Prey 7 - Mind Prey

by John Sandford

  "He doesn't feel right to me, anymore," Lucas said. "He'd have to be a great liar, a great actor."

  "In other words, a sociopath," Weather said.

  "Glad you said that," Lucas said.

  "A lot of very successful businessmen are—at least, that's what I've heard anecdotally. Like surgeons…"

  "Nancy Wolfe once called him a sociopath," Lucas said.

  "… and if he were facing a divorce that would cut his business in half… How much did you say he was worth?" Weather asked.

  "If he wasn't lying, could be anything up to thirty million."

  "So Andi Manette's death could be worth fifteen million dollars to him," Weather said. "I'll tell you something. Rich people get very attached to their money. It's like one of their organs, or more than that. If you asked most people who have two million dollars whether they'd rather lose one million, or lose a foot, I think most of them would rather lose the foot."

  "But that only holds if Andi Manette really wants a divorce," Lucas said. "Dunn says he was trying to put it back together."

  "What else would he say? That he hates her and he's glad they were kidnapped?"

  "Yeah." The problem wasn't a lack of motive. The problem was picking one.

  "Don't forget the last possibility," Weather said. "Tower. Her father."

  "You've got a sick mind, Karkinnen."

  "It wouldn't be the first time that a father went after his daughter. If he's desperate…"

  Lucas lay flat on his back, his fingers laced across his stomach, and he said, "When I had my little bout of depression, whenever that was, one of the worst things was lying awake at night with everything running through my head, in circles, and not being able to stop it. This isn't quite the same, but it's related. Jesus. I keep going around and around: Dunn, Wolfe, the Manettes; Dunn, Wolfe, the Manettes. The answer is there."

  Weather patted his leg. "You'll figure it out."

  "Something else is bothering me. I saw something in Gloria Crosby's apartment, but I can't remember what it was. But it's important."

  She pushed herself up: "You forgot?"

  "Not exactly forgot. It was there, but it's like I never really recognized it. It's like when you see a face in the street, and an hour later you realize it was an old classmate. Like that. I saw something…"

  "Sleep on it," she said. "Maybe your subconscious will kick it out."

  After a while in the dark, after Weather had rolled back to her own pillow, he said, "You know, those two Bible verses have me whipped, too. Must be Stillwater. That would be too much of a coincidence—or a trick, or something—not to be right. But what's he talking about?"

  And Weather said something that sounded like "ZZZzzttug."

  When he woke, before he opened his eyes, he thought of the Bible verses. Maybe the not was the key. Be ye not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no understanding whose mouth must be held in with bit and bridle, lest they come near unto thee. But even if the not was the key word, he thought wryly, ye had no understanding. And who was coming near unto whom?

  He thought about it through shaving, through the shower, and came up with nothing brilliant, and began dressing. The day was gorgeous: sunlight slanted in through the wooden blinds in the living room, and the whole feel was that of a perfect fall day. As he put on a shirt and tie, he watched the Openers morning show. The weatherman said that the low pressure system responsible for all the rain had rambled off to the east and was presently peeing on Ohio; additional micturatory activity could be expected in New York by evening, if you were going there. The weatherman said neither peeing nor micturatory, but should have, Lucas thought. He found himself whistling, stopped to wonder why, and decided a nice day was a nice day. The kidnapping wasn't the day's fault, but he stopped whistling.

  "So we're stuck?" Roux asked. She lit a cigarette, forgetting the one already burning in an ashtray behind her. Her office stank of nicotine, and would need new curtains every year. "All we can do is grind along?"

  "I had those Bible verses sent out to Stillwater," Lucas said. "Maybe the local cops will figure something out."

  "And maybe the fairy godmother will kiss me on the sweet patootie," Lester said.

  "Nasty thought," Roux said. "Nasty."

  "I think we ought to start pushing the big four: the Manettes, Dunn, Wolfe. Start taking them apart. Somebody is talking."

  Roux shook her head. "I haven't entirely bought that. We've got the wiretaps going, but I don't think I'm ready for a full-scale assault."

  "Who's listening to the wires?" Lucas asked.

  Lester made a sound like he was clearing his throat.

  "What?"

  "Larry Carter, from uniform, then tonight, uh, Bob. Greave."

  "Ah, shit," Lucas groaned.

  "He can do that," Lester said defensively. "He's not stupid, he's just…" He groped for a phrase.

  "Investigatively challenged," Roux suggested.

  "That's it," Lester said.

  Lucas stood up, "I've gotten everything I can out of the raw paper on Dunn, Wolfe, and the Manettes, and I want to look at all the stuff from the hospitals and the possible candidates from Andi Manette's files," he said. "That's where it'll break—unless we get a piece of luck."

  "Good luck; there's a lot of it," Lester said. "And you better pick up a new copy of Anderson's book. There's more new stuff in there. We got lists coming out the wazoo."

  Lucas spent the day like a medieval monk, bent over the paper. Anything useful, he xeroxed and stuck in a smaller file. By the end of the day, he had fifty pieces of paper for additional review, plus a foot-tall stack of files to take home. He left at six, enjoying the lingering daylight, regretting the great day missed, and gone forever. This would have been a day to go up north with Weather, to learn a little more about sailing from her. They were talking about buying an S2 and racing it. Maybe next year…

  They spent a quiet evening: a quick mile run, a small, easy dinner with a lot of carrots. Afterwards, Lucas dipped into the homework files, while Weather read a Larry Rivers autobiography called What Did I Do? Occasionally she'd read him a paragraph, and they'd laugh or groan together. As she sat in the red chair, with the yellow light illuminating half of her face, he thought she looked like a painting he'd seen in New York. Vermeer, that was it. Or Van Gogh—but Van Gogh was the crazy guy, so it must have been Vermeer. Anyway, he remembered the light in the painting.

  And she looked like that, he thought, in the light.

  "Gotta go to bed," she said, regretfully, a little after nine o'clock. "Gotta be up at five-thirty. We oughta do this more often."

  "What?"

  "Nothing, together."

  When she'd gone, Lucas started through the stack of files again; came to the one marked JOHN MAIL; after the name, somebody had scrawled [deceased.]

  This one had looked good, Lucas thought. He opened it and started reading.

  The phone rang and he picked it up.

  "Yeah?"

  Greave: "Lucas, I'm peeing my pants. The asshole is talking to Dunn."

  CHAPTER 21

  « ^ »

  Greave met Lucas at the elevator doors. He was in shirtsleeves, his tie hanging around his shoulders, his hair sticking up in clumps. "Christ, lit me up like a fuckin' Christmas tree," he said. "I couldn't believe what I was hearing."

  He led Lucas down a bare but brightly lit hallway toward an open office door, their heels echoing on the tile floor.

  "You call the feebs?" Lucas asked.

  "No. Should I?"

  "Not yet." The office was furnished with a cafeteria-style folding table, three office chairs, and a television. A group of beige push-button telephones and a tape recorder sat on the table with a plate of donut crumbs; the TV was on but the sound was off, Jane Fonda hustling a treadmill. A pile of magazines sat on the floor beside the table.

  "Got it cued up," Greave said. He pushed a button on the recorder, and the tape began to roll with the sound of a phone ringing, then being
picked up.

  "George Dunn,"

  "George?" Mail's voice was cheerful, insouciant. "I'm calling for your wife, Andi."

  "What? What'd you say?" Dunn seemed stunned.

  "I'm calling for your wife. Is this call being monitored? And you better tell the truth, for Andi's sake."

  "No, for christ sakes. I'm in the car. Who is this?"

  "An old friend of Andi's… Now listen; I want a hundred thousand for the package. For the three of them."

  "How do I know this isn't a con?" Dunn asked.

  "I'm gonna play a recording." There was some apparent fumbling, then Andi Manette's voice, tinny, recorded: "George, this is Andi. Do what this man tells you. Um, he said to tell you what we talked about the last time we talked… You called me from the club and you wanted to come over, but I said that the kids were already in bed and I wasn't ready to…"

  The recording ended in mid-sentence and Mail said, "She gets a little sloppy after that, George. You wouldn't want to hear it. Anyway, you got any more questions about whether this is real?"

  Dunn's voice sounded like a rock. "No."

  "So. I don't want you to go to the bank and get a bunch of money with the numbers recorded and dusted with UV -powder and all that FBI shit. If you do it, I'll know, and I'll kill them all."

  "I gotta get the money."

  "George, you've got almost sixty thousand in case money, mostly kruggerrands, that nobody knows about, in a safety deposit box in Prescott, Wisconsin. Okay? You've got a Rolex worth $8,000 that you never wear anyway. Andi has $25,000 in diamond jewelry and a ruby from her mother, all in your joint safety deposit box at First Bank. And you've got several thousand dollars in cash hidden in the two houses… get that."

  "You sonofabitch."

  "Hey. Let's try to keep this businesslike, okay?" Mail's voice was wry, but not quite taunting.

  "How do I get it to you? I've got cops staying with me, waiting for you to call."

  "Take I-94 east all the way to the St. Croix, get off on Highway 95, get back on going west, and pull off at the Minnesota Welcome station. You know where that is?"

  "Yeah."

  "There's a phone by the Coke machine. Get on it just before seven o'clock, but keep your finger on the hook. I'll call right at seven o'clock. If it's busy, I'll try again at five after seven. If it's still busy, I'll try at ten after, but that's it: after that, I'm gone. Don't even think about telling the cops. I'll be driving around, and they can't track me when I'm moving. They've been trying. When I get you on the phone, I'll give you some instructions."

  "Okay."

  "If I see any cops, I'm gone."

  The phone went dead.

  "That's it," Greave said.

  "Jesus." Lucas walked in a quick circle, stopped to look out the window at the lights of the city, then said, "We talk to Lester and the chief. Nobody else. Nobody. We've got to get a team going."

  Roux brought the FBI in. Lucas argued against it, but she insisted: "For christ sakes, Lucas, this is the thing they do. This is their big specialty. We can't leave them out—if we do, and if we blow it, it'll be all our asses. And it should be."

  "We can handle it."

  "I'm sure we can, if it's real. But if it's anything else, we'd be in deep shit, my friend. No, they've got to come in."

  Lucas looked at Lester, who nodded, agreeing with Roux.

  "So. I'll call them, and you two can brief them. We'll want representatives on the team that tracks Dunn. You, Lucas, somebody else."

  "Sloan or Capslock."

  "Whichever, or both," Roux said. She turned away from them, flicked her lighter, and touched off another cigarette. "Christ, I hope this is the end of it."

  Lucas, up all night, arguing with Roux or briefing the feebs, stopped home at five-thirty and ate breakfast with Weather.

  "Do you think it's real?" she asked. She was running a seminar for post-docs that morning, and was dressed in a pale linen suit with a silk scarf.

  "It sure sounded good," Lucas said. "Dunn was absolutely spontaneous. We didn't have that phone monitored until yesterday, and , we didn't tell him about it… so, yeah, I believe the call. I don't think this asshole is gonna hand over his wife and kids, though."

  "Then the call was good for one thins," Weather said.

  Lucas nodded. "If it's real, it eliminates Dunn from the list."

  "Unless…" Weather said.

  "What?"

  "Unless he's talking to somebody in his office, and that person is passing the word along."

  Lucas waved her off. "That's too complicated to think about. Possible, but we'd never get to them."

  They heard the Pioneer-Press paper-delivery car slow outside the house, and the paper hit the walk. Lucas ran out to get it, and as he did, the Star-Tribune car came by, and he got that, too. Both papers had photos of Crosby above the fold.

  "For all the good it does us," Lucas said, scanning the stories. "He's got her."

  "Aren't you planning to talk to the papers today?"

  Lucas slapped his forehead. "Yes. Damnit. Noon."

  "Get some sleep," she said.

  "Yeah." He glanced at his watch. Almost six. "A few hours, anyway."

  Weather took her coffee cup and the plate on which she'd had her toast, carried them to the sink, then laughed as she walked back to the table and ruffled his hair.

  "What?" he asked.

  "You look like you're fifteen and going on your first date. You always do when you get something going. And the more awful it is, and the more tired you get, the happier you look. This whole thing is terrible: and you're getting high on it."

  "It's interesting," Lucas admitted. "This kid we're talking to, he's an interesting kid." He looked out the window, where the neighbor from across the street was walking his elderly cocker spaniel, and the day was beginning as quietly as a mouse. "I mean, you know, for a nightmare."

  Reporters from five television stations and both major papers showed up at the company headquarters at noon. Lucas talked for five minutes about police tactical simulation software and gaming programs, then passed the reporters to Ice.

  Ice said, with the camera rolling, "We're gonna show you how we're gonna catch this sucker and nail his butt to the wall."

  Lucas saw the quick smiles from the cameramen and the reporters: he had a hit on his hands. Barry Hunt caught his eye and they nodded at each other.

  "The first thing is, we know what he looks like."

  Ice ran the art program that manipulated the facial characteristics of the composite drawing of the suspect, adding and deleting hair, mustaches, beards, glasses, and collar styles. The other techies set up a camera to take pictures of the on-air reporters and manipulate their faces through the various styles. Then they put up a show that involved rotating three-dimensional maps of the Twin Cities, supposedly showing general locations of the kidnapper's hideout.

  "It's going fuckin' great, as long as nobody asks what it means and how it'll help catch the guy," Ice muttered to Lucas just before he left.

  Lucas looked back at the crowd of laughing reporters standing around the computer displays: "Don't worry about it," he said. "This is great video. Nobody'll be stupid enough to ask anything that'd spoil it."

  At three o'clock the Dunn task force met at the federal building, with Roux, Lucas, and Sloan representing the city. Roux and Sloan were just walking in when Lucas arrived, and Roux said, "Dunn's picking up the money. The feds are all over him."

  "Excellent," Lucas said.

  Dumbo and twenty FBI agents were packed in a conference room, with space left for the three city reps. Lucas sat down next to a girl who he thought must be an intern of some sort, though she hardly seemed old enough. Fifteen, he thought, or sixteen. She looked at him, a level, speculating glance that struck him as too old for her body and face. He felt uncomfortable with her sitting behind him as he faced Dumbo.

  Dumbo laid out the procedure: fourteen agents on the ground in seven cars, plus a chopper with a spotter in t
he air. "We've already marked his car with an infra-red flasher wired into the taillight. I understand that Minneapolis uses the same technique," Dumbo said, his ears flapping.

  "Something like it," Sloan said. "I like the taillight deal. That's a nice touch. We oughta talk."

  Dumbo looked pleased: "So. You guys want to ride in the chopper or go on the ground?"

  "I'm ground," Lucas said.

  "I'll go with Lucas," Sloan said. "We've got to coordinate on the radio codes."

  "Sure." Dumbo pointed at one of the FBI technical people.

  "Who's going into the rest stop?" Lucas asked. "It's gotta look good."

  "Marie," Dumbo said, and nodded at the woman behind Lucas. Lucas glanced back at her and she grinned. "We'll put her in a high school letter jacket and a pleated skirt, give her some bubble gum. She'll go in right behind Dunn and head for the phones. There are four of them in a pod. We're monitoring all four. If Dunn has to wait, so will she. If they don't, she'll get on one and start talking to her boyfriend. She'll be looking for anything and anybody."

  Roux, peering at the woman from across the table, said, "You're either precocious or older than you look."

  "I'm thirty-two," the woman said, in a sweet young soprano.

  "And Danny McGreff—" Dumbo nodded at a man with a large square face and two-day beard—"will get there a half-hour before Dunn is scheduled to, will get Dunn's phone and stay on it until he sees Dunn come in the door. Then he'll say good-bye, and drop it on the hook and leave. We don't think anyone should be waiting—there's never been a time when all four of them have been tied up, in the time we've been monitoring them."

  "So you'll have one agent in the place and at least one outside…"

  "We'll have three in the place," Dumbo said. "There's a storage room, lockable, and we'll put two men in there a couple of hours ahead of time. They simply won't come out, and there won't be any way to check inside without a key."

  As the meeting was breaking up, Dumbo said, "Let's try to keep the radio communications clean, huh? Washington has asked us to allow a cameraman to ride with us tonight, for a documentary being made, uh, anyway for a documentary. I've agreed."