Twisted Prey

by John Sandford

  There were four witnesses: a couple out for an evening stroll, who were on the walkway that paralleled the boulevard; a St. Kate’s student, heading back to the school on her bike after getting off her shift at a Ford Parkway restaurant; and the skateboarder.

  All four saw the driver of the pickup, a fat man in a loose, short-sleeved black shirt and a bright gold ball cap, jump uninjured from the truck, stop for a second in the pool of light cast from a pole on the far side of the intersection, and run back up Randolph, across the street from the Temple of Aaron, and down an alley.

  No one thought to chase him, during the first minute after the crash; they were all gawking, reaching for their cell phones, running to look at Weather. The skater had dropped his board when the driver ducked into the alley and had run after him, but never saw him again.

  The St. Paul cops had a car there in two minutes; an ambulance arrived in six. Weather was still in the car, unconscious, when an EMT and a cop wrenched open the passenger-side door, slipped in the end of a stretcher, cut the safety belt still looped over Weather’s chest, and eased her on the stretcher.

  A moment later, she was on her way to Regions Hospital, the EMT advising the driver, “Drive fast, man . . . Let’s get her there . . . Drive faster . . .”

  A patrol sergeant recovered her purse and had opened her wallet, looking for an ID, when another cop hurried up to him and asked, “You know who she is?”

  The cop looked at the driver’s license. “Weather . . . Karkinnen.”

  “Yeah, and I ran the plates. The car’s registered to her and her husband, Lucas Davenport.”

  “Ah, shit,” the sergeant said. “Listen—get onto the BCA, get a phone number for Davenport. If they don’t have it, get one for a Del Capslock. Tell him what happened. He’s a friend of Davenport’s.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Get more cars here. Lots of cars. The guy’s on foot; we’re gonna track him down if it takes all night.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS HAD NEVER WORKED for the St. Paul cops but had lived in the city for better than twenty years and was well known around the St. Paul Police Department. He might not have been the best-liked guy, but a cop’s wife is a cop’s wife.

  The sergeant got more cars to the crash scene, and the cops crawled the neighborhood with flashlights and dogs, but they never found the driver. They had his truck, though, and the license plate went to an Alice B. Stern. Alice Stern’s house, on St. Paul’s east side, was dark and quiet. There was no response to persistent knocking. A neighbor said Stern worked at a nearby bar, as a waitress. They found her there, serving drinks. She had been at the bar since four o’clock.

  When questioned, she admitted owning the Tacoma. She used the old truck for cruising yard sales on Thursday mornings and for selling stuff at the flea market on Saturdays. For daily driving, she had a Corolla, which was still in the bar’s parking lot.

  She also had a boyfriend.

  “I can’t believe Doug would have taken it—he can’t drive,” she told the St. Paul sergeant. “I mean, he can drive, but he’s not allowed to. He just got out of Lino Lakes on his last DWI.”

  The sergeant gave her a look, and she said, “Oh, no . . .”

  * * *

  —

  THREE COP CARS went back to her house. She let them in, and together they found Douglas Garland Last in the garage, dead in a flea-market-bound office chair, a bullet hole in his head, a .38 on the floor next to his hand, along with a bright gold Iowa Hawkeyes ball cap. The sergeant called everybody. When all was said and done at the Medical Examiner’s, Last was found to have a blood alcohol content of 2.1, well over twice the legal limit.

  The same old story. Call Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Again. Not that it would do much good—Douglas Last had never been elected to anything.

  Before they ever found Last, they’d found Capslock. Del knew exactly where Lucas was.

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS WAS SITTING on his bed, paging through a tattered book of American haiku, when Del got through to him.

  Del didn’t screw around with preliminaries. “Man, Weather’s been in an auto accident. She’s on her way to Regions. She’s hurt bad. I’m on my way now, but you better get back here.”

  Lucas, heart racing, was on his feet, looking for his pants. “What happened? Where’d it happen? How bad? Del . . .”

  “She got hit on Mississippi River Boulevard, couple of blocks from your house. The other driver ran off, but they got his truck. That’s all I know. I’ll call you back . . .”

  Lucas turned cold. He had to get back there.

  The front desk hooked him up with an air charter service at Dulles International. He gave them a credit card number, he invoked Senator Smalls by name. The operator said they could leave as soon as the card cleared. He called the desk again for a cab, got dressed, stuffed his Dopp kit, all his various phones, his computer, and his camera in his backpack, did a quick survey of the room to make sure he had everything involving the case, and sprinted out the door. At the desk, he told them to hold his room, that he would be back but didn’t know when, and to let Bob or Rae in the room if they asked.

  During the forty-minute trip to Dulles, he called Bob, told him what had happened.

  “I don’t know how bad she is but she is hurt, from what I can tell. I’ll be gone for a while. You guys stay. I’ll let you know when I’m heading back . . . if I come back.”

  He next called his daughter Letty, at Stanford. He told her what Del had said, and she said, “I’m on my way. I’ll get back to you.”

  He called Del, who said, “I’m at Regions, I can’t talk to a doc, they’re all working on her. Anyway, she’s alive. The EMTs who brought her in said she was still unconscious when they got here. I found a friend of my wife’s, got her to snoop around.” Del’s wife, a nurse at Regions, wasn’t on duty when Weather was brought in. “Weather was bleeding from some head cuts, but they don’t think she’s got a fractured skull, which is good. But she does have a collapsed lung and a broken arm. They’re gonna run her through an MRI when they think they’ve stabilized her enough. They haven’t had to give her blood yet, which is also good I guess . . . That’s what I’ve got so far.”

  “I’m on my way to the airport,” Lucas said. “What do we have on the other driver?”

  “Don’t know anything yet about the driver. I’m calling my friends in St. Paul; I know they’ve got every patrol cop in the city searching the neighborhoods for him. They told me that the guy ran the stop sign on Randolph and T-boned her in that convertible of hers. That’s all I know so far, but I’m doing my best to stay on top of things. When you get on your plane, call me and tell me when you’ll get in—I’ll meet you at Humphrey.”

  * * *

  —

  LETTY CALLED BACK as Lucas’s cab was approaching Dulles. “I’m on a red-eye out of SFO at ten, going through Denver. It’s the only flight I could get. I’ll rent a car when I get to Minneapolis. See you early in the morning. How’s Mom?”

  Lucas told her what Del had given him, and then they were at the airport. She said, “Dad, take care.”

  * * *

  —

  THE SMALL BUSINESS JET had two pilots, no cabin attendant. The pilot said, “We’re told your wife was in an accident; sorry to hear it. We’ll get you there in a hurry.”

  Lucas nodded, strapped in, and they were gone.

  Lucas had seen movies in which people made phone calls from flying jets, but he wasn’t able to get through on his cell. Two hours after they left Dulles, the jet put down at the Humphrey terminal at Minneapolis–St. Paul International, and Del was waiting.

  “How much do you know?” Del asked, after Lucas had stumbled down the steps to the tarmac.

  “Only what you told me—I couldn’t get through on my phone
when we were in the air.”

  “She’s alive. She sort of recovered consciousness . . .”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Lucas demanded. “Sorta?”

  “She’s got some short circuiting. The docs say that’s not unusual with concussions. She’s got a broken arm. Her lung collapsed when something . . . I dunno what, maybe a rib . . . punctured it, but the lung’s been re-inflated. She has more cracked ribs, she’s got major bruising, and she’s probably got a soft injury in her neck tissue, although all her arms and legs and fingers and toes are moving. She’s gonna make it, but she’s gonna hurt for a few weeks. Or months.”

  Lucas felt the boulder lift from his shoulders. “I gotta call Letty,” he said. “She should be in Denver by now.”

  “I gotta tell you about the driver.”

  “They got him?”

  “Sorta.”

  “Del, goddamnit.”

  “He’s dead. He’d just gotten out of Lino Lakes on a fifth DWI. The last one, he managed to cross the centerline and hurt a couple of people,” Del said. “He did a year in the treatment facility. I guess he wasn’t completely treated because he’s only been out for a month.”

  Lucas had nothing to say to that, except, “Wouldn’t you fuckin’ know it.”

  * * *

  —

  THE TWO OF THEM walked into Regions at two o’clock in the morning. Weather was in the intensive care unit, where guests were discouraged, but given Lucas’s history and the fact that Weather was a doc, they’d pulled two chairs behind the ICU curtains around her bed.

  When Lucas stepped behind the curtain, he wanted to stop and cry. Weather’s eyes were open, but her face was horribly bruised, purple over the entire left side. Her neck was encased in a brace, her left arm in a fiber cast. Two bags of solution were hanging from a drip stand, with tubes snaking down to her arm; another emerged from beneath the bed covering, emptying urine into a bag hanging on the side of the bed.

  Lucas had been in an ICU himself as a patient on a couple of occasions and had learned to hate the odor, which he could have identified anytime, anywhere: a mixture of the coppery smell of blood, raw meat, urine, several kinds of disinfectant, and what he thought might be iodine, a stink he remembered from his rough-and-tumble childhood.

  He sat, leaned toward Weather, took her free hand, and muttered, “I’m here.” He got no acknowledging squeeze, but her eyes moved toward him, and she said, through sandpapery lips, “Was I in an accident?”

  A nurse behind Lucas whispered, “She keeps asking that.”

  Lucas said to Weather, “Yes, but you’ll be fine. The docs say you’re doing great.”

  Weather closed her eyes and seemed to drift away. Lucas sat holding her hand, and, a few minutes later, her eyes opened again, turned fractionally, and she again asked, “Was I in an accident?”

  She asked three more times, and after the third Lucas tucked her hand under the covers and stepped outside the curtain and said to a passing nurse, “I need to talk to her doc.”

  “He’s here, I’ll get him.”

  Del had been waiting in the lobby, and he walked up and asked Lucas, “What’s happening?”

  “Gonna talk to the doc.”

  The doc showed up two minutes later, carrying an iPad. He was a tall man, thin, in a white physician’s jacket, gray slacks, and steel-rimmed glasses perched on a beaked nose. “Mr. Davenport?” he asked, and, looking at Del, said, “Mr. Capslock, nice to see you again.”

  “Is she going to be okay?” Lucas asked.

  “Yes. Most likely,” the doc said, turning back to Lucas. “We’ve got all the obvious stuff handled, the open question at this point is the neck injury, which we can’t fully assess until we can talk to her. The head injury appears to be a moderate-to-serious concussion.”

  “She keeps asking if she’s been in an accident.”

  “That happens. There’s no reason to believe it will continue, it should clear up. She may have some residual amnesia, and that might go away or may never go away. Typically, she could lose the few minutes before the collision or part of the day, or she might lose some of it and get it back later. Or she might not lose anything at all.”

  “Bottom line?”

  “Bottom line is, she should be fine. The neck is the thing I’m most worried about—but it could be that there’s nothing there. We know there’s some swelling of the muscles on both sides of the spine, which means she’s going to have some pain. But the specifics? We don’t know yet.”

  “When will you know?”

  “Best guess? Tomorrow. I expect that after she’s had some good solid sleep, she’ll be able to talk to us, and we can do some tests and get some responses.”

  “What can I do for her?” Lucas asked.

  “Not much. What she needs most is physical rest. One thing—and this is hardest for doctors—she needs cognitive rest. Don’t bring in magazines or her tablet or laptop. She’ll be here for a few days, and we don’t even want her watching TV. She needs to keep her brain quiet. For people like her, that’s difficult. She’s gonna get very bored.”

  “Bored is okay,” Lucas said. “We can handle bored.”

  “That’s what they all say,” the doc said, with a smile. He turned to Del. “How are you doing?”

  “I’m back at work, but it still hurts,” Del said. “Can’t run all that well.”

  “That’ll take some time,” the doc said. “Are you still doing the PT?”

  “When I can . . .” Del’s eyes shifted away from the doc.

  “Hey! Do it all the time. Every time. Goddamnit, Capslock . . .”

  “I know, I know,” Del said.

  The doc turned back to Lucas. “I had Capslock after his adventures down in El Paso. I can tell you, he was hurt a lot worse than Weather. And look at him now.”

  Lucas: “Do I have to?”

  “I know it’s hard.”

  Del had gone out to his car while Lucas was behind the curtain with Weather and now he handed Lucas a plastic shopping bag. “I went to Barnes and Noble while I was waiting for the plane to come in,” he said. “Magazines. You owe me seventy-seven dollars.”

  “The doc said I can’t give her magazines.”

  “They’re for you,” Del said. “When I was in here, my old lady almost went nuts from the boredom. Man, you sit there and stare at each other, and, every once in a while, a little pee trickles into the bag. That’s about it for excitement.”

  “Take the magazines,” the doc said.

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS TOOK the shopping bag and sent Del home. “No point in both of us going nuts.” As Del was walking away, Lucas called to him, and when Del turned, Lucas said, “Hey, you da man.”

  Del waved, and Lucas went back behind the curtain, and a second later Weather’s eyes opened, and she asked, “Was I in an accident?”

  Lucas said, “Yes,” and she closed her eyes again, and he picked up a copy of Outside magazine and started with the last page.

  She asked again, and again, and again—“Was I in an accident?”—and after the last time, Lucas said, “Yes,” and she asked, “Was anyone else hurt? Did I hit somebody?”

  Lucas dropped the magazine: “Holy shit, you’re back. Don’t go anywhere, I gotta tell the nurse.”

  * * *

  —

  WEATHER’S BRAIN was working again, and she asked a hundred questions, and she was still asking questions when Letty pushed through the curtain, looked at Weather’s bruised face, and blurted, “Oh my God.”

  “Just what I would expect from a college student,” Weather said. “Oh my God.”

  Letty turned to Lucas. “She looks bad, but not so bad she can’t give me a hard time.”

  Lucas said, “She’s not good. She’s gonna hurt a lot, and she’s going to be bitchy for weeks.”r />
  “What about the asshole who hit her?” Letty asked. She was a lanky young woman, with striking dark hair and eyes.

  “He’s dead,” Lucas said. “He shot himself. Had a whole string of DWIs, just got out of prison for the last one.”

  “Good,” Letty said. “That keeps me from the inconvenience of killing him.”

  Weather said, “Letty, we need to get you some serious therapy.”

  * * *

  —

  AT SEVEN O’CLOCK, Weather drifted off to sleep, and a nurse said she’d be down for a while. “We get lots of concussions here. She’s worn out, and she’ll probably sleep until noon or later. You’d best go get some sleep yourselves.”

  They were inclined to stay, but the nurse, and then the incoming doc, shoved them out the door.

  They were both back at noon, though Weather didn’t wake until two o’clock, when she asked for her laptop. “I know all about concussions and I don’t want to browse, I just need to notify patients . . .”

  “That’s all been taken care of,” Lucas said. “You ain’t getting a laptop until the doc says so.”

  “What am I supposed to do? Lay here until I go insane?”

  “Exactly,” Letty said. “Besides, they’re planning to kick us out of here and do a lot of tests with you. You’ll be busy until dinnertime.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS SPENT the next two days suffering a mix of stress and boredom. Weather’s spine looked good, but she had several pulled muscles in her neck, chest, and rib cage, and she would be stuck with the neck brace for a while . . . “a while” being undefined. She couldn’t cough or laugh without suffering a spasm of pain, her broken arm ached, but she said she could ignore it.