Naked Prey

by John Sandford

  “Yeah?” Lucas reached out and turned off the headlights. They were immediately hurtling through a darkness so intense that it should have had Elvis paintings on it.

  “Turn the fuckin’ lights back on,” Del said after a few seconds. “There might be a curve somewhere.”

  “No curves,” Lucas said. “I could tie the wheel down, crawl in the back seat and go to sleep.” But he turned the lights on, and they crossed the Red River into North Dakota thirty-three minutes after blowing out of Armstrong.

  LUCAS DROVE THE first two hours, then Del took two, and Lucas took them into the Cities six hours after leaving the Law Enforcement Center. He dropped Del at his house, then drove through the quiet streets to Mississippi River Boulevard and the Big New House. He left the Olds in the driveway, got his bag from the trunk, fumbled his house keys out of his pocket, and trudged inside.

  Weather woke when he tiptoed into the bedroom by the light from the hallway. “That you?”

  “No. It’s a crazed rapist.”

  “How’d it go?”

  “We cracked it.” He started to undress.

  “What?” She pushed herself up. “You can turn on a light. Here . . .”

  Her bedstand light came on. “Are you working tomorrow morning?” Lucas asked. Weather operated almost daily.

  “No. I might do a palate in the afternoon, but they’ve got to finish some tests on the kid, so it’s not a sure thing. What happened with the lynching?”

  “Not a lynching,” Lucas said. “It was a revenge killing. You remember that Hale Sorrell who was in the paper a month ago, his kid got kidnapped?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It was him.”

  She was amazed, and a little entertained. “Lucas, you’re joking.”

  “No. We haven’t made an arrest, but the bodies were really clogged up with somebody else’s DNA, and I’ll tell you what: it’s gonna be Sorrell’s. He found out who killed his kid, he tracked them down and he hanged them. I don’t know the details, but we’re gonna find out.”

  “Oh, God. That poor family. That poor family.”

  “You don’t really go around hanging people,” Lucas said.

  “What would you do if somebody kidnapped Sam and killed him?”

  Lucas got in bed but didn’t answer.

  She pressed him: “What would you do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh, bullshit, Lucas, I know what you’d do and so do you,” she said. “You’d wait until the police weren’t looking, then you’d find them and kill them.”

  “All right,” Lucas said. Then, after a while, “Make a spoon.”

  She rolled away from him, and Lucas snuggled up behind her, arm around her waist. “See anything about it on TV?”

  “Yeah. That Washington man and the sheriff had a press conference, and Washington lost it and started screaming at the sheriff about being a redneck bigot and the sheriff kept apologizing. It was like he admitted it, or something.”

  “Aw, man, we told him . . .”

  “It was pretty funny, if you like assassinations,” Weather said. “And this little girl was on. She had this amazing face, like in those pictures from the Dust Bowl.”

  “Letty West. I’ll tell you about her in the morning,” Lucas said. They snuggled for a while, and then Lucas rolled away and said, “I gotta sleep. I’m supposed to be downtown at seven o’clock or some fuckin’ thing.”

  “Set your clock,” Weather said. “Are you going to arrest him? Sorrell?”

  “No, no. It’s just that the goddamn governor’s aide is a maniac. He wants an early meeting. Nothing’s gonna happen with Sorrell for a day or two.”

  LOREN SINGLETON AND his mother, unaffected by the crystal clarity of the night and the rippling northern lights, were passing through Fargo as Lucas snuggled up against Weather’s butt. And as Lucas stirred under the drone of the alarm clock, and Weather kicked him and he groaned, and thrashed toward the snooze button, they were rolling up the long landscaped driveway at Hale Sorrell’s house in the countryside east of Rochester.

  Sorrell himself, wearing blue silk pajamas, let them in the house. Singleton, in his deputy sheriff’s uniform, asked, “Is your wife up yet?”

  “Oh, God. Oh, my God, you found her?” Sorrell asked, his eyes wide. They clicked over to Margery, but didn’t ask the question: maybe she was some kind of social worker. He turned and shouted, “Mary! Mary!”

  From up the stairs: “Who is it?”

  “You better come down.”

  “You have any relatives in the house?” Singleton asked. “Any help, any friends?”

  “No, no—Mary could call her mother . . .” Mary Sorrell came down the stairs and said, “Is it Tammy?”

  “No, it’s not Tammy,” Singleton said. He thought about the warm bundle he’d carried outside.

  “Then what . . .?” Sorrell asked.

  Was there fear in his eyes? Did he think Singleton was here because of the hangings? Better get it done with.

  “It’s just . . .” Singleton said, digging in his coat pocket. He glanced at his mother: they’d worked this out. “It’s just . . .” The Sorrells were looking at his pocket, as though he were about to produce a paper or a photograph. Instead, Singleton produced a snubby .38 caliber revolver, pushed it toward Sorrell’s eyes and pulled the trigger.

  At the last moment, Sorrell flinched. Even at the short distance, Singleton might have missed—but Singleton flinched the same way, and the bullet struck Sorrell between the eyes and he fell backward. After a second of stunning gun-smoked silence in the aftermath of the blast, Mary Sorrell backed a step away, and began to scream, looking at her husband’s body, and then, realizing, up at Singleton.

  The gun was pointing at her head and Singleton pulled the trigger and flinched again, just as Mary Sorrell flinched the opposite way, and, though he was four feet from her, the bullet clipped only the corner of her ear, and she staggered away and turned and tried to run.

  “Goddamn you,” Margery shrilled, and to Singleton: “Shoot her. Shoot her.”

  She was now six feet away, and Singleton, shaking badly, shot her in the back and she went down, hurt but still able to scramble, weakly, to her hands and knees. She made a coughing noise, like a lion, coughing from the blood in her lungs and crawled away from him, trailing brilliant red lung-shot blood now. Still shaking, he stepped carefully around it and shot her in the back of the head and she went down for good.

  Then Singleton and Mom both stood there until Singleton groaned, “Oh, God.”

  “Shut up, dumb shit,” his mother said. “Just listen.”

  They listened together. For running feet, for a call, for a question. All they heard was the crinkling silence of the big house. They knew from Tammy that the Sorrells had no live-in servants, although there was a housekeeper who would be arriving after eight o’clock.

  “We ought to check around,” Margery said, looking up and down the entry hall. “There’s money in this place. I can smell it.”

  “Mom, we gotta get out of here,” Sorrell said. “We can’t touch anything. I told you. They got microscopes, they got all kinds of shit. Don’t touch anything.”

  So they left, in the wan light of the predawn, locking the door behind them. They had at least a couple of hours before the housekeeper showed up. Not enough time to get back to Armstrong, but certainly enough time to arrive early in the day, to be astonished if Singleton was called upon to be astonished.

  “Left some money back there,” Margery said as they rolled out of the driveway. “Left some goddamned money on the table.”

  10

  Lucas slept for four hours. Then the alarm buzzer went, and he groaned, and Weather kicked him and said, “The clock, the clock,” and he groaned again and swatted the clock hard enough to trigger the snooze feature for the next thirty years. Weather said, “Get up, you’ll go back to sleep, get up.”

  “No, just give me a minute.”

  “Get up, c’mon, you’re k
eeping me awake.”

  “Jeez . . .” He rolled out of bed, stunned by the early hour, staggered to the window, looked at the indoor-outdoor thermometer—it was stuck at –2°F—then parted the wooden slats of the shade and peered out at a surly, pitch-dark morning. The sun wasn’t due up for a while, but a streetlight provided enough illumination that he could see the bare branches moving on a lilac bush. Not only bitterly cold, but windy. Good.

  He turned back to the bed, but Weather said, “Go in the bathroom.”

  “Miserable bitch,” he muttered, and heard her cruel laugh as he tottered off.

  Lucas didn’t care for mornings, unless he came on them from behind. He liked the dawn hours, if he could go home and go to bed after the sun came up. But getting up before the sun wasn’t natural. Science had proven that early birds weren’t as intelligent, sexually vigorous, or good-looking as night owls, although he couldn’t tell Weather—she cheerfully got up every workday morning at five-thirty, and was often cutting somebody open by seven o’clock.

  THE GOVERNOR WAS an early bird. He was dressed in a crisp white shirt, sleeves rolled two careful turns—a concession to the fact that it was Saturday—dark gray slacks and black loafers. A pale gray jacket hung from an antique coat tree in a corner of his office. He looked fine, but Lucas could take some thin comfort from Neil Mitford, who looked like a bad car-train accident. He was wearing jeans and a tattered tweed jacket over a black-and-gold Iowa Hawkeyes sweatshirt, and had lost his shoes somewhere—he wore gray-and-red woolen hunting socks. John McCord, the BCA superintendent, huddled in a corner in khakis and a sweater with a red-nosed reindeer on the chest. Rose Marie Roux was still among the missing.

  “Coffee?” Henderson asked cheerfully. “Wonder where Rose Marie is?”

  “Probably killed by the cold,” Lucas grumped. “Or run over by a car in the dark. Gimme about six sugars.”

  “Good to get up at this time, get going,” Henderson said. “You get a four-hour jump on everybody. You’re on them before they know what hit them.”

  “Unless you have a heart attack and die,” Lucas said.

  McCord had a sixteen-ounce Diet Pepsi in his coat pocket, his own source of caffeine. Mitford drained one cup of coffee in fifteen seconds, and poured another. The governor settled behind his desk and sipped. “What’s going on, and what do we do about it?”

  Lucas outlined the theory, upon which everyone agreed—that Sorrell had somehow learned who had killed his child, and had killed them in return.

  “That’d take some brass balls,” McCord said.

  “He might be like that,” Mitford said. “I did some research . . .”

  Rose Marie slipped into the room, said, “Sorry—it was just so damn cold and dark,” and found a chair. Henderson gave her a one-minute update, and then turned back to Mitford. “You were saying?”

  “I pulled everything I could find on the guy. After he graduated from Cal Tech, he turned down a bunch of heavy-duty jobs and enlisted in the Army. He spent six years as an infantry and then a Special Forces officer. There are some hints that he had combat decorations, but there wasn’t a war going on, so . . .”

  “So he did snoop-and-poops and maybe cut a few throats,” Henderson said. He seemed pleased with the snoop-and-poops and the throat cutting.

  “That’s what I think,” Mitford said.

  “So.” Henderson picked up a ballpoint pen and toyed with it, leaned way back, and asked the ceiling, “When do we take him? We have enough, I think.”

  “We should get the DNA back tomorrow morning,” Lucas said. “We could go tomorrow, but if anything else comes up, it wouldn’t hurt to wait until Monday.”

  Mitford seemed startled. “Monday?” He looked at Henderson. “We can’t wait until Monday.”

  Henderson was shaking his head and said, “Lucas, when I said when . . . I meant before breakfast, or after? We can’t wait until tonight, or tomorrow. Washington is killing us. Fifty states, you know, CBS . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know it.”

  “They want me to go over to Channel Three and do a segment at eleven o’clock,” Henderson said. “Then they’re switching out to Fargo for a segment with Washington. I want to be able to say that we’ve made an arrest, and I want to say something about what we think happened. If I do that, we’ll fuck the guy. Washington. I’d love to fuck him. Love it.” He turned in his chair, once all the way around, and then again, his pink tongue stuck on his bottom lip as if tasting the word fuck, his glasses glittering from the overhead lights. “Love to fuck him.”

  “It’d be good,” Mitford said. “And it’d be national.”

  Lucas began, “If we’re trying to build a case . . .”

  “It doesn’t matter. Look, we’ve got X amount of information to arrest him with, and to get a DNA sample from him. Then we’ve got to wait a day or two to process his sample. So . . . why not grab him now?”

  “Just . . .” Lucas looked at Rose Marie. “Doesn’t seem orderly.”

  “Can I get some of that coffee?” Rose Marie asked. “I talk better when I can see.”

  “Of course,” Henderson said. “Let me . . .”

  “Lucas, everybody else is right and you’re wrong,” Rose Marie said as Henderson poured her a cup. “We’ve got two things going: a big crime and a big publicity problem. We can strangle the publicity problem before it gets out of control, and not do much harm to the criminal case.”

  “If we do hurt the criminal case,” Mitford said, “what we’ve done is, we’ve fucked up a case against a bright, hard-working guy who employs hundreds of Minnesotans, and who killed a couple of thugs who kidnapped and presumably cold-bloodedly murdered his daughter. So fuckin’ what?”

  Lucas said to Mitford, “Don’t get your shorts in a knot,” and then, to the governor, “You say take him, we’ll take him. It’s seven-thirty now, I can kick Del out of bed, we’ll go down and get him. We can have him by, say, ten at the latest, and you can make your announcement. I’ve got Neil’s cell-phone number, if he’ll be with you.”

  “I will,” Mitford said. He jumped up and rubbed his hands together like a cold man in front of a fire. “Hot damn. We came, we saw, we kicked ass. And . . . he’s a Republican.”

  “Poor bastard,” said Rose Marie.

  “You making the call?” Lucas asked, looking at Henderson.

  “Get him,” Henderson said.

  DEL WAS AS much a night owl as Lucas, and was not happy when Lucas shook him out of bed. Del’s wife, Cheryl, was already awake and writing bills in the kitchen when Lucas arrived, and she sent Lucas back to the bedroom to do the dirty work. Lucas stuck his head in the door and cooed, “Get up, sleepyhead. Time to work.”

  Nothing.

  “Sleepyhead, get up . . .”

  “I hope you die of leprosy,” Del moaned. He pushed himself up on his elbows. “What do you want?”

  “It’s not what I want,” Lucas said. “It’s what the governor and Rose Marie and McCord want. They want Sorrell busted at ten o’clock this morning, and you and I are going down, with a couple of BCA guys in another car, and we’re gonna drag him kicking and screaming out of his mansion.”

  “Can’t you do it by yourself?”

  “I could, but then I’d feel bad, knowing that you were up here in a nice warm bed sleeping late while I was dragging my ass all the way down to Rochester.”

  “All right.” He dropped back on the pillow. “Just give me one more minute.”

  Lucas wasn’t buying that routine.

  JENKINS AND SHRAKE were the BCA’s official flatfeet. Most of the other agents had degrees in psychology or social work or accounting or computer science, and worked out for two hours a day in the gym. Jenkins and Shrake had graduated from Hennepin Community College with Law Enforcement Certificates, and, as far as anyone knew, that was the last time either had cracked a book that didn’t have Tom Clancy’s name on the cover. Both of them smoked and drank too much, both had been divorced a couple of times, and Lucas k
new for sure that they both carried saps. They were the pair most often sent to arrest people because, they admitted, they liked the work.

  Lucas and Del were eating scrambled eggs at a Bakers Square restaurant on Ford Parkway, six blocks from Lucas’s house, when the other two arrived. Jenkins was a heavyset man, unshaven, with gray hair and suspicious eyes. Shrake was tall and lean, closely shaven with a pencil-thin white mustache, also gray-haired with suspicious eyes. They both wore hats and buttoned-up woolen overcoats and Shrake had an unlit cigarette pasted to his lower lip. They didn’t sit, they stood outside the booth looking down, their hands in their coat pockets, like a couple of wandering East German Stasi thugs. They finished each other’s sentences.

  Jenkins: “If we can bust this asshole at ten . . .”

  Shrake: “We can get back up here in time to watch the playoff game.”

  Jenkins: “If you guys don’t fuck something up.”

  Shrake: “In which case, we’ll miss the game.”

  Jenkins: “Then we’ll tell everybody in the BCA that you guys are queer.”

  Shrake: “And that Davenport is the girlie.”

  Lucas continued to chew and Del put a piece of bacon in his mouth, and stared out the window at the Ford plant across the street.

  “I think we can get it done by ten,” Lucas said, after swallowing. “But you guys oughta know—Del actually is gay, and you’ve probably violated about six diversity guidelines.”

  Del turned and stared steadily at the pair, unsmiling, until Jenkins said, “Not that it really matters,” and they all tried to laugh, but it was too early in the morning and too cold, and Shrake’s hoarse laughter trailed away into a spasm of tobacco coughs. The sun was just up, and the car exhausts were melting the frost on the streets, leaving behind nasty little streaks of black ice. Too fuckin’ early.

  THE TRIP THROUGH the frozen countryside took an hour and a half, with an orange sun finally groaning up over the horizon. There was more snow around the Cities than in the northwest, and for twenty minutes, they ran down the highway alongside a snowmobile rally in the adjoining ditches, a couple of dozen sleds making a fast run south.