John Sandford - Broken Prey

“Ah. . poop. Let me check that.”

He gave it to one of the co-op staff, who checked and came back five minutes later: “There was a name change, all right. Still can’t find the references. .”

“Take the most uncommon-looking last name in the references and start calling around to all of them you can find,” Lucas suggested.

They spent the rest of the morning tracking more dead ends: the work was tedious and left Lucas feeling stupid. At lunchtime, he went out for a BLT, then returned to his office and told Carol not to let anyone in, short of an emergency.

He closed the door, put his feet up on his desk, and thought about all the activity in the co-op room. Elle might be right: the kind of information they were getting wouldn’t really pinpoint anyone. The other problem was, when you were dealing with so many possibilities, you tended to forget about the facts you already had.

For instance, he thought, somebody had passed the information about Peterson to the Big Three. That was a fact, and they hadn’t emphasized it enough. It had to be one of fewer than a dozen people. They were all on tape.

Did O’Donnell make any small specific move, did he touch all three food trays, did he do anything that might possibly involve the passing of information? How about the guys up in the cage? Was there some way to fiddle with the time code on the tape, or mess with the tape itself, so the guy in the back could have a little chat with Taylor, Lighter, and Chase and nobody would know?

Lucas couldn’t stand going down to the co-op room again, so he dragged out the tapes of the St. John’s isolation wing. He ran through them at high speed, the people coming and going in their silent-movie way.

Here came O’Donnell. Here was the food. He says something to Lighter, and the food goes in. Didn’t touch anything that time. He talks to Chase. Food goes in. .

He couldn’t see it. Maybe O’Donnell put the messages in the food in the hallway? Might he have some power over one of the orderlies who delivered the trays?

He ran back and forth through the tapes, watching people come and go, staffers talking to prisoners, interacting with other staffers. Here’s Beloit, here’s Grant, here’s Hart, here’s O’Donnell, here goes Sennet. .

“What’s he doing?” Lucas asked himself.

He was watching Leo Grant. Hard to pick up, if you weren’t running the tapes at high speed.

Okay: Grant walks down the corridor, dressed in slacks and a sport coat, hands in his pockets. He’s with Sennet. Sennet pushes a button, and they talk to Lighter. While they talk, Grant takes off his sport coat, folds it over his arm.

Lucas couldn’t make out what the conversation was about, but watched as Grant turned his back to the window where Lighter was standing. Grant was facing both the camera and Sennet. They talked some more, and then Sennet punched the window release, and the window closed, shutting Lighter away again.

Sennet steps across the hallway. Grant, still with his coat off, steps sideways across the hall, never turning his back fully to the camera or to Sennet. Sennet opens Chases’s window. They talk, Grant turns his back to Chase, as they talk. He’s facing Sennet. Sennet closes Chase’s window. Taylor’s window is down the hall. Sennet heads that way, and Grant slips his jacket on, and follows Sennet, his back to the camera. They talk to Taylor, and Grant casually slips his jacket off again. He turns his back to Taylor, but never to Sennet or the camera. .

Sennet punched Taylor’s window when they were finished, and he and Grant walked back toward the camera, Grant a step behind so that Sennet had to turn slightly to talk to him. They disappeared under the camera and, presumably, out the door.

Lucas ran the sequence several times. Maybe Grant just couldn’t get the jacket right. Maybe the temperature was uncomfortable. But maybe. . could he have had something written on the back of his shirt? Or a piece of paper or cloth tacked to his shirt?

Lucas dug out the anomalies list and found only one short entry for Grant: a Dr. Peter Baylor, from a clinic in Colorado, had mentioned that Grant had gone to a private psychiatric clinic in Cancun after leaving Colorado. The anomaly was that there were three references from Colorado in Grant’s record, but none from Cancun.

Lucas looked up the telephone numbers for Colorado, called, asked for Peter Baylor, and was told that he wasn’t working that day. “I’m trying to find the phone number for a former staff member of yours, Leo. .” He flipped through the paper. It wasn’t Leonard, it was. . “Leopold Grant. He left your hospital and apparently went to Cancun.”

After being routed around, he talked to a woman in the clinic’s personnel department who didn’t have a number, but had a name: The Coetrine Center. After a hassle with the AT amp;T operator, he got the place. The woman who answered the phone, in Spanish, switched smoothly to English, then forwarded him to another office. The man who answered the phone there, in Spanish, changed to English.

Lucas said, “I need some information about a former employee of yours named Leopold Grant. .”

“You already have some incorrect information,” the man said, pleasantly enough. “Here, you might as well get it from the horse’s mouth. .”

Before Lucas could reply, the man half covered the mouthpiece of the receiver, and Lucas could hear him call out something, but not what he said.

A second later, another phone receiver rattled, and an American man’s voice said, “This is Leo Grant. Can I help you?”

For a moment, Lucas experienced the kind of disorientation he might have felt in a falling elevator.

Then he said, “I beg your pardon? Who is this?”

The Cancun guy said, “Leo Grant. Who are you?”

“Uh. . Lucas Davenport-I’m an agent with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. We have had a series of murders here. . one of the people we’re investigating is a Leopold Grant, a psychologist who works at the St. John’s Security Hospital. He shows references from the West Bend Hospital in Boulder, Colorado.”

There followed a moment of silence, then a crunching sound, as if the man on the other end of the line had bitten off a piece of celery. Then, “How do I know this isn’t a stupid pet trick?”

“Do you have a line to the States?” Lucas asked.

“Well, sure.”

“Call directory assistance for Minnesota, ask for the number for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Under the listings for the state of Minnesota. Call that number, then ask for me: My name is Lucas Davenport, L-u-c-a-s D-a-v-e-n-p-o-r-t. . This is critical: do it right away.”

“I’ll call you right back.” There was a final chewing crunch, and then the line went dead.

Lucas, his heart suddenly booming, stuck his head out the office door. “Carol: run down to the co-op center, tell them we need every speck of information we can get on Leo Grant, the psychologist at St. John’s.”

“Leo Grant. .”

“Run.”

Lucas took a couple of turns around his office, thinking about Grant. He was well spoken, soft faced. . but he’d also hung out with Sam O’Donnell, would have known about O’Donnell’s Christmas voice, had worked with Charlie Pope and the Big Three. Could have passed word of Peterson’s murder. .

And going way back, he was the one who said that Charlie was smarter than he looked, that Charlie might go for college girls, that there might be a second man or woman. Jesus. He’d been steering them from the start.

“Ah, man.” He looked at the phone: “Call, motherfucker.”

A minute later, the phone rang. “This is Leo Grant from Cancun.”