Twisted Prey

by John Sandford

  Smalls shook his head. “He had his high beams on, and they were burning right through the back window of my Caddy. It was like getting caught in a searchlight. I couldn’t see anything . . . And he hit us.”

  The deputy looked down the hill. “She did a heck of a job driving. Another twenty, thirty feet, and you’d have gone over the edge and hit that gravel bar like you’d jumped out of a five-story building. Makes me kind of nervous even standing here.”

  * * *

  —

  THE AMBULANCE LEFT for the Winchester Medical Center, Smalls following in a state police car. Whitehead’s death was confirmed, and Smalls was treated for the impact on his nose. It had continued to bleed, but a doc used what he called a chemical cautery on it, which stopped the bleeding immediately. The doctor gave him some pain pills. Smalls said, “I don’t need the pills.”

  “Not yet,” the doc said. “You will.”

  When he was released, the deputies took him aside for an extended statement, and told him that the Cadillac would be left where it had landed until a state accident investigator could get to the scene.

  When he was done with the interview, Smalls called chief of staff Kitten Carter and arranged to have her drive to the hospital to pick him up. She said she would notify Whitehead’s mother and father of her death.

  And when there was nothing left to do, Smalls asked to be taken to the hospital’s chapel. The police left him there, and Smalls, a lifelong Episcopalian, knelt and prayed for Cecily Whitehead’s soul. Less charitably, he had a word with the Lord about finding the people who’d murdered her. Then he cried. He finally pulled himself together after a while and began thinking seriously about the accident.

  It had been no accident.

  It had been an assassination attempt, and he thought he knew who was behind it. Justice, if not in a court of law, would come.

  He said it aloud, to Whitehead: “I swear, CeeCee, I will get them. I’ll get every one of those motherfuckers.”

  Whitehead hadn’t been particularly delicate, nor particularly forgiving: if she were already experiencing the afterlife, he had no doubt that she would be looking forward to any revenge—and the colder, the better.

  * * *

  —

  KITTEN CARTER arrived at the hospital. She’d been on her cell phone for three hours by the time she got there. The first news of the accident would be leaked to reporters who owed her favors and who would put the most sympathetic spin to the night’s events.

  “. . . good friends and political allies who’d gone to the cabin to plot strategy for the summer clashes over the health care proposals . . .”

  * * *

  —

  THE LOCAL DEPUTIES turned the crash investigation over to the West Virginia State Police. The second day after the accident, an investigator interviewed Smalls, in his Senate office, with Carter sitting in. Smalls, with two black eyes and a broad white bandage over his nose, and dressed in a blue-striped seersucker suit with a navy blue knit tie, immediately understood that something was wrong.

  The investigator’s name was Carl Armstrong. When he’d finished with his questions, Smalls said, “Don’t bullshit me, Carl. Something’s not right. You think I’m lying about something. What is it?”

  The investigator had been taking notes on a legal pad inside a leather portfolio. He sighed, closed the portfolio, and said, “Our lab has been over your vehicle inch by inch, sir. There’s no sign that it was ever hit by another truck.”

  Carter was sitting in a wingback chair, illegally smoking a small brown cigarillo. She looked at Smalls, then frowned at Armstrong and said, “That’s wrong. The other guys took them right off the road—smashed them off. What do you mean, there’s no sign?”

  Smalls jumped in. “That’s exactly right. The impact caved the door in . . . there’s gotta be some sign of that. I mean, I was in a fairly bad accident once, years ago, and both vehicles had extensive damage. This one was worse. The hit was worse. What do you mean, no sign?”

  “No metal scrapes, no paint, no glancing blow. The only thing we’ve found are signs that you hit several trees on both sides of the truck and the front grille and hood,” Armstrong said.

  “Then you’re not looking hard enough,” Smalls snapped. “That guy crashed right into us and killed CeeCee, and damn near killed me.”

  Armstrong looked away and shrugged. “Uh, well, I wonder if he actually hit you or maybe just caused Miz Whitehead to lose control?”

  “She hadn’t been drinking . . .”

  Armstrong held up a hand. “We know that. She had zero alcohol in her blood, and we know she was driving because the blood on that side of the cab and on the air bag matches hers. We don’t doubt anything you’ve told us, except the impact itself.”

  Carter: “Senator Smalls has provided a written statement in which he relates the force of the impact.”

  “There’s a low gravel berm where they went over the side—we’re wondering if Miz Whitehead might have hit that hard, and the senator might be mistaking that for the impact of the truck.”

  Smalls was already shaking his head. “No. I heard the truck hit. I saw it hit—I was looking out the driver’s-side window when it hit.”

  “There’s no paint from another car, no metal, no glass on the road . . . no nothing,” Armstrong repeated.

  Carter said to Smalls, “Senator, maybe we need to get some FBI crime scene people up there . . .”

  Smalls put a finger on his lips, to shut her up. He stood, and said, “Carl, I’m going to ask another guy to talk to you about the evidence, if you don’t mind. Kitten and I don’t know about such things, but I think it’d be a good idea if we put a second pair of eyes on this whole deal.”

  Armstrong had dealt with politicians a number of times, and Smalls seemed to him to be one of the more reasonable members of the species. No shouting, no accusations. He flushed with relief, and said, “Senator . . . anything we can do, we’ll be happy to do. We’d like to understand what happened here. Send your guy around anytime. We’ll probably give him more cooperation than he’ll even want.”

  “That’s great,” Smalls said, extending a hand. “I’ll drop a note to your superintendent, thanking him for your work.”

  “Appreciate that,” Armstrong said, as they shook. “I really do, sir.”

  * * *

  —

  WHEN ARMSTRONG HAD GONE, Carter asked, “Why were you pouring butter on him? He didn’t believe you. I mean, Jesus, somebody killed CeeCee and almost killed you. If you let this stand, the whole thing is gonna get buried—”

  “No, no, no . . .” Smalls was on his feet. He touched his nose, picked up the tube of pain pills, shook it like a maraca, put it back down; not many left, and he’d already taken one that morning. His nose was still burning like fire from the chemical cautery. The doc had been right about needing the pills, not for the mechanical damage but for the cauterized tissue. He wandered over to his trophy wall, filled with plaques and keys to Minnesota cities and photos of himself with presidents, governors, other senators, assorted rich people, including Whitehead, and politically conservative movie stars.

  Thinking about it.

  Carter kept her mouth shut, and after a while Smalls, playing with an earlobe and gazing at his pictures, said, “I’m surprised by . . . what Armstrong said. No evidence. But I’m not really astonished. Remember when I told you the first thing I did was get my gun because I thought the guys who hit us might be paid killers? Assassins? Professionals?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t . . .”

  “I was right. They were,” Smalls said. “I don’t know how they did this, but I’m sure that if the right investigator looked under the right rock, he could find someone who could explain it. We need to get that done, because . . .”

  “They could be coming back for another shot at you,” Carter finished.

>   “Yeah. Probably not right away, but sooner or later.” Smalls left the trophy wall, walked to his oversized desk, pushed a button on an intercom. “Sally . . . get Lucas Davenport on the line. His number’s on your contact list.”

  “That’s the guy . . .” Carter began.

  “Yeah,” Smalls said. “That’s the guy.”

  2

  Lucas Davenport and Charlie Knight walked out of the Sedgwick County Regional Forensic Science Center into the bright Kansas sunshine, and Lucas took his sunglasses from his jacket pocket, slipped them on his nose, and said, “Move on. Nothing to see here.”

  “Could be worse,” Knight said. He put on his own sunglasses. They were silvered and made him look like a movie version of a Texas highway patrolman, which he probably knew. His teeth, which didn’t quite match—the two upper central incisors were white, the others various shades of yellow—made him look even more like a Texas cop. “The sonofabitch might’ve lived.”

  That made Lucas smile, and he said, “He wasn’t as bad as his boss.”

  “Maybe not, but it’d be a goddamn close call.” They’d been to look at the bullet-riddled body of a man named Molina.

  “You want to write this up?” Lucas asked, as they walked out to the rental car.

  “Yeah, I’ll do it tonight,” Knight said. “You’ll be rolled up with your old lady by the time I get finished.” Lucas’s plane was going out that evening, Knight’s not until the next morning.

  “What about Wise?” Lucas asked.

  “Fuck him. Let Wichita put him away,” Knight said. “I don’t know for sure, but I suspect the Kansas state pen ain’t a leading garden spot.”

  “I suspect you’re right about that,” Lucas said. “So, you thinking steak or cheeseburger?”

  “Anything with beef in it that’s not Mexican,” Knight said.

  “Yeah? Mexican’s one of my favorites,” Lucas said.

  “I’m married to a Mexican, and we got gourmet Mexicano right there in the kitchen, so I ain’t eating Mexican in Wichita. I’d like to get around a big bloody T-bone.”

  “You can do that in Wichita,” Lucas said. “Did I ever tell you about the time I danced with a professional assassin in Wichita? No? Her name was Clara Rinker . . .”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS, WORKING OUT OF MINNEAPOLIS, but without a lot to do, and Knight, working out of Dallas, had hooked up to look into the murder of a Jesús Rojas Molina.

  Molina, at the time of his death, was in the Federal Witness Protection Program, which was run by the U.S. Marshals Service. Both marshals now, Lucas and Knight had been chosen to look at the case because they both had histories in earlier lives as homicide investigators, Lucas in Minnesota, Knight in Houston.

  Molina, the dead man, had ratted out his boss in a homegrown “cartel” that served the illegal drug needs of Birmingham, Alabama. After the boss was convicted and sent to prison forever, Molina was relocated to Wichita to keep him away from the boss’s relatives, who’d promised to disassemble him with a power drill and a straight razor.

  He believed them, as did the Marshals Service. As a Witness Protection client, Molina got a crappy manufactured home on the south side of Wichita, and a five-year-old Corolla, and a greeter’s job at a Walmart Supercenter.

  Not good enough for a man who liked rolling high.

  A year after moving to Wichita, he was peddling cocaine to the town’s higher-end dope clientele, meaning those who were afraid of methamphetamine or didn’t like the way meth cut into their frontal lobes. He did that until Bobby Wise, whom he’d met as a fellow free enterprise enthusiast and whose wife Molina was screwing, put five shots from his .44 Magnum through Molina’s screen door and into his chest and neck.

  One would have done the job. Then Wise would have had the other four to use on his wife, who had promptly turned him in for the murder. But he loved her, so he simply cried when the cops came to get him, and he told her he still loved her.

  The Wichita cops seized the .44, matched the slugs, confronted him with the evidence, and got a confession. Lucas and Knight were the Marshals Service representatives to the investigation, making sure that Wise was the one and only killer: that he hadn’t been sent by the Alabama boss’s murderous wife or equally murderous children.

  They’d interviewed both Wise and his wife, who’d been confused about the whole Witness Protection thing—they had no idea that Molina had been in it. They were convincing.

  Lucas and Knight were moving on: nothing to see here.

  * * *

  —

  THAT HAD BEEN THE STORY too frequently with Lucas in his two years as a marshal. He’d had a half dozen interesting cases, most resolved in a couple of weeks, along with a half dozen tracking cases that were still open and two cold cases that might never be resolved. Lucas had joined the Service specifically to work on difficult cases—and he’d found something he hadn’t expected.

  The world was opening up to American criminals. The wars in the Middle East and the demand for American blue-collar workers in foreign jobs meant that the brighter crooks were disappearing into the confusion of war and irregular employment.

  Others were crossing into western Canada, where the raucous oil sands industry provided income and obscure hideouts, as well as a familiar language. The disaster industry, helped by climate change, provided unregulated construction jobs and opportunities for scam artists in the Caribbean and Mexico.

  In the U.S., even casual contact with the law often tripped up fugitives; when they went foreign, that didn’t happen.

  * * *

  —

  BUT THERE WAS ONE OPENING, one source of interesting investigations, which Lucas still wasn’t sure would develop into a full-time gig. He wasn’t sure that he wanted it to. The jobs were coming out of Washington, D.C. From politicians in trouble.

  * * *

  —

  THE PREVIOUS SPRING, a Democratic congressman from Illinois had gotten in touch through the former governor of Minnesota, who was a friend of both the congressman and Lucas.

  The congressman, Daniel Benson, had a college dropout daughter who’d gotten herself a flaming skull tattoo above the crack of her ass and a boyfriend in a sleeveless jeans jacket with a Harley. Benson hadn’t worried about it too much until he learned that the boyfriend was an ex-con and a member of a neo-Nazi party and that the daughter had made a YouTube video with him. She was largely unclothed in it, except for the fake German SS helmet and a red-and-black swastika armband. The congressman couldn’t get in touch with her, either on her cell phone or by email.

  The congressman thought she might have been kidnapped—or, if not exactly kidnapped, at least was being held against her will. Lucas was asked to take a look. The Marshals Service director was consulted, and he was more than happy to approve a quiet favor for a ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee.

  Lucas found the Nazi and the daughter in eight days, at their Ohio hideout. He and another marshal had retrieved the girl and had gotten her enrolled in a sex-and-drugs rehab center. The boyfriend had resisted arrest, and one of his legs had been broken in the fight. Because resisting arrest with violence is a crime, they were able to enter the rented hideout, where they found two thousand hits of hydrocodone in a plastic baggie and four semiautomatic pistols.

  Charges of possession with intent to distribute and possession of firearms by a convicted felon were added to the resisting arrest charges, and the boyfriend was shipped off to a federal prison.

  Lucas couldn’t do much about the videos, which were out on the Internet, but the daughter was obscure enough, and the video was stupid enough, that the congressman thought he could probably let it go.

  * * *

  —

  WORD ABOUT THE CASE got around, and that led to another. A U.S. senator from Wyoming had a sprawling ranch and a lot of cattle.
The ranch backed up to an area of Yellowstone National Park that had wolves in it. Shot wolves began showing up on his property and then across the fence into the park. The senator had no problem with dead wolves personally but didn’t like the idea of a criminal action that would have every environmentalist in the nation on his back, along with CBS and, worse, CNN.

  “I’m not shooting the wolves, and my kids aren’t shooting the wolves, and my hands aren’t shooting the wolves, because I told them all we’re a hell of a lot better off with a few dead heifers than we are with a few dead wolves, and that if I got even a hint that they were involved, I’d have their asses,” he told Lucas. “I need this to stop, like, now.”

  He said the federal wildlife people hadn’t been able to get anywhere because, basically, they weren’t criminal investigators, and because everybody knew them by sight.

  Lucas went out to Wyoming, spent a few days asking around, eventually found three brothers, all cowboys, who had a little sideline rustling cattle, spoke quietly to them about who might be doing what. They called it blackmail, but not wishing to have their sideline revealed, the cowboys were willing to speculate about the wolf shootings.

  With a wildlife guy in tow to make everything legal, Lucas ambushed the senator’s southern neighbor, who was stalking a decoy that looked a lot like a wolf, in the park. The senator and the neighbor had feuded over the years, some kind of complicated water dispute that Lucas didn’t try to understand.

  “That sonofabitch,” the senator had said when Lucas called him. “He embarrasses the shit outta me and he gets rid of wolves that he don’t want, neither. Two birds with one stone. I know for sure he’s a fuckin’ Democrat.”

  The neighbor didn’t actually shoot anything, though, so wouldn’t face much of a penalty, even if he was convicted. He claimed he’d been out for a walk and had taken his scoped semiauto .223 with him as protection against wolves . . . and bears and owls and chickadees and . . . whatever.