Broken Prey

by John Sandford

“Better. I get these coughing jags that make me think I’m gonna bust a rib, but I don’t feel too bad. Maybe get out tomorrow . . .”

  WHEN LUCAS RANG OFF, he realized that he’d become distracted, trying to read, talk on the phone, and drive all at once. He was speeding down a white line between two lanes, still running over a hundred. He guiltily moved back into the left lane; he hated to see other drivers on cell phones . . .

  And goddamnit! What had he picked up in the transcript? Something had stuck in his mind like a gooey old song, and he couldn’t stop thinking about it. Nothing obvious, something subtle . . .

  He held the Lexus at a hundred; any faster and the truck felt unstable. As it was, he made it into Northfield in a little more than half an hour from his office. Following the GPS map off I-35 down Highway 19, he buzzed past the Malt-O-Meal plant, across the bridge and a long block up to Division, right on Division and left on Seventh, and up a long rising hill until he saw, on the left, two cop cars outside a small blue-gray clapboard house that stood in a copse of maples.

  A couple of cops were leaning against a car and turned to look at his truck as he pulled to the curb. He killed the engine, pulled the flasher and tossed it on the passenger seat, and walked up the drive. A dilapidated detached garage sat just behind the house, and a stack of decorative birch firewood was piled next to a side door.

  “Davenport?” one of the cops asked.

  “Yeah—nothing?”

  The cop shook his head. “Nothing you don’t know about. A dab of blood, a piece of rope. It don’t look good.”

  “Who all’s inside?”

  “Only our lead investigator, Jim Goode. The chief’s down at the office, coordinating. If you’re going in, you should go in the back.”

  LUCAS WALKED AROUND to the back of the house, climbed a short wooden stoop, and looked in through the screen door. Inside, a thin man in a plaid shirt and gray slacks was talking on a cell phone. He saw Lucas and said into the phone, “Just a minute,” and then, to Lucas, “Lucas Davenport?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m Jim Goode. If you hook the edge of the screen with your fingernails, you can pull the door open. The house is contaminated up to where I am.”

  Lucas hooked the door open, carefully avoiding the door handle. He was in the kitchen, a small room with laminate cupboards and a narrow, U-shaped counter covered with plastic; a double porcelain sink, chipped and yellowed with age; and a floor of curling vinyl.

  The walls were real plaster, and there were pots everywhere, several with flowers, geraniums and cut yellow roses. A small breakfast table, covered with an embroidered tablecloth, sat under a bright window, with two brilliant blue chairs, one on each side. The arrangement looked both tidy and lonely. The house probably dated to World War II, he thought, and had last been updated in the seventies.

  THERE WAS A FOOT-LONG smear on the floor, the purple-black color of blood. Somebody had stepped in it and smeared it. Not too much blood, Lucas thought: less than he’d lost when he was hit in the nose. On the other side of the kitchen was a curl of yellow plastic rope, the kind used to tie down tarpaulins. Goode was saying into the cell phone, “I do think we have to get them farther out now. Uh-huh. At least that far. And Dakota has to push down this way . . . Okay. Maybe we could try the Highway Patrol . . . Uh-huh. Okay. Davenport’s here now, I’ll be back pretty quick.”

  He rang off, put his hand out, and as Lucas shook it, he said, “We’ve got everybody we can find out on country roads. If he’s really going to hunt her down, and do it around here, he’s got to be moving around. We downloaded pictures of Pope and Peterson, Xeroxed off a few hundred of them, and we’ve got students from St. Olaf and Carleton going out in their cars, leafleting everything inside of twenty miles.”

  “Hope nobody stumbles on Pope.”

  “They’re out in groups of three, except where they’re putting up public posters in stores and phone poles, and then they’re in twos,” Goode said. “Everybody’s got cell phones.”

  “Great,” Lucas said. And it was—somebody had been moving fast. “What about this place?”

  Goode pointed: “The blood and the rope. That’s all we’ve got—but it really is blood, it isn’t chocolate syrup or anything. It’s pretty dry, but not completely, so he probably got her this morning.” He was talking quickly, nervously, the words tumbling out. “We checked the house to make sure there was nobody here. Other than the check, we’ve stayed out. We’re hoping your crime-scene crew . . .”

  “They might find signs of Pope or a second person with him, but they won’t help us find Peterson,” Lucas said. “We gotta be careful in here, but I want to go through her personal records. Credit-card bills, that sort of thing. Did you see anything like that?”

  “There’s a little office in the second bedroom.” Goode pointed down a hallway.

  “Then that’s where I’ll be,” Lucas said. “What about Peterson? Single or divorced? Kids?”

  “Divorced two years. No kids. Ex-husband’s a teacher at the high school.”

  “Check him?”

  “At the exact time that call got to your reporter up in Minneapolis, he was halfway through a physics class. It’s not a copycat.”

  “How about Peterson? She good looking? Has she been out on the town?”

  “Pretty average-looking, forty, a little heavy . . . Hang on. There’s a photograph.” He stepped over to a kitchen counter, pushed a piece of paper, and pointed at a snapshot. “We’re not touching it, because we thought maybe Pope shot it. Brought it with him. But that’s her.”

  A woman with brown hair, a squarish chin held up a bit, direct dark eyes.

  Goode continued as Lucas looked at the photo: “We don’t know if she’s been on the town. She’s been divorced two years, so she might have been looking around.”

  “Okay. This is critical, because everybody that Pope’s killed has been single, and out on the town at least a little bit,” Lucas said. “It’s about the only thing we can find that all three had in common. Get some guys, talk to the neighbors, talk to the people at Carleton. I want to know who she hung out with, who her friends were. I want to talk to her ex. I want to do this as quick as you can get them here . . . Or not here, but someplace close by.”

  “I’ll set something up,” Goode said. He took a calendar out of his pocket, took out a card, and scribbled on it. “My cell phone. You think of a single thing, call me, I’ll be right outside on the street, talking to neighbors.”

  “Okay.”

  Lucas turned away and took a step, and then Goode asked, “What are her chances?”

  “Man . . . ,” Lucas shook his head. “If he’s telling the truth, and she’s still alive? About one in hundred, I’d say. We’re gonna have to take him while he’s moving her.”

  GOODE LEFT, and Lucas went back to Peterson’s home office. Her desk was made of four file cabinets, two each on either side of a knee space, with a red-lacquered door spanning the knee space. A Macintosh laptop sat in the middle of the desk, with a cable leading to a small HP ink-jet printer on the left. A telephone sat next to the printer, along with a radio-CD player; a CD, showing a slender woman standing in the rain with an umbrella overhead—Jazz for a Rainy Afternoon—sat on top of the player. And there were pencils and ballpoints in an earthenware jar, a bottle of generic ibuprofen, a Rolodex, a box of Kleenex, a scratchpad, and a bunch of yellow legal pads.

  The walls around the desk were crowded with cheap oak-look bookcases, six feet tall, the shelves jammed with books. More books and papers sat on top of the bookcases, and more paper was stacked on the floor.

  And he could smell her. She had been in the room not too many hours earlier, wearing perfume, a subtle scent, just a hint of lilacs or violets or lilies of the valley—something woodland, wild, and light.

  THE SCENT CAUGHT HIM by surprise. For a moment, he lay his forehead on the front edge of her desk, closed his eyes. A few seconds passed, and he sat up, pushed the “on” button on the Mac, and bega
n going through the desk litter, starting with the scratchpad, the notebooks, and the Rolodex. Anything that might show a place, or a date, or an appointment.

  He found phone numbers with a couple of first names, some appointment times noted with places that seemed to refer to student meetings. Could the second guy be a student? Seemed unlikely—what student would want to hang with Pope? But everything he found, he set aside.

  When the computer was up, he went into the mail program and started reading down through the “in box,” the “deleted” and the “sent” listings. More names, with e-mail addresses; most of the e-mail was from students, a few from fellow faculty, one from a woman who was apparently a personal friend who wanted to know if she was going up to MOA Saturday. Mall of America? Two e-mails came from a guy with the initial Z who Lucas thought was probably Peterson’s ex-husband, concerning cuts from a jade tree. Most of the rest came from ceramics people scattered around the country. Receipts from Amazon, old travel reservations with Northwest, Hertz, and Holiday Inn, and miscellaneous life detritus made up the rest.

  Nothing leaped out at him.

  He pulled open the file cabinets: she was meticulous about finances, and one cabinet contained file folders of her American Express and Visa bills. Lucas went through them line by line, noting the few times she’d used her credit cards in what appeared to be restaurants. There weren’t many, and most were out of state.

  He made notes on all of it and was still working when Goode called back.

  “Marilyn Derech is a friend of hers,” Goode said. “She lives down the street, three houses down. We can use her family room to talk to people. I’ve got them coming here, we’ve got a half dozen coming so far. There are a couple here now . . .”

  “I’ll come down. I’ve got some more names,” Lucas said. “Did you ever find her purse?”

  “Uh . . . we tried not to track through the place much, but it seems like I saw a bag by the couch facing the TV in the front room.”

  “Okay. Give me five minutes.”

  He found the bag, pawed through it. Again, her scent hit him in the face. And Jesus, the old cliché about women’s handbags had never been wrong, he thought. She had everything in there but a fishing pole. Lots of paper: receipts from the gas station, notes from students, a withdrawal slip—forty dollars—from an ATM, bundled Kleenex, loose change, glasses, a glasses-cleaning cloth, a billfold with thirty-five dollars in the cash slot and some change in the clip section.

  Car keys in the bottom of the bag. A rock; an ordinary black smooth basaltic stone, and he wasn’t the least bit mystified: Weather picked up that kind of stuff all the time. Lipstick. A ChapStick. Another ChapStick. More ibuprofen.

  Nothing: he felt like throwing the bag through the fuckin’ front window.

  Turned around in the room. She’d just been here, and now, she was God knows where. His eye caught the clock on the stove in the kitchen, through the archway from the living room: as he glanced at it, the display changed, clicking off a minute.

  He could feel the time trickling away.

  HE GOT HIS NOTES and hurried outside; a cop was still leaning against the car, designated, he guessed, to keep an eye on the house. “If the phone rings in there . . .”

  “It won’t—they’re being routed downtown.”

  “Good. Where’s this place . . . ?”

  The cop pointed farther up the street and across. “That white house. The one . . . There’s Jim.”

  Lucas saw Goode step out on a porch and look down toward him. He went that way, fast.

  “GODDAMN TIME,” he said to Goode as he hurried up. “We’ve got no time.”

  “I know, I know . . . I got six people here.” Goode looked at his watch. “We sent a guy downtown to get her ex-husband, he’s been down at the station . . .”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Uh, shit—Zack? Zeke?”

  Lucas nodded: “Okay.”

  MARILYN DERECH WAS a plump blond woman who looked scared: wide-eyed and scared. Four other women and a plump man, who all looked scared, sat on the living-room couch and chairs, and two more kitchen chairs Derech had brought into the living room.

  Lucas introduced himself, got their names: “We’re really in trouble here,” he said. “Does anybody know anything about her social life? Who she was seeing, where she went at night? Was she dating, did she go to bars?”

  After a moment of silence, one of the women flipped up a hand. “We went to a restaurant up in the Cities, they have wine and music.” The woman had introduced herself as Carol Olson. She looked about forty, with medium-brown hair, a thin nose. “On Grand Avenue in St. Paul, it’s called BluesBerries.”

  “BluesBerries—I know where that is,” Lucas said. “Did you talk to guys, did you . . .”

  “We just went up and had some wine and listened to music, and then we had dinner . . . we didn’t really talk to anybody.”

  “Only the one time.”

  “I only went the one time, but I think she’d gone up a couple of times.” Then she stopped and put a hand to her lips. “Listen to me. I’m trying to protect her reputation. I don’t think she went up, I know she did. She knew the place pretty well, where the best parking was and everything. She liked it because she thought . . . it was interesting and safe and she wouldn’t see anybody from Northfield up there.”

  “Why wouldn’t she want to see anybody from Northfield? She was divorced.”

  “Yes, but Zach is around. He’s not dating anyone,” Olson said. “When they broke up, it was sort of her that did it. She wanted a little . . . more.”

  “Adventure?” Lucas asked.

  “More of something,” Olson said.

  “I’m not being cute,” Lucas said. “Was she looking around? Was she hanging out? Was BluesBerries it, or was she hitting the bars? Did anybody ever hear of a place down in Faribault called the Rockyard?”

  The guy, who had introduced himself as Tom Wells, knew about the Rockyard. “I live up the street, my business sells commercial sanitary supplies—toilet paper and paper towels and cleaning stuff . . . the Rockyard is one of our accounts. If you were going to pick one place where Carlita Peterson would never go, that’s it.”

  “But would she know not to go there?”

  “She’d know,” he said. “She wouldn’t go there.”

  “If you took Carlita to a strange city and told her to find a place to eat, the first door she walked through would be the best restaurant in town,” said a woman named Ann Lasker.

  “But maybe she’d go there for an adventure? To the Rockyard?’ ”

  “Her adventures wouldn’t come in the form of a biker,” Wells said. “If she was looking for action, it’d maybe be a”—he looked around at the women—“what? A history professor who sailed?”

  A couple of them nodded.

  LUCAS WORKED THEM THROUGH: Where did she go, whom did she see? The answers were “not far, and not many, outside the school.”

  Fifteen minutes in, Zachery Peterson arrived. He was a tall man, too thin, in a pale blue short-sleeved dress shirt, dark blue slacks, and brown thick-soled shoes. He wore tiny rimless spectacles and had a sparse, two-inch ponytail tied with a rubber band. He stood with his hands knotted in his pockets.

  He hadn’t heard from his ex-wife in two weeks: “We talked about once a month,” he told Lucas, looking uncomfortable. “We hadn’t really settled everything from the divorce yet. It was going slow.”

  “Did she mention any kind of relationship with anyone, any kind of relationship?” Lucas asked. “Did she have any new girlfriends? Anybody?”

  They all shook their heads; and they went down his list of questions. Lucas was watching Peterson, caught him once wiping an eye, and wrote him off as a suspect.

  “If he took her, he took her from the house, early. Did anyone see a car? Could you call all your neighbors and ask if anybody saw a strange car . . . ?”

  GOING OUT OF THE HOUSE, he looked back and caught the kitchen clock in the D
erech house: an hour had gone by. Another one. He was nowhere.

  Sloan called: “I can’t find anyone who’ll tell me that Larson was gay, or ever had any gay contacts, or even knew a lesbian, for that matter.”

  “Everybody knows a lesbian,” Lucas said. He was outside on Derech’s lawn, looking at the sun.

  “Everybody but Larson.”

  LUCAS WENT BACK to Peterson’s house, into the detached garage, pulled her car apart. Nothing to work with. Nothing. Back into the house, into the paper. Desperation pulling at his shirttails. Somebody called, “Agent Davenport?”

  “Yeah . . .”

  Back past the stove clock to the back door. A cop was there, in uniform. Another man stood in the backyard, an elderly man, cork shaped, with white-straw hair, wearing a cap that said TOP GUN. He had a small black, brown, and white dog on the end of a thin leash. The dog kept jumping straight up in the air. Lucas thought it might have been a Jack Russell terrier.

  The cop said, “Mr. Grass lives around the block . . . well, around two blocks. He was walking Louie this morning and thinks he may have seen a guy around here that he’d never seen before.”

  A pulse of hope.

  Lucas stepped outside, trying to relax his face. “Mr. Grass? Your first name is . . .”

  “Louie . . . just like the dog.” He frowned at Lucas: “What the hell happened to your face, son? You look like you went three rounds with a better boxer.”

  “That’s about right,” Lucas said, touching the loop of bruised skin under his eye, wincing. “A guy plugged me right in the nose . . . Listen, tell me about this car.”

  “Silver car . . .”

  “Not white?”

  “Mmm, looked silver. Could have been white, I guess. I saw him down at the bottom of the block going around the corner. I thought he might be lost because he was going slow.”

  “No way you would have seen the plates . . .”

  “I did see the plates, but I don’t know what the number was. It was Minnesota, though.”