Stolen Prey p-22

by John Sandford

  The scene was dead quiet, except for the moaning wind in the trees. The incoming clouds were so gray and low, the house so touched with a cool decorator chic, a tightness, a foreboding, that a Hollywood camera corkscrewing down the lane to the front door would have automatically hinted at horrors to be found behind the well-scrubbed window glass. A crazy housewife with poison, a husband with a meat cleaver in his hand, a couple of robotic kids with a long-barreled revolver and blank gray eyes…

  None of which would have done justice to the real horror behind the door.

  Lucas got to the house at a little after eleven o’clock in the morning, and walked back out on the front porch five minutes later, looking for a breath of fresh air and maybe a place to spit, to get the taste of death out of his mouth.

  He was a tall, hard, very rich man with broad shoulders and a hawkish nose, wearing a two-hundred-dollar white shirt and a dark blue Purple Label suit with a red Hermes necktie, the necktie twisted and pulled loose behind the knot. His face was tanned, and the thin white line of a scar dropped across one eyebrow onto his cheek; another white scar showed in the pit of his neck, where a young girl, barely into her teens, had shot him with a street pistol that he hadn’t seen coming.

  He rubbed his face with the fingers of his left hand, which protruded from a slightly dirty-looking cast. Del Capslock followed him out onto the porch. Del looked back over his shoulder and said, “I don’t think I’ve ever been to a crime scene this quiet.”

  “Whatta you gonna say?” Lucas asked. He sniffed at the cast. Nasty. He needed to wash it again.

  “You know what freaked me out?” Del asked. “It wasn’t the kids. It was the dogs. The dogs couldn’t tell us anything. They weren’t witnesses. They weren’t attack dogs. Two miniature poodles and a golden retriever? They killed them anyway. Hunted them down. They were killing everything, because they liked it.”

  “I don’t know. There’s a lot going on in there,” Lucas said. “Maybe they killed the dogs first, to extort information. Went around and shot them just to prove that they’d do it. Then the boy, then the wife and daughter, then the guy. They wanted something from the guy.”

  “We don’t know they did it that way,” Del said. Del was too thin-grizzled, some would say-unshaven, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and Nike cross-trainers. The T-shirt said Menard’s, which was a local building supply chain. His comment reflected an ingrained skepticism about any unsupported assertion: he wanted facts.

  “I feel like they did,” Lucas said. He was more comfortable with assumption and speculation than Del. He looked up and down the street, past the cluster of official cars and vans. He could see pieces of two houses, one in each direction. There were more along the way, but out of sight. “The thing is, they shot the dogs, that’s three shots. They shot the boy three or four times. That’s a lot of gunshots. Even in a neighborhood like this, with the doors closed and the air conditioners going, and boats … that’s a lot of shots. Makes me think they had silencers, makes me think they were pros, here for a reason. Then the guy, they go to work with a knife. They started out terrorizing him, ended up torturing him.”

  “Drugs?”

  “Gotta be. Gotta be, here in the Twin Cities. Too calculated for anything else. Shaffer says the guy ran a software place that peddles Spanish-language software down in Mexico. It looks custom-made as a money laundry,” Lucas said. He looked back into the house, though he couldn’t see anything from the porch.

  Del said, “Here’s something.”

  Lucas turned back to see a lone patrolman jogging back down the street. He was overweight, and his stomach jiggled as he ran. The patrolman cut across the lawn.

  “The neighbors,” he said to Lucas. He was red-faced and seemed to run out of words, tried to catch his breath.

  “Yeah?”

  “The neighbors, the Merriams, they’re three houses down.” The cop pointed down the street. “The husband, Dave, saw a van parked in the driveway yesterday afternoon. He saw it three times, coming home, going out, and coming back from town. There for a couple hours, at least. He says it was a blue van, a Chevy, and he says the first three letters of the plate were S-K-Y. He thinks it stuck with him because of sky-blue. Sky on the plate and blue on the van.”

  Lucas nodded. “Okay, that’s good stuff.” He turned and yelled back into the house, “Shaffer? Shaffer?” He said to the cop, “Go tell that to Shaffer. We need to run that right now.”

  The cop went inside and Del asked, “What are we going to do?”

  Lucas shrugged: “Call everybody. Look for blue vans. Push the DNA on the wife and daughter … I wouldn’t bet on semen. If they were professionals, they were probably wearing rubbers. We might pick up some blood or something, maybe one of them scratched or bit somebody.”

  Del nodded. “You look around the house, around the neighborhood, and it’s screaming rich. Could have been a couple of crazy dopers thinking they kept a lot of money in the house.”

  Lucas said, “Nah.”

  Del scratched an ear and then said, “All right.”

  “They were looking for something,” Lucas said. “It looks like drugs. It looks like that stuff in Mexico. So harsh. So cruel.”

  “Maybe they’ll pop right up in the DNA bank,” Del said.

  “Fat chance.”

  “Yeah.” Del looked up in the sky. “It’s gonna rain.”

  “We need it,” Lucas said. “Been hot for a long time. First cool day in a while.”

  “Fall’s coming,” Del said.

  They went back inside, where an agent named Bob Shaffer was talking to the patrolman. When he saw Lucas, he said, “Maybe a break.”

  Lucas nodded, once. “Anything more?”

  “Romeo’s worked out a sequence. I think it’s probably right.”

  Romeo was a lab tech, a short man with a swarthy complexion, a fleshy nose, and a neat little soul patch that actually looked good. Lucas and Del found him in the living room, looking at the dead adult male, a notebook in his hand. He might have been taking inventory in a dime store. But the living room didn’t smell like a dime store; it smelled like the back room at a meat locker.

  The dead man, who was almost certainly named Patrick Brooks, forty-five, blond, once good-looking with big white Chiclet teeth, lay on his back, on the living room carpet, in a drying circle of blood. His arms, down to his elbows, were taped to his sides with ordinary duct tape. There were no fingers on his hands: they’d been cut off, one knuckle-length at a time, and lay around the room like so many cocktail wieners. He had no eyes-they were over by the television. His pants had been pulled down to his knees; he’d been castrated. They’d cut off his ears, but left his tongue, probably so he could talk. He had apparently died while the killers were cutting open his abdomen, because they hadn’t finished the job.

  “Shaffer said you have a sequence,” Lucas said.

  “I think so,” Romeo said. He ticked his yellow pencil at the dead man. “He went last. I think they came in with guns, to keep everybody under control. Rounded them up, taped them up, put them on the floor. They started out shooting the dogs. The golden got it right here, the poodles ran into the kitchen. Shot them there. Did the wife next: Candace. Raped her, beat her, whatever, then cut her throat. Then the kid, uh, Jackson, started screaming or struggling or something, and they shot him: some of the blood splatter and brain tissue from the head shot landed on his mother’s leg, which was already naked, and didn’t move after the blood landed on it.”

  “So she was dead first,” Del said.

  “Right. Then they did the daughter, Amelia. She’s pretty messed up, so I’m thinking … they did a lot of stuff to her. The ME’ll have to give you that. Then they cut her throat. She bled out, and you can see, there are a couple finger joints on her blood. It looks like they rolled across her blood and picked some of it up.”

  “Unless it’s his blood,” Del said.

  “No, it looks like they rolled across wet blood. I think it’ll turn out to
be hers.”

  “Like we were talking about,” Lucas said to Del. “They wanted something from him, or they were sending a message.”

  “Did they bring the knives, or use the kitchen knives?” Del asked.

  “Brought them. The knife block is full. Looks like razors, or scalpels, and for some of it, it was probably pliers, side cutters. You get that kind of crushing cut with side cutters. They knew what they were going to do,” Romeo said.

  “Then they wrote on the wall,” Lucas said. They all turned and looked at the wall, where a bloody message said: “Were coming.” No apostrophe.

  “Yeah … they took a couple of the finger joints and used them like markers. The joints are the ones on the couch. They’ve got wall paint on them, like chalk. We’re hoping we might get some DNA, but I’ll bet you anything that they were wearing gloves.”

  “Didn’t gag them-had the tape, but didn’t tape their mouths,” Del said.

  “I think they wanted them to talk back and forth. I think they wanted them to hear each other dying,” Lucas said.

  “That would be the gloomy interpretation,” Romeo said.

  “You got another one?” Lucas asked.

  “No, I don’t,” Romeo said. “You’re probably right. One thing: we’ve got precision, rather than frenzy. Del was talking before, about maybe some crazy guys. I don’t think so. I think it was cold. It feels that way to me. Three or four guys.”

  Lucas looked at the bodies, at the mess. “What about DNA? Any chance?”

  “Oh, yeah. We’ll get some DNA,” Romeo said. “We’ll get sweat or skin cells off the woman’s or the girl’s thighs, if no place else.”

  Del said, “If they’re professionals, they’ll know that sooner or later they’ll do time, and if they pop up in a DNA bank, they’ll go down for this. So I’m thinking, they’re not too worried about DNA banks.”

  “Because they’re stupid?” Romeo suggested.

  “No,” Del said, surveying the shambles. “It’d be because they’re not from here. They’re from someplace else. Mexico, Central America. Could be Russia.”

  “Good thought,” Lucas said.

  Shaffer called from the next room: “Hey, Lucas, Rose Marie’s here.”

  “Got it,” Lucas said.

  Rose Marie Roux, the commissioner of public safety, once state senator, once Minneapolis chief of police, once-for a short time-a street cop, was coming up the sidewalk. She was a stocky woman in a blue dress who looked a lot like somebody’s beloved silver-haired mother, except for the cigarette that dangled from her lower lip. She was a quick study, and a longtime winner in the backroom battles at the Capitol.

  She shook her head at Lucas: “I’m not going in there. I don’t want to see it,” she said. “I do need something to tell the media.”

  “They’re all four dead,” Lucas said. “Patrick Brooks, his wife, son, and daughter. Tortured, the females raped. I wouldn’t give them any detail-just, brutally murdered.”

  “Is there anything … promising?” Roux asked.

  “No, not that I’ve seen,” Lucas said. “It looks professional. Brutal, impersonal. Meant to send a message. We might never find them, truth to tell.”

  “I don’t want to tell three million people that we’re not going to catch them,” Roux said.

  “So, say that we’re looking at some leads, that we have some definite areas of interest that we can’t talk about, and that we’ll be doing DNA analysis,” Lucas said.

  “Do we actually have any possibilities? Or am I tap-dancing?”

  “One,” Lucas said. “They wrote on the wall, ‘Were coming,’ no apostrophe in the were. But that suggests … suggests … that they may be looking for somebody else. The way they did this, looks like there may have been an interrogation. Like they were questioning Brooks, trying to get something out of him, and he didn’t have it.”

  She mulled that over for a few seconds, then said, “Excuse me, but did you just tell me that they might do this again? To somebody else?”

  “Can’t rule it out,” Lucas said.

  “That’s bad. That’s really bad,” she said.

  “Gives us another shot at them,” Lucas said, looking on the bright side.

  “Ah, jeez … Who’s got the detail?”

  “Shaffer.”

  “Okay.” She mulled that over for a minute, then said, “He’s competent. But keep talking to him. Keep talking to him, Lucas.”

  “What are you doing out here?” Lucas asked. “Is there some kind of … involvement?” He meant political involvement.

  “Yeah, some marginal engagement,” she said. “Candace Brooks was going to run for something, sooner or later. Probably the state senate, next year, if Hoffman retires. The Brookses maxed out contributions for the major offices last few elections, and they’re strong out here in the local party … but, it’s not any big political thing.”

  “So it won’t make any difference if we find out that they were running a drug-money laundry, and giving cash to the local Democrats?”

  She shrugged, a political sophisticate: “It’d hurt for about four minutes. Then, not. But, you know, they were our people.” She meant Democrats.

  Del asked, “So what are you going to tell the media?”

  She looked him up and down, raised her eyebrows, and said, “Jesus, Del, you look like you just fell out of a boxcar.”

  “Professional dress,” Del said. “Around home, I wear Ralph Lauren chinos and Tiger Woods golf shirts.”

  She made a rude noise and turned to look down toward the end of the street, where the media was stacked up, out of sight. “I’ll tell them the truth, just not all of it-four brutal murders, motive unknown. That we’ve got lots of leads and expect to make an arrest fairly quickly.”

  “That’d scare the shit out of me, that promise, if anybody had an attention span longer than two seconds,” Lucas said.

  “That’s what we’re working with,” Roux said. “Though I have to say as the state’s chief law enforcement official, I do expect you to catch them.” She poked Lucas in the chest. “You.”

  Lucas walked halfway down the block and watched from a distance as Rose Marie spoke to the media. She gave them the basics, and nothing more. She stood in a neighbor’s lush green yard, a mansion in the background, with the media in the street. She used the word brutal, and refused to enlarge upon that.

  That was accurate but, in the eyes of the reporters, inadequate.

  One of them knew a cop who was working the roadblock, and Channel Eleven headlined his comments: rape, torture, murder. Finger joints, eyeballs, castration, throats cut with razors. The message on the wall. “We’re coming”-the producer supplied the missing apostrophe on the phonied-up blue-screened graphic behind the anchorwoman.

  The Channel Eleven report set off a media firestorm, which intensified when another station “confirmed rumors from earlier today….”

  The media was large in the Twin Cities. A juicy murder would go viral in seconds.

  Rumors of the massacre at the Brookses’ house swept through Sunnie Software minutes after the bodies were discovered. Patrick Brooks had been scheduled to meet with marketing and development and hadn’t shown up. Neither he nor anyone else answered the home phone, and his cell phone rang and was never picked up.

  The vice president for sales, named Bell, had had a bad feeling about it. A lawyer friend of Bell’s lived near the Brooks home, and Bell had asked the lawyer to call his wife, who ran over and found the front door cracked open.

  Nobody answered her call, so she’d pushed the door open with a fingernail and peeked inside….

  Started screaming.

  As she ran back down the street, she called 911, and then her husband, who called back to Sunnie with a garbled story of blood and murder.

  The cops came, and then the BCA.

  Then the media, ambushing employees in the street.

  “This is really fucked,” said one of the account managers, a young man with hair to
the middle of his back. “Who are they going to suspect, huh? The guy with the hair…”

  “Rob, stop thinking about yourself,” one of the women said. “They’re all dead.”

  “But who are they gonna think did it?” Rob cried.

  Several of them told him to shut up, and guiltily gave thanks for their neatly coiffed hair.

  The murder story caught Ivan Turicek and Kristina Sanderson at work in the systems security area at Hennepin National Bank. Sanderson was getting ready to go home: she worked the six-to-two shift, while Turicek came in at noon and took it until eight. They were alone, with a bank of computers. Turicek had seen a fragment of a story on a television in the Skyway, and now had one of the computers set to catch the Web broadcast from Channel Eleven.

  Channel Eleven was the one with the source: rape, torture, murder, eyeballs, castration … “We’re coming” with an apostrophe.

  “Oh my God, what have we done?” Sanderson blurted, staring at the screen. A thin schizophrenic with blond, frizzy hair and a fine white smile, when she used it, she was pale as a sheet of printer paper, one hand to her mouth.

  Turicek shook his head: “Not us.”

  “Ivan, I don’t want to be bullshitted,” Sanderson said, as she looked down at the flat panel. “This was us and you know it.”

  They were alone in the security area, but cameras peered down at them from the end of the work bay. They supposedly didn’t record sound, but Turicek was an immigrant from Russia, and never believed anything anybody said about limits of surveillance. In his experience, somebody was always listening.

  He said, “Shh.” Then, after a moment, “We need to call Jacob. Or you should go see him. He’s probably still asleep, doesn’t know about this.”