John Sandford - Phantom prey

Neither Lucas nor Del had fired a shot; they both climbed back into Lucas’s truck and Lucas whipped it around in a circle. Davis was moving forward, but couldn’t climb the steep bank of the ditch for a hundred yards or so, and bounced and ricocheted over the rough turf on the edge of the ditch, and finally coaxed the truck up the side and hit the gravel road. Lucas was a hundred feet behind him when they cleared the top of a hill, past a farmhouse where there was a woman standing on the lawn with a golden retriever. They were going way too fast.

Gravel dust made it impossible to see for more than forty or fifty yards. Every time Lucas moved to the side, to get out of the dust, Davis moved over in front of him.

“Gotta hard right coming up,” Del yelled. “Coming up… Coming up close!”

Lucas hit the brakes and dropped back, the stability- control lights flashing on his dashboard, but Davis plowed into the intersection, too fast to hold. The back end of the pickup started to slide, the rear wheels frantically throwing rocks and dirt, and the truck almost went into the ditch again, but Davis at least got it straight, with two wheels down in the ditch and two on the shoulder. Then the ditch wall got steeper and he tried to stop; did stop. Sat for a moment, and then the truck slowly rolled sideways. Davis tried to steer into it, but failed, and the truck rolled, and stopped upside down.

“Hard right,” Del said, climbing out behind the muzzle of his Beretta 9mm.

Lucas said, “Might be a gun in the truck. Watch it.” They boxed the truck, easing up behind it. There was no visible piece of sheet metal on the vehicle that hadn’t been dented in the roll. All the windows were cracked, and when Lucas came up on the driver’s side, he could hear Davis weeping.

He risked a peek: Davis was hanging upside down in his safety belt, his face contorted, tears running down his forehead into his hair. Lucas asked, “Are you hurt?”

Davis, out of control, asked “ Wha- wha- what’s gonna happen to the birds?”

“Are you hurt?” Del asked.

“No, I’m just upside down."

"Gotta gun?” Lucas asked. “No."

"Let’s get you out of there.”

They’d gotten him out, and Del had cuffed him, when a sheriff’s car cut around a corner a half- mile away, out from behind the shelter of a stand of trees, and Del looked back at the farmhouse where the woman had been and said, “She must have called it in.”

Lucas said, “Hang on,” and climbed in the truck and hit the switch that activated the two red- LED flashers on his grill. The cop car slowed a bit, but came on, stopped thirty yards away and the cop got out with a shotgun, pointed to the sky, and Lucas shouted, “BCA-BCA,” and he and Del held up their IDs.

“I’m so fucked,” Davis said.

With the Goodhue deputy standing there, they read Davis his rights, and Lucas asked if he understood them, and then Del said, “You scared the shit out of us, back there, man. What the hell was that all about?”

“I knew you were coming, someday,” Davis said. “I knew you’d find out.” He began to weep again, and the deputy seemed about to say something, but Lucas gave him a quick head shake.

“You almost shot me in the balls, Ricky,” Lucas said. “Two inches over, and I’d be Nutless Davenport, wonder cop.”

That made Davis smile, momentarily, shakily, and he said, “I didn’t want to do it. That crazy bitch made me do it. We weren’t trying to kill you.”Lucas was a little pissed: “Man, you shoot a gun at somebody."

"I was trying to wound you or something. Get you off the case

Didn’t try to hit you in the nuts, though,” he said, miserably. Then. “Look at my truck. Jesus, look at my truck. What’s gonna happen to my birds? What’s gonna happen to the farm?”

“Did you buy the farm with the fifty thousand?"

"Yeah… paid it off, anyway,” he said. “We couldn’t afford the mortgage when it rolled over. It was some kind of A- T- M or A- R- M or something. Couldn’t make payments. We just got the birds, we were desperate.”

“Who killed Frances?"

"She did,” he said bitterly. “Helen,” Lucas said. “Called me up at work and said there’d been a terrible accident and I had to get down there. Accident, my ass, she stabbed her about a hundred times. Big puddle of blood all over the place. I never knew she hated the Austins that much.”

Del: “Hated them?"

"Hated them. They treated her like dirt. Paid her shit, and she was like, invisible. If I’d known all that shit… I don’t know."

"So you didn’t plan it out?"

"Hell no. I wouldn’t have done anything to Frances Austin,” Davis said. “I mean, we stole the money. She had so much, we didn’t think she’d notice right away, or that she could figure out what happened. But she figured it out: came right out and told Helen that she was gonna be locked up for a hundred years, because that’s what happened when somebody stole from the Austins. They started screaming at each other, and finally, Helen… stabbed her.”

“And you came down and picked up the body with your wrecker, and put her in the ditch.”

“I guess,” he said. “That’s the goddamnedest thing,” the Goodhue deputy said. “You should have gone right straight to the police."

"You weren’t there,” Davis moaned. “You weren’t there."

"And you loved her?” Lucas asked. “I did then, but that’s gone away,” Davis said. “That crazy bitch. I see her looking at me… she was scaring me. I think, I don’t know. I didn’t want to be around when she had a knife in her hand.”

“When she killed the other ones, were you around for that?” Lucas asked.

“What?"

"When she killed-"

"She didn’t kill anybody else,” Davis said. “I mean, I know that. We were together when those other people were killed, and we weren’t anywhere around there.”

“What about Frank?” Del asked. “Frank who?"

"Frank Willett?"

"I don’t know any Frank Willett. Who’s he?”

Goodhue County was part of a sheriff’s co- op and the deputy called in the crime- scene team, and they all trucked back to the trailer. Davis told them where the pistol was, the one he’d used to shoot at Lucas, and they marked it. And they dug out the folder from the Riverside bank, the one that would have Emily Wau’s fingerprints on it.

“Whose idea was the Francis thing-calling you Frank, so the ID would be good?” Lucas asked.

“Helen figured that out,” Davis said. “Where’d you get the ID?”He shrugged: “Trucker. Them things float around, you can get any name you want.”

“Did you have one of Frances’s credit cards or something? I understand you had to have two forms of ID.”

Davis’s head bobbed. “Yeah… Helen got one of those offers in the mail, for a credit card, already approved. She mailed it back, and the card came. That’s what started the whole thing. That right there.”

They were outside, in the dark, about to put Davis in the deputy’s car, when another car topped the hill by the neighbor’s farmhouse, and Davis said, “That’s Helen, coming home from work.”

Sobotny’s car slowed at the turnoff, as Lucas hustled back to the truck, and then straightened and continued down the road. Del piled into the passenger seat, and they went after her, caught her a mile away, flashers going, and she finally pulled over by a stop sign.

They came up behind her, slowly, carefully, and found her with her head resting on the center pad of the steering wheel.

Lucas said, “Come out of there.” She sat up for a moment, staring straight ahead, like she was considering other possibilities, then turned the key and shut down the car, and got out.

“Agent Davenport,” she said. “Helen."