Masked Prey

by John Sandford

  “I do,” Stokes said. He pulled a wad of sweaty one-dollar bills from his pocket and laid them on the bar, where they slowly uncurled. “That’s eighteen dollars right there.”

  The bartender walked down the bar to get the beer, and Stokes said to Dunn, “I was over to my sister’s place last night and she’s got a computer and she showed me that, uh, computer place you were talking about. The one you wrote on the napkin.”

  Dunn looked back over at him, ran his tongue across the front of his teeth a couple of times, and said, “So, did you read it?” He was vaguely surprised that Stokes hadn’t lost the napkin.

  “One of the articles on it. I didn’t understand it all and then my sister shoved the napkin in the garbage, by mistake, and got ketchup and shit all over it. But she’d printed the article so I could read it in bed, and she said we could type part of it back in and search for it. We did that, but the computer went to a whole different place. The article was there, and a whole bunch of other articles, but the biggest thing was pictures of kids walking on the street. Seemed weird to me.”

  Dunn, who’d only been about nine percent interested in anything Stokes might have to say, because Stokes was a dumbass, found his interest temporarily jacked up to thirty-five percent.

  “A different website?”

  “Yup. Called itself, uh . . . 19? No. 1919. With a whole bunch of articles. Including that one you gave me. And the pictures of kids.”

  “Porn?”

  “No, no, not porn, just kids walking along,” Stokes said. “Some were pretty little, some looked like they were maybe in high school.”

  “With the article I sent you to?” Dunn asked.

  “Yup.”

  “You know what the website was?”

  “Yup. My sister wrote it down.” Stokes reached in his hip pocket, found a wadded-up piece of computer paper, and spread it on the bar.

  Stokes had spent some time in a previous visit to Chuck’s Wagon bending Dunn’s ear about his rights as a natural-born white man and a faithful follower of country music, as well as about how his custom-assembled .223 rifle could give you a half-minute of angle all day long.

  Dunn had given him the URL of a skinhead site that combined the three—the white man stuff, country music, and guns, and where you could also buy a bumper sticker that riffed on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives: “Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms—Sounds Like Heaven to Me.”

  Dunn didn’t recognize the name of the website that was written on the crumpled sheet of paper, in purple ink and a woman’s handwriting. In fact, there was no website name at all, only a jumble of letters, numbers, and symbols that looked like a super-secure password. He took the paper and said, “Thanks. I’ll look into it,” and when the bartender came back with the PBR, Dunn said, “I’ll get this one,” and pushed a ten-dollar bill across the bar.

  Stokes said, “Well, thank you, big guy. That’s real nice. I’ll get the next one.”

  Dunn tipped up his beer, finishing it, and said, “Actually, I have to get home. Got an early job.”

  “Well, don’t fall in no holes,” Stokes said.

  Dunn was an excellent civil engineer and didn’t fall in no holes and didn’t appreciate hole-falling humor. He nodded at Stokes, a tight nod—everything about him was tight, really tight, screwed-down tight, so fuckin’ tight he squeaked when he walked—and he marched out of the bar in his high-topped Doc Martens 1460s, and, from Stokes’s perspective, disappeared into the afternoon.

  The bartender, who was looking up at the titsy chick reading the news on the Fox channel, glanced after him as he went through the door, and muttered to himself, “Asshole.”

  * * *

  —

  DUNN DROVE HOME, to a neatly kept, two-story house on the edge of Warrenton, for which he’d paid seven hundred thousand dollars. He lived alone, his wife having departed six years earlier, leaving him with a red-striped cat, which, like his wife, eventually disappeared and was not missed. He did miss the eight hundred thousand in savings she’d taken with her, but he did all right, putting twenty percent of his income into savings every year, toward an early retirement.

  With his tight black combat boots, his tight jeans, his tapered work shirts, his workout body, and blond hair cut in a white sidewall, Dunn looked like a comic-book Nazi. He wasn’t a comic-book anything and he definitely was not a Nazi—Nazis were more dumb guys like Stokes who went marching around and saluting and carrying shields and baseball bats and generally behaving like fools.

  Dunn wasn’t a Nazi, but he was a fascist.

  He went to political lectures in the evenings, when they caught his interest, and there was always something going on in DC; and he knew a few people and placed some money where he thought it might do political good, used for intelligent publications aimed at influential people. Very carefully placed the money: being known as a fascist would not help business.

  After his wife left, Dunn had moved out of the master bedroom and into a smaller one, converting the master into an office and library. When he got home from Chuck’s Wagon and his talk with Stokes, he went to his computer and typed in the URL address Stokes’s sister had written on the paper. The website popped up: 1919 in large type, and in much smaller type, beneath that, the words, “Thy Honor Is Thy Loyalty.”

  Dunn immediately recognized the motto as one used by the Nazi SS. At first he ignored the photos on the page and instead flipped through the articles that ran on the website. He recognized several of them from his quiet lurking on neo-Nazi and white supremacist sites.

  At first, he didn’t understand. There was a space to post responses, but no way to directly address the owners of the site. The articles were routine and all over the place, some from Nazi or KKK fruitcakes, others that might charitably be regarded merely as ultra-conservative. It was one of the worst websites he’d ever seen.

  He then turned to the photographs, and they mystified him. Pictures of the children of prominent politicians, but nothing to explain why they were there.

  Still mystified, he went to his bedroom, stripped off his clothes, pulled on a clean black latex bodysuit and a pair of ankle socks and walked down to his garage.

  The garage had three stalls. He kept his Ford F-150 in one and a Ford Mustang in the middle. His ex-wife, when she was living there, had occupied the third stall with her Lexus, but when she’d left, he’d put up a studs-and-Sheetrock wall separating his two stalls from the third, painted the walls white, and built himself a home gym.

  The gym was based around a Peloton bike for cardiovascular exercise, racks of free weights for strength workouts, and a wall of mirrors. He rode the bike five days a week for forty minutes or an hour. For the weight work, he’d divided his body’s muscle groups in half, and worked each zone three days a week, on alternate days.

  He did the bike first, pulling on the biking shoes, putting on the earphones and heart monitor, mounting the bike, bringing up a workout program, then following one of the tight-bodied women on the video screen, who pushed him up hills and more hills, standing, sitting, blowing off five hundred calories, cranking until his leg muscles were screaming at him.

  Thinking about that 1919 website.

  When he got off the bike, his body pouring sweat, he walked back into the house and drank a protein drink, moved around until the lactic acid had burned off in his legs.

  When he was feeling loose and supple again, he went back to the gym, rolled out a yoga mat, set the alarm on his iPhone, sat and closed his eyes and meditated for exactly twenty minutes. When the alarm went off, he rolled onto his stomach, used the iPhone as a timer, and did a “plank” for three minutes, building core strength. That done, he rolled up the mat and went to the free weights.

  Thinking about that website.

  The workout took an hour. When he finished, he pulled off the bodysuit and the Nike weightlifting shoes,
and checked himself in the mirror, nude, top to toe, looking for any extraneous fat. And, truth be told, he liked looking at himself. He posed, flashing his six-pack and biceps. He was pumped, his muscles inflated and burning again: strong, pale, perfectly cut.

  If his ex-wife could see him now, he thought, she’d flop down on her back and spread her legs. Bitch.

  He did poses for ten minutes, then walked back through the house to his bedroom, stepped into the attached bath, looked at himself in the mirror for a moment, then masturbated into the sink, watching his own crystalline blue eyes the whole time.

  All done, he showered, dried himself, dressed again.

  Feeling perfect.

  Thinking about the website.

  * * *

  —

  THEN—IN A FLASH—he understood.

  The website was a message in a bottle, thrown out to whoever might find it, and might be willing to act on it.

  He’d been looking for something like this, he realized. He’d been looking for a long time, without realizing it. Right there, in that cryptic setting, was a whole action plan and an invitation to anyone who could understand it.

  He leaned back in his desk chair, staring at the ceiling.

  This was it.

  He was going in.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  Lucas Davenport took a waking breath and rolled over to look at the nightstand clock: 6:55. He dimly remembered setting the alarm for seven o’clock, so he had five minutes. If he turned it off, he might sleep for three hours, so he didn’t.

  Weather, his wife, was still asleep beside him, which meant that it was the weekend, the only days she slept in. He rolled away from her toward the clock side of the bed, winced from the dull ache in his chest and settled in for the last four minutes, eyes half open, looking up at the ceiling. Trying to nail the exact day of the week: Sunday? Sunday.

  On Sunday, he had to get on an airplane. Everything was coming into focus.

  Lucas had been shot the previous spring. With September half gone, he was still feeling after-effects; which, he supposed, was better than the alternative. He was working hard to get back in shape, running, lifting, punching a heavy bag. Everybody said how good he looked.

  When he checked himself in the mirror, though, in his own eyes he looked gray, and too thin. Not wiry, but something over toward emaciated. His cheekbones had been blunt, and were now knife-edged; the crow’s feet at his eyes were like cuts; his watch was too loose at his wrist. He’d lost chunks of the hockey defenseman muscle he’d carried since college and getting it back, at his age, two years past fifty, was tough.

  He wanted the weight. The morning scale said he was at 192, and for a cop who enjoyed the occasional fight, two hundred pounds was a good starting point.

  Now something was happening in Washington, DC. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good, and at the moment he wasn’t in top form. Or maybe, his wife suggested, his body was fine, but his brain was still screwed up.

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS HAD BEEN barbequing steaks in his backyard the night before for a couple of cop friends and their wives, when Elmer Henderson had called. Henderson was a U.S. senator from Minnesota, a former governor, a onetime vice-presidential candidate (he lost), and one of the richest men in the state.

  Henderson had a ten-thousand-square-foot cabin on his own private six-hundred-acre lake, staff of six, up in the Northwoods, when he needed something simpler and more primitive than his life in the Twin Cities and Washington, DC. He had a dozen plaid shirts and numerous pairs of carefully ironed and faded jeans for the cabin life, along with several pairs of buffalo-hide loafers. Lucas had once spent a weekend at the cabin and he’d peeked in Henderson’s main closet—because he was a cop, and therefore somewhat curious, or snoopy, take your pick. Henderson’s Jockey shorts, Lucas believed, after a surreptitious inspection, were both ironed and starched.

  Henderson also had a smaller, more discreet cabin in Wisconsin, which he called “The Hideout,” where he and the other Big Cigars from the Twin Cities cut their political deals. Lucas had been there, as well . . . cutting a deal.

  * * *

  —

  LUCAS WAS RICH HIMSELF, but not rich like the people who’d inherited wealth. He didn’t assume its presence, because he’d made his money during a time when he wasn’t working as a cop. He’d been run out of the Minneapolis Police Department after he’d beaten a pimp who’d church-keyed one of his sources. The beating had neither cured the pimp of his inclinations, nor the woman of her facial scars, but had made a point that had resonated on Minneapolis streets, at least for a while.

  While he was in college, and later, working as a cop, he’d had a sideline as a developer of role-playing games. None of them got as big as Dungeons & Dragons, but they’d sold well enough to buy him a used Porsche 911.

  Then computers came along and the in-person role-playing games began to die. That occurred as he was being pushed out of the Minneapolis Police Department. With the new 9-1-1 systems then coming online, it occurred to him that American police departments could use role-playing games for their 9-1-1 systems, giving their personnel practice in responding to emergencies before they had to handle the real thing.

  He wrote the simulations, found a college computer freak who could do the programming, and the resulting Davenport Simulations, which he’d sold at exactly the right time, had made him wealthy.

  But not rich like Henderson.

  As F. Scott Fitzgerald didn’t say, but perhaps should have, “The very rich are different than you and me.” And as Ernest Hemingway didn’t say, but probably would have liked to have said, “Yes, they have more money.”

  If the exchange had actually occurred, Lucas thought, Fitzgerald would have had the better of it. In his experience, many of the very rich never really touched the sides or the bottom of the world, of life, but were cocooned from it, even when they wound up dead with needles in their arms.

  Henderson was a prime example of the privileges of inherited wealth. Still, he and Lucas were friends on some level, and Henderson had twice been in a position to give Lucas something that he wanted but couldn’t get on his own: the authority to hunt.

  After Lucas lost his job with Minneapolis, and after he made his money, he’d gotten, with Henderson’s support, a political appointment as an agent with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and a new badge. When the time ran out on that appointment, Henderson and another U.S. senator, Porter Smalls, had ushered him into a job as a deputy U.S. Marshal.

  And they’d seen to it that he had the freedom to hunt, as long as he performed the occasional political task.

  * * *

  —

  “I’LL SEND A PLANE,” Henderson told Lucas, because of course he would. Sending a plane didn’t mean much more to him than giving a cop cab fare. “In fact, I already sent it, if nobody’s screwed up, or my wife didn’t sneak off to Manhattan. You need to be here tomorrow morning.”

  “Tomorrow’s Sunday,” Lucas said.

  “I’ll talk to the bishop and tell him you’re excused,” Henderson said.

  “Ah, Jesus, you know I got shot, I’m still in recovery mode . . .”

  “I know all about that,” Henderson said. “You weren’t hurt so bad you didn’t run off to Nevada and kill somebody.”

  “I didn’t kill anybody,” Lucas grumbled.

  “Okay—you managed the killing. Well done, in my opinion. The world has enough cannibals,” Henderson said. “Anyway, you’re all healed up. My office, tomorrow, one o’clock. That should allow you to sleep in until eight tomorrow morning. Or seven. Whatever.”

  “Eight? Listen, Elmer, I never . . .” But Henderson was gone. Here was the rich man’s assumption: make a call and the guy shows up on time, with a necktie and polished shoes.

  * * *

  —

&nb
sp; WHEN THEIR GUESTS HAD DEPARTED, and the kids were soundly asleep, and the dishes washed, Lucas and Weather had had one of the snarly disagreements common to long-lasting marriages, and they had gone to bed a little angry with each other. The trouble came down to Henderson’s request and Lucas’s occasional political missions. The argument started there, compounded by Weather’s unease with the increasing levels of violence in Lucas’s job, and had moved to a more general political dispute.

  Weather, a surgeon, was an unabashed liberal. Because they had much more money than they really needed, Weather had freed herself from the usual routine of plastic and micro surgeries. She no longer looked for clients, but spent much of her time going from one hospital to the next, doing necessary surgical repairs on indigent cases.

  There was more work of that kind than she could handle and she was constantly exposed to a population that was unable to care for itself—including people literally driven into bankruptcy by medical costs, who’d had to choose between eating and medical care.

  The American medical system was broken, she thought, and needed to be fixed. She’d gone to a convention of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons in Los Angeles, and had been traumatized by the sight of thousands of street people, including small children, living under bridges and viaducts.

  “Worse than anything we had in the Great Depression,” she said.

  Lucas was not so liberal. He believed that no matter how much money or time you spent on the poor, there’d always be people at the bottom unable to care for themselves, and that was simply a fact to be lived with. Also, some people really needed to be shot, and, if only wounded, shot again.

  “Your mistake,” he’d told Weather, after one beer too many, and to his regret, “is that you characterize everything as a problem. A problem is something that can be solved. Some things aren’t problems—they’re situations. A situation can’t be solved, it just is. Medical care is a bottomless hole. We could spend every nickel everyone makes in the country on medical care, and it still wouldn’t be enough. If a guy thinks he’s dying and somebody else is paying for all his care, why shouldn’t he ask for the very best for the very longest time possible, right into the grave? And they do. We can’t afford that, sweetheart.”