Shadow Prey

by John Sandford

  “Davenport? What the hell . . . ?”

  “Dropped the phone,” Lucas said sleepily. “What happened?”

  “They did another one. A federal judge in Oklahoma City.”

  “Shit.” Lucas yawned and sat up. “The way you’re talking, the killer got away.”

  “Yeah. He had braids, like . . .”

  “ . . . the guy who did Cuervo. So there had to be at least three of them, counting Bluebird.”

  “Yeah. Anderson’s getting everything he can out of the Oklahoma cops. And those pictures—we’re getting them at nine. We’ll meet in Wink’s office.”

  “No problems?”

  “Aw, we gotta go through the usual bullshit, but we’ll get them,” Daniel said.

  “Somebody ought to call Lily,” Lucas said.

  “My secretary’ll take care of it. There’s one more thing . . . .”

  “What?”

  “The feds are in it.”

  Lucas groaned. “Aw, no, please . . .”

  “Yeah. With both feet. Made the announcement an hour ago. I talked to the Minneapolis agent-in-charge and he says Lawrence Duberville Clay himself is taking a personal interest.”

  “Sonofabitch. Can we keep them off the street? Those guys could screw up a wet dream.”

  “I’ll suggest that they focus on intelligence, but it won’t work,” Daniel said. “Clay thinks he can ride the crime business into the attorney general’s job, and maybe the presidency. The papers are calling these killings ‘domestic terrorism.’ That’ll get him out here for sure, just like when he went out to Chicago on that dope deal, and L.A. for the Green Army bust. When he gets here, he’ll want some action.”

  “Fuck him. Let him find his own action.”

  “Try to be nice, all right? And in the meantime, let’s get these pictures from the Trib and start hammering the street. If we nail these cocksuckers, Lawrence Duberville won’t have any reason to come out.”

  They met with StarTribune executives in the office of Louis Wink, the paper’s bald-as-a-cueball editor. Harold Probst, the publisher, and Kelly Lawrence, the city editor, sat in. Lily arrived on Daniel’s arm; his elbow, Lucas noticed, was pressing Lily’s breast. Daniel wore a gray suit that was virtually a mirror image of Wink’s, and a self-satisfied smile. The meeting lasted ten minutes.

  “The reason I object is that it brings up the question of whether we’re an arm of the police. It damages our credibility,” said the round-faced Lawrence.

  “With who?” Lily asked heatedly. She was dressed in a rough silk blouse and another tweed skirt. She either had the world’s best complexion or did the world’s best makeup, Lucas thought.

  “With people on the street,” said the city editor. Lawrence was wearing a rumpled cotton dress that was just the wrong color of blue for her eyes. Lily looked so much better that Lucas wished she’d waited outside.

  “Oh, bullshit,” Lily snapped. “You have this great big goddamned building full of yuppies in penny loafers and you’re worried about damaging your reputation with street people? Jesus H. Christ on a crutch.”

  “Take it easy,” Lucas said soothingly. “She’s right. It’s a sensitive question.”

  “We wouldn’t even ask, if the crimes weren’t so horrendous. They killed a federal judge last night; butchered him. They killed one of the brightest up-and-coming politicians in the country and two people here,” Daniel said in a syrupy voice. He turned to Lily. “The fact is, the press is in a very delicate situation.”

  He turned back to Wink and Probst, where the power was. “All we want to do is look at the face of the man that Lily thinks might be the New York killer. And we want to look at the people around him, so we can question them. You might very well have run all of those pictures in the paper, for anyone to see. You promised confidentiality to nobody. In fact, they were soliciting attention by their very presence at this confrontation.”

  “Well, that’s right,” said Probst. A flash of irritation crossed Wink’s face. Probst had come up on the advertising side.

  “And you’ll get a tremendous story out of it,” Lucas put in. “You’ll stick it right up the Pioneer Press’s ass.”

  Lawrence, the city editor, brightened, but Lily continued to stew. “And if you don’t we’ll go to court and drag it out of you anyway,” she snarled.

  “Hey . . .” Wink sat up.

  Daniel broke in before he could go any further. He pointed a finger at Lily’s face and said, “No, we won’t, Lieutenant. If they decide against us in this room, we’ll look for other pictures, but we won’t go to court. And if you keep this up, I’ll ship your ass back to New York faster than you can say ‘Avenue of the Americas.’ ”

  Lily opened her mouth and just as suddenly snapped it shut. “Okay,” she said. She glanced at Wink. “Sorry.”

  Daniel smiled his most charming smile at Wink and said, “Please?”

  “I think . . . we should get some prints in here,” Wink said. He nodded at Lawrence. “Get them.”

  They all sat silently until the city editor came back with three manila envelopes and handed them to Wink. Wink opened one, took out a set of eight-by-ten prints, looked at them, then passed them to Daniel. Daniel dealt them out across the table to Lily, who stood up, spread them out and began studying them.

  “It’s him,” she said after a moment. She tapped one of the faces. “That’s my man.”

  They got two sets of photos and stopped on the street corner before Daniel walked back to City Hall.

  “Larry Hart is coming over this afternoon. He had to get his case load closed out,” Daniel said to Lucas. “I’ll get him a set of photographs. He may know somebody.”

  “All right. And I’ll show my set around.”

  Daniel nodded and looked at Lily. “You should watch your temper. You almost lost it for us.”

  “Newsies piss me off,” she said. “You were getting pushed around.”

  “I wasn’t getting pushed. Everybody knew what would happen. We had to go through the ritual,” Daniel said mildly.

  “Okay. It’s your turf. I apologize,” she said.

  “You should apologize. Being a hell of guy, I accept,” Daniel said, and started off across the street.

  Lily looked after him. “He’s a piece of work,” she said after a moment.

  “He’s okay. He can be an asshole, but he isn’t stupid,” Lucas said.

  “So who’s this Larry Hart?” Lily asked.

  “He’s a Welfare guy, a Sioux. Good guy, knows the streets, probably knows a thousand Indians. He’s fairly large in Indian politics. He’s written some articles, goes out to all the powwows and so on.”

  “We need him. I spent six hours on the street yesterday and didn’t learn a thing. The guy I was with—”

  “Shearson?”

  “Yeah. He wouldn’t know an Indian from a fire hydrant. Christ, it was almost embarrassing,” she said, shaking her head.

  “You’re not going back out with him?”

  “No.” She looked at him without a sign of a smile. “Besides his woefully inadequate IQ, we had a little problem yesterday.”

  “Well . . .”

  “I thought I might ride along with you. You’re showing the pictures around, right?”

  “Yeah.” Lucas scratched his head. He didn’t like working with a partner: he sometimes made deals that were best kept private. But Lily was from New York and shouldn’t be a problem that way. “All right, I guess. I’m parked down this way.”

  “Everybody says you’ve got the best contacts in the Indian community,” Lily said as they walked along. Lucas kept looking at her and tripped on an uneven sidewalk slab. She grinned, still looking straight ahead.

  “I know about eight guys. Maybe ten. And not well,” Lucas said when he recovered.

  “You came up with the picture from the paper,” she pointed out.

  “I had a guy I could squeeze.” Lucas stepped off the curb and walked around the nose of his Porsche. Lily walked behind
him.

  “Uh, around there,” he said, pointing back to the passenger-side door.

  She looked down at the 911, surprised. “Is this your car?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought we were crossing the street,” Lily said as she stepped back to the curb.

  Lucas got in and popped open her door; she climbed inside and fastened the seat belt. “Not many New York cops would have the guts to drive around in a Porsche. Everybody would figure he was in the bag,” she said.

  “I’ve got some money of my own,” Lucas said.

  “Even so, you wouldn’t have to buy a Porsche with it,” Lily said primly. “You could buy a perfectly good car for ten or fifteen thousand and give the other twenty or thirty thousand to charity. You could give it to the Little Sisters of the Poor.”

  “I thought about that,” Lucas said. He gunned the Porsche through an illegal U-turn and punched it up to forty in the twenty-five-mile-per-hour business zone. “And I decided, fuck ’em.”

  Lily threw back her head and laughed. Lucas grinned at her and thought that maybe she was carrying a few too many pounds, but maybe that wasn’t all bad.

  They took the photographs to the Indian Center, showed them around. Two of the men in the photos were known by face but not by name. Nobody knew where they lived. Lucas called Anderson, told him about the tentative IDs, and Anderson promised to get more photos on the street.

  After leaving the Indian Center, they stopped at an Indian-dominated public housing project, where Lucas knew two old men who worked as caretakers. They got no new IDs. The hostility was palpable.

  “They don’t like cops,” Lily said as they left.

  “Nobody around here likes cops,” Lucas said, looking back at the decrepit buildings. “When they see us, we’re mostly getting their cars towed away in the winter. They don’t like us, but at least they’re not against us. But this is something else. This time, they’re against us.”

  “Maybe they got reasons,” Lily said. She was looking out the window at a group of Indian children sitting on the porch of a decaying clapboard house. “Those kids ought to be in school. What you’ve got here, Davenport, is a clean slum. The people are fucked up, but the street gets cleaned twice a week.”

  They spent the rest of the morning running the photos down Lucas’ Indian acquaintances. Lily trailed behind, not saying much, studying the faces of the Indians, listening to them, the Indians looking curiously back.

  “They think you might be an Indian, or part Indian, but they’re not sure until they hear your voice,” Lucas said between stops. “You look a little Indian.”

  “I don’t sound Indian.”

  “You sound Lawn Guyland.”

  “There’s an Indian reservation on Long Island,” she said.

  “No shit? Jesus, I’d like to hear those people talk . . . .”

  Late in the morning, Lucas drove to Yellow Hand’s apartment at the Point, describing him to Lily as they went. Outside, on the stoop, he reached back and freed the P7 in its holster.

  “Is this trouble?” she asked.

  “I doubt it,” he said. “But you know.”

  “Okay.” When they were inside the door, she slipped her hand into a mufflike opening in her shoulder bag, took out a short Colt Officer’s Model .45 and jacked a shell into the chamber.

  “A forty-five?” Lucas said as she put it back in the purse.

  “I’m not strong enough to wrestle with assholes,” she said bluntly. “If I shoot somebody, I want him to go down. Not that the P7 isn’t a nice little gun. But it’s a bit light for serious work.”

  “Not if you can shoot,” Lucas said through his teeth as he headed up the stairs.

  “I can shoot the eyes out of a moving pigeon,” she said. “And not hit the feathers.”

  The door on the top floor was open. Nobody home. Lucas eased inside, looked around, then tramped across a litter of paper, orange peels and empty personal-size catsup packs from McDonald’s. “This is where he was,” Lucas said, kicking Yellow Hand’s mattress.

  “Place feels vacant,” Lily said. She touched one of the empty catsup packs with the toe of her shoe. Street people stole them from fast-food joints and used the catsup to make tomato soup. “They’re really hurting for money.”

  “Crackheads,” Lucas said.

  Lily nodded. She took the Colt out of the purse, pulled the magazine, stuck it between the little and ring fingers of her gun hand, cupped the ejection port with her free hand and jacked the slide. The chambered round ejected into her palm. She snapped it back into the magazine and pushed the magazine back into the butt of the pistol. She’d done it smoothly, without thinking, Lucas thought. She’d spent some time with the gun.

  “The trouble with single-action weapons,” Lucas said, “is that shit happens and you’re caught with an empty chamber.”

  “Not if you’ve got half a brain,” she said. She was looking around at the litter. “I’ve learned to anticipate.”

  Lucas stopped and picked up an object that had been almost hidden by Yellow Hand’s mattress where it had pressed against the wall.

  Lily asked, “What?” and he tossed it to her. She turned it over in her hands. “Crack pipe. You said he was a crackhead.”

  “Yeah. But I wonder why he left it here? I wouldn’t think the boy would be without it. All of his other shit is gone.”

  “I don’t know. Nothing wrong with it. Yet,” Lily said. She dropped the glass pipe on the floor and stepped on it, crushing it.

  On the street again, Lucas suggested a check at Cuervo’s rental office. If there was anyone running the place, he told Lily, there might be some word of where Yellow Hand had gone. She nodded. “I’m following you,” she said.

  “I hope the dipshit hasn’t gone back to the res,” Lucas said as they climbed back in the car. “Yellow Hand would be hell to find out there, if he didn’t want to be found.”

  Lucas had been in Cuervo’s office a dozen times over the years. Nothing had changed in the shabby stairway that went up to it. The building had permanent bad breath, compounded of stale urine, wet plaster and catshit. As Lucas reached the top of the stairs, Cuervo’s office door opened on a chain and a woman looked out through the crack.

  “Who’re you?” Lucas asked.

  “Harriet Cuervo,” the woman snapped. All Lucas could see were her eyes, which were the color of acid-washed jeans, and a pale crescent of face. “Who in the hell are you to be asking?”

  “Police,” Lucas said. Lucas fished his badge case out of his jacket pocket and flashed the badge at her. Lily waited behind him, down a step. “We didn’t know you’d taken over Ray’s operation.”

  “Know now,” the woman grunted. The chain rattled off and she let the door swing open. Her husband’s murder had left a faint stain on the wooden floor and Harriet Cuervo was standing in the middle of it. She was wearing a print dress that fell straight from her neck to her knees. “I told the other cops everything I knew,” she said bluntly.

  “We’re looking for a different kind of information,” Lucas said. The woman went back around Cuervo’s old desk. Lucas stepped inside the office and glanced around. Something had changed, something was wrong, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. “We’re asking about one of his tenants.”

  “So what do you want to know?” she asked. She was five feet, nine inches tall and weighed perhaps a hundred pounds, all of it rawboned knobs. There were short vertical lines above and below her lips, as though they’d once been stitched shut.

  “You’ve got a renter named Yellow Hand, down at the Point?”

  “Sure. Yellow Hand.” She opened a ledger and ran a finger down an open column. “Paid up ’til tomorrow.”

  “You didn’t see him yesterday or today?”

  “Shit, I don’t do no surveys. I just rent the fuckin’ apartments,” she said. “If he don’t have the money tomorrow, out he goes. Today, I don’t care what he does.”

  “So you haven’t seen him?”
<
br />   “Nope.” She peered around Lucas at Lily. “She a cop too?”

  “Yeah.”

  Cuervo looked Lily up and down. “Dresses pretty good for a cop,” she sniffed.

  “If Yellow Hand doesn’t pay, do you go down and evict him yourself?” Lily asked curiously.

  “I got an associate,” Cuervo said.

  “Who’s that?” Lucas asked.

  “Bald Peterson.”

  “Yeah? I thought he’d left town.”

  “He’s come back. You know him?”

  “Yeah. We go back.”

  “Say . . .” Harriet Cuervo’s eyes narrowed and she made a gun of her index finger and thumb and pointed it at Lucas’ heart. “You ain’t the cop that pounded him, are you? Years ago? Like fuckin’ crippled him?”

  “We’ve had some disagreements,” Lucas said. “Tell him hello for me.” He took a step toward the door. “How about a guy named Shadow Love? You seen him around?”

  “Shadow Love? Never even heard of him.”

  “He was living up at the Point . . . .”

  She shrugged. “Didn’t rent from me,” she said. “Must’ve been one of those other flatheads let him in. You know how it goes.”

  “Yeah,” Lucas said as he turned away again. “Sorry about Ray.”

  “It’s nice somebody is, ’cause I ain’t,” Cuervo said flatly. Her face showed some animation for the first time. “I was trying to think what I remembered best about Ray. One thing, you know? And you know what come to mind? He had a bunch of porno videotapes. He had one called Airtight Brunette. You know what an airtight brunette is? That’s one who is filled up everyplace, if you know what I mean. Three guys. Anyway, his favorite part was when this guy ’jaculates on the brunette’s chest. He was running that back and forth, back and forth. Everytime he stopped the VCR and rewound the tape, the regular TV show come on. You know what that was?”

  “Uh, no, I wouldn’t,” Lucas said. He glanced quickly at Lily, who was staring at Cuervo, fascinated.