[Prey 11] - Easy Prey

by John Sandford

  "I just want to get going." The man was furious, unapologetic. "You had me blocked in. I'm busy, I'm in a goddamned hurry, and you're screwing around with some asshole."

  Lucas said, "Put your car in park."

  "It is in park."

  Lucas reached past him, turned the key, killed the engine. "Sit here until I tell you you can go. If you move, you go to jail."

  "I'm in a fuckin' hurry," the man screamed.

  Lucas went back to the Bloomington cops and explained what bad happened with Olson. An ambulance siren started in the distance. The traffic jam intensified as people leaving the mall stopped to gawk at the Porsche and the police car, and the man lying on the grass.

  "The thing is, he was fine in the parking lot when we were talking to him," Lucas said. "Then he headed back to his hotel room, and a minute later, here be came running after us. Now he's had whatever this is. A fit."

  A car was passing in the outside lane, and a kid yelled, "Did you shoot him?"

  "Maybe a stroke," said the sergeant.

  "He's just out," Del said. "He's like somebody knocked him out."

  "I think we better go look at the motel," Lucas said. "Could you guys stay here and handle the pararnedics and traffic, but send another car over to the motel?"

  "Yeah. Have somebody here in a minute." He looked at the Lexus. "What's the story on this guy?"

  Lucas told him quickly, and the sergeant nodded. "Fuckhead. We'll keep him around for a while."

  "That'd be good," Lucas said. "At least until he's cooled out."

  Lucas and Del walked toward the hotel, off the grass, across the parking lot. The desk clerk had come to the front window to watch the commotion at the curb. Lucas showed him the badge case and said, "We need the room number and a key for a guest named Olson."

  The clerk stepped behind the desk, punched up a computer. "We've got two Olsons—a Mr. Tom and a Mr. Lynn Olson."

  "Give us both keys," Lucas said.

  The clerk never hesitated. He looked in a slotted drawer, took out two keys, and pushed them across the desk. "Is there anything else I can do?"

  "A Bloomington police car is gonna be here in a minute," Lucas said. "Send the cops up."

  The Olsons' two rooms were adjacent, up an interior stairway and down a long carpeted hall that smelled faintly of disinfectant and something else, like wine or beer. "Would something in his own room freak him out?" Del asked as they counted the room numbers down the hall.

  "I was wondering that," Lucas said. "Let's try his folks."

  The elder Olsons' door came up first. Lucas knocked. No answer.

  Knocked louder. They listened, then Del shook his head and Lucas put the key in the lock, turned it, and pushed.

  No chain. The door swung open and Lucas stepped inside, smelled the blood and urine.

  Lynn Olson lay diagonally across the double bed closest to the door, facedown, fully clothed, his head twisted strangely to the right, away from them. One arm was outstretched; a chromed revolver lay on the floor under his hand. His wife lay on the next bed, rigidly, straight down the middle, shoeless but otherwise clothed. She was faceup, her head on a pillow, a red gunshot wound showing at her temple.

  "Oh, fuck," Del said from behind Lucas.

  They moved slowly into the room, both of them unconsciously pulling their weapons. The room was actually a small suite, with a sitting area off the main room. The bathroom was in the back. Lucas checked quickly, found it empty, and went back to the main room.

  Del, who'd stayed back, said, "Gun by the bed."

  Lucas stepped toward Lynn Olson, touched his cheek: cold. He was dead, and had been dead for a while. There was no question about Lil Olson. They could see the spray from the gunshot wound on the far side of her head where the slug had exited. Lucas knelt next to the gun, got his nose an inch away from it: a nine-millimeter. "I don't think that's the gun that was used on Plain," he said. "That was a pretty big crater in the concrete. I don't think a nine would do that."

  "And I can't see the thread. Alie'e goes down, so somebody kills Plain. I can see that: revenge, especially after that photo spread. He's making a buck off Alie'e's death, and maybe some nut takes it the wrong way. Same thing with Corbeau: she's one of the sinners around Alie'e, one of the muff-divers. But the parents. I don't see the parents."

  Lucas shook his head. From the hallway, they heard a voice. "Hello?"

  Del went to the door, poked his head out. "Down here."

  Two new Bloomington cops arrived a moment later, one in his twenties, the other graying, heavier. "Two dead," Lucas said. "We're gonna need the crime lab, big-time, and like right now."

  The gray-haired one said, "I saw you on TV. On the Alie'e thing. Is this more of that?"

  Lucas nodded. "These are Alie'e parents."

  The cop exhaled, hooked his thumbs over his belt, took another long look as though memorizing the scene. "Gotta hand it to you," he said, as though it were Lucas's doing. "This is some weird shit." He looked at his younger partner. "Call it in."

  Lucas said, "I just thought of something. I'm gonna have to… I need Lynn Olsons billfold."

  "Aw, man, I don't know," the older cop said. Crime scenes were not to be messed with.

  "Yeah, I know, but I need it." Lucas stepped back inside the room, looked around, saw a plastic bag stuffed into an ice bucket, got it, and walked over to Olsons body. He could see the lump of the wallet in Olsons back pocket, carefully lifted the pocket flap, gripped the wallet through the plastic bag, and slipped it out. With the wallet inside the bag, be opened it, found the drivers license in a credit-card slot, and maneuvered it out.

  "Could you call this in?" he asked the older cop. "Ask them to run Lynn Olson, DOB 2-23-44. He lives in Burnt River, Minnesota. We need cars registered to him."

  Bloomington came back in thirty seconds. Olson had three cars: a new dark-blue Volvo, a two-year-old Ford Explorer, and a green 1968 Pontiac GTO.

  "You guys got it," Lucas told the Bloomington cops. "We need to look for this car in the parking lot." And to Del: "Come on."

  On the way down the stairs, Del said, "Marcy's gonna make it."

  Lucas looked at him. "You didn't talk to anyone?"

  "No, man. You bummed me out with that bad vibe. But this was the vibe. Not Marcy. You were getting a vibe from this."

  "Del, you can't be smokin' that shit while you're working."

  "Yeah, well, watch. She's good." He seemed marginally more cheerful.

  They found the Olsons' car in a minute, the blue Volvo, much like Tom Olson's car but a decade newer. Lucas walked around to the passenger side, squeezing between the Volvo and a red Chevy Camaro. He saw the bullet hole before he got to the door, reached down and touched it. Hard to mistake, either by sight or feel. "That's Olympic-quality shooting," Del said. He knelt in the narrow space to look at the hole, while Lucas turned to look back up the parking lot. Three Bloomington squad cars rounded the corner of the hotel, one after another, lights flashing, like a Shriners parade.

  "I better call Rose Marie," he said. "I left my phone in the car."

  Del handed him the cell phone, and he punched in Rose Marie's number. "This is Lucas," he said. "How is she?"

  Lucas listened, Del peering at him. Lucas took the phone away from his ear and told him, "She's still on the table."

  "She's okay," Del said, but now he sounded uncertain.

  Lucas said to Rose Marie, "Okay. We've had a development down here."

  Chapter 16

  « ^ »

  While Del waited at the car, Lucas led the arriving Bloomington cops up the stairs to the Olsons' room, then violated the crime scene again. This time, over the Bloomington cops' protests, he took the Olsons' car keys off a dresser.

  "The keys are completely out of the scene," he told them. "You won't get anything off the car keys… But we need to look in their trunk."

  "Yeah, but…" the sergeant said uneasily. It was all against his training.

  "Look, it's oka
y. I'll take the responsibility," Lucas said. "But I'd appreciate it if you could come down and watch while we open the car."

  The sergeant agreed to walk along. Lucas opened the car trunk, found nothing but odd bits of traveling luggage—a camera bag, a half-full laundry bag, two golf clubs and a couple of loose balls, an open box of plastic garbage bags, an empty cooler, and, under a purple Minnesota Vikings jacket, a gray-metal toolbox.

  "Looking for a big gun?" Del asked.

  "If this is what it looks like, if this is murder-suicide… man, it'd make life easier," Lucas said. He dipped into the box of garbage bags, pulled one out, ripped a couple of chunks out of it, made mittens out of the chunks and opened the toolbox. The top of the box was a lift-out tray with a socketwrench and sockets. He lifted the tray out. Tools. "Nothing," he said.

  Del had taken the keys out of the truck to open the passenger-side door. "I don't see anything."

  Del stood up. "But the hole in the door… This could clean up Marcy and probably Plain. Revenge shootings. Either that or…"

  "What?"

  "What if Lynn Olson was trying to fuck his daughter, and something happened? He was drunk at the party… and maybe Lansing… I don't know."

  "Where'd Plain come into it?" Lucas asked, thinking it over.

  "Maybe he saw something?"

  "Why wouldn't he tell us? He said he didn't like them much, the whole crowd around Alie'e."

  "I don't know," Del said.

  They stayed at the motel for an hour, watched the preliminary crime-scene work, and made arrangements for a statement for the Bloomington cops.

  "You gotta do the gun right now," Lucas said as a crime-scene tech crawled over the room. "It may be the gun used to shoot Marcy Sherrill."

  "We'll have it in a couple of hours, no more," the tech said. "Have they taken a bullet out of her?"

  "I don't know." Lucas called to ask, and was told that both bullets that hit Sherrill had done clean pass-throughs. Another crime-scene team was at Jael Corbeau's studio, trying to recover a slug from what looked like a bullet hole in a wooden railing. Jael was still at the hospital.

  A cluster of television camera trucks had appeared at a diner across the street. Bloomington was keeping them away from the motel, and a Bloomington cop had moved Lucas's Porsche back into the lot. As they left the motel, Lucas could see sudden movement among the cameramen, the cameras going up on their shoulders.

  "We're about to go on TV," he said. Del dipped his head and stepped behind Lucas. At the car, he kept his head down, one hand over his face. As they pulled out of the parking lot, a TV truck pulled out behind them in pursuit. Lucas lost it on the interstate, cutting through evening traffic like a shark.

  They'd made the phone checks: Sherrill was still on the table. She'd taken a lot of blood, but the prognosis had improved. Tom Olson was asleep. He'd been disoriented at the hospital, his body overcome with shock. He'd been sedated.

  North of town, at James Bee's house, the cops had cleaned out the computers and the Rolodex. There'd been one cross-match between the Rolodex and the names on the party list from Silly Hanson's, and a competent Minneapolis cop named Loring was running down the cross. The cops at Bee's house also found three ounces of cocaine in a bedroom. Bee claimed it belonged to his wife, the blonde, who denied it. They were both being transported to the county jail.

  They still had the outstanding warrant for the second house, but Del shook his head: "Everything's too heavy right how," he said. "If we need it, let's do it tomorrow. Let's go talk to Bee—maybe he'll give us what we need."

  "Let's stop at the hospital first."

  "Yeah, well—I assumed that," Del said.

  They weren't allowed to look into the operating room, and Sherrill was still on the table.

  "Jesus, how long's it been?" Lucas asked Rose Marie.

  Rose Marie bad taken an empty hospital room, and was working two separate patient telephones. She looked at her watch. "Four hours."

  "How much more can they have to do?"

  "I don't know what they've done, Lucas. Look… go away. Go do something."

  "Like what?" he asked.

  "I don't care, but this isn't good for you." She looked at Del. "You either."

  Del said, "So lets go talk to Bee."

  Bee was with his lawyer. Lucas knocked on the door, poked his head in. "Wanted you to know… we're looking for some information and we might be able to talk."

  "I don't think so," the lawyer said. "Your search warrant is a piece of toilet paper."

  "Au contraire," Del said. "That thing is a piece of gold. Your client here is going straight to jail, and he won't be passing Go."

  Bee looked troubled. He said, "I don't think I've exactly got a problem. For one thing, it wasn't my cocaine, it was Connie's. But say I wanted to help Connie… what would you need to know?"

  "We're trying to find out who was running Sandy Lansing, the woman killed with Alie'e Maison. She was dealing, but she was retail. We're looking for the guy behind her."

  Bee shrugged. "Let me talk to Ralph here. I don't know if I could help you even if I wanted to. But let me talk to Ralph."

  "Talk to Ralph," Lucas said. And to Ralph: "I understand you've been shootin' beaver again."

  Ralph grinned and said, "Shhh," and Bee said, "What?"

  Ralph said, "I got a little beaver problem up at my cabin."

  "Larry Connell said about once an hour he'd hear a high-powered rifle," Lucas said.

  "Deer seasons coming up," the lawyer said. "I need the practice. And those fuckin' beaver, if they block up that creek, it's gonna flood my whole property. Goddamn rodents. I hate them almost as much as I hate the DNR."

  "What beaver?" Bee asked.

  "Talk to you later," Lucas said.

  "You know what you dumb shits did?" Bee said. "You took the one guy who'd know about this for sure—you took and put him in prison. He hates your ass, and he ain't never gonna talk to you."

  Del said, "What?" and he and Lucas looked at each other, then simultaneously said, "Rashid Al-Balah."

  Outside, Lucas said, "We gotta nail down that poker game. If Tricks gonna be anywhere, that'd be it."

  "Gimme two hours," Del said. "You going back to the hospital?"

  "Yeah."

  "Turn on your cell phone."

  "Okay."

  "No. I wanna see you do it," Del said.

  Lucas took out the cell phone and turned it on. Del took out his, punched a speed-dial code, and Lucas's phone buzzed. "Satisfied?"

  "Keep it on," Del said. "I don't want to be kicking down the door of a high-stakes game by myself."

  Lucas walked through the tunnel to the government center and took an elevator up to the county attorney's office. Randall Towson was in conference. Lucas got him out, into a hallway.

  "What's going on?" Towson asked. He was holding a printout of what looked like a financial spreadsheet.

  "Have you talked to Al-Balah's attorney about Del bumping into Trick Bentoin?"

  "Not yet, but I can't put it off much longer," Towson said.

  "Could you call him now?" Lucas asked. "And tell him that we've lost Trick, and can't do anything yet, but we're looking. And that we might want to talk to Al-Balah tomorrow."

  "Makes us look retarded," Towson said. "He'll be calling the papers two minutes after he hangs up."

  "We really need to talk to Al-Balah," Lucas said. "It's the Maison case."

  He gave Towson a quick explanation, and Towson said finally, "All right. I gotta call him anyway. I'll do it right now. You sure you'll find Bentoin?"

  "No. But Del's heard that it's a big game, and that normally would be a magnet for the guy. Even if he's not there, somebody else at the game might know where he is."

  "How's Marcy?"

  "I'm going over there now. She was still on the table, the last I heard."

  "Listen, she's gonna make it," Towson said. He knew that Lucas and Marcy had had a relationship. "She's in good shape, and once they g
et her on the table…"

  "Yeah, well. I hope."

  "She's gonna make it, man."

  At the hospital, Lucas nodded at a couple of loitering cops and headed straight for the desk. A nurse saw him coming, shook her head, and said, "She's still not out, but Dr. Gunderson came out for a Coke and said they've got almost everything hooked up again. It shouldn't be much longer."

  "She's doing okay?"

  The nurse equivocated. "She's doing as good as she could. I understand…" She looked both ways, as though worried she might be caught giving out unauthorized information.

  "Yeah, yeah?"

  "I understand that the bullet hit her just below her breast and a couple of inches off the centerline, so there's a lung problem and they've got a problem with bone splinters from her ribs, but there's no spinal involvement. I think if they've got the bleeding under control and if she's strong enough, she should make it. That's what I think, but I'm not in there."

  "Bless you," Lucas said. "She's pretty strong."

  He headed down to the room that Rose Marie had commandeered, and found her talking with Frank Lester.

  "Anything new?" Lester asked.

  "Maybe the edge of something," Lucas said. "How about you? And where's Jael?"

  "You talk first."

  Lucas gave them a quick account of the raid on Bee's house, Bee's suggestion that Al-Balah might come up with the name, and Del's search for Trick Bentoin. Rose Marie took it all in and said, finally, "You're still about three levels away from the killer."

  "Or maybe four or five," Lucas said. "Where's Jael?"

  "We had Franklin take her back to her place to get some clothes. We're gonna ditch her someplace safe, maybe over in Hudson, keep her covered. She wants to talk to you again. I think she blames herself for what happened to Marcy."