John Sandford - Broken Prey

Sloan came in with a handful of paper: “He cut out newspaper stories on the killings.”

“All right, all right, that’s good,” Lucas said. He thumbed through the stories-they’d been cut from a half dozen papers. They were rolling downhill now. “He was collecting them. Better and better.”

The deputy came in: “There’s a gun safe in the back bedroom, in a closet. It was open. A rifle and two shotguns.”

“There’s a reloading machine down in the basement,” Lucas said. “Run down and see what kinds of dies he has. . see if there’s any brass lying around.”

The deputy disappeared, and Sloan asked, “Anything in the bills?”

“He buys all his gas in Mankato. . he bought one tank in the Cities, in Bloomington, right down by the mall. So. . that ain’t anything.”

The deputy came back: “There’s brass for a.40 and a.45.”

“So he’s got two pistols,” Sloan said.

And Nordwall came back: “O’Donnell cleaned out his account yesterday afternoon. He took out five thousand, and later in the day, he hit his ATM for another five hundred.”

“Do they know. .?”

“It was him. Personally. They know him. Told the teller that he was buying a car, and he’d sell one next week and put it all back.”

Sloan looked at Lucas and nodded.

“I put out a pickup on the Acura, but just locally,” Nordwall said. “You want to go statewide?”

Lucas looked around the house: they had the trophy news stories, and a spot of blood. A missing man, missing money, and some missing clothes. “Yeah. Let’s go everywhere,” he said.

Nordwall called into his office, staying in touch. Lucas heard him say, “Well, Jesus Christ, just lie about it. Later we can say you hadn’t been clued in. Yeah, lie. And if they ask you if I told you to lie, lie about that.”

“What the hell was that?”

“A local reporter called and asked if we were looking at a staff member at St. John’s.”

“Ah, Jesus,” Lucas said.

“Wasn’t us,” Nordwall said. “It’s the goddamn hospital. That place leaks like a sieve.”

Lucas thought about it for a minute, then said to Nordwall. “Let’s go take a walk around the yard.”

Nordwall said, “What?”

Outside, Lucas said, “I didn’t want your deputy hearing this. I just don’t want to leave you hanging in the wind, you got that election coming up. . So now you’re gonna be one of about seven people in the state who know it. You gotta keep your mouth shut. I mean, don’t tell your wife.”

Nordwall looked at him with a bit of skepticism. “You know something that important?”

Lucas said, “A few days ago, some fishermen pulled a body out of the Minnesota River up in Le Sueur County, by Kasota. It had been in the water a month or so.”

“I heard about it. It’s right across the county line. You think O’Donnell did it?”

“I’m sure our killer did it, O’Donnell or whoever,” Lucas said. He pivoted to face Nordwall. “The body was. . Charlie Pope.”

Nordwall’s mouth dropped open. After a few seconds, he said, “You gotta be shittin’ me,” and Lucas had to smile.

Lucas explained. Going back in the door, Nordwall muttered, “You’re playing a dangerous game, Lucas. It’s the right thing, but if you don’t get this guy. . the media are gonna scalp you.”

“We’re gonna keep it quiet for just a couple more days,” Lucas said. “Let’s see if we can jump O’Donnell before he knows we’re looking for him. We’ll check and make sure we’ve got all his cars. We’ll get the tags for the MDX and mugs out to all the highway-patrol troopers here, down in Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois, out in the Dakotas. Check the airport and see if the MDX is there, and if we can spot a plane ticket. What else. .?”

They worked out a program and started running it.

An hour after Lucas got back to BCA headquarters, the cops at Minneapolis-St. Paul International called and said they had the MDX. “We haven’t opened it,” the cop said. “I can see what looks like a parking ticket on the floor-that’d give us an exact time it came in.”

“Don’t touch it,” Lucas said. “I’m sending my crime-scene guys over. Have somebody stand by the truck.”

While the crime-scene truck rolled, Lucas got the co-op center calling the airlines, looking for the ride that O’Donnell took out of town. He watched them work it for a while, got bored when nothing happened, walked down to the canteen, and got a cup of coffee.

Hopping Crow called: “The blood in the refrigerator was frozen, of course. We don’t have a DNA yet, maybe by tomorrow. I can tell you that it’s human, and that it’s Charlie Pope’s blood type. Pope was an O positive, O’Donnell’s records say he’s an A positive. So.”

“So Pope’s blood was in O’Donnell’s freezer.”

“Probably his. Peterson’s was also O, but we don’t have any reason to think her blood was frozen.”

He was in his office when the Crime Scene crew called. “The parking ticket on the floor was from seven o’clock last night.”

“I’ll pass it on to the coordination center. What else?”

“Nothing really, just the usual car junk. He was pretty neat. We’ll be done in a half hour. You want us to take it to the impound?”

“Yeah. Seal it up. We may want to go over it with a microscope, depending on how things break.”

The same guy called back twenty minutes later. “We found some blood. It was under the mat in the cargo compartment. It looks relatively fresh. . it’s dry, but not dusty. Thought you ought to know.”

“We need a blood type and DNA,” Lucas said. “Get it back here as quick as you can.”

They were running now. He got another blood type: it was O again, could be Pope, could be Peterson. He made a mental bet on Peterson. He called Hopping Crow, to tell him to push the tests. “We’ll know by tomorrow night,” Hopping Crow said. “Who knows, maybe it’s somebody else?”

“Don’t even think that.”

They picked up bits and pieces of information about O’Donnell and his lifestyle all through the day, but nothing that would point a finger. Cops were talking with a kayak club, a singles cycling club, the last woman O’Donnell was known to have dated. She said, “It came down to a choice between me and the Pontiac, and I had the feeling I wasn’t going to win. So we sort of broke it off. .”

Early in the day, Lucas felt that the logjam was breaking, that the ice was going out, that the peel was coming off the banana. And then everything slowed, and he began to see nothing but trivia. . He wandered out of the office at nine o’clock, discouraged.

Where the fuck was he?

Ruffe Ignace lay awake in bed, listening to Ruffe’s Radio, cataloging the day’s events and insults: What the fuck is she doing, telling me that I have to watch my adverbs? She wouldn’t know an adverb if one jumped up and bit her on the tit. Green is a bad color for me, it makes my skin look yellow; gotta get rid of the green golf shirt. I wonder if my dick reaches up to my bellybutton when I’m really hard? I don’t think it does. Does anybody’s? Maybe I oughta get dressed and go out for a slice. .

When the phone rang, he said, “Pope,” and he scrambled through the dark to the phone charger, fumbled with the phone, punched the TALK button: “Ignace.”

And it was: “Hey, Ruffe. Thought I’d call you and say good-bye.”

“Good-bye? Where are you now?”

A rumbling, wheezing, whispery laugh, and then, “If this phone is tapped, you’ll find out soon enough. Anyway, the police were getting too close: this Davenport guy is smarter than I expected.”

“I don’t know anything about that-as far as I know, they’ve got no idea where you are, Charlie.”