Naked Prey

by John Sandford

  “Canadians call them snow machines,” Del said, shaking himself out of a slumber, and looking out the window at the riders. They were in Lucas’s new Acura SUV, which Lucas had begun to suspect was a disguised minivan.

  “What?”

  “They call them snow machines, instead of snowmobiles. Or sleds.”

  “Fuckin’ Canadians.”

  “They are the spawn of the devil,” Del agreed, yawning. “Want me to drive for a while?”

  “If we stop, those goddamn flatfeet are gonna pull that Dodge off the road, and then they’re gonna get stuck, and then it’ll take another half hour to get down there, and we’ll all be freezing and our socks will be wet.”

  “Good. I didn’t want to drive. Wake me up when we get there.”

  SORRELL’S HOME WAS eight miles outside of Rochester on a rolling piece of country that might have made a decent golf course. Though the driveway was open, Lucas had the feeling that they’d triggered security sensors when they crossed between the two stone pillars that marked its entrance. The driveway leading to the hilltop house was blacktopped, carefully plowed, and though it seemed to pass through a woodlot, the trees were too aesthetically pleasing to be natural.

  The house itself seemed modest enough from the bottom of the drive, a kind of Pasadena bungalow of redwood and brick, with a wing. Only when they got closer did Lucas realize how big the place was, and that what looked like a wing was a garage.

  “I could put the Big New House in the garage,” Lucas said, as they neared the crest of the hill.

  “You paid what, a million-five for that?” Del said. Del had been trying to worm the price out of him.

  “Nothing near that,” Lucas said. “But this place—this place would go for a million-five.”

  “Or maybe six million-five . . .”

  The driveway disappeared around the corner of the wing, apparently to hide the utilitarian commonness of garage doors. They stopped in front of the house, got out, waited until Jenkins and Shrake joined them. Jenkins parked his car beside Lucas’s SUV, effectively blocking the driveway. They walked as a group, blowing steam in the cold air, up the steps of the low front porch. The porch had a swing, as did Lucas’s Big New House, and a stone walkway along the front, under an overhanging eave.

  Lucas looked at Jenkins and Shrake, said, “Ready,” and Jenkins said, “Unless you want me around back.” Lucas shook his head. “Let’s everybody be polite,” he said.

  “Probably at work anyway,” Shrake said. “The place feels empty.”

  Lucas pushed the doorbell and heard the empty echo. Shrake was right: there was something weird about houses—they felt either occupied or empty, and even without looking inside, most street cops could feel whether there were people inside.

  One of Lucas’s old friends with the Minneapolis police force, Harrison Sloan, theorized that people who were tiptoeing, or even breathing, gave off vibrations that the house amplified, and that you could subconsciously feel the vibrations. Lucas told him he was full of shit, but secretly thought he might be onto something.

  He pushed the doorbell again, and then a third time. Jenkins moved down the walkway to a line of windows, and tried to see inside, trying one window after another. Halfway down, he stopped and moved his head up and down, his hand against the glass of the storm window, blocking reflections. Then he shook his head and said, “I’ll be right back.”

  He went out to the Dodge, popped the trunk, and fished out a twenty-pound, yellow-handled maul. As he climbed back up the porch, Lucas said, “What are you doing?”

  “Gonna knock the door down,” Jenkins said.

  “What are you talking about?” Del asked.

  Jenkins sighed, as if instructing a slow student. “If you look through that window, you’ll see a hand and an arm. Just a hand and an arm, sticking out of a hallway into the kitchen. It looks to me like a dead hand, but I can’t be sure. It might still be a live hand, that dies while we stand here bullshitting. So if you’ll stand back . . .”

  Lucas turned to Del who said, “Oh, boy,” and to Shrake, who said, gloomily, “There goes the fuckin’ playoff game.”

  JENKINS HAD A nice smooth wood-chopping swing, and the edge of the maul hit just above the doorknob, blowing the door open. Jenkins stepped back, and Lucas slipped his .45 out of its holster and pushed the door open with his knuckles. Del, to one side, with his Glock pointed overhead, said, “I’m going . . .” and then he was inside, with Lucas two steps behind, and Jenkins behind him. Shrake had jogged around to the back, just in case.

  “Guy down here,” Del said, and Lucas moved forward, and then Del said, “Another one,” and Lucas saw the first body sprawled in the hallway, one arm sticking like a chicken claw into the kitchen. Sorrell. Lucas recognized him from the photographs, except that the photographs didn’t have a bullet hole in the face.

  Del was moving, and Lucas moved with him, and Lucas saw the woman, facedown in a puddle of blood. Like Sorrell, she was wearing a bathrobe, and one leg stuck out toward Lucas. As he’d done with the door, he stooped and touched her leg with his knuckles. Not cold; still some warmth.

  “Not long ago,” Lucas said.

  “Let’s clear the first floor,” Del said.

  Lucas spoke over his shoulder to Jenkins. “Put a gun on the stairs. We’re gonna clear the floor.”

  “Gotcha,” Jenkins said. He moved to the base of a curling stairway with a blond-wood railing, his pistol pointed generally up the stairs. Lucas and Del took two minutes clearing the first floor, slowing to pop the back door and let Shrake in. When the floor was clear, Shrake and Jenkins took the basement and Lucas and Del took the second floor, although all four believed the house was empty, except for themselves and the bodies.

  And it was.

  Lucas came back down the stairs, tucking the gun away, and said, “Let’s move it out on the porch . . . make some calls.”

  The first call went to the Olmsted County sheriff’s office. Lucas identified himself, gave the dispatcher a quick summary of the situation for the recording tape, and got the sheriff’s cell phone. The sheriff took the call on the second ring, listened for a moment, then said, “Oh, my God. I’m on my way.”

  “Bring the ME and tell him we’re gonna need some fast body temps.”

  Then he called the governor, through Mitford. “Neil. Get me a number for the governor. Like right now.”

  Mitford said, “He’s next door. Hang on, I’ll walk the phone over. Did you get him?”

  “Not exactly,” Lucas said.

  Henderson took the line. “Get him?”

  “We busted down the door of his house and found Sorrell and a woman who I expect is his wife, dead in the front hallway. Shot to death. Looks like executions. Looks like they’d just come down in their bathrobes and were shot. Like somebody got them out of bed. Bodies aren’t quite cold.”

  “Good lord. Did you . . . touch them?”

  “Yeah. The sheriff’s on the way with the ME,” Lucas said. He was standing on the porch, and down at the bottom of the hill, he could see a patrol car flying down the approach road, slowing for the driveway. “We’ve got one coming in right now.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. I’m a little stunned. But I’d say that either Joe’s not dead, and he came back, or that there’s another player.”

  “What do I do with the CBS interview?”

  “You got what, an hour? I’ll talk to the sheriff about notifying the next of kin, tell them that it’s critical to move fast. If we can get that done, you could make the announcement. I wouldn’t make the announcement, though, before the next-of-kin notification. Not unless we get some media out here, or something, as cover. If you do, it’ll come back to bite you on the ass—some relative talking to TV about how he heard it first from you, and how awful it was.”

  “Let me think about that,” Henderson said. “In the meantime, get the sheriff to find the next of kin.”

  “Okay,” Lucas sa
id.

  “Take down a number,” Henderson said. He read off a phone number, and Lucas jotted it in the palm of his hand. “That’s the red cell phone. About ten people have the number, so don’t call it too often. But call me on this.”

  “Okay.”

  “You know, if you look at this one way . . . our problem was solved pretty quickly.”

  “I wouldn’t look at it that way,” Lucas said. “Not in public, anyway.”

  “Call me back,” Henderson said, and he was gone.

  THE SHERIFF’S CAR reached the top of the hill and pulled around Jenkins’s Dodge, slid to a stop in the snow. An apple-cheeked deputy jumped out of the driver’s side, and, staying behind his car, hand on his holstered six-gun, the other hand pointed at the cops on the porch, shouted, “All right. All right.”

  “Jesus Christ, calm down,” Shrake said, from where he was leaning on the porch rail. He blew a stream of cigarette smoke at the kid. “We’re really important state cops and you’re just a kid who’s not important at all.”

  That confused the deputy, and slowed him down. “Where are the casualties?” he asked, no longer shouting.

  “There are two dead bodies inside: Hale Sorrell and, we think, his wife,” Lucas said.

  “Oh, God.” The kid jumped back inside the car and they could see him calling in.

  Lucas’s cell phone rang, and Rose Marie was on the line. “You gotta be kidding me.”

  He moved down the walkway under the eaves. “We’re not. We don’t know anything except that there’s probably nobody inside the house, except the dead people. I haven’t had a chance to think about anything.”

  “Sorrell for sure?”

  “Yeah. You ever meet his wife?”

  “A time or two—Sorrell’s age, mid-forties, probably, dark hair, a little heavy, short.”

  “That’s her, ninety-nine percent,” Lucas said.

  “Do I need to be there?”

  “No. The locals are arriving, and I’ve got Henderson’s direct line. If I were you, I’d get next to the governor and guide his footsteps, so as to avoid the dogshit.”

  “I’ll do that. Call if you need anything,” she said, and was gone.

  THE SHERIFF’S NAME was Brad Wilson, and he arrived ten minutes after the first car came in. By that time, there were four sheriff’s deputies on the scene, two of them on the porch, two more sent around to “cover the back—just in case,” but mostly to get them out of Lucas’s hair.

  The sheriff was an older, barrel-chested man wearing a pearl-handled .45 on a gunbelt. He and Lucas had met once, when Lucas was working with Minneapolis. Lucas thought him competent, and maybe better than that. “You attract more goddamned trouble, Davenport,” the sheriff said as he came up. “Hale’s dead? And Mary?”

  “Come on and take a look. We’ve been keeping everybody out so the crime scene guys’ll have a chance.”

  The sheriff nodded and followed Lucas inside, stepping carefully. They stood back, but the sheriff, leaning over Sorrell, said, “That’s Hale. And that’s Mary. God bless me. How’d you come to find them?”

  “We came up here to arrest him on murder charges,” Lucas said. “Sorrell’s the guy who hanged those two people up north.”

  The sheriff’s mouth dropped open, then snapped close. After a moment, he said, “You wouldn’t be pulling my leg, would you?”

  “No. The two people he hanged were probably the people who kidnapped his daughter.”

  “You better tell me,” the sheriff said. He looked a last time at the two figures on the floor. “Holy mackerel.” And, “I got to call the feds. They are going to wet their pants.”

  AFTER THE SHERIFF called the FBI, Lucas got him to dispatch pairs of deputies to local homeowners. “We want to know if anybody saw a car or any other kind of vehicle here, this morning or late last night. Or anything else, for that matter. Ask them if they ever saw Sorrell in a red Jeep Cherokee.”

  The first media trucks from Rochester began arriving fifteen minutes later. Twenty minutes after that, a Twin Cities media helicopter flew over. Hale Sorrell’s parents and Mary Sorrell’s mother were notified of the deaths by the sheriff’s chaplain, and said that they would notify other family members. Lucas called Henderson. “You’re good to go. Next of kin are notified.”

  “Excellent. How are things down there?”

  “We’re just mostly standing around, waiting for the medical examiner. He was off somewhere, but he’s on his way now.”

  AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK, still waiting for the medical examiner, they filed into a home theater, turned on the fifty-inch flat-panel television, and watched Henderson do the interview with CBS. Somebody—Mitford, probably—had roughed him up. His hair wasn’t quite as smooth as it usually was, and a fat brown file envelope sat on the table in front of him. He looked like the harried executive with bad news, and he delivered it straight ahead, no punches pulled.

  “Jesus, he looks almost . . . tough,” Del said.

  Washington came on, a moon-faced black man with a dark suit and white shirt, a man who knew he’d been seriously one-upped. The dead people were dope dealers and kidnappers? The hangman and his wife had been executed in their hallway?

  “I feel there were some serious investigative shortcomings in Custer County, and I’m calling on the federal government to blahblahblahblah . . .”

  “Bullshit bullshit bullshit,” Del said. “It ain’t workin’.”

  Fifteen minutes after they were off the air, Henderson called. “Anything new?”

  “No. You looked pretty good.”

  “Thanks. We heard Washington is on his way home to Chicago.”

  “God bless him.”

  JENKINS AND SHRAKE were in the media room, watching the playoff from premium leather-paneled theater seats. Del was prowling the house, checking desks and bureaus and calendars and computer files. Twenty minutes after he began, he handed Lucas a piece of paper: an Iowa title transfer application from a Curtis Frank, of Des Moines, to a Larry Smith, of Oelwein, Iowa, on the purchase of a 1996 Jeep Cherokee, dated three weeks earlier.

  “Check the Oelwein address?” Lucas asked.

  “No, but I will. Bet you a buck it’s fake.”

  THE ME HAD arrived, and after fussing around, checked the blood puddles and body temps. Sorrell and his wife had certainly been killed sometime after midnight, he said, and after he got some weights and checked the accuracy of the house thermostat and the floor-level temperatures, he said he could probably do better than that.

  “Off the top of my head, I’d say they were killed this morning,” he said. “They’re a little too warm to have lain on the floor all night, and the blood is a little too liquid. But we’ll have to do the numbers before we know for sure.”

  Sheriff Wilson was standing by the door and said, “Here come the feds. Just what we needed.”

  “Who?”

  “Lanny Cole and Jim Green. Pretty good guys, actually.”

  “Mmm. I know Cole, I don’t know Green.”

  Del came back and said, “There’s no such address in Oelwein. It’s fake. There is a Curtis Frank, and he says he sold the truck for cash. I talked to Des Moines homicide cops and they’ll take a picture of Sorrell down to his house for an ID.” He saw the men in suits coming up to the door and said, “Feebs.”

  COLE, THE FBI agent, shook hands with the sheriff and said, “How ya doing, Brad?” and nodded at Lucas and asked, “They got any more jobs over there at the BCA?”

  “I got a slot for a female investigator,” Lucas said.

  “I can investigate females,” Cole said. “So what happened here?”

  Wilson and Lucas took him through it, Lucas connecting Sorrell with the hangings in Custer County. “I gotta call in on that,” Cole said, squatting next to Sorrell. “We got civil rights guys on the way to take a look at it. You say Hale did it?”

  “Most likely.”

  Cole nodded, and looked at his partner who said, “We knew something was seriously screwed
up.”

  “Didn’t know it was that screwed up,” Cole said. He looked down at the body again and said, “Goddamnit, Hale. What’d you do?”

  “You guys want in on this act?” Lucas asked.

  Cole shook his head. “We’re gonna want to know all about it, if you could forward your findings . . . but we’re not going to get directly involved. We just don’t have the manpower, what with discovering Arab terror plots at the Washington County courthouse.”

  Sheriff Wilson looked at Lucas and said, “Doesn’t make any sense for us to do it—it doesn’t sound like the killer’s from around here. So you got it. I’ll call John McCord right now, and ask you in.”

  “Good enough,” Lucas said. “If your guys come up with anything, they can pass it up to me, and I’ll coordinate with Lanny and Jim.” To the feds: “Any problem getting your files on the kidnapping?”

  “I’ll talk to the SAC from here. We should be able to give you the file this afternoon.”

  Back to Wilson: “Can you handle the press down here?”

  “I can do that.”

  “So we’re set.”

  THE FBI AGENTS visited, nothing more, and at noon they left. A BCA crime scene crew arrived from the Twin Cities, and Lucas eventually joined Del in turning over the house, looking at pieces of paper. They found nothing of interest, but couldn’t get into three of the Sorrells’ four computers.

  The two desk-top machines, one in a library and another in a home office, and a laptop in Sorrell’s briefcase, were password-protected, and would have to be cracked by computer people. A fourth laptop, apparently belonging to Mary Sorrell, was not protected, but contained nothing but letters, a personal calendar, and a few documents relating to a heart disease research foundation.

  Lucas was returning Sorrell’s machine to the briefcase when he found an envelope with a bank letterhead. Inside were twenty separate receipts for bank drafts, each for $50,000, with each check made to a different, major Las Vegas hotel.

  “A million dollars,” Del said. “High roller. Maybe that had something to do with the kidnapping? Gambling debts or something?”