Broken Prey

by John Sandford

  “I called at the newspaper and told them I was a cop and it was an emergency and they gave me your cell phone. And I was telling the truth: it’s an emergency, all right.”

  “What?”

  Pope laughed. “I got her.”

  Ignace didn’t make the connection for a second, and again said, “What?”

  “I got her. The next one.”

  Ignace started taking notes. “Who?”

  “Carlita Peterson. I been watching her for three weeks. Got her in my car and I’m leaving right now, taking her up the thirty-five right into the deep woods. Know where’s this old empty cabin up there, you can camp out.”

  “Ah, Jesus, man, you gotta stop. You gotta stop . . .”

  “I ain’t gonna stop, Roo-Fay,” the whisperer said. “Tell you what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna spend a little time with her tonight, take the starch out of her. Then I’m gonna kick her out in the woods tomorrow, give her a one-minute head start—I won’t look, either, I won’t look which way she runs. Then I’m going out with my razor. Maybe she’ll get away.”

  “Ah, Jesus . . .”

  “My other woman drove me to it; I been walking around with a hard-on for three days, the way she talks, she just drives me to distraction. But this’ll fix it for a while. You know how, after you fuck, you don’t have to fuck again for a while? Well, after I take this next one, I won’t have to worry about taking my woman.”

  “Ah, jeez . . .”

  “Hey, don’t tell me it don’t give you a little tingle in the back of your balls, thinking about it.”

  “Listen, Mr. Pope. Please. Let her go. C’mon, you gotta get help, please let her go. I’ll write whatever you want, I’ll write your whole story, whatever you want to say, if you just let her go . . .”

  “Hey, fuck you, Roo-Fay. Too late for all of that shit. But I’ll tell you what—you got the rest of today and all of tonight to find us. I won’t do her until tomorrow morning; but that’s as long as I’m gonna go. You tell that to the cops.”

  Click.

  IGNACE STARED DUMBFOUNDED at the phone for a moment, then pushed himself up, unconsciously brushed the seat of his pants, took a couple of walking steps, then broke into a run, running as hard as he could, arms pumping, notebook in one hand, cell phone in the other, down to the paper, buzzing all the way: Man, man-oh-man, Jesus, man.

  CAROL STUCK HER HEAD in Lucas’s office and said, “If your nose doesn’t hurt too bad to talk, a guy named Rufus is on the telephone. He says he’s a reporter from the Star-Tribune and it’s urgent.”

  Lucas picked up the phone: “Davenport.”

  “He just called me,” Ignace blurted. “One minute ago. On my cell phone.”

  “Ah, shit . . . ,” Lucas said.

  “He said he took a woman whose name is Carlita Peterson, wait a minute, wait a minute, I got the number he was calling from . . .”

  Lucas sat up and shouted at Carol, “We’re gonna need a phone number run . . . Get Dave, get Dave on the line . . .”

  Ignace said, “You ready? Here it is . . .”

  He recited the number and Lucas shouted it to Carol, who shouted back, “Dave’s running it . . .”

  Lucas went back to the phone: “He said he’s already got this woman?”

  “That’s what he said. He said he’s going to take her up north and fuck with her for a while and then tomorrow morning he’s going to turn her loose and hunt her down with his razor.”

  “You’re sure it was him?”

  “Same guy as last time.”

  Carol shouted, “Carlita Diaz Peterson, Northfield. It’s a cell phone. The address is coming up.”

  Lucas yelled back, “Get the sheriff on the line. I think it’s Rice County, but it might be Dakota. Get somebody over to her house. Tell the phone guys I want to know the location of the cell phone when he called . . .”

  BACK TO IGNACE, the phone: “Are you at your office?”

  “Yes.”

  “Stay there. I’ll be there soon as I can. I’ll need a typescript.”

  “I’ll have it by the time you get here,” Ignace said. He suddenly left his asshole persona and sounded like a worried human being: “Jesus, Davenport, he said he had her in his car, that he was already heading north.”

  LUCAS BANGED OUT the number for the co-op office, talked to Ray Reese: “Pull your socks up. The Star-Trib reporter got another call from Charlie Pope; he says he’s taken a woman from Northfield and he’s in his car heading for the Boundary Waters. Pull the trigger on the network. Now.”

  “Hang on.”

  Ten seconds later, Reese was back: “We’re doing it. Anything else? You know where he’s starting from?”

  “Gonna get that in a minute. Tell everybody that Pope says he already picked up the woman. Tell them that: that he says he’s got her, that if we miss him, she’s gonna die. Tell them to be careful.”

  HE THREW THE PHONE back at the receiver and realized his hands were slippery with sweat: that didn’t happen often. Up and out of the office: Carol was on the phone. “Where’d it come from? Where’d it come from?”

  She waved him off.

  He walked out of the office, ten feet down the hall, and then back, anxious to move, grating, “Where’s it coming from?”

  She was taking a note, then pulled the phone away from her ear: “It came from a cell in Burnsville.” Burnsville was a big suburb right on the south side of the metro area: Pope was less than fifteen miles from where Lucas was sitting.

  “Damnit. If he’s heading north . . . He could be on either Thirty-five E or Thirty-five W . . .”

  “Or city streets,” Carol offered.

  “Yeah. Call Burnsville. Tell them that. Pull out everything.”

  He went back to the map. If Pope was on either branch of I-35, he would just about be going through the downtown area of either Minneapolis or St. Paul. But the two areas were ten minutes apart, and he might also have gone either east or west on the I-494 loop.

  Pope had called from precisely the place where they could get the least information on direction. But if he were going north, the possibilities narrowed down again once he got north of the Twin Cities. The most obvious route would be on I-35 north, but there were other major links going north.

  If he was going north. He’d never gone north before.

  Lucas thought of the bull’s-eye he’d drawn on the Minnesota map that morning. He went back to the phone, called Reese at the co-op office: “Ray, listen. He called from Burnsville. That means if he’s going north, he’s in the metro area, so move the search area north about as fast as he could be traveling. Then, when the network is set, I want you to call all of the major nodes in the south end. He may be jerking us around when he keeps saying that he’s going north. He didn’t leave his home ground with the others, and from what I’ve been able to tell, Pope doesn’t know anything about the Boundary Waters. So tell the people down south that he may be down there. Tell them that it’s really critical that they don’t ease off because they think he’s going north . . .”

  “I can get that out in five minutes.”

  “Do that.”

  Carol stuck her head in the office: “Two calls—Northfield police and Ruffe Ignace, that reporter . . .”

  “I want both of them. Give me Northfield first.”

  HE PICKED UP his phone and a voice said, “Agent Davenport, this is Jim Goode down in Northfield. We’ve got a car at the Peterson house, and it doesn’t look good. She didn’t show up at work this morning. She’s a ceramics teacher at St. Olaf, and the guys looked in the window of her house and they saw some cut rope on the kitchen floor. They called that probable cause, went in, they say the house is empty, but there’s a smear of what looks like dried blood on the kitchen floor, not much, but a smear, and that cut rope.”

  “Seal the place off,” Lucas said. “I’ll send down our crime-scene crew . . .”

  “It’s sealed off now. I’m calling in all our guys, we’re gonna do the streets, and the
sheriff is running the county.”

  “Don’t quit on it—there’s a possibility that he’s still down there.”

  “That cocksucker, if he’s killed Carlita Peterson, he’s a dead man,” Goode said.

  “You know her?”

  “Yes, a little bit. She seemed like a nice lady.”

  “I’m coming down,” Lucas said. “I’ve got a guy to talk to first, I might be a couple of hours.”

  IGNACE CAME UP: “Listen, instead of running over here, I got a transcript that I can cut and paste to Microsoft Word and ship it to you. You could have it in one minute.”

  “Do that,” Lucas said. “I should have thought of it myself. Here’s the address . . .”

  HE CHECKED THREE TIMES, five seconds apart, and then the document came rolling in. At the top: “This is verbatim.”

  Lucas read down through the conversation between Pope and Ignace. Pope said they had until tomorrow morning. Some time, then. Not much, and he might be lying. Still, there was a chance.

  He sent the document to the printer, then looked again at the language, searching for the kind of things he’d pulled out of the first call. Nothing struck him that seemed particularly important. Pope said he had the woman in his car, which implied a sedan or coupe, but not a pickup or an SUV. That eliminated about half the vehicles heading north . . . unless he was lying. Pope said he was “leaving.”

  Leaving from Burnsville? Was that where he was hiding? A big town, a major suburb. Lots of people around.

  Most likely, Lucas thought, Pope meant that he was leaving the area, not that he was leaving that very minute. Lucas was still mulling over the conversation when Carol came in: “Channel Three just called. They’ve heard about the network alert from their cops reporter. Everybody else will hear about it in the next ten minutes. What do you want me to do?”

  “Tell them that we’ve got no comment at this time . . . Do they have Peterson’s name yet?”

  “They didn’t say anything.”

  Lucas stood up, picked up his sport coat. “Put them off. Tell them you can’t talk without an okay from me, and I’m somewhere in my car. You don’t know where.”

  “So where will you be?”

  “Northfield. I’ll be on the cell,” Lucas said.

  “And you’re okay to drive?”

  “Huh?”

  “Your nose—your face. You don’t look so good.”

  “Nah. I’m fine. Couple more Aleves, I’m good for the day.” He touched his nose, gave it a tentative push, and winced. For ten minutes there, he’d forgotten about it.

  He stopped at the co-op center, three guys, three computers, and three telephones in a room the size of a closet. Lucas said, “Probably a sedan or coupe. White, maybe an Olds.”

  They all nodded, and he was out the door.

  EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE, Carlita Peterson would get together both the energy and the angle to give the backseat a good thump. She was lying on her face, or had been, and it gave him a hard-on thinking about her back there, desperate, trying to kick, feeling the rope cut into her.

  Knowing the power.

  The Gods Down the Hall always said that was the best part. The killing and the pain were fine, but when you could look into their eyes, and know they were feeling the power . . .

  He’d stash her for the rest of the day, take her out tonight, just like he’d told Ruffe that he would. And tomorrow morning . . . He could feel the need coming on him, stronger than ever. The Gods Down the Hall had talked to him about this, about the power and the need, so closely tied together, about the ecstasy that was coming . . .

  ONE NIGHT WALKING BACK to Millie Lincoln’s town house, Mihovil said, “Is Sherrie a very close friend with you?”

  “Well . . . yeah. I guess,” she said. “I mean, we don’t hang out so much now that you’re around, but we used to, you know. Hang out.”

  “I think she watches us make love.”

  “What?”

  “The other night when I came over and we go back to the playroom and do it, and then we are resting, and I see a spot of light on the door. A minute later, I look back and it’s gone. No light. Then a couple of minutes later, I see the light again. Just a little spot. So then we are doing it again, and I see no light.”

  “What was it?” Millie was intrigued.

  “There is a very small hole in the door, like a nail hole, right under the bar that runs across the middle of it. When we are done, and you and Sherrie are in the kitchen, I look through the hole. All you can see is the bed, but you can see all of the bed. I think . . . when there is no light, she is watching. When you can see light, then her eye is not at the hole.”

  Millie could feel herself going a flame pink. The witch. What did she see? What had they been doing the last time . . . ? Millie thought about it and, if anything, got a little pinker.

  “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “Well, I am not sure. And you are friends. And I’m not sure she was watching. But I think she was.”

  Now a surge of anger. “Goddamnit. We’re gonna have it out right now . . .” She stepped out a little faster.

  “Wait, wait wait . . . ,” Mihovil said. “Maybe, let it go this night.”

  “What?”

  “What can it hurt? She watches, she doesn’t do anything. You can’t take pictures through the hole. She has no boyfriend, she just enjoys herself.”

  “You sound like you liked it.”

  “Well . . .” He shrugged and grinned. “Maybe I did like it . . .”

  “God, Mihovil . . .” But, in fact, his comment produced a little thrill.

  That night, when they were doing it, Millie kept an eye on the door—and that meant she had to keep her glasses on, because she couldn’t see the little spot without them. Would Sherrie be suspicious? Millie didn’t know, but she wanted to see if the little spot was there—and before they went in the bedroom, Mihovil had carefully turned on a living-room desk lamp that they’d calculated would provide the light.

  And Millie saw the tiny light blink at her. This time, she got more than a little thrill: Mihovil had his head down between her thighs, and her head was propped on the pillow, her eyes cracked just enough to watch the light, and when the light blinked out—when Sherrie started watching—Millie felt a rush so intense that she wasn’t sure she could stand it.

  She cried out once, and again, and felt her heels drumming on the mattress as Mihovil had said they would, when she really got into it, and then an orgasm rolled over her brain like a tsunami. She could remember yipping, a noise she’d never heard herself make before, and then nothing was anything except the feeling of Mihovil’s tongue in the middle of her existence, and her own self, going off . . .

  14

  LUCAS HAD TAKEN the truck to work, because the softer ride was easier on his broken nose. Now he stuck the flasher on the roof, punched the address of Carlita Peterson’s house into his dashboard navigation system, cut too fast through the traffic on I-35, and got clear of St. Paul.

  When the traffic had thinned, he reached into the passenger foot well and fumbled through his briefcase, looking for Ignace’s transcript of the talk with Pope. Someplace, something in the document was not quite right. He wasn’t sure what it was: just a vibration.

  He found the transcript, pinned the paper into the center of the steering wheel with his thumb, and read it again. No vibration this time. But he’d picked something up the first time he’d read it . . .

  He got on the cell phone and called Sloan at home: “Pope called and said he’s picked up a woman named Carlita Peterson from Northfield. He says he’s taking her north.”

  “Ah, no.” Cough. “What’d he say exactly?”

  Lucas read the transcript, flicking his eyes between the paper and the traffic he was knifing through. Sloan said, “Find out . . . never mind. If the house listing was to a Carlita Peterson, that probably means she’s single or divorced and lives alone. That’s three single people. We know Rice went to bars looking fo
r women, and Larson used to go into Chaps when she got off work. I bet he’s picking them up in bars or some kind of social activity . . .”

  LUCAS THOUGHT ABOUT IT: Northfield was a college town just off I-35 and not far from Faribault, where Adam Rice had spent time at the Rockyard. If Lucas had been told that a sexual predator had been hanging out in Faribault and asked to guess where he would next attack, he might have guessed Northfield. A couple of thousand college girls would provide easy prey, and the college town’s mix of student and farm bars, cafés, and stores would provide plenty of camouflage through which to prowl.

  “I’ll buy that,” Lucas said to Sloan. “Listen: Any chance that Larson was gay, or had gay contacts?”

  “Nobody said anything. She had a boyfriend . . . What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking about the second man—or the second woman,” Lucas said. “What if she’s picking them up and Pope just does the killing? Nobody would ever see him in a bar. If she drives, nobody would ever see him in a car.”

  “Yeah, but you could make the same argument if it’s a guy—he picks up women as a straight guy, or men as a gay.”

  “But: nobody ever saw Larson hanging out with guys in Chaps,” Lucas said. “That paper you gave me said she mostly went in to chat with the bartender. And a woman would be more inclined to walk outside, or get in a car, with another woman, than with a man.”

  “Let me call around,” Sloan said. “I’ll get some guys asking questions.”

  “We’ve now got two people connected to colleges. Both the women. One a student, one a teacher.”

  After a moment of thought, Sloan said, “I don’t see much in that.”

  “Neither do I, but think about it,” Lucas said. And, almost as an afterthought, “How’re you feeling?”