John Sanford - Prey 12 - Chosen Prey.txt

by Chosen Prey(lit)

  “Yeah . . .”

  “Tell you what’s worse: If you have the kid, and the kid dies. That’s worse.”

  “I guess.” She sighed. “Fuckin’ moose, huh?”

  MARCY HAD PHOTOS of Aronson’s jewelry when Lucas arrived at the office in the morning, as well as insurance photograph of Neumann’s diamond and emerald rings.

  “Aronson’s parents came in this morning,” she said. “They decided they didn’t want to take a chance on the mail, so they drove down last night, stayed in a motel, and brought them in first thing.”

  Lucas looked at the photos. Both the necklace and the ring had been shot against a black background, and had been enlarged to show detail. “Better than I hoped,” he said. “Get the property guys to run these around town. Paper the place.”

  “That’s sorta under way,” Marcy said. “We got some copies made, and Del’s taking them around to people he knows, and he knows most of them. . . . Property’s already doing some more.”

  “Okay. . . . Do you know if the state’s still working the hill?”

  “They are—McGrady called. They’ve got an ID on another one of the dead women. Ellice Hampton, from Clear Lake, Iowa. She disappeared four years ago, twenty-eight. She was unemployed and living with her parents when she disappeared. She’d been working with an insurance company in Des Moines, in the advertising and publicity department. She did advertising layouts for print media and was active in community theater. She’d been looking for work in both Des Moines and Minneapolis. Blond, good-looking, small, and busty. Divorced—ex-husband was a cop in Mason City, and he’s in the clear.”

  “Another artsy type.”

  “That’s the impression I get. I called down Clear Lake, but they’ve got nothing at all on the case—she vanished, and her parents didn’t even know where she’d been planning to go that day, if she’d been planning to go anywhere. When they got home from their jobs, she wasn’t there, though her car was. She just never came back.”

  “Is there any point in doing a list?”

  “From what the Clear Lake cop said, her parents really didn’t know too much about her friends either in Des Moines or up here. They don’t even know if she had any friends up here.”

  “Goddamnit.”

  “He’s careful about that. He cuts the woman out of her usual crowd, moves in, must feed them some kind of bullshit to keep them from talking, and then kills them.”

  “Maybe tells them he’s married or something,” Lucas said.

  “Still, you’d think . . .”

  “Yeah. Somebody would know.”

  They thought about that for a minute, then Marcy said, “So anyway, that’s three people we’ve ID’d from the graveyard, five to go.”

  WITH NOTHING SPECIFIC to work on, Lucas had to decide whether to drive down the graveyard—where he wouldn’t have much to do—or review paper. The idea of reviewing paper bored him, and after a visit to Homicide to talk to Black, he noticed a shaft of sunlight out on the street.

  “Sun’s out,” he said to Black as he left.

  “Today only,” Black said. “More rain or snow coming for the weekend.”

  The sunlight made the decision for him. He was out of downtown ahead of the rush, running through the sun-dappled countryside. The countryside still had the cold colors of winter, but when he cracked the windows, he could smell spring on the way. Still a little snow in the north shadows, along the shaded sides of the fence lines and the glacial hills, but the water was moving in the drainage ditches, and farmers had their tractors out of the machine sheds and the sun felt yellower and warmer than in the weeks just past.

  On the grave-site hill, everything changed. The hill faced away from the afternoon sun, and under the oak trees, there was a river of mud, and men grubbing for bones. The hill, he thought, looked like an old browned photograph of a World War I trench site during a cease-fire, except for the brilliant blue slashes of a dozen plastic tarps.

  McGrady had gotten some rest. He was sitting on a camp chair, reading a copy of Maxim, when Lucas climbed up to the command tent. “I always liked pictures of sexy women,” he said, almost absently. “Like the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. But somehow, after all the liberation bullshit, we finally got around to the point where women have stopped being objects and have become products. Have you ever looked at this rag?”

  “No.” But he was amused.

  McGrady flipped it over his shoulder onto the ground. “I’m just getting old, I guess. Couple of the younger guys were looking at it, thought it’s great.”

  “Still eight bodies,” Lucas said. He didn’t care about Maxim, had never heard of it.

  “Yeah, still eight. I think that’s all it’s going to be unless we find a whole new graveyard somewhere. We think one of them might be a girl from Lino Lakes, but we can’t track down any dental records. I don’t know what the hang-up is.”

  “Marcy said something about the parents moving a couple of times, and they’re still trying to track them down. From what I saw of the records, I’m not sure how good a fit she is.”

  “Blond, busty, and missing.”

  “But some of her friends think she was about to run away to California; and she wasn’t interested in art.”

  “If we find the parents, we could do some DNA and skip the dentals,” McGrady said. He yawned, and then said, “Another day out here, I think. If we don’t find anything new.”

  “You still got TV. . . .”

  “Yup. But they’re getting bored, I think. No new bodies.” They both looked down the hill at the television vans. The crews were sitting along the edge of the road on blue tarps; two of the cameramen were playing chess and one of the reporters was sprawled out on his back, talking on a cell phone.

  Lucas looked up the hill and saw Marshall sitting at the top, looking down. “But you still got Marshall.”

  “The guy spooks the hell out of me,” McGrady said. “Good guy, but a little intense.”

  They talked for a few more minutes, then Lucas walked up the hill to where Marshall was sitting on a garbage bag. “How’s it going?”

  Marshall was smoking a Marlboro. He grinned and blew smoke and nodded. “Getting a handle on it,” he said. “I got a little overworked there for a while. How’s it going on your end?”

  He sounded so mellow that Lucas couldn’t help smiling back. “We’re making some progress. We reviewed the cases we know about, and decided that our guy is stealing everything he can from the women he kills—everything small and worthwhile, anyway. Jewelry, cash, maybe small cameras. We’ve got photos of stuff that was taken from Aronson—and maybe another woman—and we’re gonna run them around to every fence in town.”

  Marshall bobbed his head and then said, “I’m starting to worry about what happens when we identify him.”

  “That could be a while, yet,” Lucas said.

  “I know the kind of work you guys do—that you do—and I think that sooner or later, you’re gonna figure him out. Am I right?”

  Lucas shrugged. “I believe we will. We always have a few who slip past us, but once we get any kind of a handle on this guy, I think we’ll be able to pin him with those drawings. Once we get a name, we can start connecting some dots, and we’ve got a lot of dots to start with.”

  “But what you’ll get will be circumstantial: maybe really solid, but maybe not. He could beat it.”

  “That’s always a risk.”

  Marshall blew more smoke, and his jaw worked. After a minute he said, “That would be . . . tragic.”

  “At this point, I don’t think it’ll happen,” Lucas said.

  “So tell me what you’ve got. I’ve been down here all the time. I keep meaning to come up to see you, but I can’t get myself away from . . .” He looked down the hill, and his jaw worked again. “. . . all the holes.”

  Lucas ran the case past him, everything that they had learned. Marshall’s eyebrows went up when he heard about the photo of Laura Winton at St. Pat’s, and about the
death of Neumann.

  “You think they’re all connected?”

  “The Neumann thing . . . that’s just not right. We know he was at St. Pat’s, we know the art teacher died after the drawings were put on TV, we know that Aronson was missing jewelry, and so was Neumann. That’s what we think. The St. Paul cops haven’t gone public with it, but I think Neumann was killed as a kind of . . . cleanup. She figured something out.”

  “A cleanup,” Marshall said. He pitched his cigarette down the hill. “The fucker ought to be skinned alive.”

  Lucas’s cell phone rang a moment later, and he fumbled it out of his pocket. “Yeah?”

  “This is Del. Where are you?”

  “Talking with Marshall, down at the graveyard. What’s going on?”

  “We gotta break,” Del said. “Get your ass back up here.”

  “What happened?”

  Del explained quickly, and Lucas said, “I’m on my way,” hung up, and to Marshall: “Gotta run.”

  “Something?”

  Lucas was already headed down the hill, and he called back, “Maybe.”

  Marshall said, “I’m coming,” and they both scrambled down the wet hill and hopped the ditch, Lucas hurrying to his car, Marshall jogging heavily to his, swinging then through U-turns and accelerating away to the north.

  13

  LUCAS WAS PORSCHE-TRAINED, and showed it, even in the hippo-like Tahoe; he could see Marshall laboring to keep up as the Dunn County deputy tracked him across Dakota County toward the Cities. Once he was on the highway, he put the truck on cruise control to remind himself to slow down. Marshall got on his taillights and stayed there. Lucas led him into a parking garage downtown, called Del while the other cop parked, and after Marshall had climbed into the Tahoe, continued out. Del was waiting on the corner at City Hall.

  “Tell Terry what you told me,” Lucas said, as Del climbed in the back.

  “I was running a picture of Neumann’s and Aronson’s jewelry around town,” Del told Marshall. “There’s a guy Lucas and I both know, Bob Brown’s his name, he deals in estate jewelry. Tries to keep it as legit as he can. I showed him the pictures, and as he soon as he saw the Aronson ring and the pearl necklace, he recognized them. They came in six months ago. He’d sold the necklace, but the ring was still there, and it’s got the ‘Love Forever.’ I gave him a receipt; it’s back at the office.”

  Lucas said to Marshall, “The ring had ‘Love Forever’ engraved inside.”

  “So there’s no question, then,” Marshall said. “Where’d he get them?”

  “Off a bartender named Frank Stans at the Bolo Lounge, a nudie bar out on Highway 55—that’s just west of here, fifteen minutes,” Del said. “Stans told him he bought the stuff across the bar from a guy who said he inherited it.”

  “What are the chances that Stans . . . ?”

  “Stans is a black guy, and he’s dealt with Bob on other stuff. So it’s unlikely,” Del said.

  “And we know where he’s at? This Stans guy?” Marshall said.

  Del looked at his watch. “His shift started about ten minutes ago.”

  Marshall cracked a grin and said, “The big city.”

  “What?” Del asked over the seat back.

  “Over in Wisconsin, the nudie bars don’t get going until after dinner.”

  “I got a cabin in Wisconsin, up north,” Lucas said. “I was going deer hunting a couple of years ago, and when I got up there, Friday night, late, it was snowing. So I’m in my cabin, checking everything out, and find out I’d picked up a box of varmint rounds for my .243. So I’m wandering around trying to find some place open that sells .243s, and I stop at a convenience store and they told me that the only place open that might sell them was this nudie bar. I went over, and sure enough, they had some decent loads, in about anything you wanted. And they had a grocery area and a bait operation in the back room. This chick up on the bar, dancing . . . I bet she went 180, and she was not a tall girl. Had bruises all over her, like she fell down a lot.”

  “Different culture,” Marshall said. “We like something you can get ahold of.”

  “You not only could get a hold on this one, you could hardly avoid her,” Lucas said.

  “Bruises like she was getting beat up?” Del asked.

  “Naw. Like she might start drinking martinis at breakfast,” Lucas said. “She was definitely a . . . bruised peach. She could dance, though.”

  “Why’d you have to go through that whole thing about .243s to tell us a nudie-bar story?” Del asked.

  Lucas shook his head. “The idea of hanging out in a combination bait shop–nudie bar looking at fat women dance at midnight before the deer opener . . . I don’t know. It does feel different than what we got here.”

  THE BOLO LOUNGE was open but had no customers. A woman in a robe and plastic flip-flops was sitting on the edge of a table-sized circular stage when they came in, reading a throwaway real estate magazine. She looked them over, and Lucas shook his head. “Don’t bother,” he said. “Where’s Frank Stans?”

  She didn’t answer, but she looked down toward the bar; a black man stood at the far end, looking down at the bartop. Frank Stans was older, in his sixties, Lucas thought, bald with a fringe of white hair. He did not look like anybody’s grandpa—he looked like he’d once lifted a lot of weight, and from time to time some of it had fallen on his face. He was reading a Japanese manga comic book and drinking what looked like a Pepto-Bismol cocktail through a straw.

  “Mr. Stans?” Lucas asked.

  Stans looked up. “Who wants to know?”

  “Minneapolis police.” Lucas showed him his ID, and as Marshall and Del moved up beside him, pulled the photos of the Aronson jewelry out of his pocket. “We’re told that you sold this ring and necklace to Bob Brown six months ago. We’re wondering where you got it.”

  Lucas dropped the pictures on the bar, and Stans looked down at them without touching the photographs. “Don’t remember,” he grunted. “I sold things to Brown once or twice, but I don’t remember this.”

  “It’d be really good if you tried hard,” Del said. “The stuff was taken off a girl who was murdered and buried out in the countryside.”

  “We’re not looking at you as an accomplice,” Lucas said, trying to take the edge off.

  “Not yet,” said Marshall, putting the edge back on.

  Lucas glanced at him—Marshall’s voice sounded like chipped glass—then looked back at Stans and said, “So look at them again. Because it would be a rainy day in your life if you don’t remember, and we find out later that you were bullshitting us.”

  Stans and Marshall had locked eyes, and neither was backing off. Del said, “This is particularly important to the deputy here, ’cause some of his family was killed by the guy who took this jewelry.”

  “You say Deputy Dog?” Stans asked, cutting his eyes over to Del.

  “I . . .” Del started.

  Marshall jumped in, talking to Del while he still looked at Stans. “He don’t bother me. I deal with trash all the time. Sooner or later, something always happens to them.”

  “That a threat?” Stans asked, not quite looking at Marshall.

  “No, I don’t threaten anybody. I guess the good Lord just don’t like accomplices. He winds up catching them behind the bar and taking them off.”

  Stans now looked at Lucas. “Listen to this shit. Listen to this . . .”

  Lucas put up a finger, silencing Stans, then said to Marshall, “Shut up.”

  Marshall nodded. Lucas said to Stans, “So taking a second look, see if you remember better.”

  Stans had locked eyes with Marshall again, and this time, apparently saw something he didn’t like. He looked back down at the pictures and said, “Yeah, I got it off some white boy. Never saw him before. Said somebody downtown put him on me, told him that I bought estate jewelry.”

  “What’d he look like?” Lucas asked.

  Stans shrugged. “I don’t know. Like a white boy. White face, sk
inny, maybe six feet or a little more or less, but about that. Brown hair. Maybe blond hair. No beard or anything.”

  “Nervous?”

  “No.” He looked at Marshall again, and then his eyes flicked away. “Doper. He was running on crack, I could tell by looking at him. He wanted the money, and he wanted it right that minute.”

  “What else?”

  “Nothin’ else. I had three hundred dollars on me, and that’s what I gave him. I told him, take it or leave it, and he took it.”

  “Would you recognize him if you saw him again?”