Gathering Prey (3 page)

He could still hear.

He flopped around on the ground, hit the back of his head on a tree root, and everybody laughed and then Pilate said, “Shred him.”

Somebody had a knife or a razor, and they cut his clothes off him, until he was buck naked except for the tape, and then Pilate said, “Kristen . . .”

“I got them,” she said. She clanked something together. Steel.

Henry was dragged for a while, rough, over rocks and tree roots and spiky brush, and then somebody said, “Gonna cut the tape, hold his arms.”

For a few seconds, Henry thought they were going to cut him loose, and he stopped struggling while somebody he couldn’t see cut the tape around his wrists. Two or three people had hold of each arm, and he fought them, but couldn’t get free, and they pushed him up against the rough bark of a pine tree and Pilate said, “Higher, get them really high.”

Henry’s tormentors levered his arms overhead, his back against the bark, and a woman said, “I can’t reach that high,” and a man said, “Give’m to me.”

They nailed him to the tree. Drove big spikes through his wrists, just below the heel of his hands. Henry screamed and screamed and screamed and not much got out, because of the tape over his mouth.

Then he fainted.

He came to, what might have been a half minute later, his hands over his head, his entire body electric with pain.

A woman said, a rough excitement riding her voice, “Look at this kid. Really. Look at this—”

He fainted again.

L
ucas Davenport knew he was stinking the place up, but he couldn’t help himself. He’d snarled at his wife, growled at his daughter, snapped at his son, and probably would have punted the baby had she crossed his path.

Okay, he wouldn’t have kicked the baby.

He was out trying to run it off without much luck.

His problems were both strategic and tactical.

The strategic difficulty derived from a case the year before, when a madman’s body dump had been found down an abandoned cistern south of the Twin Cities. The killer had kidnapped a sheriff’s deputy and had been beating and raping her, and was about to kill her, when Lucas arrived. The madman had been killed in the ensuing fight. The deputy had eventually left the sheriff’s department and had moved to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, where she was working as an investigator.

Catrin Mattsson was doing all right. She was still screwed up and admitted it, but drugs and shrinks were moving her around to the place where she could live with herself. She’d become friends with his wife and daughter, and would occasionally drop around for dinner and a chat.

Lucas had taken it differently. He wasn’t bothered by the fact that the killer had died in the fight. He didn’t worry about the secret that he and Mattsson shared, about what exactly had happened down in that basement in the final half second of the confrontation.

He worried about the world. Everything seemed off-kilter. Everything. That was bad.

He’d once suffered through a clinical depression and had sworn he wouldn’t go through that again, not without drugs, or whatever else the docs said he had to do. Even then, depression was to be feared—and he could feel it sniffing around outside his door, looking for a way in.

He’d never been a particularly cheerful guy, but he’d done all right—he had an interesting job, a great family, good friends, even made a bundle of money a few years before, on a computer simulation system.

Which had nothing to do with depression.

William Styron’s book
Darkness Visible
, which he’d read while going through his own depression, had argued that
depression
is a terrible word for the affliction. Should be called something like
mindstorm
. Still, Lucas’s intuition told him that mindstorms didn’t just show up: they needed something to chew on.

His problem was that he’d looked a little too deeply into the souls of a lot of bad people; done what he could to track them down. He’d been largely successful, over the years, but there was apparently a never-ending line of assholes, who would continue to show up after he was long gone. He was beginning to feel helpless.

Not only helpless, but unhelped.

The bureaucrats at the BCA didn’t much like him. They didn’t mind his catching criminals, as long as it wasn’t too much of an inconvenience; as long as it didn’t shred their overtime budget. As long as nothing required them to go on TV and sweat and do tap dances.

Lucas had always simply dismissed bureaucrats. They were the guys who were
supposed
to fix overtime budgets and do tap dances and take the blame for the clusterfucks, because they were always sure to be there when credit was being taken.

No more. Now it was all about keeping your head down, while figuring ways to push the budget up. About not pissing anyone off. About,
Hey, people get killed from time to time, that’s just the way of the world, let’s not bust a budget about it . . .

It was getting him down, because he made his living by hunting killers, and had always thought it was a righteous thing to do. Important, intelligent people were now saying, you know,
not so much.

That was the strategic part of his problem.

•   •   •

TACTICALLY, A LAWYER
named Park Raines was running legal rings around the BCA, and if he won out, a killer named Ben Merion was going to walk. Even more annoying, Raines was actually a pretty good guy, ethically sound, and he’d take it to the hoop right in your face and not go around whining about foul this and foul that.

Still, Lucas didn’t like being on the losing side in a murder case and the prospect was churning his gut.

Park Raines’s client, Ben Merion, lived in the town of Sunfish Lake, probably the richest plot of land, square foot for square foot, in Minnesota. On the last day of February, he’d hit his wife, Gloria Merion, on the head, with a carefully crafted club, and had then thrown her down the stairs in their $2.3 million lakeside home, where her head had rattled off the wooden railings—railings that fit the depressive fracture in her skull exactly perfectly.

The fall hadn’t quite killed her, though it had knocked her out, so Merion put his hand over her mouth and pinched off her nose until she stopped breathing.

Lucas’s group had run the investigation, and over a couple of months, he and his investigators determined that the Merion marriage was on the rocks; that Ben Merion had signed a prenup that said he’d get nothing in a divorce, but would inherit half if she predeceased him; that in case the house and ten million in stock wouldn’t work for him, he’d taken out a five-million-dollar insurance policy on her three months before she was murdered—or died, as Park Raines put it. As icing on the BCA’s cake, Merion had a girlfriend named Connie Sweat, or, when working at the Blue Diamond Cutter Gentleman’s Club, Honey Potts, and his wife had found out about it.

Two of Lucas’s investigators, Jenkins and Shrake, had further determined that Ben met Gloria while remodeling her house—he was a building contractor—and as Shrake put it, “He spent more time laying pipe than laying tile, if you catch my drift.”

“So what?” Lucas said.

“Well, that staircase had a custom set of balusters. Those are like the spokes in a railing—”

“I know what balusters are,” Lucas said.

“The thing is, Merion turned the balusters himself on his handy little wood lathe. If he needed to make an exact copy to whack her with, it’d take him about ten minutes.”

“You guys are your own kind of geniuses,” Lucas said.

“We knew that.”

They had the medical examiner on their side: death, he said, had come from asphyxiation, not from the blow to the head. The blow may have been intended to kill, but when that didn’t work, a second blow would be unseemly for the simple reason that a good medical examiner could determine the time difference between the first and second impact, gauged by the amount of blood released by the first whack. If the second impact came, say, three minutes after the first . . . well, falling down the stairs didn’t often take three minutes. Not unless you had a lot longer staircase than the Merions had.

•   •   •

PARK RAINES HAD,
of course, gotten his own medical expert, who said that the fall had forced the unconscious woman’s face into the carpeting on the stair tread, and
that
had smothered her. He found carpet threads on her tongue.

The medical examiner pointed out that Gloria Merion’s mouth may well have been open during her fall down the stairs, and she could have picked up the carpet threads that way.

Could have, might have. Beyond a reasonable doubt? Maybe not.

•   •   •

SO THERE’D BEEN
some legitimate doubt, even in Lucas’s mind . . . until Beatrice Sawyer, leader of the BCA crime scene crew, discovered three bloody hairs stuck to a baseboard . . . in the bathroom. And tiny droplets of blood, invisible to the naked eye, on the wallpaper and baseboard, but none on the floor, because the floor had been washed.

That added up to murder.

Unless, Raines argued, in the preliminary hearing, incompetent cops had tracked the damp blood in there—they
had
gone into the bathroom after tramping up and down the stairs, before the crime scene people got there.

And that insurance policy? Nothing but a legal maneuver rich people used to get around the federal estate tax, and commonly done, Park Raines said. It had been intended to benefit the children from her first marriage, not Ben Merion.

The wood-lathe business? Sure, he could have done that. Proof that he’d done it? Well, show me the proof.

And the girlfriend? Yes, Ben had once been intimate with Connie Sweat, but that ended when Ben and Gloria married. He’d visited Connie’s town house a couple of times, but only to retrieve personal property that he’d left at her place, back before Ben got married.

The trial was starting in three weeks and things did not look all that good. The best trial prosecutors had begged off, worrying about their high-profile conviction stats, leaving the case to a twenty-eight-year-old hippie who’d gotten out of law school three years earlier, played saxophone in a jazz band at night, and showed more interest in the music than the law. He’d never been the lead prosecutor on a major case.

Lucas believed that he would be a good prosecutor someday, if he chose law over music, but he wasn’t yet.

Running five miles, until it felt like his wheels were coming off, didn’t do all that much for his physical condition, but the pain helped Lucas stop thinking about Merion.

And the combination of it all, the strategic and tactical, had the depression monster sniffing around his doorstep.

So he ran.

•   •   •

AS HE WAS OUT RUNNING
, his daughter Letty was lying on the carpet in the den, nine o’clock at night, her legs, from her knees to her feet, on a couch. She was staring at the ceiling, thinking about life, or that part of life that involved a guy named Gary Bazile. Bazile was a junior in economics at Stanford who also played lacrosse; he had big white teeth and large muscles. He was calling her every night and her father had begun to notice.

Early in her freshman year, Letty, who had avoided carnal entanglements in high school—“I don’t want to be the girl that the jocks practice on,” she’d told a friend—had decided that Now Was the Time. Bazile had benefited greatly from the decision, but Letty’s interest was beginning to wane.

In contemplating the ceiling, a telephone by her hand, she thought perhaps she’d cut Gary off a little too abruptly a few minutes earlier. “Gotta put my baby sister to bed,” she’d lied. When her phone rang again, she picked it up, willing herself to be kind to him: but the screen said the call was coming from Unknown, in an unfamiliar area code, 605. California? She didn’t get many solicitation calls, because she’d listed her number on the “do not call” registry.

She punched
Answer
and said, “Hello?”

“Is this Letty?” A woman’s voice, rough, vaguely familiar.

“Yes, this is Letty.”

“Letty, this is Skye, do you remember me? From San Francisco, me and Henry were singing on the square? You bought us dinner at McDonald’s?”

“Hey, Skye,” Letty said, swinging her feet down to the floor. “How are you? Where are you? In town?”

“Rapid City. Man, the devil got Henry. They cut his heart out.”

“What? What? Henry?”

“They cut his heart out.” Skye began to sob into the phone. “That’s what Pilot’s girlfriend told me, and she was laughing. She said Pilot keeps it in a Mason jar. She said they’re going to get mine, next. Man, I am in some serious shit out here and they cut Henry’s heart out.”

“Where are you, exactly?” Letty asked.

“Rapid City . . . I got dropped off by this guy,” Skye said.

“Are you safe? For right now?”

“For right now. I’m in the bus station. It’s the only public phone I could find.”

“Okay, slow down. Now, tell me,” Letty said.

“The devil was in Sturgis—”

“When you say ‘the devil’—”

“Pilot. Pilot. We told you about Pilot. Pilot was in Sturgis with his disciples. They were camping out there and they were pretending to be bikers and some of the women were turning tricks out of their RV. I told Henry to stay away, but he disappeared. We were supposed to meet, and he didn’t show up. We had a backup meet, and he never showed there, either. All the bikers left, and the town was almost empty. I spent three days walking around, looking for him, and he’s not there. Then I was in a grocery store and the blond bitch came in and when I went out, she came out at the same time, she said that they killed Henry and they ate part of him and Pilot put his heart in a Mason jar. He said Pilot made some guy roast Henry’s dick over a fire and eat it.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Letty said.

“I’m calling because you said your old man was a cop, and because . . . you’re the only friend I got,” Skye said.

Letty was on her feet now, pacing. “Let me call and charge a bus ticket for you, to get you here, where we can figure something out. Stay in the station until you’re on the bus.”

“I got money for a bus, but I didn’t know where to go. Then I thought about you. What about Henry? What if they killed him?”

“They’re probably trying to freak you out, but I’ll get you with my dad, and he can check around,” Letty said. “The main thing is, to get you somewhere safe. How much money do you have?”

“Two hundred dollars. It’s left over . . . we got lucky. Two hundred dollars.”

“Can you buy a ticket to Minneapolis?”

“Wait a minute.”