John Sandford - Broken Prey

“Sure. Why?”

“Things are a little tense here,” Weather said. “We’ve just heard that France has raised its terror-alert level. They think something’s going on.”

“Really?” Something else to worry about.

“Yes. They’ve gone from Run to Hide . .”

The joke was so unexpected that Lucas snorted, and hurt his nose again. He said, “Oh, Jesus, don’t make me laugh. .”

“The only two higher levels are Surrender and Collaborate ,” Weather said.

“You’re killing my nose, goddamnit,” Lucas said. “Davenport’s a French name, by the way. .”

The second call came a few minutes after nine o’clock as Lucas stood naked in front of his chest of drawers, digging around, certain that there was one more pair of clean shorts. He’d seen them the day before. .

He ran the washer according to a severely logical schedule based on need: he had, he thought, perhaps twenty pairs of shorts. Why wash after only five or ten pairs have been used, as Weather would, thus putting all that extra water down the drain and through the sewage plant, when you could wait the whole twenty days and only have to wash once? Of course, if you miscalculated. .

He had just found the pair of shorts when the phone rang; he stepped over to the table and took it.

Dr. Cale, from St. John’s. “We’ve, uh, had what is sort of an anomalous situation out here. I really feel stupid for calling you, but I decided it was best not to put it off.”

“What?” Lucas asked; he felt a tingle.

“Well, uh, after you left here, uh, the word that you were looking at staff members got around pretty quick. Not from Jansen. Apparently, somebody in the security booth overheard enough to understand what you were looking at, and the gossip got started. .”

“What? What happened?”

“Sam O’Donnell didn’t show up for work this morning,” Cale said. “He’s an hour and a half late. Nobody knows where he is-he’s not at home, we checked. At least, he doesn’t answer when we knock. Doesn’t answer pages or his phone. Nobody’s seen him.”

“Okay, okay-this is something. I’m coming down there,” Lucas said. “If he shows up, call me on my cell phone. I’ll be there in an hour.”

He and Sloan did the running hookup, taking the Porsche back through the bean- and cornfields, past the truck gardens and river-bottom fields; there’d been a bug hatch of some kind, and they started picking up serious splatter every time they crossed a bridge. On the way down, they called Nordwall, the Blue Earth County sheriff, and arranged for a search warrant.

The sheriff called back: “Thought you’d want to know. He drives a gray Acura MDX.”

“Excellent!” Lucas said.

Sloan had a laptop with him. He called Cale, got O’Donnell’s address, plugged it into a Microsoft map program, and took them through St. John’s into an exurban neighborhood between St. John’s and Mankato. They cleared the top of a hill, where Lucas expected to find the house, but then twisted down a narrow blacktop road into a deep creek-cut valley, and along the creek for a half mile. They spotted a sheriff’s car at the bottom of a gravel driveway, slowed, and turned in. A deputy came over and said, “Davenport? The sheriff’s up at the house. They haven’t gone in yet. They’re waiting.”

Lucas took the Porsche up the drive, found a modern redwood-and-stone house set to look down the valley; the slope behind the house was heavily wooded, burr oaks with fat dark leaves. A separate building, a workshop or second garage, was visible behind the residence. A blue Buick and a patrol car were parked in front of the attached garage. Nordwall was standing next to the Buick with a deputy, who was swinging a wrecking bar like a baseball bat. Lucas and Sloan got out of the Porsche and walked over.

“Get the warrant?” Lucas asked.

Nordwall nodded: “Yup. Hope he didn’t go out for a loaf of bread. . you think he’s the second man?”

“Uh, we gotta talk about that,” Lucas said. “Let’s take a look inside.”

The deputy said, “The sheriff wanted to wait for you, but I looked in the back window. This guy might be running. There’s a whole pile of clothes on one bed, and a suitcase, like he left it behind.”

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.