Gathering Prey Read online

  “Okay, if you see a JJ road just on the north side of Clear Lake—”

  “I see it on the nav.”

  “That’ll take you . . . Okay, the guy’s off the road, he ran through an intersection, he’s off the road in the ditch.”

  “What about the girl?” Long silence, and Lucas repeated it, “They got the girl?”

  “No. I’m hearing that the guy’s still in the car, he’s got a gun and he’s going to kill this girl if they don’t get him another car.”

  Lucas took the corner at JJ and headed north. “I’m north on JJ, get me in there.”

  He saw them from a mile away, what looked like ten cop cars with their flashers going. He came up fast, saw cops behind cars, saw an ancient Chevy Cavalier station wagon in a bean field at the intersection of a narrow side road. It looked as though the driver of the station wagon had tried to make the turn, but missed it, ran through a fence out into the bean field, where he bogged down.

  Lucas pulled up behind the last sheriff’s patrol car, climbed out, and jogged down to the lead car, where the Wisconsin patrolman and a couple of deputies were crouched. The patrolman said, “You’re Davenport?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Stern is on the way. He’ll be a while, though.”

  “You talking to the guy?”

  “Off and on. He’ll roll down that side window and scream at us, then roll it back up. He seems . . . I mean, nuts. I mean like, you know, he needs a doctor and medication. Or maybe he’s just high. He was yelling some stuff at us, like the Fall is coming, and we’re all scared shitless, and it won’t do us any good because we’re all going down . . . Sounds crazy to me.”

  “Did he say what he wants?”

  “He said he wants a patrol car or he’s going to kill her. We told him a guy was coming to talk to him, and we could work something out.”

  “He shoot at anybody?”

  “Not yet, but he’s got a gun. Randy’s got some glasses, he’s looking at him.”

  He pointed over at another car, where a deputy was sitting behind a rear wheel, looking at the car in the field with a pair of heavy binoculars. “Looks like a big old revolver.”

  “I’ll go look. But what do you think?”

  “Well, honest to God, you know, Phil over there is on the regional SWAT team, he’s got his rifle, he could take him out.” Lucas looked back to where a guy had a rifle propped on a sandbag over a patrol car’s bumper. “But we’re shooting through that window glass. My inclination is, if it looks like he’s going to do something . . . I’d try to take him out. I mean, if he freaks out and shoots the girl, then it’ll be too late, and he seems to be freakin’ out.”

  “Let me go look,” Lucas said.

  “Sheriff’s coming down, he’ll be here in five, ten minutes.”

  Lucas duckwalked over to the car where the deputy was keeping watch with the binoculars. “Can I look?”

  “He’s waving the gun around. Looks like he’s arguing with whoever’s in the back.”

  Lucas took the glasses, focused. The car was only a hundred feet away, and with the big image-stabilized Canons, he could see individual hairs in the man’s beard. He looked like he was in his late twenties, had what appeared to be a propeller-shaped tattoo, or maybe an elongated infinity sign, on his forehead. He was shouting into the back, kept poking the gun toward the back, then swiveling to look out at the cops.

  “Doesn’t look good,” he said.

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  Lucas handed the binoculars back to the cop, sat with his back to the car, and called Letty. “If I message Skye, will the phone make a sound?”

  “I don’t know. I think so. But you could call her—the phone won’t ring, and she should see the screen light up.”

  “Give me that number again,” Lucas said.

  Lucas took the number, then crawled over to the car’s bumper, whistled at the highway patrolman, and waved him over. When he got there, Lucas said, “You’re running this scene—I’ve got no jurisdiction. I think I can call her without tipping the guy off. What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. What do you think?”

  “The guy’s not just acting crazy—we’ve got good reason to think he is crazy. I think if we put the rifle on him, and if I call and he reacts, then if it looks like he’s going to use the gun, we take him.”

  The cop bit his lip, thinking, then said, “We’ve got to do something. I’m not sure we can wait until the sheriff gets here.”

  “The question is, can our shooter hit him through the window glass?”

  “I asked him that, and he said he’s shooting solid core. He says he’s pretty square to the window glass, and if he shoots at the guy’s head, the bullet might deflect a bit, but he’ll still hit his head somewhere. A smaller target would be more of a question.”

  Lucas nodded. “Okay. I’m gonna call her. You tell the rifle guy to be ready, but don’t shoot unless it looks like he’s about to pull the trigger on her.” To the cop with the glasses, he said, “Watch him. Tell me what he does.”

  He called. When the phone stopped ringing, there was silence. He said quietly, “This is Lucas, Letty’s dad. If you push the round button at the bottom of the phone, the main screen will come up. Then push the green button on the screen, too. It’ll switch you to phone mode. Could you do that?”

  The cop with the binoculars said, “He’s just sitting there. Looks like he’s talking to himself.”

  Lucas said into the phone, “On the bottom line, there’s a square with a lot of dots in it—the keypad. Push that button. When the keypad comes up, push the bottom of the phone against your body—that’s where the keypad sound comes from. You need to muffle that. If you’ve done that, tap any button. Don’t hold it down, just tap it quick.”

  A second later, he got a beep.

  “Good. We’re talking. Are you hurt? If you’re hurt bad and need an ambulance right now, tap a button.”

  Silence.

  “Good. You’re not hurt. If you think this guy is going to shoot you, that he’s seriously going to do it, tap a button.”

  Beep.

  The patrolman said, “Damnit.”

  Lucas said into the phone, “If you think there’s any chance that you can talk him down, give me a beep.”

  Silence.

  Then a man’s voice: “This is it, this is it. No way out. No way out now. They ain’t coming back for me, they ain’t comin’ back. Piece-of-shit car, piece of shit. You ain’t goin’ no place, don’t even think about it, bitch. I’ll blow your fuckin’ brains all over the car, that’s for sure.”

  The guy with the binoculars said, “That’s him, I can read his lips when I hear the words, she’s holding the phone so we can hear him.”

  A cop called, “The sheriff’s here.”

  • • •

  A MINUTE LATER, the sheriff scuttled up, half bent over, crouched next to the patrolman. He was a short, thick man with sandy hair, a brush mustache, and round, gold-rimmed glasses. “Are we talking to him?”

  “We’re yelling at him, but we’re afraid to make a move any closer,” the patrolman said. “Says he’ll kill the girl if we do. We’re talking about having Phil take him out.”

  The sheriff looked back three cars, where the shooter was sitting behind a patrol car, looking at the fugitive car through a scope. “If we have to.”

  “I’d really like to talk to this guy—he could probably give us all the rest of them,” Lucas said.

  The sheriff looked at him and asked, “Who are you?”

  Lucas gave him the five-second version, and explained the phone connection with Skye, and the sheriff said, “Phil could probably actually shoot him in the shoulder of his gun arm. I mean, shooting normally, Phil could put three shots through a dime at that range. With the window, it’s more of a problem. But if he could take that shoulder out, we could rush him—”

  The phone beeped, then beeped again and Lucas said, “If there’s a problem, beep me again.”r />
  Beep.

  Then the man’s voice again, “Say good-bye, bitch, ’cause you’re going first. They’re gonna shoot me, but I don’t give a shit no more, I don’t give a shit no more . . .”

  The man sounded frantic, whipping himself up for it. The deputy with the binoculars said, his voice calm enough, “He’s turning around in the seat, he’s kneeling on the seat looking toward the back . . .” and the sheriff scrambled away, toward the car where the rifleman was set up.

  From where Lucas was sitting with the phone, he couldn’t see the shooter, but the patrolman could, and Lucas called, “Is he—?”

  BAM!

  Lucas saw the sheriff bolt toward the target car, pistol in his hand, and Lucas followed, well back. The sheriff stumbled through the beans and almost went down, and Lucas worried that he’d shoot himself, or somebody else, but he didn’t, and a few seconds later, they were looking through the side window at a dead guy in the front seat of the car. The rifle round had struck him in the cheekbone and gone through his head, knocking him back into the front seat.

  Lucas said, “The girl’s in the back,” and a deputy arriving at that moment yanked on the back hatch, but it was locked, and the sheriff pulled open the driver’s-side door and reached across the dead man’s legs to pull the keys out of the ignition, and they all went around to the back of the car and unlocked the hatch.

  They could see the unmoving body in the back, covered with a green woolen blanket. Lucas pulled it off and Skye was looking up at him, eyes wide with fear.

  Lucas said, “Skye: you’re okay.”

  The sheriff said, “Don’t let her see that,” and tipped his head toward the front of the car. And, “Tom, get that tape off her.”

  A deputy produced a switchblade and began cutting the tape off Skye’s legs and she said, “They were going to kill me. Last night Pilate told Bony to give me some water but he wouldn’t have to bother with feeding me, they were going to kill me today . . .”

  “Gonna get you to the hospital, honey,” the sheriff said. “You gotta be pretty shook up.” To Lucas he said, “We called in an ambulance, they’re on the way, oughta be here . . .”

  • • •

  THE DEPUTY FINISHED taking the tape that bound her arms to her body, and Skye tried to get out of the car, but when she put her feet down, nearly collapsed. Lucas caught her under the arms and pushed her back until she was sitting on the edge of the trunk. He said, “Letty told me that you were a witness to a killing last night.”

  “Who’s Letty?” the sheriff asked. Lucas gave him another five-second explanation, and then Skye said, “I heard it all, and saw the end of it. I was taped up in the back bedroom and the doors on that thing were about as thick as tinfoil. Pilate got connected to some dope dealer here and was going to buy some cocaine from him, but when the dope dealer got here, Pilate didn’t have the money. He was trying to buy on credit—”

  “On credit?” the sheriff said. “Dope?”

  “That’s what he tried, and the guy tried to get out, I guess he had a gun. Pilate said something about him having a gun, but then there was a fight and this guy came crashing through the bedroom door and there was blood gushing out of his neck, like they cut his throat or something, and Pilate told Kristen—Kristen got cut bad, they talked about that, they took her to a hospital, I think in St. Paul, last night. Anyway, Pilate said that the RV wouldn’t be safe anymore because there was no way they could clean up all the blood. I mean, there was blood everywhere, you wouldn’t believe it, so he decided to burn it . . .”

  She told the story, sitting on the edge of the car, of how she got the phone, and how she called Letty, and how they took her off the street in Duluth. Then she turned her eyes up to Lucas and said, “I think they might have killed Henry. Have you heard?”

  Lucas shook his head. “Henry . . . didn’t make it.”

  She’d been stressed and talking fast but showing no tears . . . until Lucas told her that Henry hadn’t made it, and then she suddenly began leaking tears and flopped backward into the trunk space, sobbing. The sheriff pulled on Lucas’s sleeve and Lucas stepped back and the sheriff whispered, “We gotta talk. Who in the heck is Henry?”

  “Her companion. They killed him in South Dakota. Let’s get her on the way to the hospital, and I’ll fill you in.”

  • • •

  THE AMBULANCE ARRIVED, and though Skye said she wasn’t hurt, Lucas put her in the ambulance and told her, “Just ride along with this. You don’t have to be bleeding to be hurt.”

  She no longer had her pack—she thought it might have burned in the RV—but her walking staff was in the backseat of the car in the bean field.

  “If I could get that . . . I’ve had it a long time.”

  “I’ll see to it,” Lucas said. “They’ll probably want to take fingerprints off it, in case one of the other people handled it. So, it could be a while.”

  “Okay. Call Letty,” Skye said. “Tell her what happened. She saved my life.”

  “I will,” Lucas said.

  The ambulance left for the hospital in Menomonie and Lucas stepped away from the deputies and the post-shooting bureaucracy, and called Letty. Letty answered halfway through the first ring and Lucas said, “We got her. The guy she was with was killed.”

  He told her what had happened, and Letty said, “I’m coming to the hospital.”

  “Not a bad idea, you might be her only friend. Uh, take your mom’s car.”

  “Mom’s not here.”

  “Letty . . .”

  “I’m coming,” she said.

  She hung up and Lucas looked at the phone and said, “Ah, shit.”

  She’d be coming, all right, in his Porsche.

  She had a right foot like a ship’s anchor.

  • • •

  LUCAS GAVE THE SHERIFF everything he knew, from the murder in Los Angeles to the crucifixion in South Dakota, to the murder of Malin the night before, the search of Malin’s apartment, and the phone call to Letty.

  The sheriff stuck a wad of Copenhagen under his tongue as he listened, chewed, spit once, and then said, “Those sonsofbitches come to this county, they won’t be walking away.”

  “I don’t think they’re looking to walk away,” Lucas said. “They’re like a tornado: they don’t think about too much at all. They just kill and move on.”

  “So we’re shifting this basically over to the DCI? To Stern?”

  “I guess. Nobody knows exactly where these people are, or what their cars look like. Probably get Skye to do some identikits.”

  Another car came rolling fast from the south, grille lights flashing, and the sheriff said, “That’s probably Stern now.”

  • • •

  IT WAS. STERN LOOKED at the body in the car and said, “One down. Would have liked to have talked to him.”

  “I made the call,” the sheriff said, spitting again. “We thought he was about to shoot the girl.”

  Stern slapped him on the shoulder and said, “I’m not criticizing, Jim, we all would’ve done the same thing.” He turned to Lucas: “Did the girl give us anything useful?”

  “One thing. There were two people present at the murder last night, this Pilate guy, and one of the women, named Kristen. Skye said she got cut pretty bad and she was treated at an emergency room, probably in the Twin Cities. We should get some video of her.”

  “We need that right now,” Stern said.

  “I’ll call on my way down to Menomonie,” Lucas said. “About Skye. You guys are going to want to wring her out, but when you’re done . . . she’s sort of a friend of my daughter. If you want, I’ll put her in a hotel in St. Paul and we’ll keep an eye on her.”

  “Probably as good as it’s gonna get, if she doesn’t have an address,” Stern said. “Appreciate the offer.”

  Before Lucas left, he took the highway patrolman aside and asked, “Are you guys running any speed traps down on I-94?”

  “Just curious?”

  “Well, my dau
ghter’s coming over, she’s a friend of Skye’s. She’s probably upset and driving too fast, because she’s kinda freaked out. If I could slow her down a bit . . .”

  The patrolman checked and found a trap near Exit 10, at Roberts, Wisconsin, not far from the Minnesota line. Lucas called Letty from his truck: “Where are you?”

  “I-94.”

  “But not in Wisconsin, yet,” Lucas said.

  “Not yet. Not quite.”

  “The Wisconsin highway patrol is running a trap near Exit 10, that’s ten miles on the other side of the river. Watch the mile signs.”

  “Got it. I’m driving slow. I’ll tell you, though, a seven-speed manual seems a little overcooked for this bitch. You can keep it in fifth and still blow the doors off anything else on the road.”

  “Letty, goddamnit . . .”

  “Just honking your horn, Dad. I’ll see you in Menomonie.”

  • • •

  LUCAS HAD JUST GOTTEN in the Benz when he saw Stern jogging toward him. He rolled down the window, and Stern came up and said, “He had a cell phone. We looked at the recents and he had a call just a minute or so before he got off the highway. That had to be somebody else in the caravan who spotted the roadblock being set up.”

  “Had to be,” Lucas said.

  “I’ll get the numbers down to Madison and we’ll start pinging them,” Stern said. “We oughta have a location pretty quick.”

  • • •

  LUCAS WAS ALMOST AS FAR from the hospital as Letty was, the difference being that she was driving a Porsche on an interstate highway and he was driving an SUV on back roads. On the way down, he called the BCA duty officer and told him about the woman who’d been treated for knife cuts, and asked him to check the local hospitals.

  “Sometime right before or after midnight, probably,” he said.

  “We’ll get it going.”

  • • •

  LUCAS WAS NOT SURPRISED when he pulled into the hospital parking lot and saw his Porsche already there. When he walked past it, he could hear the ticking as the engine cooled. Inside the emergency room, Skye was sitting on a bed, talking to Letty, who was sitting in a visitor’s chair.