Naked Prey (2 page)

Warr pleaded, but the big man couldn’t hear her—later couldn’t remember anything she said, except that there were a lot of whispered
Please
s. Didn’t do her any good. Didn’t do her any good when she fought him, either, though it might have given her a brief thirty seconds of satisfaction.

He couldn’t get her high enough to get her feet off the ground, and as he struggled to do it, a space opened between the bottom of his coat sleeve and the glove on his right hand. The space, the warm flesh, bumped against her face, and quick as a cat, she sank her teeth into his arm, biting ferociously, twisting her head against his arm. He let go of the rope and she fell, holding on with her teeth, pulling him down, and he hammered at the side of her head until she let go.

She was groaning when he boosted her back up, and she ground out, “We’re not the only ones.”

That stopped him for a moment: “What?”

“They’ll be coming for you, you cocksucker.” She spat at him, from three inches away, and hit him in the face. He flinched, grabbed her around the waist and boosted her higher, his gloves slippery with blood, and then he had her high enough and he stepped away, holding tight to the rope, and she swung free and her groaning stopped. He managed to pull her up another four inches, then tied the rope off on the trunk.

He watched them for a few minutes, swinging in the snow, in the dim light, their heads bent, their bodies violently elongated like martyrs in an El Greco painting . . .

Then he turned and left them.

They may have been dead then, or it might have taken a few minutes. He didn’t care, and it didn’t matter. He rolled slowly, carefully, out of the side road, down through Broderick and on south. He was miles away before he became aware of the pain in his wrist, and the blood flowing down his sleeve toward his elbow. When he turned his arm over in the dim light of the car, he found that she’d bitten a chunk of flesh out of his wrist, a lemon-wedge that was still bleeding profusely.

If a cop stopped him and saw it . . .

He pulled over in the dark, wrapped his wrist with a pad of paper towels and a length of duct tape, stepped out of the truck, washed his hand and arm in snow, tossed the bloody jacket in the back of the truck and dug out a lighter coat from the bag in back.

Get home,
he thought.
Burn the coat, dump the truck.

Get home.

W
EATHER
D
AVENPORT CRAWLED
sleepily out of bed. The kid was squalling, hungry in his bedroom down the hall, and she started that. Lucas woke up as the housekeeper called, “I got him, Weather. I’m up.”

“Ah, great,” Weather said. She came back to the bed, sat down, looked at the clock.

“Getting up?” Lucas asked.

“Alarm’s going off in fifteen minutes anyway,” she said. She yawned, inhaled, exhaled, pushed herself off the bed and headed for the bathroom, pulling off her cotton nightgown as she went. Lucas, lying half awake under the crazy quilt, could see nothing but darkness on the other side of the wood slats that covered the window. January in Minnesota: the sun came up at 11:45 and went down at noon, he thought.

He shifted his head around on the pillow, tried to get comfortable, tried to get back to sleep. Sleep was unlikely: He’d been feeling down for a month or more, and
depression was the enemy of decent sleep. The marriage was fine, the new kid was great. Nothing to do with that—his sense of the blue was a chemical thing, but the chemicals made sleep impossible. If he went down further, he’d check with the doc. On the other hand, it might just be the winter, which this year had started in October.

He heard the shower start, and then Ellen, the housekeeper, banging down the stairs with the kid. The kid was named Samuel Kalle Davenport, the “Kalle” a Finnish name, for Weather’s late father. The housekeeper was a fifty-five-year-old ex-nurse who loved kids. The four of them together had a deal they all liked.

After a few minutes, the shower stopped and Lucas sat up. He was awake now, no point in struggling against it. He climbed out of bed, remembered the clock, picked it up and turned off the alarm. As he did, Weather came out of the bathroom, rubbing her hair with a towel.

“You getting up?” she asked cheerfully. She was a small woman, and an early bird. She liked nothing better than getting up before the sun, to begin the hunt for worms.

“Uh,” Lucas said. He started for the bathroom, but she smelled so warm and good as he passed her that he slipped an arm around her waist and picked her up and gave her a warm sucking kiss on the tummy below her navel.

She squirmed around, laughed once, and then said, severely, “Put me down, you oaf.”

“Mad rapist attacks naked housewife in bedroom.” Lucas carried her back to the bed and threw her on it and landed on the bed next to her, hands running around where they shouldn’t be.

“Get away from me,” she said, rolling away. “Come on, Lucas, goddamnit.” She whacked him on the ear, and it hurt, and he collapsed on the bed. She got out and started
scrubbing at her hair again and said, “You men get hard-ons in the morning and you’re so proud of them, just swishing around in the air. You can’t help showing off.”

“Try not to use the word
swish,”
Lucas said.

“Sex in the morning is for teenagers, and we aren’t,” she said.

Lucas rolled over on his stomach. “Now you’ve offended me.”

“Offend this,” she said. She’d spun her towel into a whip, and snapped him on the ass with it. That hurt, too, more than the whack on the ear, and he rolled off the bed and said, “Arrgh, naked housewife attacks sleeping man.”

Weather, laughing, backed away from him, rewinding the towel, said, “Sleeping man snapped in the balls with wet towel.”

Then Ellen, the housekeeper, called from the stairs, “You guys up?”

They both stopped in their tracks, and Weather whispered, “Well, you are. What do you want me to tell her?”

W
EATHER WAS A
surgeon, and she was cutting on somebody almost every morning. This morning, she had three separate jobs, all at Regions, all involving burns—two separate skin grafts, and a scalp expansion on the head of a former electric lineman, trying to stretch what hair he had left over the burn scars he’d taken from a hot line.

She was bustling around the kitchen, in full imperial surgeon mode, when Lucas finally made it down the stairs. Ellen had the kid in a high chair, and was pushing orange vegetable mush into his face.

“I’ll be home by three o’clock, Ellen, but I’ll be out of touch from seven-thirty to at least ten,” Weather was saying. “If there’s a problem, you know what to do. The man
from Harper’s is coming over this morning to look at the front steps . . . ”

The phone rang, and they all looked at it. Maybe a canceled operation? Lucas picked it up: “Hello?”

“Lucas? Rose Marie.” The new head of the state’s Department of Public Safety.

“Uh-oh.”

“You got that right. How soon can you get in?”

“Fifteen minutes,” Lucas said. “What’s up?”

“Tell you when you get here. Hurry. Oh—is Weather still there?”

“Just getting ready to leave.”

“Let me talk to her.”

Lucas handed the phone to Weather and at the same time said, “Rose Marie. Something happened, I gotta run.”

Weather took the phone, said, “Hello,” listened for a moment, and then said, “Yes, Lucas gave it to me. I think we’ll start tonight. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I don’t think we’ll skip any of it, I was listening to the Japanese flute last night . . . ”

While they were talking, Lucas went to the front closet and got his overcoat and briefcase. He took his .45 out of the briefcase and clipped it on his belt, and pulled the coat on, listening to Weather talk to his boss. Rose Marie subscribed to a theory that children became smarter if they were exposed to classical music as fetuses, continuing until they were, say, forty-five. She’d found a set of records made specifically for infants. Weather had swallowed the whole thing, and was about to start the program.

“I’m going,” Lucas called to her, when he had his coat on.

Weather said, “Wait, wait . . . ” and then, to the phone, “I’ve got to say good-bye to Lucas. Talk to you tonight.” She hung up and came over to Lucas and stood on tiptoe to kiss him on the lips. “She said you’d be going out of town. So . . . ”

“Oh, boy,” Lucas said. He kissed her again, and then went over and kissed Sam on the top of his head. “See you all.”

R
UNNING A FEW
minutes later than the fifteen he’d promised, Lucas Davenport walked a long block down St. Paul’s Wabasha Street, toward the former store that housed the state Department of Public Safety. Lucas’s own office was a mile or so away, at the main Bureau of Criminal Apprehension office on University Avenue, so he’d had to find a space in one of the commercial parking garages. Around him, feather-like flakes of snow settled on the sidewalks, on the shoulders of passers-by, and drifted into the traffic, slowing and softening the usual hustle of the morning rush.

L
UCAS WAS A
tall, athletic man, hatless, in a blue suit and gray cashmere overcoat, swinging a black Coach briefcase with no thought of the North, of dead people hanging in a frozen stand of oaks. Both coat and case were Christmas gifts from Weather, and though he’d taken some grief about them—they were a little too fey for a cop, he’d been told—he liked them. The coat was soft and warm and dramatic, and the briefcase had that aristocratic thump that impressed people who were impressed by aristocratic thumps. That included almost all bureaucrats.

He was surrounded by bureaucrats, as the result of a political cluster-fuck that had stretched across three or four different sets of politicians. When the dust had settled, the former Minneapolis chief of police was the Minnesota Public Safety Commissioner, and Lucas had a new job fixing crime for the governor.

Lucas’s job was officially designated “Director, Office
of Regional Studies.” The ORS had been planted within the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and drew its budget and support from the BCA—but Lucas reported directly to Rose Marie Roux and through her to the governor. The governor had already been burned by a couple of outstate murder cases that had gone unsolved, and he’d had enough of that.

In both cases, the local sheriff’s departments had investigated the murders, before calling in the BCA. When the cases proved too complicated or politically touchy, they started screaming for help—and blamed the BCA, and the state, when the cases went unsolved.

That the cases had been mucked up by the locals hadn’t cut any ice with the hometown newspapers. Where was all the scientific investigation stuff they kept seeing on the Discovery Channel? Why were they sending all that taxpayer money to St. Paul? What was the governor doing, sitting on his ass?

Questions that a 44 percent governor didn’t appreciate.

So the governor created the Office of Regional Studies in consultation with Roux. The office was intended, as the insiders all knew, to “fix shit.” The BCA director, John McCord, hated the idea. Nobody above him really cared. They just wanted shit fixed. Lucas smiled at the thought. He hadn’t fixed anything big yet, but this call sounded like others he’d gotten from Roux over the years.

Lucas smiled often enough—he liked his job and his life—but the years had given him a hard face and French-Canadian genes had left him with crystal-blue eyes. His hair was dark, with flecks of gray, and a white scar ran across his forehead and one eyebrow onto the cheek below. Another scar dimpled his throat, a nasty round white spot with a slashing tail. He’d been shot by a little girl and had been choking on his tongue and on the blood from the wound, passing out, and a surgeon—the same one he’d
later married—had opened his throat and airway with a jackknife.

That had all been years ago.

Now, he thought, he spent too much time in a chair. In an effort to fight what he saw as sloth, he’d been playing winter basketball with a group of aging jocks from Minneapolis. He was broad-shouldered, quick-moving, and not quite gaunt.

H
E BRUSHED BY
a redheaded woman who was leading a muffin-sized red dog in a muffin-sized red Christmas sweater down the sidewalk. The woman smiled and said, “Hi, Lucas,” as they passed. He half-turned and blurted, “Hey. How ya doin’?” and smiled and kept going. Where’d he know her from? Somewhere. He was up the steps, inside the shopping mall that led to the DPS, in an elevator:
A bartender,
he thought. She used to be a bartender. Where? O’Brien’s? Maybe . . .

R
OSE
M
ARIE
R
OUX’S
office was a twenty-foot square that she’d furnished with her own money: a good cherry-wood desk, two comfortable visitors’ chairs in green leather, a couch, a few prints and photographs of politicians, a bookcase full of reference books and state procedure manuals.

Rose Marie was sprawled in a chair behind her desk, an overweight woman with improbably blond-tinted fly-away hair, wearing a rumpled blue dress, with an unlit cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth. Word around town was that when she took the job, she’d moved the commissioner’s office across the building so she could get a window that opened. At any time of day, you were likely to see her head sticking out the window, it was said, with a plume of smoke hanging over it.

“What?” Lucas asked.

“Sit down,” she said. She pointed at a green leather chair. “The governor’s a couple of minutes out, but I can give you an outline.” She took a breath. “Well . . . ”

“What?”

“We’ve had a lynching.” The statement hung in the air like an oral Goodyear blimp.

“Tell me,” Lucas said after a moment.

“Up north, a few miles outside of Armstrong. You know where that is?”

“By Thief River, somewhere.”

“Very good. A black man and a white woman were found hanging from a tree out in the countryside. They were naked. Handcuffed, legs taped with strapping tape. They’d been living together in some flyspeck town north of Armstrong.”

“Lynched,” Lucas said. He thought about it for a few seconds, then said slowly, “Lynched means that somebody is suspected of a crime. The townspeople take justice into their own hands and the law doesn’t do anything about it. Is that—?”

“No. What actually happened is that they were murdered,” Rose Marie said, twisting in her chair. “Sometime last night. But it’s a black man and a blond woman and they’re hanging from trees, naked. When the word gets out, the shit’s gonna hit the fan, and we can say
murder
all we want, and the movie people are going to be screaming
lynching.
We need to get some shit up there.”

“Does Bemidji know?” Lucas asked. The BCA’s Bemidji office handled investigations in the northern part of the state.

“I don’t know—they don’t know from me. What we’ve got is an informal contact with Ray Zahn, the state patrolman out of Armstrong,” Rose Marie said. “He called in about forty-five minutes ago, and had the call switched to me, at home. He seems to be a smart guy. He was first on
the scene, a couple of minutes ahead of the first sheriff’s deputies.”

“Maybe the sheriff’ll handle it,” Lucas suggested.

“Zahn says no. He says the sheriff is a new guy who’s scared of his own shadow. Zahn says the sheriff’ll call us as soon as he looks at the scene.”

“And I’m going.”

“Absolutely. That’s the first thing the governor said when I called him. We’ve got a National Guard chopper getting ready. You can fly right into the scene.”

“That’s all we know?” Lucas asked.

“That’s everything,” Roux said.

“Then I’ll get going,” Lucas said, pushing up from the green chair. He felt a hum, a little spear of pleasure breaking through the blue. An evil bastard to hunt: nothing like it to cheer a guy up. “You can call me in the air if anything changes.”

“Wait for the governor. He’s only a minute or two away.”

W
HILE THEY WAITED,
Lucas got on his cell phone and called Del: “Where are you?”

“In bed.” Del Capslock had come over from Minneapolis with Lucas.

“Get up. I’ll pick you up in fifteen or twenty minutes. Bring some clothes for a couple of days. Bring some boots, too. We’re going up north. We’re gonna be outside.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Yeah. Exactly right. I’ll tell you when I see you.”

R
OSE
M
ARIE’S TELEPHONE
rang, and she picked it up, listened for one second, then dropped it back on the hook. “Governor just came through the front door.”