John Sandford - Stolen Prey

Sanderson knew exactly where she was going, looked at the back door. The door was locked, and she’d have to fit a key into it. Albitis was between her and the front door. She panicked and pulled open the nearest door, the one that went to the attic, and as she heard the mechanical ratcheting as the.45 was cocked, she ran up the stairs.

The stairs were a straight shot, eighteen steps straight up: the entry into the attic was simply a hole in the floor, wrapped on three sides by a banister. The attic, which had been Sanderson’s bedroom when she was a teenager, was full of junk. She looked around wildly, anything that she could use to defend herself, heard Albitis start up the stairs, shouting, “Kris! Kris!”

Daddy’s golf clubs, nearly twenty years old and covered with dust, were poking out of his old Golden Golphers-themed golf bag, propped against the wall behind the back banister. She pulled out the biggest one, an original Big Bertha, raised it over her head, looked over the banister, and Albitis was right there, nearly at the top of the stairs with the.45 in her hand.

Albitis shouted, “Kris! I don’t want-”

Sanderson didn’t hear any of that: she just saw a killer coming for her, and she swung the club in a long arc. Albitis either sensed the motion or heard it, cocked her head upward, and caught the face of the Big Bertha on her forehead.

Crunch.

It sounded bad. It sounded like somebody had broken a board over his knee.

Albitis stiffened, looked right at Sanderson with blank eyes, and then toppled and fell down the stairs in three stages. She went thumpa-thump , and stopped, then thumpa-thumpa-thump , and stopped a couple of steps from the bottom, then turned one last time, thumpa-thump , and hit the floor at the bottom.

Sanderson cried, “Oh, my God, Edie, are you hurt?”

She ran down the stairs and found Albitis in a heap; still breathing, her eyes still open, and blank as a sheet of paper. There was no blood, but there was a major dent where the crown of her head met her forehead.

“Oh, my God,” Sanderson cried again. She tried to get Albitis to sit upright, but Albitis was as loose as a bag of laundry.

Sanderson ran to the front door and looked out, and then to the back door and looked out, and then to the garage. She frantically threw the boxes of gold onto the garage floor, then half-carried, half-dragged Albitis to the car and across the backseat.

“Are you all right?” she sobbed.

No answer.

She ran back into the house, got Albitis’s shoulder bag, and threw it on the other woman’s body.

As she backed out of the garage, she saw the boxes of gold lying on the garage floor and got out and ran back up the driveway, pulled the door down, making sure it latched. She was five minutes from Regions Hospital. She didn’t dare take Albitis all the way in because there would be questions. Instead, she drove around on side streets until she found a place where she couldn’t easily be seen, dragged Albitis out of the car, and propped her against a tree.

She got Albitis’s bag and propped it against her side: What’s a woman without her bag? Albitis was still as loose as death, but she wasn’t dead: she was now snoring. As Sanderson turned away from the body, she saw Albitis’s cell phone on the ground, where it had fallen out of a pocket. She picked it up, looked at it, and thought, Keys. She went back to Albitis’s bag and got the car keys. With the keys in her pocket, she drove out to the end of the street and called 911.

The 911 dispatcher asked, “Is this an emergency?”

A St. Paul Cop called Lucas through the BCA switchboard.

“Uh, you guys had that pickup request on an Edie Albitis?”

“Yeah! You got her?”

“Well, sort of…”

Albitis was being prepped for surgery when Lucas arrived at the emergency room. He talked briefly to a neurosurgeon who said that Albitis had not regained consciousness since she’d arrived, and had a significant depressive fracture of the frontal bone.

“The imaging shows we’ve got significant epidural bleeding under the impact site, and there appears to be some rebound bleeding on the opposite side of her head,” he said. “We need to relieve the pressure from the bleeding as quickly as we can, so we’re going in right now. She was lucky in that whatever hit her didn’t break the skin, so the wound is closed.”

“She gonna make it?” Lucas asked.

The surgeon shrugged. “I’d say she should, but I don’t know how bad she’s been scrambled. She took a terrific whack with something. Something smooth, no edges to rip the skin. I was almost thinking it might be something like a fender, but the radius of a fender is too large. This was a small-radius impact, and nearly symmetrical. It’s like somebody whacked her with one of those iron balls they use in the shot put.”

“An iron ball?”

“Just an example,” the doc said. “But like that. I’d say small radius, metal, smooth, moving fast. The frontal bone is tough. This took a lot of energy.”

A St. Paul cop was in the waiting room, one of the first responders, and he described the scene where they picked her up. “Got a nine-one-one call, and we were close and went over there and found her. Her purse was there, but nothing else.”

There was no sign of an accident, no glass in the street. She was propped up against a tree, completely out of it, when the cops arrived. “We could see something was wrong with her head, so we called for an ambulance. Talked to some of the neighbors, but nobody had seen anything. Where she was … wasn’t like concealed, or anything, she was right out in the open, but she would have been hard to see from any of the houses. The place was picked.”

“What about the call to nine-one-one?”

“Woman caller, gave the exact location, sounded freaked out. The call came from a no-name phone. Didn’t find a phone with Albitis, so it may have been her own phone.”

“Shoot.”

After thinking about it, Lucas called the dispatch center and had them play the 911 call for him. He couldn’t have proven it, not in a court, but he recognized the trembling panic of the caller. “That fuckin’ Sanderson. Kristina Sanderson,” he said aloud, and he went to find her.

After dropping Albitis and making the call to 911, Sanderson wiped the phone with a Kleenex and dropped it out the window onto the freeway, where it was run over several hundred times in the next hour or so, before the biggest chunk of the finely ground remnant made it to the shoulder.

She was worried about Albitis, but was now more focused on the gold. Albitis, she thought, really couldn’t turn her in, without implicating herself. So, however that turned out, it was something for the future. For now, she had to take care of the gold, which was the only remaining reason for doing any of this.

Back at the house, she threw the boxes of gold back in the car. Since she’d already moved them once, by the time she was finished, she’d moved seventeen hundred pounds of heavy metal, almost as though she’d been stacking car batteries all day.

When the gold was loaded, she went out to Albitis’s car and found more gold in the trunk. She backed Albitis’s car up to the garage and transferred the gold to her car. Then she got a bunch of garbage bags from under the kitchen sink, a spade, and a blue plastic tarp from the garage, put them in her car, and pulled out to the street. Albitis’s car went into the garage: she’d move it later.

With all that done, she headed out into the countryside. Out to the farm.

She’d never really expected to have the money to buy the place, but she’d visited it a dozen times, touring her dream. Dog kennels over here, a stable over there. Chicken coops to the right.