“Yeah, she did,” Lucas said, looking back at the growing cluster around the body. “She’s dead.”
A long silence at the other end. Then Mallard, his voice hushed, asked, “You aren’t joking?”
“No. She showed, right in the slot. We had no time to take her. Our sniper nailed her from up on the ridge. Single shot, center-of-mass, looks like it clipped her spine and heart.”
More silence, then: “Oh, fuck.” Silence, then: “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. She never got a shot off.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Yeah, yeah. Listen, let me get back to you. We’re still standing here, we got stuff…
LUCAS WAS WATCHING the crime-scene team when Marcy came up. Marcy liked to fight, but never looked happy around a body. She was shaking her head, but then she looked up, a questioning look crossing her face, and then she said, “Jesus, Lucas—you’re all teared up. Are you okay?”
“Ah, it’s just the fuckin’ allergies or something,” he said. He wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Man. Clara Rinker, huh? Clara Rinker.”
28
RINKER WAS BURIED IN ST. LOUIS. Treena Ross, who was out on bail and who would probably never go to trial, took charge of the funeral. “No way she’s gonna be buried in Flyspeck, or whatever it’s called,” she told Lucas in a phone call. “She hated that place. We’ll bury her here, and the people from the warehouse can come and say goodbye.”
Lucas was of two minds about going, but finally, on the morning of the funeral, flew into Lambert and was picked up by Andreno, who insisted on carrying Lucas’s bag out to the car and said, “This is the most amazing thing I ever heard of, Davenport. I couldn’t believe it when you called.”
THE FUNERAL WAS done from a funeral home chapel, with Treena Ross’s Unitarian minister presiding. Mallard was walking across the parking lot when they pulled in, and he waited for them.
“End of a part of my life,” Mallard said. “I looked for her for ten years. This will be the first time I’ve ever seen her, when I knew it was her. I didn’t know, that time in Wichita.”
He and Andreno stepped toward the chapel, but Lucas hung back. “I’ll wait for you guys here. I don’t want to see her, and I don’t want to hear what the minister says.”
“You’re just gonna stand here?” Andreno asked.
“I’ll go to the cemetery,” Lucas said.
“I gotta go in,” Mallard said. He sounded glum. “So I can see for myself.”
“You okay?” Andreno asked.
“Yeah. But different. I keep thinking it was worth the trade, Malone for all the people who won’t be killed. Who might not be killed. But I don’t feel that way.”
“Malone was Malone—all those other anonymous people are just police reports,” Lucas said.
LUCAS WAITED IN Andreno’s car with the windows down. October, and still too warm in St. Louis—but then, it was warm in St. Paul, too. Almost seventy, the day before. Twenty people came to see Rinker buried, and Lucas suspected that there were St. Louis FBI agents somewhere out on the edges, making movies. He didn’t care about that. He just wanted to get it done.
When Mallard and Andreno finally came out of the funeral home chapel, Andreno said, “Wasn’t bad.” They all three rode to the cemetery together, and Mallard asked Lucas, “Why’d you come?”
“I kind of liked her,” Lucas said. “All the time I’ve been a cop, I’ve divided assholes into two groups: people who were assholes because they wanted to be—people who made themselves into assholes—and people who were made that way by life. Rinker never had a chance. But she kept trying.”
“You sound like National Public Radio,” Mallard said. They fell into the short line of cars going to the cemetery.
“Fuck a bunch of public radio,” Lucas said. “Rinker was twisted and tortured by people a hell of a lot worse than she ever was, and nobody did anything about it. And she was probably getting out of it when we came along. I think if she’d never come to Minneapolis, she’d probably be out of it now.”
Andreno shook his head. “Ross never would have let her get out. If she’d tried to get out, he’d have had her killed the first chance he got.”
THEY RODE ALONG for a while, then Mallard said, “You’re really bummed out, Lucas.”
“I bum myself out. I keep thinking that for everything that was bad in the woman, there were all these good things. And one of the good things was, she was a romantic. She believed in love and marriage and babies and working hard and standing on your own. You know why we got her? Because she could never have seen that somebody would be cynical enough to fake his own wedding for the sole purpose of setting her up to be killed.”
“You didn’t exactly…”
“Yes, I did. I thought that if she showed, there was maybe a two percent chance of taking her alive. I set her up to be killed, and she was.”
More silence, then Mallard said, “Good. Fuck her. She killed Malone.”
“And that’s your last word on it.”
“It is. Fuck her.”
“You’re a hard man,” Andreno said, and he wasn’t smiling.
AT THE GRAVESIDE, the mourners dropped dirt on the coffin, while Lucas, Mallard, and Andreno hung back. Treena Ross cried, wiping her nose with a big white hanky. She was still crying when the service ended, and people began to drift away. She walked past Lucas and Mallard as they headed to their car, and she called, “Hey, FBI.”
They looked at her and she said, “I was never that stupid, you know?”
Lucas nodded, and couldn’t suppress an acknowledging smile. “We know.”
WHEN EVERYBODY ELSE was gone, Lucas and Andreno dropped handfuls of dirt on Rinker’s coffin at the bottom of the grave. Mallard watched. He hadn’t had much to say after Lucas’s pronouncements on Rinker. And when Lucas and Andreno came away from the grave site, he said, “I’ll leave you here. I’ve got a ride downtown.” “Okay.”
They shook hands and Mallard said, “You done good, Lucas. You ever need a job…”
“I’ll call,” Lucas said.
Andreno dropped him back at the airport and said, “Well. I’m probably not as bummed out as you are, because I never knew her. But I’m gonna have a hard time getting back to the fuckin’ golf course.”
“You ever do any undercover work?” Lucas asked.
Andreno’s eyebrows went up. “From time to time. I make a real good traveling salesman, for some reason.”
“You know about my new job. You could be getting a call.”
Andreno nodded and said, “Lucas, I’d owe you more than I could tell you.”
BACK IN ST. PAUL that night, Weather asked if he were feeling better. He’d been shuffling around with his hands in his pockets, hang-dog and moody. She’d been playing something light on the piano, maybe Chopin, and he’d been watching the tag end of a meaningless football game.
“I’m okay, really,” he said.
“Okay for the real wedding?”
“Sure. Two weeks. I’m up for it—and the house. The house is looking good, if we could just get the goddamn parquet guys to put in the trim.”
“Calm down.”
“Yeah.” He took a deep breath and exhaled, looked up at her perched on the arm of the couch. “I wouldn’t want to do this again. Run into another Rinker.”
“I don’t think there could be another Rinker,” Weather said. She bounced and smiled and said, “Ouch.”
“What?”
“The kid just kicked me.”
Lucas put a hand on her belly. “Matt, or maybe Sam. New Testament or Old. Emilie spelled with an i-e, like the French do, or Annie, with an i-e, like the English.”
“But never Clara.”
“Never Clara,” Lucas said. “Clara’s gone.”
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, bu
siness establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Naked Prey
A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2003 by John Sandford
This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.
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A BERKLEY BOOK®
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BERKLEY and the “B” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.
Electronic edition: July, 2004
TITLES BY JOHN SANDFORD
Rules of Prey
Shadow Prey
Eyes of Prey
Silent Prey
Winter Prey
Night Prey
Mind Prey
Sudden Prey
The Night Crew
Secret Prey
Certain Prey
Easy Prey
Chosen Prey
Mortal Prey
Naked Prey
THE KIDD NOVELS
The Fool’s Run
The Empress File
The Devil’s Code
For Deborah Howell,
there at the beginning
Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
1
THURSDAY NIGHT, PITCH black, blowing snow. Heavy clouds, no moon behind them.
The Buick disappeared into the garage and the door started down. The big man, rolling down the highway in a battered Cherokee, killed his lights, pulled into the driveway, and took the shotgun off the car seat. The snow crunched underfoot as he stepped out; the snow was coming down in pellets, rather than flakes, and they stung as they slapped his warm face.
He loped up the driveway, fully exposed for a moment, and stopped just at the corner of the garage, in a shadow beneath the security light.
Jane Warr opened the side door and stepped through, her back turned to him as she pulled the door closed behind her.
He said, “Jane.”
She jumped, her hand at her throat, choking down a scream as she pivoted, and shrank against the door. Taking in the muzzle of the shotgun, and the large man with the beard and the stocking cap, she screeched: “What? Who’re you? Get away . . . ” A jumble of panic words.
He stayed with her, tracking her with the shotgun, and he said, slowly, as if speaking to a child, “Jane, this is a shotgun. If you scream, I will blow your heart out.”
She looked, and it was a shotgun all right, a twelve-gauge pump, and it was pointing at her heart. She made herself be still, thought of Deon in the house. If Deon looked out and saw them . . . Deon would take care of himself. “What do you want?”
“Joe Kelly.”
They stood for two or three seconds, the snow pellets peppering the garage, the big man’s beard going white with it. Then, “Joe’s not here.” A hint of assertion in her voice—this didn’t involve her, this shotgun.
“Bullshit,” the big man said. He twitched the muzzle to the left, toward the house. “We’re going inside to talk to him, and he’s gonna pay me some money. I don’t want to hurt you or anybody else, but I’m gonna talk to Joe. If I have to hurt the whole bunch of you, I will.”
He sounded familiar, she thought. Maybe one of the guys from Missouri, from Kansas City? “Are you one of the Kansas City people? Because we’re not . . . ”
“Shut up,” the big man said. “Get your ass up the steps and into the house. Keep your mouth shut.”
She did what he told her. This was not the first time she’d been present when an unfriendly man flashed a gun—not even the second or third time—but she was worried. On the other hand, he said he was looking for Joe. When he found out Joe wasn’t here, he’d go. Maybe.
“Joe’s not here,” she said, as she went up the steps.
“Quiet!” The man’s voice dropped. “One thing I learned down in Kansas City—I’ll share this with you—is that when trouble starts, you pull the trigger. Don’t figure anything out, just pull the trigger. If Joe or Deon try anything on me, you can kiss your butt good-bye.”
“All right,” she said. Her voice had dropped with his. Now she was on the stranger’s side. She’d be okay, she told herself, as long as Deon didn’t do anything. But there was something too weird about this guy. I’ll share this with you?—she’d never heard a serious asshole say anything like that.
They went up the stairs onto a back porch, then through the porch into a mudroom, then through another door into the kitchen. None of the doors was locked. Broderick was a small town, and it doesn’t take long to pick up small-town habits. As they clunked into the kitchen, which smelled like microwave popcorn and week-old carrot peels, Deon Cash called from the living room, “Hey,” and they heard his feet hit the floor. A second later he stepped into the kitchen, scowling about something, a thin, five-foot-ten-inch black man in an Indian-print fleece pullover and jeans, with a can of Budweiser in one hand.
He saw Warr, the big man behind her, and then, an instant later, registered the shotgun. By that time, the big man had shifted the barrel of the shotgun and it was pointing at Cash’s head. “Don’t even think about moving.”
“Easy,” Cash said. He put the can of Budweiser on a kitchen counter, freeing his hands.
“Call Joe.”
Cash looked puzzled for a second, then said, “Joe ain’t here.”
“Call him,” the big man said. He’d thought about this, about all the calling.
Cash shrugged. “HEY JOE,” he shouted.
Nothing. After a long moment, the man with the shotgun said, “Goddamnit, where is he?”
“He went away last month. He ain’t been back. We don’t know where he is,” Warr said. “Told you he wasn’t here.”
“Go stand next to Deon.” Warr stepped over next to Cash, and the big man dipped his left hand into his parka pocket and pulled out a clump of chain. Handcuffs. He tossed them on the floor and looked at Warr. “Put them on Deon. Deon, turn around.”
“Aw, man . . . ”
“It’s up to you,” the big man said. “I don’t want to hurt you two, but I will. We’re gonna wait for him if it takes all night.”
“He ain’t here,” Warr said in exasperation. “He ain’t coming back.”
“Cuffs,” the big man said. “I know what it sounds like when cuffs lock up.”
“Aw man . . . ”
“C’mon.” The shotgun moved to Cash’s head, and Warr bent over and picked up one set of cuffs and the big man said, “Turn around so I can see it,” and Warr clicked the cuffs in place, pinning Cash’s hands behind him.
The big man dipped his hand into his pocket again and came up with a roll of strapping tape. “Tape his feet together.”
“Man, you startin’ to piss me off,” Cash said. Even with his hands cuffed, he managed to look stupidly fierce.
“Better’n being dead. Sit down and stick your feet out so she can tape you up.”
Still gr
umbling, Cash sat down and Warr crouched beside him and said, “I’m pretty scared,” and Cash said, “We gonna be all right. The masked man can go look at Joe’s stuff, see he ain’t here.”
The big man made her take eight tight winds of tape around Cash’s ankles. Then he ordered Warr to take off her parka and cuff her own hands. She got one cuff, but fumbled with the other, and the man with the shotgun told her to turn and back toward him, and when she did, clicked the second cuff in place. He then ordered both of them to lie on their stomachs, and with the shotgun pointed at them, he checked Cash’s cuffs and then Warr’s, just to make sure. When he was satisfied, he pulled on a pair of cotton gloves, knelt beside Warr, and taped her ankles, then moved over to Cash and put the rest of the roll of tape around his.
When he was done, Cash said, “So go look. Joe ain’t here.”
“I believe you,” the big man said, standing up. They looked so helpless that he almost backed out. He steadied himself. “I know where Joe is.”
After a moment’s silence, Cash asked, “Where is he?”
“In a hole in the ground, a couple miles south of Terre-bonne. Don’t think I could find it myself, anymore,” the big man said. “I just asked you about him so you’d think that . . . ” He shrugged. “That you had a chance.”
Another moment’s silence, and then Warr said, “Aw, God, Deon. Listen to his voice.”
Cash put the pieces together, then said, loud, croaking, but not yet screaming, “We didn’t do nothin’, man. We didn’t do nothin’.”
“I know what you did,” the big man said.
“Don’t hurt us,” Warr said. She flopped against the vinyl, tried to get over on her back. “Please don’t hurt us. I’ll tell the cops whatever you want.”
“We get a trial,” Cash said. He twisted around, the better to see the man’s face, and to test the tape on his legs. “We innocent until we proved guilty.”
“Innocent.” The big man spat it out.
Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15 Page 104