John Sandford - Broken Prey

“No. This kind of thing gets around too fast. I want to have Grant on the ground, with cuffs on him, before anybody even knows we’re coming.”

Sloan looked at his watch. “His shift is gonna be over about now.”

“Ah. .,” Lucas glanced at his own watch. “Call Dr. Cale. Ask him to find out if Grant’s gone yet. Tell him not to be obvious about it.”

Sloan dialed, got Cale, asked, listened, and said, “Just a minute.” He took the phone down and said, “Grant left early-half an hour or forty-five minutes ago.”

“Uh-oh. Does Cale know why?”

Sloan asked, listened, then said, “No. He doesn’t know why. He just saw him going out through the security wall, and he was carrying a briefcase and looked like he was in a hurry. Cale assumed he was leaving.”

“Get a home address. Tell Cale not to mention this, in case he comes back there.”

While Sloan got the address, Lucas pulled out his cell phone and tapped the speed dial for the office. Carol answered: “Carol, check with the co-op guys. When I told them to get every speck of information on Grant. . did they call the hospital directly?”

She called back: “Yes. They talked to a couple of people. They got the name of a Mrs. Hardesty in Personnel.”

Lucas hung up and looked at Sloan. “He might know we’re coming.”

Sloan called Jenkins and Shrake in the trailing car, and they pulled into a gas station. The software on Lucas’s navigation system wouldn’t allow an address to be entered while the truck was moving; he punched it in, got a map, and they took off again.

“Maybe we better call the sheriff now,” Sloan suggested, when they were back on the road. “Get somebody looking for his car.”

“Do it,” Lucas said.

Sloan called the Department of Motor Vehicle Registration, identified himself, and gave them Grant’s name and address. A moment later he had the car and the tag number. He caught Nordwall in his office, and Lucas listened as Sloan outlined the situation. Then Sloan said, “I’ve got the car, tag, and his address. We’re coming up on the address, we’re just outside of Mankato, now. We’re only about a mile out. .”

He gave Nordwall the description of the car, the tag number, and the address, listened for a moment, said, “Yeah, I can hold. What’s going on?”

Lucas glanced at Sloan, who shrugged, then the sheriff came back up and Sloan, suddenly intent, “Uh-huh, ah, jeez, it’s gotta be related. We’re gonna be there in a minute. See you there.”

“What?” Lucas asked.

“There’s been some kind of hassle, some kind of attack on a college kid, right there at Grant’s address. There are a couple of cars on the way, nobody on the scene yet. The sheriff heard the call through his nine-one-one monitor, less than a minute ago. The address rang a bell.”

“Goddamnit. . Call the city cops. Tell them we’re coming in.”

The man who called himself Leopold Grant lay writhing on his bed, pale and naked, in a steaming mix of odors, sweat, semen, tobacco, and bed-sheet starch, plugged into a stethoscope. The black sensor cable led from his ears to a hole in the bedroom wall; in the slanted white light knifing across his body from the half-turned slats in the Venetian blinds, he looked like a movie cyborg recharging its batteries.

He was, in a way. On the other side of the wall, Millie Lincoln was enjoying a visit from Mihovil. Grant was only two feet from her, just on the other side of the wall. With the stethoscope’s sensor duct-taped to the back side of the Sheetrock above Millie’s bed, he could hear every gasp, groan, giggle, and lick.

He lived for them.

An hour earlier, he’d run out of the security hospital. One of the nondangerous patients, who worked in Personnel, had tracked him down to tell him that they were pulling all the information on him; that they were calling all his references; that the cops had called from St. Paul and asked for every speck of information.

Not for everybody-just for Grant. So they had him.

His first impulse had been to run. He’d run most of his life, it was nothing new. Get back to his apartment, take everything of value, load it into his car, get it up to the Twin Cities, rent another car, run to Chicago, dump the rental. . He could see himself arriving in Miami, a roll of cash in his pockets, white teeth through a new beard, a new name, a new profession, a Hawaiian shirt.

That had been the impulse; and he’d left the hospital in a shit-faced panic.

But the Gods Down the Hall had gotten to him in some elemental way. They didn’t let go; they tried to pull him back. That talk of a glorious Armageddon. And then when he got back to his apartment, that goddamned Millie Lincoln was at it again. Didn’t she ever study? Didn’t she ever do anything but fuck?

She’d stopped the flight in its tracks, put him on his bed, sweating, writhing, his imagination gone amok.

He’d first heard her three months earlier, and had heard her three or four afternoons or nights every week, with an eager lover, probably another college kid. He thought it was the same guy every time, because the voice had a distinct, baritone vibration.

But it wasn’t the guy who did it to him. It was Millie. Millie didn’t just have orgasms. She worked up to them slowly, and she gave directions: “Oh, do that again, oh, do that. Oh, oh. Ohhhh, c’mon, slow down, go up a little, oh, oh, God, oh. .”

Grant had at first heard her only faintly. He’d heard her bed knocking on the wall, a rhythmic bump-bump-bump that could be only one thing. He’d pressed his ear to the drywall, and first heard her groans along with some unintelligible words.

He’d tried pressing a glass against the wall, the better to hear. There was some marginal improvement, but not enough. Then, at the hospital, one of the docs had left a stethoscope lying unattended at a nurses’ station, and he’d stolen it. He cut a hole in the wall behind the headboard of his bed, and taped the sensor to the wall on the other side. The stethoscope made a major difference. He could hear individual words; he learned her name; and he soon understood that these were modern children, who had an idea of what they wanted and were clear in their requests, which really turned him on. .

He’d gone looking for her, then.

They lived in an apartment complex. Their building had two floors, with eighteen pairs of back-to-back red-brick units on each floor, like an old army barracks but new. Millie’s entrance was on the opposite side of the building from Grant’s. When he checked the mailboxes, he found four female names.

He watched their doors when he could do it without being obvious. Two of the women were blond, one was fairly dark. The fourth was a bit overweight, chubby but attractive, with fair skin and reddish-brown hair. He thought she might be the one, but he wasn’t sure.

Millie. . Millie was causing him trouble this afternoon. He’d come home, planning to run, and had then heard the bumping on the wall. Ten minutes later, she was pounding away, and here he lay, naked, writhing with her, eyes clenched, ears plugged into the stethoscope, riding with her. .

Remembering the first woman, Angela Larson:

The first woman hadn’t been very interesting. He’d noticed her in an art store six or seven months before the killing and had gone back a few times, just to look. She was a tall, dark-haired woman, but with pale eyes and a kind of wide Slavic forehead and sensuous lips. The first night, while he was still developing into a god on his own, he waited until the shop closed, planning to follow her to her car, and then to her home. The lights went out, and he waited, but she never came out.

The next night, he found her going out the back. He watched her as she walked down to the bar, which had a bigger parking lot than the craft store, slipped into her car. He followed her efficiently, using techniques learned from Robert Ludlum, and was disappointed to find her going into an apartment building. Lots of lights, lots of people around, and since it was mostly students, a lot of awareness.