John Sandford - Broken Prey

“And. .”

“There’s none of that in his history. Lucas, I’m coming to the conclusion that he is not our man.”

“Then he’s dead,” Lucas said.

“That may be so.”

“Don’t tell me that,” Lucas said. He was groping: “How about a tumor, or something. Remember the Texas Tower, Whitman?”

“Yes. .”

“There was a song about him, how he had a tumor in his brain,” Lucas said. “Something like that.”

“Yes. There was a song, I believe by a person named Richard Friedman. And Whitman did have a tumor, although they don’t know if it was responsible for his behavior.”

“What if O’Donnell had a tumor?”

“That’s a possibility-when you’re dealing with the brain, almost anything is possible. However, when there’s a tumor involved, there are physical symptoms as well as psychological upsets, and none of his family and friends saw anything like that.”

“How do you explain the fact that he took all the money out of his bank account the day he disappeared?”

She smiled and shook her head: “I don’t explain it. I leave that up to you.”

Sloan, who had been watching the interchange, said, “Nordwall had a couple of deputies trying to find out where O’Donnell was the night Peterson disappeared. They can’t find him. They can’t find him on the nights that Larson or the Rices were killed, either-but that might not mean much. He lived out in the woods, and the Rices and Larson are far enough back that nobody really can put their finger on whether they saw him or not.”

“Mention the shift problem,” Elle said.

“Yeah, the shift,” Sloan said. “He worked a seven-to-three shift, but he always came in early, around six o’clock, to get the handoff from the overnight. That means he had to get up around five o’clock, and if he wanted to get eight hours of sleep, he was in bed by nine. So. People wouldn’t expect to see him late on the nights of the killings, but it would be absolutely normal for him to be in bed. Legitimately.”

“God. . bless me,” Lucas said.

“Here’s a question,” Sloan said. “He didn’t come into work-so presumably he was (a) on his way to Chicago or was already there, or (b) he was dead. Assuming he went to Chicago after work on the day he decided to run, sometime around seven o’clock, he would have been there by, say, nine o’clock. He didn’t call Ignace for more than twenty-four hours. What was he doing?”

“Making. . arrangements,” Lucas said. Elle wasn’t there at the moment, so he added, “How the fuck would I know?”

“Maybe we ought to call Chicago Homicide, see if they’ve had anything particularly rude. .”

Chicago homicide had one murder reported for the night O’Donnell disappeared: a twelve-year-old boy named Terence Smith had run over his uncle, Roger Smith, with Roger’s own car.

“They’re sure it’s murder?” Lucas asked Sloan.

“He ran over him eight or ten times. They said Roger’s head looked like a thin-crust pizza.”

“Ah.”

“What next?” Sloan asked. “Where do we go?”

On the morning of the third day, Lucas, after a restless night, heard the alarm go off, shut it down, waited; and the phone rang.

“Catch him yet?” Weather asked.

“Not yet. Still thrashing around,” he said. “How’re you doing?”

“Had an interesting case early this morning,” Weather said. “A man was shot in the face. I assisted, putting things right.”

“That sounds British: putting things right. ”

“I think I’m becoming British. I like it here.”

“Wish I were there. . sort of,” Lucas said. “So: You fixed the guy?”

“Oh, yeah. He wasn’t that badly hurt-depending on how you define ‘hurt,’ I guess. But what struck me as strange was that in the whole time I’ve been working here, that was the first gunshot wound I’ve seen. In Minneapolis, as quiet as it is, it’s an odd week when we don’t have two or three.”

“You’re starting to sound like a liberal: Want to take away our God-given right to bear arms?”

“No, no. But it’s weird: there are no guns. .”

He was shaving, a half hour later, when the phrase struck him:

There are no guns.

Huh.

He finished shaving, got in the shower, thought about it some more. No guns.

He called the airport cops and asked them to round up all declarations of handguns made the night O’Donnell flew. There were only a half dozen: he got the names and addresses, and phoned them to the co-op group, had them check the people behind the names.

When he got downtown, the co-op people reported that three of the men who checked guns were members of a shooting team who were on their way to a match in Virginia. The co-op had talked to sponsors and spouses of all three men, and then to the men themselves.

“They aren’t O’Donnell,” the co-op guy said.

Two of the other three were going prairie-dog shooting with hybrid single-shot pistols, not the.40 and.45 that Lucas was looking for. The co-op had interviewed a woman in the apartment complex where the two men lived. They were told that neither man looked like O’Donnell, that they lived full-time in the apartment complex, and that they were both members of a gay shooting-sports group that often traveled to Wyoming for prairie-dog shoots. The last guy hadn’t been found, but one of the gun inspectors at the airport said that he was a lawyer and a black guy and that the gun he had checked was an antique.

Lucas called Sloan. “Remember when we found that pistol brass in the basement, I think it was.40 and.45, and the gun safe was open, like something had just been taken out?”

“Yeah?”

“If he flew, if he knew he was heading for the airport to fly, what happened to the guns? He couldn’t get on the airplane with them. He didn’t declare them. The guns weren’t in the car. Where are they?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay-now try this. What is the great similarity between Sam O’Donnell and Charlie Pope?”

Sloan thought for a few seconds, then said, “They both spent a lot of time in St. John’s. .”

“Something more basic than that,” Lucas said. “ We can’t find him. Not only that, nobody’s seen him. He’s invisible, but everything we’ve got points directly at him. Just as everything pointed at Charlie-the DNA, the past record, the calls to Ignace. We even had a witness who thought she saw him, but now we know she didn’t.”

“Yeah. But it wasn’t like the killer was trying to lead us to Charlie. The lead to Charlie came from that Fox guy, the parole officer. .”

“That was not quite a coincidence,” Lucas said. “A guy who is suspected of killing women after raping them, and who has been treated and released, disappears, and suddenly a sex killer is on the loose. What parole officer wouldn’t make a call? Then, because we’d figured that out on our own, when the DNA came in-there was never any doubt. No doubt in anybody’s mind, except maybe Elle’s, until the cat fisherman brought up Pope’s hand.”

Lucas continued: “Now, we have the same situation. Guy disappears. Evidence is found both in the refrigerator and in the car. Charlie Pope’s frozen blood and Carlita Peterson’s blood, not frozen. But nobody ever sees the guy. Nobody sees his face. Nobody sees him anywhere . . and Elle says he doesn’t fit.”

“You think we’re being conned?”

“I’m forty-six percent sure of it,” Lucas said.

“Forty-six percent. You gotta go with that.”

“Listen, this is what I think: the guns thing was a fuckup. He’s still out there, and he’s still got the guns.”

“Who?”