Twisted Prey

by John Sandford

  “Not being able to move my neck is driving me crazy. It makes my eyes hurt, looking around without moving my head. Not being able to read is worse . . .”

  * * *

  —

  LETTY BEGAN TO TALK about going back to California—classes were about to start again—and Weather told her to go. Letty said she would . . . in a few days. She wanted to see Weather at home.

  Lucas brought Sam and Gabrielle down to see Weather every afternoon; Weather fell into a routine of sleeping late in the morning, taking a nap in the afternoon, and staying up late with Lucas. She’d already determined that she wouldn’t be working again for at least six weeks, and two months was more likely.

  On the sixth day after the accident, they sat up talking until two in the morning. Lucas, the night owl, was still restless when he got home and spent another hour reading. At eight o’clock the next morning, he was sleeping soundly when there was a knock on the bedroom door, and Letty called, “Dad?”

  He struggled to sit up. “Yeah?”

  “There’s a lady here to see you,” Letty said.

  “What?”

  “There’s a lady here to see you. I’ve got her in the kitchen. You better come down.” Letty’s tone implied significance.

  Lucas felt like he’d been hit on the forehead with a five-pound ham. “A lady? What does she want?”

  “You better come down,” Letty repeated.

  She turned away from the door and went back down the hallway to the stairs. Lucas got up, found his jeans and a T-shirt, pulled them on. He was barefoot but didn’t bother with shoes, followed Letty down the hall and down the stairs.

  * * *

  —

  THE WOMAN waiting in the kitchen looked like a refugee from Ukraine, but not the Ukraine of today, more like a year after World War II. She was short, with gray hair that might once have been blond; she was elderly, probably in her seventies; and she was overweight. She was wearing a cheap raincoat, though the day was bright and warm, and carrying a plastic purse in one hand. To complete the image, she was wearing a babushka. She smelled vaguely of boiled cabbage and sausage, or looked like she should. And she looked exhausted.

  Letty was standing next to her, and Lucas asked the woman, “What can I do for you?”

  She made a pacifying gesture with her free hand, and said, “I’m Mary Last. My boy is Douglas Last, who the police say was driving when your wife was in the accident. But he didn’t do it.”

  Lucas looked at Letty, and said, “I don’t think . . .”

  Letty: “Listen to her.”

  There was that tone in her voice again, and Lucas turned back to Mary Last, and asked, “Why didn’t he do it?”

  “Douglas, he drank too much,” Mary Last said. “I tried to tell him. And he’s smoked since he was in high school. He ate cheeseburgers every day—every day of his life. Eggs and bacon in the morning, cheeseburgers all day, or pepperoni pizza. Even now. He never exercised. He was a fat man, and he had heart failure. The doctors said he would die in one year, maybe two, if he didn’t change. He didn’t. The food was like a drug. He was an addict. My boy, he couldn’t run a hundred feet, but the police say he ran so fast nobody could catch him and he got away. This is impossible for him to do. Impossible. You ask his doctor.”

  Letty later told Weather that Lucas could have said any of a thousand things in response, but Lucas was feeling the world shifting around him. What had been simple and awful had suddenly become enormously complex and even worse.

  He looked at the old lady, and said, “Sonofabitch.”

  14

  Lucas had been a cop for more than two decades, and as soon as the words came out of the old lady’s mouth, he knew that she was telling the truth, that she was right, Last couldn’t run a hundred feet. Weather’s crash had been set up to take Lucas out of Washington, and Mary Last’s son had been murdered. Lucas had to check, but he knew it was true.

  Lucas had been in the Cities for a week and had not talked to Smalls since the accident, other than to drop him an email, telling him what had happened. Smalls had simply answered back, “Take care of your wife.”

  After sending Mary Last away, Lucas called Smalls on his private cell phone. When Smalls answered, Lucas identified himself, and asked, “Do you still have protection?”

  “Yes, but nothing . . .”

  “Senator, I think Weather was taken out by the same guy who ambushed you and Miz Whitehead. I think they set up the guy with the DWI, Douglas Last, and then murdered him. I’ve got good reason to think this. The killers are still with us, and active, and they might be here in the Twin Cities.”

  Smalls didn’t respond immediately, though Lucas could hear him breathing. Finally: “It’s best if I go away for a while. I’ve got to be back after the recess, but for the time being . . .”

  “Don’t tell me where you’re going. Or anyone else. You know how to get a burner phone?”

  “Of course.”

  “These guys are very sophisticated. My last case, my cell phone was tracked by a bunch of dopers—everybody’s got tech now. Get a couple of burners, FedEx one of them to Kitten, don’t call anyone except her, and any business that you have to do with other people, do through her. I don’t think they can break that—not easily anyway. I’ve got a private line to her myself, so we can relay anything we need to say to each other.”

  “I’ll be gone tonight,” Smalls said. “Are you going back to Washington?”

  “I have to talk to Weather about that. And I have to hire some people to sit with her until this is done.”

  * * *

  —

  AFTER HE GOT OFF the phone with Smalls, Lucas called Mitchel White, the Ramsey County medical examiner, told him about what Last’s mother had said, and asked, “Did you look at his heart?”

  “Yes. He had advanced congestive heart failure. But, Lucas, he had a bullet go through his head, and the shot was fired from one inch away.”

  “The witnesses said he jumped out of his car after the accident, sprinted down the street and into an alley,” Lucas said. “A sixteen-year-old kid ran after him but never saw him again.”

  “I didn’t know that,” White said. “Everybody was focused on the gunshot wound. I can tell you, though, he didn’t sprint anywhere. For one thing, he weighed two fifty-two, his legs were bacon-wrapped twigs, and his heart was a lump of Jell-O.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS MADE ANOTHER CALL, asked an old political friend for a favor.

  He called Roger Morris, at St. Paul Homicide, and told him what he thought. “Oh boy. All right, I’m on it,” Morris said. “This shouldn’t have gotten past us. I never heard a word about his heart.”

  When Lucas and Letty got to the hospital, Catrin Mattson, wearing a loose white overshirt to cover her gun, was already sitting in a chair next to Weather’s bed, reading aloud a magazine story about shoes. Virgil Flowers was slumped in the second chair, cowboy boots up on the end of Weather’s bed.

  When Lucas came in, Mattson said to Weather, whose eyes were closed, “The lug is here. And your improbably beautiful daughter.”

  Weather said, “We’ve got a two-lug room. And hello, Daughter.”

  Lucas kissed Weather on the lips, and Mattson on the forehead, and said to Mattson, “You got here in a hurry,” and to Flowers, “What the fuck do you want?”

  “Sneaky way to see your improbably beautiful daughter,” Flowers said. “The rest of you, I don’t give a shit about.”

  Letty stepped behind Flowers and began massaging his shoulders. “You’re such a manly man,” she said. “You’ve even got muscles in your shoulders.”

  “Of course,” Flowers said. “That’s where I keep most of them, until they’re needed. Ooo. That feels good.”

  Mattson watched the massaging, made a crooked smile, and looked up at Lucas. “Rose M
arie talked to the director and he came up with my leave of absence in something like eight seconds.”

  Rose Marie Roux was the head of the Department of Public Safety and Lucas’s old political friend. She was the one he’d called for the favor, asking, if Mattson agreed, that she be given an emergency leave of absence to watch over Weather.

  Mattson worked for the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, Lucas’s former department, as did Flowers, and she knew Weather well. The director reported directly to Roux and was unlikely to resist any of her suggestions.

  The fix was in.

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS HAD CAUGHT Mattson’s crooked smile and thought, Hmm. Catrin might have a thing for Virgil, dismissed the thought, and said, “How long . . . ?”

  “They told me to stay as long as I was needed,” Mattson said, “though it’s not my kind of gig.”

  “I know that, but this is complicated,” Lucas said. “I asked for you because you can handle it.”

  “I could handle it, too,” Flowers said.

  Lucas: “Yeah, but I worry that that’s not all you’d handle.”

  Letty rolled her eyes, and said, “Oh, Jesus.”

  Weather: “Since you haven’t told me anything about what’s going on, why don’t you tell all of us at the same time?”

  “It’s crazy,” Letty said. “But then, we’ve all seen crazier.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS TOLD THEM, and the two women listened quietly. “You’re saying they almost killed Weather to move you off the job,” Mattson said.

  “Yes. Whether they were trying to kill her or only hurt her bad enough to get me back here, I don’t know,” Lucas said.

  “They were willing to kill her, like they were Smalls’s girlfriend,” Letty said. “They killed that Last person in cold blood.”

  “That’s right,” Lucas said. To Mattson: “That’s why I need somebody good in here. These guys are professionals. They kill for a living.”

  “They’ve messed up a few times,” Weather observed. “Missed Smalls, killed his girlfriend. They tried to mug you but failed . . .”

  “Would have worked with you, though, if Last’s mother hadn’t come to see me,” Lucas said. “St. Paul cops said it looked for all the world like a suicide. Like he sat there and finished a bottle of vodka and then shot himself. The gun even belonged to his girlfriend, nobody’s prints on it but his.”

  “Interesting,” Flowers said.

  Letty said, “Yeah. Almost worth staying for.”

  “No, no, no,” Weather said. “You get on back to school. And, Lucas, when are you going back to Washington?”

  “That depends on you,” Lucas said.

  “They’re letting me out of here tomorrow, I think, if I promise to stay in bed for a couple of more days. Catrin can take me around, Helen can handle the house and the kids . . . you need to take care of this.”

  “I’ll wait until you’re home,” Lucas said. “But, yeah—I oughta get back. These people need to be put away.”

  “These people need to get shot, is what they need,” Letty said. She and Mattson slapped hands. Flowers only raised his eyebrows.

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS TOOK Mattson aside before he left the hospital: “I need to make sure you’re okay with this.”

  “Weather’s a good friend. She helped me a lot after my . . . problem,” Mattson said.

  “How about a grand a day?” Lucas asked.

  “Lucas, that’s not . . .”

  “Yes, it is,” Lucas said. “You’ve taken a leave, I’ve got the money. Is that good?”

  “That’s better than good,” Mattson said. “I’d do it for free.”

  “I know. It’s nice for all of us that you don’t have to.”

  * * *

  —

  SHE WENT BACK to Weather, and Lucas and Letty walked out of the hospital with Flowers. In the parking lot, Flowers said, “You need anything, let me know. Anything. I can always take some undertime. If Catrin needs somebody to spell her . . .”

  Letty got a handful of Flowers’s shirt and pulled him in and kissed him on the lips, and let the kiss linger. “Thank you.”

  Lucas said, “Hey . . . Hey! The guy’s practically married.”

  “He could still fool around,” Letty said. “I mean, God, it’s like you don’t even live in the twenty-first century.”

  “Hey!”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS FINALLY MADE a call to Rae Givens, told her to jack up Bob. “I’m headed back to Washington day after tomorrow.”

  “Ooo. We get to shoot somebody?”

  “That could happen,” Lucas said. “Try to pretend you’re not happy about it.”

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS GOT Weather settled at home, watched her for a day until she got annoyed—“I’m unhappy enough about this neck brace that I’m going to take it out on you, and I’m too tired to fight, so go to Washington and fix this,” she said.

  Lucas and Letty went to the airport together, Lucas headed east, Letty west, and when they’d gotten through security, they sat at Lucas’s gate until it was time for him to board the plane. She gave him a squeeze when he got in line, and said, “Call me every night and tell me what’s happening. In case I have to come out there . . .”

  “I’ll be okay,” he said. “I don’t want you out there under any circumstances.”

  Letty could be as cold as anyone Lucas had ever known. She stepped back, and said, “There’s only one circumstance that would take me out there. Think about it.”

  He thought about it on the plane. She’d be out to Washington if he were killed. She’d bring a gun. In some ways, she was a typical lighthearted college girl; in other ways, she wasn’t.

  Not at all.

  * * *

  —

  BOB AND RAE were waiting when he got in, and they met in Lucas’s room, where he told them all about the accident.

  When he was done, Bob said, “This . . . You can’t do this kind of thing out of your hip pocket. They had to do some intel work; they must have had some computer access to spot the drunk . . . If he was living with his girlfriend, he wouldn’t even have an address of his own. How’d they find him?”

  “Probation records,” Lucas said. “If they have a good computer guy, he could get into state files . . .”

  Rae nodded. “We’ve had that problem on the federal level. The files are designed to provide a fast response to people who aren’t computer jocks. For a serious hacker, getting in there would be child’s play.”

  “And we’re dealing with people who probably have access to federal computer systems,” Lucas said.

  “The safest bet here would be to make a hard move on Ritter. We know he used a truck once, so I have to believe he was probably there in Minnesota,” Bob said.

  “I agree,” Lucas said. “We don’t have enough for an arrest or a search warrant, but we can roust him, impound his truck, get Carl Armstrong to take a look at it. I’ll get Russell looking for a way to put Ritter in St. Paul—run his credit cards, look at airlines.”

  “Put this Parrish guy in there, too,” Rae said.

  * * *

  —

  THEY’D MOVE the next morning, they decided. Bob and Rae had been watching Ritter’s truck during the week Lucas was gone. They would continue with that the next day, while Lucas would work with Forte on a computer search of electronic records on both Ritter and Parrish.

  When the other two had gone, Lucas called Forte and told him what he wanted to do, and Forte agreed to start pulling all the records he could think of, that might track the movements of the two men during the days before and after Weather was hit.

  With that under way, Lucas called Carl Armstrong in West Virginia
, to get the latest results on the logs they’d pulled out of the mountainside ditch.

  “The news is mixed,” Armstrong told him. “The paint on the logs came from the Cadillac, but we knew that was probably the case. The other side of the logs, the ones that would be on the attack truck . . . we’ve got white canvas fibers. I think they padded the logs, probably to minimize damage to the side of the truck. They must’ve taken the padding with them after they threw the logs in the ditch—we’ve got no paint on the logs themselves.”

  “Damnit,” Lucas said.

  “Well, you told me they were pros,” Armstrong said. “That sounds professional.”

  “Talk to you tomorrow, Carl,” Lucas said.

  * * *

  —

  FORTE GOT BACK with the information that Parrish had probably been in Washington the night that Weather got hit.

  “I pulled his credit card charges, and he uses his cards a lot. We have charges for most days leading up to the attack on Weather, on the day itself, and every day since, all around Washington. But Ritter . . . Ritter has MasterCard, Visa, Chase, and Amex cards, but he went dark three days before Weather was attacked and didn’t pop up again until two days later. He doesn’t use his card as much as Parrish, but he uses it every day or two. I couldn’t find any other five-day periods when he didn’t use one or the other. Not when he was in the States.”

  “He was trying to avoid anything that would put him in the Cities.”

  “I think so. That’s negative proof, not so good for a jury. But now we know,” Forte said. “No airline tickets, no trace of any cars rented in the Twin Cities, but we have George Claxson’s private plane flying into Omaha the first day Ritter goes silent.”

  “Who’s George Claxson again?” Lucas asked. The name rang a bell, but he couldn’t place it.