Broken Prey (16 page)

HE GOT HIS NOTES and hurried outside; a cop was still leaning against the car, designated, he guessed, to keep an eye on the house. “If the phone rings in there . . .”

“It won’t—they’re being routed downtown.”

“Good. Where’s this place . . . ?”

The cop pointed farther up the street and across. “That white house. The one . . . There’s Jim.”

Lucas saw Goode step out on a porch and look down toward him. He went that way, fast.

“GODDAMN TIME,” he said to Goode as he hurried up. “We’ve got no time.”

“I know, I know . . . I got six people here.” Goode looked at his watch. “We sent a guy downtown to get her ex-husband, he’s been down at the station . . .”

“What’s his name?”

“Uh, shit—Zack? Zeke?”

Lucas nodded: “Okay.”

MARILYN DERECH WAS a plump blond woman who looked scared: wide-eyed and scared. Four other women and a plump man, who all looked scared, sat on the living-room couch and chairs, and two more kitchen chairs Derech had brought into the living room.

Lucas introduced himself, got their names: “We’re really in trouble here,” he said. “Does anybody know anything about her social life? Who she was seeing, where she went at night? Was she dating, did she go to bars?”

After a moment of silence, one of the women flipped up a hand. “We went to a restaurant up in the Cities, they have wine and music.” The woman had introduced herself as Carol Olson. She looked about forty, with medium-brown hair, a thin nose. “On Grand Avenue in St. Paul, it’s called BluesBerries.”

“BluesBerries—I know where that is,” Lucas said. “Did you talk to guys, did you . . .”

“We just went up and had some wine and listened to music, and then we had dinner . . . we didn’t really talk to anybody.”

“Only the one time.”

“I only went the one time, but I think she’d gone up a couple of times.” Then she stopped and put a hand to her lips. “Listen to me. I’m trying to protect her reputation. I don’t
think
she went up, I
know
she did. She knew the place pretty well, where the best parking was and everything. She liked it because she thought . . . it was interesting and safe and she wouldn’t see anybody from Northfield up there.”

“Why wouldn’t she want to see anybody from Northfield? She was divorced.”

“Yes, but Zach is around. He’s not dating anyone,” Olson said. “When they broke up, it was sort of her that did it. She wanted a little . . . more.”

“Adventure?” Lucas asked.

“More of something,” Olson said.

“I’m not being cute,” Lucas said. “Was she looking around? Was she hanging out? Was BluesBerries it, or was she hitting the bars? Did anybody ever hear of a place down in Faribault called the Rockyard?”

The guy, who had introduced himself as Tom Wells, knew about the Rockyard. “I live up the street, my business sells commercial sanitary supplies—toilet paper and paper towels and cleaning stuff . . . the Rockyard is one of our accounts. If you were going to pick one place where Carlita Peterson would never go, that’s it.”

“But would she
know
not to go there?”

“She’d know,” he said. “She wouldn’t go there.”

“If you took Carlita to a strange city and told her to find a place to eat, the first door she walked through would be the best restaurant in town,” said a woman named Ann Lasker.

“But maybe she’d go there for an adventure? To the Rockyard?’ ”

“Her adventures wouldn’t come in the form of a biker,” Wells said. “If she was looking for action, it’d maybe be a”—he looked around at the women—“what? A history professor who sailed?”

A couple of them nodded.

LUCAS WORKED THEM THROUGH: Where did she go, whom did she see? The answers were “not far, and not many, outside the school.”

Fifteen minutes in, Zachery Peterson arrived. He was a tall man, too thin, in a pale blue short-sleeved dress shirt, dark blue slacks, and brown thick-soled shoes. He wore tiny rimless spectacles and had a sparse, two-inch ponytail tied with a rubber band. He stood with his hands knotted in his pockets.

He hadn’t heard from his ex-wife in two weeks: “We talked about once a month,” he told Lucas, looking uncomfortable. “We hadn’t really settled everything from the divorce yet. It was going slow.”

“Did she mention any kind of relationship with anyone,
any
kind of relationship?” Lucas asked. “Did she have any new girlfriends? Anybody?”

They all shook their heads; and they went down his list of questions. Lucas was watching Peterson, caught him once wiping an eye, and wrote him off as a suspect.

“If he took her, he took her from the house, early. Did anyone see a car? Could you call all your neighbors and ask if anybody saw a strange car . . . ?”

GOING OUT OF THE HOUSE, he looked back and caught the kitchen clock in the Derech house: an hour had gone by. Another one. He was nowhere.

Sloan called: “I can’t find anyone who’ll tell me that Larson was gay, or ever had any gay contacts, or even knew a lesbian, for that matter.”

“Everybody knows a lesbian,” Lucas said. He was outside on Derech’s lawn, looking at the sun.

“Everybody but Larson.”

LUCAS WENT BACK to Peterson’s house, into the detached garage, pulled her car apart. Nothing to work with. Nothing. Back into the house, into the paper. Desperation pulling at his shirttails. Somebody called, “Agent Davenport?”

“Yeah . . .”

Back past the stove clock to the back door. A cop was there, in uniform. Another man stood in the backyard, an elderly man, cork shaped, with white-straw hair, wearing a cap that said
TOP GUN
. He had a small black, brown, and white dog on the end of a thin leash. The dog kept jumping straight up in the air. Lucas thought it might have been a Jack Russell terrier.

The cop said, “Mr. Grass lives around the block . . . well, around two blocks. He was walking Louie this morning and thinks he may have seen a guy around here that he’d never seen before.”

A pulse of hope.

Lucas stepped outside, trying to relax his face. “Mr. Grass? Your first name is . . .”

“Louie . . . just like the dog.” He frowned at Lucas: “What the hell happened to your face, son? You look like you went three rounds with a better boxer.”

“That’s about right,” Lucas said, touching the loop of bruised skin under his eye, wincing. “A guy plugged me right in the nose . . . Listen, tell me about this car.”

“Silver car . . .”

“Not white?”

“Mmm, looked silver. Could have been white, I guess. I saw him down at the bottom of the block going around the corner. I thought he might be lost because he was going slow.”

“No way you would have seen the plates . . .”

“I did see the plates, but I don’t know what the number was. It was Minnesota, though.”

“Could it have been an Oldsmobile?”

“I don’t know . . . Do they have an SUV?”

Lucas grimaced. “An SUV? It wasn’t a sedan?”

“Naw, it was an SUV,” Grass said. “I couldn’t tell you what make, they all look alike.” He picked up Lucas’s look of frustration and said, “I’m sorry.”

“The driver . . .”

Now Grass shook his head. “Didn’t see his face. I was going this way, he was going the other way, and he was looking away from me . . . but he came down this street, all right. Early. Before six o’clock. This goddamn dog has a bigger prostate than I do, I think. He starts jumping up and down, yapping, wants to get out and pee first thing.”

“Mr. Grass, if you can remember
anything
else . . . this is really critical . . .”

Grass looked sad; thought and shook his head. “I’m sorry, son. I saw this car go by, all by itself, early, slow, and it just stuck in my mind. But I didn’t pay it any real attention.”

“Think about it, will you?” Lucas asked. “Any little thing.”

They talked for another minute, then Lucas got on his phone and called the co-op: “Listen: we’ve got a second guy who says the car may be light, silver or possibly white. But he says it’s an SUV. Put that out: tell everybody not to rely on it, we’re still looking for a white Olds, but if anyone spots a silver or white SUV in a sensitive area, stop it.”

THE AFTERNOON SLOPED into evening. Lucas felt like he wanted to prop a couple of two-by-fours under the sun to keep it from going down. The crime-scene people arrived, confirmed most of what they already knew: there was blood on the kitchen floor. They also pointed out two small round black marks the size of dimes, on the vinyl floor. Since there were only two marks, there was a good chance they’d been made by the killer.

“Black-soled athletic shoes,” the crime-scene tech said. “Soft rubber. It rubs off easy, on vinyl. If she’d been wearing them, we’d probably see more of them. It’s almost impossible to keep from rubbing them off . . .”

“How many people in Minnesota wear black-soled athletic shoes?” Lucas asked.

“Lots,” the tech said. “Maybe hundreds of thousands.”

LUCAS WORKED THROUGH the rest of the files in Peterson’s office and learned a lot about Peterson, but nothing helpful. He went so far as to dump her entire e-mail list to the co-op, to have them run against car registrations, looking for a white GM car or a silver SUV.

Nothing.

Minnesota is a tall state, Lucas thought, going out into the yard, looking at the half dome of the sun as it sank behind the house next door, but even if he was going all the way north, he’d be there.

A great summer evening; there’d be a few car deaths and a few more cripplings, a couple of shootings—maybe—and somewhere a woman was waiting to be butchered.

He couldn’t stand it.

STANDING IN THE YARD, he talked to Sloan again—Sloan had gone downtown so he’d have access to a police computer—and to Elle, and even to Weather, whom he reached before she went to bed.

“You say
Sloan
is going psycho . . . you sound like
you’re
going psycho,” she said. “I don’t think it’s healthy for both of you to be crazy at the same time.”

“Sloan says he’s gonna quit. He sounds serious.” Silence, two seconds, five seconds. “You still there?”

“I was wondering what took him so long,” Weather said.

“Ah, Jesus, I’m trying to talk him out of it.”

“Don’t do that. Let him get out.”

“Gotta find this goddamn woman,” Lucas said.

“Yes. Do it.”

HE WENT DOWN to the Northfield police station, a red-brick riverside building shared by the cops and the fire department. Three cops were sitting in a conference room, two city guys and a sheriff’s deputy, Styrofoam cups scattered around, the smell of coffee and old pastry; a police radio burped in the background, a harsh underline to the hunt. The main dispatch center for the region was in Owatonna, well to the south, and the cops inside the station were just waiting for any call that needed a quick reaction. Not what you’d expect, Lucas thought, for a major search operation—but the fact that there was nobody in the office meant that everybody was on the road.

Stopping white cars. Stopping light-colored SUVs.

Stopping cars with single men in them. Stopping cars that looked funny; acted funny; might be out of place.

Glassing hillsides in the woods, as though they were hunting for deer, or elk.

Fighting the sundown.

AFTER DARK, the action slowed. Reports came in from the Boundary Waters. Nothing there.

Lots of cars stopped.

Lucas watched, waited, and talked. At eleven o’clock, tense but bored, tired of jumping every time one of the radios burped, he borrowed a yellow legal pad and began to copy the names of rock songs onto a piece of paper. One hundred and twenty songs, when he finished. He looked at the list, crossed off two songs, added one that Carol had suggested that morning—Robert Palmer’s “Bad Case of Loving You,” which Lucas thought was on pretty shaky grounds to make the top 100, if not in outright quicksand. Still, a good tune . . .

He stood up and said, “Jesus Christ, where is she?”

A half an hour later, he’d rolled and rerolled the paper with the rock list until it looked like a cheap yellow cigar. He finally stuffed it in his pants pocket and was about to go out for a Coke when a Goodhue County deputy was routed through to the dispatcher in Owatonna, and then back out to the countryside. He was breathing hard: “Guy . . . white truck I think, SUV, turned off when he saw my lights, running fast, dumped his lights, I think he cut across a field because I lost him, I don’t know which way he’s heading now, but he was heading west when I first saw him, I’m gonna go another mile or two south, see what I can see, cut my lights and creep back up the road, I think maybe he’s just pulled off, you got somebody west of here on Nineteen?”

“Yeah, we got a couple guys, I’ll get them headed that way.”

“Tell them to shut down the flashers, he saw mine and dodged . . . I’m not seeing anything . . .”

“Jesus Christ,” Lucas said, as the dispatcher talked to cops farther out. “Where is this, where is this . . . ?”

One of the cops poked a map; his finger touched a spot where Goodhue, Rice, and Dakota counties came together.

Then another guy came up and shouted, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, guy ran by me moving fast . . . high lights. He was doing eighty-eight, I think it’s the SUV, I’m turning. I’m on Nineteen, Jenny, get me some help up here . . .”

“C’mon,” Lucas shouted at the radio.

The deputy shouted, “Ah, shit, he’s gone, he’s killed his lights, I don’t know, shit, don’t know whether he went north, south, or straight ahead. Goddamn . . . I’m going north on Boyd, that was the first turn, but he maybe ditched somewhere, do we have anybody west on Nineteen? Or south, we need somebody south . . . Man, he was moving. Andy, if you’re still around Waterford, get over to Nineteen and head east. He may be coming at you, I don’t know what color the car was, his high lights were on, but I think it was an SUV . . . I clocked him at eighty-eight . . . He could be going south, do we have anybody south . . . ?”

Lucas listened for another few seconds, then asked, “Where is that?”

One of the cops jabbed a finger at a wall map. “Tommy was coming west on Highway Nineteen when he saw the guy, and the guy disappeared here. Tommy went north, Andy is coming in this way . . .”