Broken Prey

by John Sandford

  Lucas said, “Let’s open it.”

  The deputy had done it before: “The back door’s the best. There’s extra space around the jamb—I might be able to pop it without breaking it.”

  He broke it a bit but not badly: the door came open, and Lucas stepped up and pushed it fully open. The thin odor of marijuana was right there. “Doper,” Lucas said.

  Sloan, a step behind, sniffed. “Smells like Ontario Red, Two Thousand Two.” The deputy looked at him oddly, and Sloan said, “Just kidding.”

  THE HOUSE WAS A bachelor’s nest—wood and leather, a sixty-two-inch projection television, a spa on the back deck, a bar off the kitchen. It was neatly kept, but not too neatly kept; idiosyncratic in a way that Lucas recognized as single, everything done to a lone occupant’s style.

  They cruised the house quickly, looking for a body. There was no body. As the deputy said, there was a suggestion that O’Donnell had gone in a hurry—he’d hauled most of the clothing out of the main closet in the bedroom, had thrown it on the bed, and had apparently picked whatever he needed, not bothering to rehang what he hadn’t taken.

  An overnighter case sat next to the bed, empty. Not enough room?

  Lucas went down to the unfinished basement, found a workshop and sports equipment—two kayaks hanging from the ceiling, a half dozen paddles on the wall, and an ammunition reloading setup on a workbench. When Lucas went down to the basement, the deputy went out back, looked in the outbuilding, returned as Lucas was coming back up the stairs, and said, “Car freak—he’s got a five-liter Mustang and a Trans Am in there.”

  “What color are they? The cars?”

  “Red Mustang and white Trans Am.”

  Huh. The Trans Am was not likely to be mistaken for an Olds, if the witness knew a lot about cars and had time to think about it. But white robbers, standing six feet from their victims, were often described by the victims as black, because the victims expected a robber to be black. Eyewitness testimony generally ranged from suspect to horseshit.

  Sloan called from the kitchen: “In here.”

  They went that way and found him with the freezer door open on the refrigerator: “There’s some blood in here. Can’t see it very well. About the size of a dime.”

  Lucas looked in. A layer of frost covered the blood. “Probably had a steak.”

  “Probably,” Sloan said.

  Lucas turned to Nordwall. “Charlie Pope’s blood . . . uh . . . We need to pull this blood out of here and get it up to our lab just as fast as we can. Could you get your crime-scene guy to take it out, and run it up there?”

  “Yup. He’s standing by, in case we needed him,” Nordwall said. “How fast can you get DNA back? If it’s human? I mean, it always takes us a week . . .”

  “A couple-three days if you push,” Lucas said. “But they can do a blood-type immediately. That might tell us something.”

  A ROOM THE SIZE of a large closet had been used as a home office. Lucas pulled file drawers until he found bank statements. “Do you know anybody at River National?” he asked Nordwall, after the sheriff had made the call to the crime-scene guy.

  “Yeah, I know everybody.”

  “Call them. Find out how much he left in his account . . . looks like he’s only got one account, checking. A month ago, he had . . . six thousand.”

  Nordwall went to make the call, and Lucas sat down at the desk and brought up the computer, a Dell tower. The computer wanted a password before it would work. Lucas shut it down.

  Sloan came in with a handful of paper: “He cut out newspaper stories on the killings.”

  “All right, all right, that’s good,” Lucas said. He thumbed through the stories—they’d been cut from a half dozen papers. They were rolling downhill now. “He was collecting them. Better and better.”

  The deputy came in: “There’s a gun safe in the back bedroom, in a closet. It was open. A rifle and two shotguns.”

  “There’s a reloading machine down in the basement,” Lucas said. “Run down and see what kinds of dies he has . . . see if there’s any brass lying around.”

  The deputy disappeared, and Sloan asked, “Anything in the bills?”

  “He buys all his gas in Mankato . . . he bought one tank in the Cities, in Bloomington, right down by the mall. So . . . that ain’t anything.”

  The deputy came back: “There’s brass for a .40 and a .45.”

  “So he’s got two pistols,” Sloan said.

  AND NORDWALL CAME BACK: “O’Donnell cleaned out his account yesterday afternoon. He took out five thousand, and later in the day, he hit his ATM for another five hundred.”

  “Do they know . . . ?”

  “It was him. Personally. They know him. Told the teller that he was buying a car, and he’d sell one next week and put it all back.”

  Sloan looked at Lucas and nodded.

  “I put out a pickup on the Acura, but just locally,” Nordwall said. “You want to go statewide?”

  Lucas looked around the house: they had the trophy news stories, and a spot of blood. A missing man, missing money, and some missing clothes. “Yeah. Let’s go everywhere,” he said.

  NORDWALL CALLED INTO his office, staying in touch. Lucas heard him say, “Well, Jesus Christ, just lie about it. Later we can say you hadn’t been clued in. Yeah, lie. And if they ask you if I told you to lie, lie about that.”

  “What the hell was that?”

  “A local reporter called and asked if we were looking at a staff member at St. John’s.”

  “Ah, Jesus,” Lucas said.

  “Wasn’t us,” Nordwall said. “It’s the goddamn hospital. That place leaks like a sieve.”

  Lucas thought about it for a minute, then said to Nordwall. “Let’s go take a walk around the yard.”

  Nordwall said, “What?”

  OUTSIDE, LUCAS SAID, “I didn’t want your deputy hearing this. I just don’t want to leave you hanging in the wind, you got that election coming up . . . So now you’re gonna be one of about seven people in the state who know it. You gotta keep your mouth shut. I mean, don’t tell your wife.”

  Nordwall looked at him with a bit of skepticism. “You know something that important?”

  Lucas said, “A few days ago, some fishermen pulled a body out of the Minnesota River up in Le Sueur County, by Kasota. It had been in the water a month or so.”

  “I heard about it. It’s right across the county line. You think O’Donnell did it?”

  “I’m sure our killer did it, O’Donnell or whoever,” Lucas said. He pivoted to face Nordwall. “The body was . . . Charlie Pope.”

  Nordwall’s mouth dropped open. After a few seconds, he said, “You gotta be shittin’ me,” and Lucas had to smile.

  LUCAS EXPLAINED. Going back in the door, Nordwall muttered, “You’re playing a dangerous game, Lucas. It’s the right thing, but if you don’t get this guy . . . the media are gonna scalp you.”

  “We’re gonna keep it quiet for just a couple more days,” Lucas said. “Let’s see if we can jump O’Donnell before he knows we’re looking for him. We’ll check and make sure we’ve got all his cars. We’ll get the tags for the MDX and mugs out to all the highway-patrol troopers here, down in Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois, out in the Dakotas. Check the airport and see if the MDX is there, and if we can spot a plane ticket. What else . . . ?”

  They worked out a program and started running it.

  21

  AN HOUR AFTER Lucas got back to BCA headquarters, the cops at Minneapolis–St. Paul International called and said they had the MDX. “We haven’t opened it,” the cop said. “I can see what looks like a parking ticket on the floor—that’d give us an exact time it came in.”

  “Don’t touch it,” Lucas said. “I’m sending my crime-scene guys over. Have somebody stand by the truck.”

  While the crime-scene truck rolled, Lucas got the co-op center calling the airlines, looking for the ride that O’Donnell took out of town. He watched them work it for a while, got bored when no
thing happened, walked down to the canteen, and got a cup of coffee.

  Hopping Crow called: “The blood in the refrigerator was frozen, of course. We don’t have a DNA yet, maybe by tomorrow. I can tell you that it’s human, and that it’s Charlie Pope’s blood type. Pope was an O positive, O’Donnell’s records say he’s an A positive. So.”

  “So Pope’s blood was in O’Donnell’s freezer.”

  “Probably his. Peterson’s was also O, but we don’t have any reason to think her blood was frozen.”

  HE WAS IN his office when the Crime Scene crew called. “The parking ticket on the floor was from seven o’clock last night.”

  “I’ll pass it on to the coordination center. What else?”

  “Nothing really, just the usual car junk. He was pretty neat. We’ll be done in a half hour. You want us to take it to the impound?”

  “Yeah. Seal it up. We may want to go over it with a microscope, depending on how things break.”

  The same guy called back twenty minutes later. “We found some blood. It was under the mat in the cargo compartment. It looks relatively fresh . . . it’s dry, but not dusty. Thought you ought to know.”

  “We need a blood type and DNA,” Lucas said. “Get it back here as quick as you can.”

  THEY WERE RUNNING NOW. He got another blood type: it was O again, could be Pope, could be Peterson. He made a mental bet on Peterson. He called Hopping Crow, to tell him to push the tests. “We’ll know by tomorrow night,” Hopping Crow said. “Who knows, maybe it’s somebody else?”

  “Don’t even think that.”

  They picked up bits and pieces of information about O’Donnell and his lifestyle all through the day, but nothing that would point a finger. Cops were talking with a kayak club, a singles cycling club, the last woman O’Donnell was known to have dated. She said, “It came down to a choice between me and the Pontiac, and I had the feeling I wasn’t going to win. So we sort of broke it off . . .”

  Early in the day, Lucas felt that the logjam was breaking, that the ice was going out, that the peel was coming off the banana. And then everything slowed, and he began to see nothing but trivia . . . He wandered out of the office at nine o’clock, discouraged.

  Where the fuck was he?

  RUFFE IGNACE LAY AWAKE in bed, listening to Ruffe’s Radio, cataloging the day’s events and insults: What the fuck is she doing, telling me that I have to watch my adverbs? She wouldn’t know an adverb if one jumped up and bit her on the tit. Green is a bad color for me, it makes my skin look yellow; gotta get rid of the green golf shirt. I wonder if my dick reaches up to my bellybutton when I’m really hard? I don’t think it does. Does anybody’s? Maybe I oughta get dressed and go out for a slice . . .

  When the phone rang, he said, “Pope,” and he scrambled through the dark to the phone charger, fumbled with the phone, punched the TALK button: “Ignace.”

  And it was: “Hey, Ruffe. Thought I’d call you and say good-bye.”

  “Good-bye? Where are you now?”

  A rumbling, wheezing, whispery laugh, and then, “If this phone is tapped, you’ll find out soon enough. Anyway, the police were getting too close: this Davenport guy is smarter than I expected.”

  “I don’t know anything about that—as far as I know, they’ve got no idea where you are, Charlie.”

  Another whispery chuckle: “That’s another thing. My name isn’t Charlie. Charlie, unfortunately for him, but not for the rest of us, is in a black bag somewhere. That’s what caused the trouble—I threw his dead ass into the river. Life was sweet until he came floatin’ up. Anyway, the cops found him, and they know.”

  “They know they’re not looking for Charlie Pope? Jesus Christ . . . who is this, anyway?”

  “They don’t know who I am yet, so I’m not going to tell you. In any case, I’m moving on. Maybe . . . New England. Manhattan. I’ve got to think, I’ve got to see what I’m becoming, the Gods Down the Hall . . .”

  “They know you’re not Charlie . . . ?” Ignace was outraged: And they hadn’t told me?

  “I’ll tell you something else: they might figure out who I was, but they don’t know who I’m becoming. And they don’t know who I’ve been, or how long I’ve been doing this . . .”

  “Jesus, how many . . .”

  “More’n you know, Roo-fay. The Gods Down the Hall told me I was growing. But they say that at some point, your control begins to fade, the appetite takes over. It’s dangerous, but it feels so good. I can feel that, now. I didn’t know what they were talking about, but now I do, and it feels wonderful. When it’s time to go, I’ll go, but I think . . . maybe I don’t want to go just yet. I want some more.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Change, Ruffe. Appetite. Blood. Moving . . . well, because you’re probably tapped, I’m going to go now. Got to keep moving. Keep moving . . .”

  He was gone.

  Ignace stared at the phone for a few seconds, then jumped up, turned on a light, found his Palm Pilot, and brought up Davenport’s home number. Dialed.

  LUCAS WAS STARTLED awake by the phone. His hardwired phone, not the cell phone. He glanced at the bedside clock, thought “Ignace,” and picked up the phone.

  “He just called to say good-bye,” Ignace said without preamble. “He says he’s running. He also says he’s not Charlie Pope, that Charlie Pope is dead, and that you’ve known about that. That you’ve misled everyone . . .”

  “Slow down, slow down . . . ,” Lucas said. He swung his feet to the floor, hunched over the phone. “We just found out about Pope. What’d he say? You say he’s running?”

  “Who is he?”

  “We’re not sure . . . this was on your cell phone?”

  “Yeah. You should have it.”

  “Listen, Ruffe, everybody I’ve talked to said you’re an asshole, but you seem to do the work. Okay? That’s what I think. Just don’t give me any shit about misleading the press. We’re trying to save some poor innocent fucker’s life, and we don’t even know who he or she is, yet. We’ve already failed to save three other innocent fuckers. Okay? So don’t give me any shit, and when this is all done, I’ll sit down and talk to you. I’ll give you the whole thing. Not to TV, not to the Pioneer Press, not to anybody else there at the Strib. Just you.”

  “You mean everything?” Ignace demanded. “When you get him, I get it first? If you get him?”

  “No, not that. That’s going to be a breaking news story that we can’t contain,” Lucas said. “I mean an inside feature, a blow-by-blow of who said what and how we pushed this to where we are . . .”

  A moment of silence, then: “Deal. I think. I’m gonna have to talk to the boss about Pope.”

  “Tell her to call me. Tell her to call. In the morning. I gotta hang up now and listen to the tape. I gotta find out where the call came from. I’ll be in touch.”

  O’DONNELL HAD CALLED from Chicago. Lucas called the Chicago cops, asked for help: a detective called back half an hour later and said, “Not much we can do for you, pal. That number’s a pay phone out at O’Hare. This guy going somewhere?”

  “The phone’s in the airport?” Lucas asked.

  “No. A hotel just outside. A Hilton, with a phone in the lobby.”

  “Could you check the register?”

  “Nobody by that name,” the cop said. “What is it with this guy?”

  “I kinda hate to tell you this . . .”

  The Chicago cops were not happy with the news. “We got enough of this shit without importing yours.”

  HE CALLED THE Minneapolis–St. Paul airport cops again, asked them to recheck airline tickets.

  “We already did that,” an airport cop said.

  “Yeah, but you did it in the afternoon. Now the guy shows up out by O’Hare at midnight. Maybe he was in the airport when you were looking for tickets. Maybe he didn’t fly until ten o’clock.”

  “Listen, I don’t mean to sound disrespectful, but we’ve got limited resources.”

  “How
about if the governor called you?”

  WHEN HE WASN’T talking with cops, he listened to the recording of Ignace’s phone call. In terms of factual information, there wasn’t much, but there was that voice. He got Cale out of bed: “Who socialized with O’Donnell?”

  “The junior staff . . . Probably the most active social person is Dr. Beloit.”

  “Got her number?”

  Beloit’s husband answered, got irate when Lucas asked for his wife, was skeptical when told it was a police emergency, and finally Lucas shouted at him: “I’m a state BCA agent, and I need to talk to your wife. Now. Or should I have a cop come over there and take her downtown?”

  Beloit was dazed, being awakened at two in the morning. When she finally understood who was calling, he said, “I want you to call our headquarters in St. Paul. There’s a guy there, his name is Ted. He’ll play a tape of a call to a newspaper reporter earlier this evening. None of this is public: if you let this out, I’ll come down and run over you with my truck, okay?”

  “Okay, but what do you want me to hear?”

  “I want to know if it might be Sam O’Donnell calling. It doesn’t sound like him, but it does sound like somebody disguising his voice.”

  “I heard people were looking for Sam . . . we were a little worried.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Everybody.”

  Lucas thought: Ah, shit. Everybody in the state would know in a couple of days . . . He said, “Just call Ted, okay? Here’s the number . . .”

  SHE CALLED BACK five minutes later. “I hate to say this, but that could be Sam.”

  “You think?”

  “We have a Christmas play every year, and Bob Turner, I don’t think you’ve met Bob . . .”

  “No.”

  “. . . Bob plays Santa, and Sam plays one of Santa’s elves. Some of the patients have parts. You know. Anyway, Sam always plays the elf as a, mmm, pervert, for lack of a better word. He talks about going down chimneys and catching people making love. I mean, that’s sort of the running gag. Every chimney he goes down seems to have something going on. The thing is, he’s got this heavy-breathing thing going, that spit-in-the-back-of-the-throat whisper thing. This guy tonight . . . that sounds like Sam doing his act.”