Broken Prey

by John Sandford

  Sloan scratched an ear. “Huh. I didn’t think of that.”

  “Because we were sidetracked,” Lucas said. “The guy’s been running us like a railroad.”

  FARTHER DOWN THE ROAD, Sloan said, “I got two words for you. About the rock ’n’ roll list.”

  “Rock ’n’ roll? That’s three words.”

  “Two words: Lou Reed.”

  “Lou Reed . . . ‘Walk on the Wild Side.’ ”

  “It’s not on your list. I heard it the other day when I was lyin’ on my ass, and I thought, ‘Jesus, that’s gotta go on the list.’ ”

  “You’re right, but the list is too long,” Lucas said. “I have to start cutting songs. I was thinking, maybe I should limit it to one song per group—but I can’t figure out how to do that, either. I’d leave out some of the best ones.”

  “You know what else you don’t got?”

  “What?”

  “ ‘Mustang Sally.’ ”

  “Ah, shit.”

  “You’ve got a choice between Wilson Pickett and Buddy Guy,” Sloan said.

  “I can’t make that choice.”

  “Life sucks and then you die.”

  SLOAN HAD STARTED calling the security hospital the “bat cave” and as they were driving up the kill, the phrase kept going through Lucas’s head. The place didn’t look anything like a bat cave, but it felt that way—felt like a haunted English country house, except bigger.

  “We don’t tell them about Pope,” Lucas said, as they got out of the truck.

  “Of course not. We talk about the second man.”

  I NS I D E, they were taken to the director’s office; Lawrence Cale had been fishing the first time they visited, and they hadn’t met him. He was a tall, slender, balding man, in his middle fifties, wearing too-large glasses that magnified his eyes. He reminded Lucas of the farmer in Grant Wood’s American Gothic painting. He was chewing on a toothpick.

  “My deputy says the last time you two were here, you, mmm, seriously disturbed some of the patients,” he said, after pointing them into visitor chairs.

  “That’s right,” Lucas nodded. “They were pretty much having screaming fits when we left.”

  “That’s not funny,” Cale said. “It can take days, weeks, sometimes, to calm them down.”

  “I see that as your problem,” Lucas said. He was tired of this patient shit. “Those three guys are responsible for three ordinary nice people being tortured to death.”

  Sloan was digging in his briefcase, pulled out an eight-by-ten print, slipped it across the desk. “This used to be Carlita Peterson. She was a college professor. They haven’t found the gut dump yet.”

  Cale took in the picture, flipped it over, and passed it back to Sloan without comment. “I had Chase, Lighter, and Taylor transferred to isolation. They don’t see anybody but staff. No radio or television. Everything that is said to them is taped, and we review the tapes daily. They are allowed two books a day. They specify the genre, and we choose the books, so nobody can plant a message in a book. And we check the books before they go into the cells.”

  “How about coming out? What happens with the books?” Lucas asked.

  “We check them again, for codes. We know most of the ways—pin holes over letters, that sort of thing. We make damn sure that nothing’s coming out, either.”

  “All right. Are you taking us in?”

  “No, Sam O’Donnell and Dick Hart will take you down. They know those guys. And it’s best if they don’t see me. I make the decisions on their disposition, and if I went down there, they’d be talking to me, not you.”

  “We’ll try not to disturb them any more than we have to,” Lucas said.

  Cale said, “Mmm, that picture you showed me . . .”

  “What?” Sloan asked.

  “Fuck ’em. Do what you need to.”

  O’DONNELL AND HART were waiting on the other side of the security wall. When Lucas came through, Sloan a few seconds behind, Hart said, “We heard about the professor. That goddamn Pope; I never saw this in him.”

  “The killer?”

  “I saw the killer, I never saw . . . this.”

  O’Donnell said, “Charlie was one of those guys that nobody liked, but you could see, sometimes, that he was trying to be likeable. He wanted people to like him. But Lighter and Taylor and Chase turned him into a . . . I don’t know. He’s like one of those movie psychos, Freddie or the hockey-mask guy, or somebody.”

  “Might not be Pope,” Lucas said.

  The two docs stopped in their tracks. “What?”

  “You guys suggested it the last time we were here—Dr. Beloit, maybe. Our own psychologist up in the Cities came up with the idea independently. We think Charlie Pope is being handled by a second man, or a second woman. Somebody who does the planning, does the driving . . .”

  Lucas explained, and they started walking again, the two docs taking it in. When Lucas finished, he asked, “Anything more from any of them? The Big Three?”

  “Not really,” O’Donnell said. He flipped his long hair, unconsciously touched a silver earring. “They just bitch and moan about being down in the hole.”

  THEY TOOK AN ELEVATOR DOWN, a camera looking at them through a recessed glass plate. Two floors below the entrance, they got out, into a tiled corridor that felt like a basement—sound was muffled, and though the air was cool, it felt damp. They passed a couple of staff members, who nodded and went on their way, and stopped at an electronically controlled door with another camera. Hart pushed another button, a woman’s voice said, “Hey, Dick,” and Hart said, “Hey, Pauline. It’s me, Sam and Davenport and Sloan. They should be on your list.”

  “Yes, they are. Opening up.”

  The electronic lock clicked, and O’Donnell pulled the door open. “What would they do if we were imposters and had a gun in your back?” Sloan wondered.

  “They’d know,” O’Donnell said, smiling. Dropping his voice, he said, “Her name ain’t Pauline.”

  The corridor was dim. They could see a dozen rectangles set into the walls, eight of them dark, four lit. All one-way glass. “The Big Three and a guy who tried to cut his buddy with a broken plastic spoon,” Hart said. “Where do you want to start?”

  “How does it work?” Sloan asked.

  “There’s a release button next to each window panel. You push it once and the one-way glass slides back and you’re looking through a glass security panel. That’s if you want him to see you. The talk goes through a microphone with a speaker. The guys in the other cells can’t hear what you’re talking about, unless you want them to. Then you can turn on their mikes.”

  THE ISOLATION CELLS were simple: a bed, a toilet, a sink to wash in. The walls were beige, the blanket on the bed was green, the fixtures were white, the uniforms were a washed-out French blue, like the medical scrubs that Weather sometimes wore around the house.

  Taylor was sitting on his bunk, staring at the one-way glass. “Can he see us?” Sloan asked.

  O’Donnell shook his head. “No, I’ve checked it a hundred times. But I think, sometimes, that things are so quiet down here that they pick up vibrations of people walking by. Half the time we come down here, they’re staring at the glass. When you look at them on the video, they’re hardly ever looking at the glass. There’s nothing to see.”

  “Open it,” Lucas said.

  Hart pushed a button, and the glass slid slowly back. As soon as it started moving, Taylor stood up and walked toward it. “You guys,” he said, when he saw Lucas and Sloan.

  “Yeah, we need to talk to you,” Lucas said. “We need to get a name from you. The name of the guy you sent out there.”

  Taylor wagged his head and showed a short, yellow-toothed smile. “I don’t think you got enough for that.” His voice, coming from a lowest-bid speaker, sounded like a robot’s.

  “Let me tell you what we got,” Lucas said. Taylor crossed his arms and leaned against the windowsill. “The federal district attorney has decided that your vi
ctims . . . the victims of the guy you sent out . . . were kidnapped. That’s a federal offense, and the victims were killed. They’re going for the death penalty. If we put you with the killer . . . well, you won’t have to worry about being penned up anymore.”

  “Don’t have the death penalty in Minnesota.”

  “The state doesn’t—but we’re talking about the feds. They definitely do.”

  Taylor’s gaze seemed to turn inward for a moment, and then he shrugged. “Gotta go sometime. Tell me—did our boy get another one? Did he hunt her down?”

  “Hey, you’re not gonna shock us,” Sloan said. “We’ve been dealing with dildoes like you for our whole lives. Let us tell you the rest of it.”

  “So?”

  “So we’re making this offer to all three of you. Whoever gives us the name, that guy gets a pass,” Sloan said. “The other two get transferred over to Illinois, where they get the shot. One of you will think it over and talk. He’ll get to wave good-bye to the other two.”

  “You’re really fuckin’ me up,” Taylor said, his voice flat, and with no change of expression. He ostentatiously looked at his fingernails, “I can hardly stand it.”

  “All right,” Lucas said. He reached for the button that opened and closed the panel. “Enjoy the next few months, or however long it turns out to be . . .”

  Now an expression flicked over Taylor’s face. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he snapped. “Rules say we can’t be kept here for more than two weeks without relief.”

  Hart shook his head. “That’s not quite right. Two weeks if you’ve shown recognition and contrition. Every day that you don’t is a new offense. You won’t be out of here until your boy is caught.”

  “Or until you get transferred to the federal pen,” Lucas said. He pushed the button to close the glass panel, waited for an objection from Taylor, and got nothing but ten seconds of silence. Then, in a teasing baby voice, Taylor said, “I know you’re still standing there.”

  O’Donnell sighed and pushed the microphone button, turning it off. “Next?”

  THEY DID BIGGIE NEXT. Biggie was naked and masturbating. “Go away. I need my privacy to jerk off.” He twiddled his fingers at the surveillance camera.

  “I need to tell you about the special offer,” Lucas said. Biggie never stopped while Lucas recited the death-penalty threat.

  Biggie said, “Hey, you know what? Having you watch is gettin’ me harder. This is really good.”

  “I’ll come and watch you take the needle,” Lucas said, turning away. To Hart: “Shut the window.”

  “I’m gonna come. Don’t you wanna watch?” Biggie shouted as the window slid shut, “Maybe you can get our boy for not having a hunting license . . .”

  O’Donnell punched the microphone button and said, “Hard to threaten a guy when he’s in isolation. Maybe we should have moved them back to their regular cells. Might as well be dead as down here.”

  “Almost pointless to talk to Chase,” Hart said. “He’s going downhill fast. The catatonic and manic periods are getting longer, the transitions are getting shorter. He was down for almost thirty-six hours, ending last night, then he went through transition and now he’s going manic. When he’s manic, there’s nothing left but the instinct to kill.”

  “Let’s try him,” Lucas said. “Might as well, since we’re here.”

  THE GLASS SLID BACK, and Chase hurled himself at it, his fingers like claws, his mouth open, his eyes sparking with hate. Like Biggie, he was naked: he hit the glass like a bug hitting a windshield, bounced off, came back at it, scratching at the glass, prying at its corners, his fingernails breaking, blood slipping across the glass. He was wailing, like an injured big cat, like a jaguar. Hart was shouting, “Easy, easy, easy . . . You wanna get out, wanna get out . . .”

  Chase seemed not to hear him. He hurled himself at the glass again, hitting it with his face, beating it with his fists; behind him, the cell was torn up as much as it could be, as most of it was concrete. He hadn’t simply taken off his clothing, he’d taken it off and shredded it; he’d done the same thing to the blanket, and the mattress, which was covered with nylon and bolted to the bed, was streaked with blood, where Chase had been tearing at it.

  “Close it, close it,” Lucas shouted at O’Donnell, and the window slipped shut. The microphone was still on, and they could hear the continuing animal wail until Hart reached out and cut it off.

  “Goddamnit,” Sloan said. “Maybe you ought to do something. Like sedate him.”

  Hart nodded: “We try, but chemicals don’t have much effect on him anymore. If we give him enough to really calm him down, we might kill him.”

  “Well, that’d calm him down,” Lucas said. “He’s like a fuckin’ werewolf, or something.” Then, to Sloan: “We’re wasting our time.”

  “Listen, we can work on Taylor and Biggie for you, keep talking up the death-penalty thing,” O’Donnell said. “Is that for real?”

  “It will be,” Lucas said.

  “We sorta . . . oppose the death penalty around here,” O’Donnell said. “By and large.”

  “So do we,” Sloan said. “By and large.”

  THEY STOPPED FOR LUNCH on the way back, cheeseburgers at a McDonald’s.

  “I don’t care what anybody says about the shit McDonald’s feeds you,” Sloan said. “They do know how to make a French fry. You gonna eat those?”

  They were finishing the French fries when Del called: he was even more wired than he’d been in the morning.

  “Man, you gotta find a place to lie down,” Lucas said. “You’re yelling at me.”

  “We’re getting a little frazzled,” Del shouted. “Listen, where are you? How fast can you get up here?”

  “Forty-five minutes, depending on where you are. You find West?”

  “We know where he is. We talked to a chick who just saw him. He’s walking around with his bag along the riverbank. We’ve got some Minneapolis cops coming over to help. He might be in one of the caves.”

  “All right. We’re coming. Be careful in those fuckin’ caves, man.”

  17

  A MINNEAPOLIS PATROLMAN spotted Mike West walking along the riverbank more than a mile downstream from where the woman had seen him—“When she said she saw him five minutes ago, what she meant was, she saw him half an hour ago,” Del told Lucas and Sloan.

  Del was wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and for some reason—odd on a hot day in the middle of the summer, though nobody mentioned it—a navy-blue watch cap. With his weathered face, he looked like the Ancient Mariner, except in a Metallica T-shirt. “We spent another half hour crawling all over the riverbank by the university, and he was already down by St. Thomas.”

  “So where is he?” Lucas asked. They were parked with a half dozen cop cars on Mississippi River Boulevard, looking down into the river gorge that separated St. Paul from Minneapolis. The sides of the gorge were steep, but not sheer, and covered with trees and brush. Outcrops of sandstone were showing through the greenery; the Mississippi snaked through the bottom of it, in its usual summer dress, mud and beached carp.

  Del shrugged: “He must’ve seen us coming, because he fuckin’ vanished. Dick Douglas spotted him, called it in, then went down after him. Never saw him again.”

  “Caves,” Sloan said.

  “Douglas was sure it was him?” Lucas asked.

  “It’s the guy we were told about. We found Gary, the panhandler. He said this was our guy, this Mike West. Calls him Mikey. He pointed us at Sandy, this woman, who knows West pretty good. She’s a graduate student up at the U, she works in a cafeteria and gives him leftover food.”

  “We ought to get Sandy down here,” Sloan said.

  Del nodded: “She’s on the way. Jenkins and Shrake went to get her.”

  “Jesus, I hope you told them to go easy,” Lucas said. Shrake bragged that when it came to pickups, they had a .740 slugging percentage. He wasn’t sure Shrake was joking.

  “Ah, they’re all right,” Del sai
d. “They get a little antsy sometimes.”

  They found West before the woman arrived. A couple of cops halfway down the hill, and two hundred yards south, started yelling and humping around one spot on the hill. A group of college students, who had gathered on the sidewalk, cheered, then booed. Lucas could see the cops bending into the hillside and then yelling some more. “What the hell’s going on down there?” Del wondered. They all started down the hillside, holding on to tree limbs and brush, skidding along in their slick-soled city-cop shoes.

  “What?” Lucas asked when they got to the cops. More cops were crossing the hillside to where they were standing.

  “There he is,” said one of the cops. He was hot and pissed off. He pointed at the hillside, and Lucas took a moment to see what he was pointing at—the worn white soles of two gym shoes, six or eight inches into a hole so small that it seemed impossible that a man could be on the other side of them. The hole, worn by water out of the rotten rock, apparently extended straight back into the hillside.

  Lucas stooped to look, and Sloan and Del scrambled around behind him “Come out of there,” Lucas said. He heard what might have been a muffled reply.

  “He’s holding on to something, inside there,” one of the cops said. “We tried to pull him out, but we couldn’t budge him.”

  “How about some shovels?” Del asked.

  “It’s mostly rock; we’d need jackhammers.”

  “We could try dynamite,” somebody suggested, with a snigger. Most of the cops were now enjoying themselves: watching the heavyweight detectives looking at those two fuckin’ feet. “Or maybe we oughta send for a proctologist,” somebody else said. “I bet he could hook him out.”

  “He’s not going to smother in there, is he?” Lucas asked, looking at the shoe soles.

  “Fuck if we know,” said the cop.

  Del started to laugh, and Sloan shook his head and turned away.