Naked Prey (13 page)

Then Singleton and Mom both stood there until Singleton groaned, “Oh, God.”

“Shut up, dumb shit,” his mother said. “Just listen.”

They listened together. For running feet, for a call, for a question. All they heard was the crinkling silence of the big house. They knew from Tammy that the Sorrells had no live-in servants, although there was a housekeeper who would be arriving after eight o’clock.

“We ought to check around,” Margery said, looking up and down the entry hall. “There’s money in this place. I can smell it.”

“Mom, we gotta get out of here,” Singleton said. “We can’t touch anything. I told you. They got microscopes, they got all kinds of shit. Don’t touch
anything.”

So they left, in the wan light of the predawn, locking the door behind them. They had at least a couple of hours before the housekeeper showed up. Not enough time to get back to Armstrong, but certainly enough time to arrive early in the day, to be astonished if Singleton was called upon to be astonished.

“Left some money back there,” Margery said as they rolled out of the driveway. “Left some goddamned money on the table.”

L
UCAS SLEPT FOR
four hours. Then the alarm buzzer went, and he groaned, and Weather kicked him and said, “The clock, the clock,” and he groaned again and swatted the clock hard enough to trigger the snooze feature for the next thirty years. Weather said, “Get up, you’ll go back to sleep, get up.”

“No, just give me a minute.”

“Get up, c’mon, you’re keeping me awake.”

“Jeez . . . ” He rolled out of bed, stunned by the early hour, staggered to the window, looked at the indoor-outdoor thermometer—it was stuck at -2°F—then parted the wooden slats of the shade and peered out at a surly, pitch-dark morning. The sun wasn’t due up for a while, but a streetlight provided enough illumination that he could see the bare branches moving on a lilac bush. Not only bitterly cold, but windy. Good.

He turned back to the bed, but Weather said, “Go in the bathroom.”

“Miserable bitch,” he muttered, and heard her cruel laugh as he tottered off.

Lucas didn’t care for mornings, unless he came on them from behind. He liked the dawn hours, if he could go home and go to bed after the sun came up. But getting up before the sun wasn’t natural. Science had proven that early birds weren’t as intelligent, sexually vigorous, or good-looking as night owls, although he couldn’t tell Weather—she cheerfully got up every workday morning at five-thirty, and was often cutting somebody open by seven o’clock.

T
HE GOVERNOR WAS
an early bird. He was dressed in a crisp white shirt, sleeves rolled two careful turns—a concession to the fact that it was Saturday—dark gray slacks and black loafers. A pale gray jacket hung from an antique coat tree in a corner of his office. He looked fine, but Lucas could take some thin comfort from Neil Mitford, who looked like a bad car-train accident. He was wearing jeans and a tattered tweed jacket over a black-and-gold Iowa Hawkeyes sweatshirt, and had lost his shoes somewhere—he wore gray-and-red woolen hunting socks. John McCord, the BCA superintendent, huddled in a corner in khakis and a sweater with a red-nosed reindeer on the chest. Rose Marie Roux was still among the missing.

“Coffee?” Henderson asked cheerfully. “Wonder where Rose Marie is?”

“Probably killed by the cold,” Lucas grumped. “Or run over by a car in the dark. Gimme about six sugars.”

“Good to get up at this time, get going,” Henderson said. “You get a four-hour jump on everybody. You’re on them before they know what hit them.”

“Unless you have a heart attack and die,” Lucas said.

McCord had a sixteen-ounce Diet Pepsi in his coat pocket, his own source of caffeine. Mitford drained one
cup of coffee in fifteen seconds, and poured another. The governor settled behind his desk and sipped. “What’s going on, and what do we do about it?”

Lucas outlined the theory, upon which everyone agreed—that Sorrell had somehow learned who had killed his child, and had killed them in return.

“That’d take some brass balls,” McCord said.

“He might be like that,” Mitford said. “I did some research . . . ”

Rose Marie slipped into the room, said, “Sorry—it was just so damn cold and dark,” and found a chair. Henderson gave her a one-minute update, and then turned back to Mitford. “You were saying?”

“I pulled everything I could find on the guy. After he graduated from Cal Tech, he turned down a bunch of heavy-duty jobs and enlisted in the Army. He spent six years as an infantry and then a Special Forces officer. There are some hints that he had combat decorations, but there wasn’t a war going on, so . . . ”

“So he did snoop-and-poops and maybe cut a few throats,” Henderson said. He seemed pleased with the snoop-and-poops and the throat cutting.

“That’s what I think,” Mitford said.

“So.” Henderson picked up a ballpoint pen and toyed with it, leaned way back, and asked the ceiling, “When do we take him? We have enough, I think.”

“We should get the DNA back tomorrow morning,” Lucas said. “We could go tomorrow, but if anything else comes up, it wouldn’t hurt to wait until Monday.”

Mitford seemed startled. “Monday?” He looked at Henderson. “We can’t wait until Monday.”

Henderson was shaking his head and said, “Lucas, when I said
when . . .
I meant before breakfast, or after? We can’t wait until tonight, or tomorrow. Washington is killing us.
Fifty states,
you know, CBS . . . ”

“Yeah, yeah, I know it.”

“They want me to go over to Channel Three and do a segment at eleven o’clock,” Henderson said. “Then they’re switching out to Fargo for a segment with Washington. I want to be able to say that we’ve made an arrest, and I want to say something about what we think happened. If I do that, we’ll fuck the guy. Washington. I’d love to fuck him. Love it.” He turned in his chair, once all the way around, and then again, his pink tongue stuck on his bottom lip as if tasting the word
fuck,
his glasses glittering from the overhead lights. “Love to fuck him.”

“It’d be good,” Mitford said. “And it’d be national.”

Lucas began, “If we’re trying to build a case . . . ”

“It doesn’t matter. Look, we’ve got X amount of information to arrest him with, and to get a DNA sample from him. Then we’ve got to wait a day or two to process his sample. So . . . why not grab him now?”

“Just . . . ” Lucas looked at Rose Marie. “Doesn’t seem orderly.”

“Can I get some of that coffee?” Rose Marie asked. “I talk better when I can see.”

“Of course,” Henderson said. “Let me . . . ”

“Lucas, everybody else is right and you’re wrong,” Rose Marie said as Henderson poured her a cup. “We’ve got two things going: a big crime and a big publicity problem. We can strangle the publicity problem before it gets out of control, and not do much harm to the criminal case.”

“If we do hurt the criminal case,” Mitford said, “what we’ve done is, we’ve fucked up a case against a bright, hard-working guy who employs hundreds of Minnesotans, and who killed a couple of thugs who kidnapped and presumably cold-bloodedly murdered his daughter. So fuckin’ what?”

Lucas said to Mitford, “Don’t get your shorts in a knot,”
and then, to the governor, “You say take him, we’ll take him. It’s seven-thirty now, I can kick Del out of bed, we’ll go down and get him. We can have him by, say, ten at the latest, and you can make your announcement. I’ve got Neil’s cell-phone number, if he’ll be with you.”

“I will,” Mitford said. He jumped up and rubbed his hands together like a cold man in front of a fire. “Hot damn. We came, we saw,
we kicked ass.
And . . . he’s a Republican.”

“Poor bastard,” said Rose Marie.

“You making the call?” Lucas asked, looking at Henderson.

“Get him,” Henderson said.

D
EL WAS AS
much a night owl as Lucas, and was not happy when Lucas shook him out of bed. Del’s wife, Cheryl, was already awake and writing bills in the kitchen when Lucas arrived, and she sent Lucas back to the bedroom to do the dirty work. Lucas stuck his head in the door and cooed, “Get up, sleepyhead. Time to work.”

Nothing.

“Sleepyhead, get up . . . ”

“I hope you die of leprosy,” Del moaned. He pushed himself up on his elbows. “What do you want?”

“It’s not what I want,” Lucas said. “It’s what the governor and Rose Marie and McCord want. They want Sorrell busted at ten o’clock this morning, and you and I are going down, with a couple of BCA guys in another car, and we’re gonna drag him kicking and screaming out of his mansion.”

“Can’t you do it by yourself?”

“I could, but then I’d feel bad, knowing that you were up here in a nice warm bed sleeping late while I was dragging my ass all the way down to Rochester.”

“All right.” He dropped back on the pillow. “Just give me one more minute.”

Lucas wasn’t buying that routine.

J
ENKINS AND
S
HRAKE
were the BCA’s official flatfeet. Most of the other agents had degrees in psychology or social work or accounting or computer science, and worked out for two hours a day in the gym. Jenkins and Shrake had graduated from Hennepin Community College with Law Enforcement Certificates, and, as far as anyone knew, that was the last time either had cracked a book that didn’t have Tom Clancy’s name on the cover. Both of them smoked and drank too much, both had been divorced a couple of times, and Lucas knew for sure that they both carried saps. They were the pair most often sent to arrest people because, they admitted, they liked the work.

Lucas and Del were eating scrambled eggs at a Bakers Square restaurant on Ford Parkway, six blocks from Lucas’s house, when the other two arrived. Jenkins was a heavyset man, unshaven, with gray hair and suspicious eyes. Shrake was tall and lean, closely shaven with a pencil-thin white mustache, also gray-haired with suspicious eyes. They both wore hats and buttoned-up woolen overcoats and Shrake had an unlit cigarette pasted to his lower lip. They didn’t sit, they stood outside the booth looking down, their hands in their coat pockets, like a couple of wandering East German
Stasi
thugs. They finished each other’s sentences.

Jenkins: “If we can bust this asshole at ten . . . ”

Shrake: “We can get back up here in time to watch the playoff game.”

Jenkins: “If you guys don’t fuck something up.”

Shrake: “In which case, we’ll miss the game.”

Jenkins: “Then we’ll tell everybody in the BCA that you guys are queer.”

Shrake: “And that Davenport is the girlie.”

Lucas continued to chew and Del put a piece of bacon in his mouth, and stared out the window at the Ford plant across the street.

“I think we can get it done by ten,” Lucas said, after swallowing. “But you guys oughta know—Del actually
is
gay, and you’ve probably violated about six diversity guidelines.”

Del turned and stared steadily at the pair, unsmiling, until Jenkins said, “Not that it really matters,” and they all tried to laugh, but it was too early in the morning and too cold, and Shrake’s hoarse laughter trailed away into a spasm of tobacco coughs. The sun was just up, and the car exhausts were melting the frost on the streets, leaving behind nasty little streaks of black ice. Too fuckin’ early.

T
HE TRIP THROUGH
the frozen countryside took an hour and a half, with an orange sun finally groaning up over the horizon. There was more snow around the Cities than in the northwest, and for twenty minutes, they ran down the highway alongside a snowmobile rally in the adjoining ditches, a couple of dozen sleds making a fast run south.

“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.”

S
ORRELL’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.