's a horse guy, or something. It's gotta be something like that."

  "Unless she's just lost it," Dunn said quietly.

  "My daughter…" Manette started.

  "Hey." Dunn pointed a finger at Manette, his voice cold. "I know you love your daughter, Tower, but I do too, and frankly, I know her better. She is fucked up. Her voice has changed, her manner's changed, she is desperate and she's hurt. I want to think that she's sending a message, but I don't want to cut off everything and just concentrate on that one thing. Because it's possible that she's lost it."

  Manette looked away, sideways at nothing, down at the floor.

  Dunn, uncomfortable, patted him on the back, then looked across

  Manette at Lucas. "Genevieve's dead, isn't she?"

  "You better be ready," Lucas said.

  They would do a fast scan of farms and horses, running the Dakota County agricultural assessment rolls against sex crime records and other lists. Lucas got Anderson's running case log and carried it back to his office and read for a while. Nothing occurred to him. Restless, he wandered down to Homicide, and ran into Black and Sherrill.

  "What's happening at the U?" he asked.

  "We've got five more possibles, including one with fire and sex. We're looking for him now," Sherrill said. She held up a stack of files. "You want Xeroxes?"

  "Yeah. Anderson said something about the one guy—Mail?—that he was a washout?"

  "Yeah," Black said. "Really washed out. He washed out of the river. He's dead."

  "Shit," Lucas said. "He sounded good."

  Sherrill nodded. "They let him out of St. Peter and two months later he went off the Lake Street Bridge, middle of the night. They found him down by Fort Snelling. He'd been in the water for a week."

  "How'd they ID him?" Lucas asked.

  "They found a state ID card on the body," Sherrill said. "The ME went ahead and did a dental on him; it was him."

  "All right," Lucas nodded. "Who's this other guy, the fire and sex guy?"

  "Francis Xavier Peter, age—now—thirty-four. He set sixteen fires in ten days out in St. Louis Park, nobody hurt, several houses damaged. We talked to his parents, and they say he's out on the West Coast being an actor. They haven't heard from him lately, and he doesn't have a phone. Andi Manette treated him; he was a patient for two years. She didn't like him much. He came on to her during a couple of therapy sessions."

  "An actor?"

  "That's what they say," Sherrill said.

  "This gu
y we're dealing with," Lucas said, "he could be an actor. He likes games…"

  "One thing," Black said. "Francis Xavier Peter is a blond and wore his hair long."

  "Jesus: could be the guy. Does he look anything like the composite?" Lucas asked.

  "He has a round face, sort of German-country boy," Sherrill said.

  "What you mean is, No," Lucas said. "He doesn't look like the composite."

  "Not too much," she conceded.

  "Well, push it," Lucas said.

  CHAPTER 15

  « ^ »

  The voice was tense : "They're getting close to you. You've got to move on."

  Mail, standing in the litter of two decapitated mini-tower systems—he was switching out hard drives—sneered at the phone, and the distant personality at the end of it. "Say what you mean. You don't mean, move on. You mean, kill them and dump them."

  "I mean, get yourself out," the voice said. "I didn't think anything like this was going to happen…"

  "Bullshit," Mail said. "You thought you were manipulating me. You were pushing my buttons."

  He could hear the breathing on the other end—exasperation, desperation, anticipation? Mail would have enjoyed knowing. Someday, he thought, he'd figure the voice out. Then… "Besides, they're nowhere near as close as you think. You just want me to get rid of them."

  "Did you know that Andi Manette sent a message with that tape recording you let her make? Her aunt is dead—she's been dead a long time. Her name was Lisa Farmer, and she lived on a farm. And they're looking in Dakota County, at farm houses, because that's where they put you with that little cellular phone trick. You don't have much time now."

  Click.

  Mail looked at the phone, then dropped it back on the hook and wandered around the living room, whistling, stepping over computer parts. The tune he whistled came from the bad old days at the hospital, when they piped Minnesota Public Radio into the cells. Simple Mozart: he'd probably heard it a hundred times. Mail had no time for Mozart. He wanted rhythm, not melody. He wanted sticks hammering out a blood-beat; he wanted drums, tambourines, maracas. He wanted timpani. He didn't want tinkly music.