Broken Prey (12 page)

“Do you remember what he looked like?” Lucas asked. He edged inside the door; she apparently had three rooms, a living room overlooking the street, a bedroom, and a small kitchen. Lucas couldn’t see a bath, but he could see a half-open door in the bedroom, and thought that might be it. The place smelled of Glade deodorizer.

She frowned, was uncertain. “Well, I don’t know . . . He was only there for a minute or two.”

“Would you mind if I looked out the window?”

“Please do,” she said. He crossed her living room in three steps, looked out the window. The phone was directly across the street and only fifteen feet from a streetlight.

“Did you see more than one man last night?” Lucas asked.

“No, not last night,” she said.

“Did you see a car?”

Again she frowned. “Yes, I did. He got out of a car, he parked just over there . . .” She pointed a bony finger just up the street from the phone. “A white Oldsmobile.”

“An Oldsmobile.”

“I think so.”

“New? Or old.”

“New, I think.”

“You say, you’ve said,
you think.
You’ve said it several times . . .”

“I was watching television. That’s all I do now, watch television and look out the windows, except on Mondays and Wednesdays when the social lady comes and takes me to the store. But I wasn’t paying too much attention to the telephone . . .”

“Okay . . . If we showed you some photographs, could you see if you recognize the man? Or the car?”

She smiled; she had improbably small, white, pearly teeth. “I could certainly try, but I’m pretty old.”

“Mrs. Bird, I’ll be back in a minute, okay?” Lucas said. “Just give me a minute or two.”

“I’m not going anyplace. I hope.”

WHEN LUCAS GOT back to the street, Sloan was just coming out of the bookstore, wiping his nose with a Kleenex: “They said you were upstairs.”

“The woman upstairs said she saw a guy . . . I need your photo spread,” Lucas said.

“What else did she see?”

“She said he’s driving a white Oldsmobile. A new one,” Lucas said.

Sloan’s eyebrows went up. “That could be something.”

Sloan got his briefcase from the car and together they went back up the stairs. As they walked up the stairs, Lucas said, “Try not to get too close to her. You give her that cold, you could kill her.”

“Goddamnit.” Sloan was offended.

“No, no—I’m not kidding.”

MRS. BIRD OPENED THE DOOR for them. She was more animated now than when Lucas had first knocked; excited.

“We need a place for you to sit and look at these and see them all at once,” Sloan told her.

They all looked around. In the kitchen, a single wooden chair faced a small oval table the size of a pizza pan, and on the table, a paper rose poked out of a glass bud vase. Lucas and Sloan wouldn’t fit at the table.

“Could I move your end table around in front of the couch, maybe?” Lucas asked.

“Of course.”

Mrs. Bird sat in the middle of the three-cushion couch. Lucas took some old
Reader’s Digest
s off the table and moved it in front of the couch. Lucas and Sloan sat on either side of Bird, and Sloan spread out ten five-by-seven color photographs. One of the men was Charlie Pope. The other nine, all of whom met the general description of Charlie Pope, were cops.

She looked at them for a moment, then said to Sloan, “I saw this on television once.”

“It’s pretty important . . .”

She looked back at the pictures, and then reached out and touched Charlie Pope’s face. “This is the man, I believe.”

THEY SAT LOOKING at the pictures for a few seconds, then Sloan said to Lucas, “We need to make out an affidavit and bring it back here.” Unspoken: the old lady might die in the next fifteen minutes.

“We’ll get somebody with Rochester to do it, and we can bring it back here after the meeting.”

They explained the procedure to Mrs. Bird, who nodded and said, “I’ll wait for you. I was just going to watch TV anyway.” Then she did a little dramatic, girlish shiver: “You don’t think I’ll be in any danger, do you?”

Lucas thought,
Not unless you shake hands with Sloan.
But at the same time he smiled and shook his head,
No.

12

ROCHESTER WAS A GOOD-SIZED CITY, built around a colony of doctors and wealthy patients, and probably had the highest per-capita income of any big city in the state. The money showed up in the government center, a modern red-brick, concrete, and glass building that sat on the Zumbro River a couple of blocks from the Mayo Clinic.

Twenty-nine sheriffs and police chiefs, or their alternates, along with a half dozen highway patrolmen, game wardens, and parole officers, got together in the boardroom, where the city council and county board met. Of the thirty-five, thirty were middle-aged men, most a little too heavy and going gray. The other five were women, all five tightly coifed and suited.

Lucas had talked to the Rochester chief about Bird; he would make arrangements for a formal statement. Then Lucas started the pitch to the gathered cops: “We know he’s down here someplace. You’ve all seen this morning’s
Star-Tribune
—he’s going to do it again. He’s probably already picked out somebody, and he’s stalking her. Or him. We’re looking for another guy from St. John’s named Mike West. We’re trying to keep this under our hats . . .”

They had questions, but Lucas had few answers: “Honest to God, we really don’t know what he’s doing, or how he’s hiding. There’s been a parole-violation bulletin out on him for a month, and we’ve got nothing. He’s buried himself someplace. We need to pry him out of his hole.”

He told them about the white Olds. They all made a note. One guy held up a hand: “A new white Olds . . . they stopped building Oldsmobiles . . .”

“I know.”

“We should be able to track every one of them,” the guy suggested.

“We’re doing that,” Lucas said. “The woman who gave us that information is elderly, really elderly, and we’re not absolutely sure of its quality.”

“You’re not sure how he’s armed?”

“No, but he says he is, he says he got some guns, and we believe him,” Lucas said. “Rice was in pretty good shape. We don’t think Pope would have taken him bare-handed. The medical examiner says all of the damage to Rice’s body was inflicted either with the whip or a blade. He didn’t show any signs of being beaten, or having been in a struggle before he was tied up. So there was probably a gun. If one of your guys even gets a whiff of Pope, he better be wearing a vest.”

“Pretty goodamn hot out in the countryside right now,” one of the cops said.

“Better hot than dead,” somebody else said.

Another hand: “Where’d he get the guns?”

“Same place he got the Olds,” Lucas said. “We don’t know.”

“We know he was in Rochester last night?”

“Three blocks from here,” Lucas said. He gestured out the window at his back. “Right across the river.”

And it went on for a while.

WHEN THEY BROKE UP, Sloan came over and said, “I’m feeling like shit, man. Bobby Anderson from Scott County’s here. He said he’d give me a ride back home, if you’re gonna go see Marcia Pope.”

Lucas nodded: “You look bad. I can’t believe the Marcia Pope thing is going anywhere, anyway. The Austin cops already talked to her twice.”

Sloan took off, and Lucas, back in the truck, headed south toward the Iowa border, and the city of Austin.

MARCIA POPE LIVED IN a shingle-sided cottage on a tree-shaded street on the edge of Austin, in a subdivision built by meatpackers. The house was technically white, but probably hadn’t been painted in forty years; the siding was grooved with dirt and mold, the ragged grass had only been fitfully mown, the narrow sidewalk leading to the front door was cracked and twisted.

Lucas pulled into the gravel patch that served as a driveway, and as he got out of the car, saw the curtains twitch. Until that moment, it hadn’t really occurred to him that Charlie Pope might be inside. Could Charlie be stupid enough to hide out at his mother’s? And here was Lucas going to the front door, no protective vest, his pistol tucked in a spot that might be a half second too slow, his mind working on other errands.

He slowed, scratched his face, miming a man who’d forgotten something, went back to the truck, pulled his gun out, and tucked it into his side pants pocket. The front sight had been smoothed to prevent hangups, and he kept the hammer and trigger assembly hanging out so his hand would fall on them.

Which wouldn’t do him a lot of good, he thought, as he started back up the sidewalk, if Charlie was waiting behind the door with a shotgun stoked with double-ought buckshot . . . He saw the curtain twitch again and thought,
Why would he wait until I got to the door?

GOOD THOUGHT. But nothing happened on the way up, and at the door he stepped to one side and rang the bell. A few seconds passed, and he rang it again; then the door jerked open an inch or two, and a woman asked, “Whattaya want?”

He felt like a Fuller Brush salesman, but put on his official cop voice: “Mrs. Marcia Pope?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m Lucas Davenport with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.” He held up his ID with his left hand. “We’re looking for your son, Charlie. Is he here?”

“No, he’s not here. I haven’t seen him in more’n a month. I don’t know where he is. I’ve already talked to the Austin police.”

All he could see was one eye, a hank of steel gray hair, and the end of a short, pointed nose. “I need to interview you. Open up.”

“You got a warrant?” The door opened two more inches, the better to argue.

“No, but I could get one. Then we’d come back, put handcuffs on you so all the neighbors could enjoy themselves, and take you to police headquarters to talk.”

Silence, three seconds, five seconds. “You’re not going to take me if I talk to you now?”

“Not if you tell me the truth,” Lucas said. “Charlie’s not here?”

The door opened wide enough that he could see her. She was a small, hatchet-faced woman wearing black slacks and a blue blouse that looked like a uniform from a chain restaurant. “I ain’t seen that boy since the Fourth of July. He came down on the bus to see the fireworks. He always loved them.”

Lucas nodded: “Can I come in?”

“The house is a mess,” she said reluctantly. “I’ve been working all the time . . .”

But she backed up and he stepped inside.

SHE HAD A TV, a beat-up couch, a green La-Z-Boy, and a couple of end tables in the living room. Everything was stacked with magazines and tabloid newspapers; even more paper was stacked against the walls; decades of
Us
and
People.
The room smelled of fried meat and Heinz 57 Sauce.

Pope seemed to be looking for a place for Lucas to sit, but he said, “Never mind, I’m okay . . .” He eased toward the kitchen: more magazines, but no sound, or feel, or anything that indicated another person around. They stood facing each other and Lucas pushed her for names of friends, anything that might point to where Pope had gone.

“He had to have friends from high school . . .”

“He wasn’t in high school that long. There was one boy, in grade school, but he drownded.”

In the end, it seemed that she’d hardly known her child. When he was twelve, she said, he started skipping school. She didn’t know where he spent his days; he simply went somewhere and hid. The school authorities hunted him down at the end of every summer, but as soon as his enrollment was counted for the state aid, they let him go. He was a pain in the ass, and always had been.

The high point of his teen years had come when he’d crashed his bike, hitting his head on a curb.

“They thought he was gonna die, but he didn’t; goddamn brains almost squirted out his ear,” his mother said.

In eleventh grade, Charlie Pope stopped pretending. He quit school, got a job at a McDonald’s, was fired. “Never washed his hands after the bathroom, they said.” He did some more time at a Burger King, was fired again, and then did whatever kind of pickup work he could get, lived however he could, Marcia said.

“His old man took off thirty years ago. Nobody knows where he is or what he’s doing. He was a worthless piece of shit anyhow, but I didn’t know that when I took up with him,” Marcia said. “I was just a girl.”

“So there’s nobody—nobody ever talked to Charlie.”

She looked away from him for a moment, her forehead wrinkling. Then, “You know, there was them brothers from over by Hill. He was talking about them on the Fourth, maybe they’d have a summer job for him. He didn’t like hauling garbage . . . What was their name? I can’t think . . .”

“What about them?”

“They’re farmers. They got these big gardens, Charlie says. They live in the country somewhere by Hill, they sell tomatoes and corn and cukes and stuff down on the highway somewhere,” she said. “One of them vegetable stands. They use to hire Charlie to work in the gardens . . . you know, pickin’ shit and pulling weeds and they had one of those machines, like a lawnmower, but it plows . . .”

“A tiller?”

“That’s it. They taught him how to run it and he’d help with the gardens. He did that for a couple of summers. He liked it.”

A little tingle: “This was where? By Hill? That’s a town?” Lucas asked.

“Yeah. Hill.”

“You don’t know their names?”

“No . . . I mean I used to. I seen one of the boys, once, he had one of those things on his face and neck, a raspberry thing, I think they call them? Or a strawberry thing? One of those like birthmarks, great big one on the side of his face . . .”

“A port-wine mark?”

She snapped her fingers: “That’s it. A port-wine stain. Right on the side of his face.”

He pushed her, but that was all she had. He left a card with her and said, “I need to tell you two things,” he said. He crowded her a little, let her feel the authority. “If Charlie gets in touch, you call us. He’s dangerous, and he’s dangerous to you. He’s completely run off the rails this time. You understand?”

“Yup. I’ll call you, don’t you worry.” But her eyes slid away from his.

He got right back in her face. “You better, or you’ll go inside with him, Mrs. Pope. You wouldn’t like the women’s prison. We’re talking the worst kind of murder, now, and if you help him, you’ll be an accomplice. So you call.”

“I will.” She looked at the card this time.

“Second, you don’t talk to anybody about what you told me,” Lucas said. “I need to go look up these garden guys, and we don’t want anybody to know we’re coming. So you just keep your mouth shut, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I’m not fooling, Mrs. Pope. You mess with us on this, we’ll put your ass in jail.”

LUCAS FOUND HILL in his Minnesota atlas; more a crossroads than a town. The map showed two streets where a creek crossed a county road; the place might have a bar, maybe a gas pump. Still in Mower County, northwest of Austin. The sheriff had been at the meeting that morning . . .

LUCAS HEADED EAST out of town, on his cell phone as he drove. The sheriff was still in his car somewhere, and the Mower County dispatcher wouldn’t give Lucas his phone number. “Then give him mine, call him and tell him to call me back,” Lucas said.

Larry Ball got back five minutes later. Lucas could hear noise in the background, music and voices. The Rochester Mall?

“I just talked to Marcia Pope,” Lucas told him. “There are a couple of guys just outside of Austin who hired Charlie Pope to work their gardens. They’re truck gardeners, out by a place called Hill. You know a couple of brothers, one’s got a port-wine mark on his face?”

“Huh. Yeah, I sorta know the guy. Don’t know his name, but I talked to him once when I was campaigning. He was working at a roadside stand,
mmm,
I think where I-Ninety crosses Highway Sixteen near Dexter.”

“Dexter. I saw that on my map.”

“Yeah, listen, I’ll tell you who’d know, is Bob Youngie,” Ball said. “He’s one of my deputies. He’s working, I’ll call him, and have him call you right back.”

LUCAS COULD SEE the interstate up ahead. He was fairly sure he should go east but wasn’t positive, so he pulled off to the side of the road, waiting. Youngie called a minute later. He had a gravelly voice, a whisky voice, and sounded like an older guy. “You’re looking for the Martin brothers, Gerald and Jerome,” he said, when Lucas answered the cell-phone call. “You going out there now?”

“Yeah. I’m just coming up on Ninety-four.”

“You want to go east, to Exit One Ninety-three. I’m in my car now, I’m a little closer, so you’ll see me when you come off. I’m calling another car, he’ll be a couple minutes behind you. He’s just leaving town.”

“The Martins . . . they’re trouble?”

“No, I couldn’t say that,” Youngie said. “They stay to themselves, they don’t like having people on their land. They’ve run some hunters off, and we’ve had to warn them about carrying guns when they do it. And they got dogs. I think it’s best if a couple of us came along.”

“The sheriff told you what we’re doing?” Lucas asked.

“Yup. That’s another reason.”

“Glad to have you,” Lucas said.

YOUNGIE WAS AS TALL as Lucas, maybe sixty, gray haired with a Marlboro-man mustache. He was leaning on the front fender of his car, smoking a cigarette, when Lucas came off the interstate and pulled in behind him.

“Nice truck,” he said, when Lucas got out. Youngie had cool blue eyes like Lucas’s own, and they seemed slightly amused.

“I got it for the Magic Fingers seats,” Lucas said, looking back at the blue Lexus. “Keeps you company on the long hauls.”

Youngie glanced at the truck, biting just for a second, then back at Lucas, amused again. “You gonna catch Charlie?”

“Yeah. Or else kill him.”

“I heard that about you,” Youngie said. “The or-else part.”

“Just the job I had,” Lucas said.

“I hear you.” Youngie put out his hand and Lucas shook. Youngie’s hand was like a wood file. “Here come the kids . . .”

Another sheriff’s car was coming off the interstate. Lucas could see two cops inside. “The kids?”

“They got three, four years between them,” Youngie said. “I’ll have them come in last.”

“You really think . . . ?”

“If we ain’t ready, why’re we going out there at all?”

“That’s a point,” Lucas said.

YOUNGIE BRIEFED THE TWO young cops on the visit to the Martin farm. He would lead the way in, Lucas would follow, and the kids would come in and block and watch. “If there’s trouble, you call in first, help us later,” Youngie told them.