Gathering Prey Read online

  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 benefit
ed 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.”

  Letty heard some talk in the background, and then said, “Yes, it’s a hundred dollars.”

  “Then do it. I’ll give you the money back, no problem,” Letty said. “Call and tell me when you’ll get here.”

  “It’s the Jefferson Lines, I can get a ticket now. Wait a minute, let me ask this guy.” She was gone for a minute, and Letty could hear some talk in the background. Skye came back to the phone and said, “The bus leaves here at midnight and arrives in Minneapolis at noon tomorrow.”

  “All right. All right, I’ll meet you at the bus station. Stay away from Pilot and stay away from that blonde.”

  “I will. Oh, Jesus, what about Henry?”

  “We’ll work that out. I’ll get my dad, and we’ll work that out.”

  • • •

  HER DAD WAS Lucas Davenport.

  Lucas was a tall man, dark-haired except for a streak of white threading across his temples and over his ears, dark-complected, heavy at the shoulders. He had blue eyes, a nose that had been broken a couple of times, and a scar that reached from his hairline down over one eye, not from some back-alley fight, but from a simple fishing accident. He had another scar high on his throat, where a young girl had once shot him with a piece-of-crap street gun. So his body was well lived in, and he’d just turned fifty, and didn’t like it. Some days, too many days lately, he felt old—too much bullshit, not enough progress in saving the world.

  For his birthday, his wife, Weather, a surgeon, had bought him an elliptical machine: “You’ve been pounding the pavement for too long. Give your knees a break.”

  He used it from time to time, but he really liked running on the street, especially after a rain. He liked running through the odors of the night, through the air off the Mississippi, through the neon flickering off the leftover puddles of rainwater. He needed to run when he was dealing with people like Ben Merion.

  By the time he reached the last corner toward home, he’d worked through his grouchiness. He turned the corner and picked up the pace, not quite to a full-out sprint, but close enough for a fifty-year-old.

  And through the sweat in his eyes, saw Letty standing under the porch light, hands in her jeans pockets: looking for him.

  Letty had gotten herself laid: he and Weather agreed on that, although Weather called it “becoming sexually active.” Lucas was ninety percent sure that she hadn’t been sexually active in high school, aside from some squeezing and rubbing, though she’d been a popular girl. Once at Stanford, she’d apparently decided to let go.

  Lucas deeply hoped that the sex had been decent and that the guy had been good for her, and kind. When he was college-aged, he hadn’t always been good for the women in his life, or kind, and he regretted it. He also knew that there was not much he could do about Letty’s sex life, for either good or bad. Keep his mouth shut and pray, that was about it. Trust her good instincts.

  He turned up the driveway and called out, “Whatcha doing?”

  “Waiting for you. Something’s come up,” Letty said.

  He stopped short of the porch, bent over, his hands on his knees, gulping air. When he’d caught his breath, he stood up: “Tell me.”

  • • •

  WHEN SHE’D TOLD HIM, he said, “Have you thought about the possibility that she’s nuts? Or that she’s working you?”

  “Of course. I don’t think she’s crazy—I mean, I don’t think she’s delusional,” Letty said. “I have to admit that she talks about a guy being the devil, which doesn’t sound good, but when she does it . . . you almost have to hear it. She’s not talking literally: not a guy with horns and a tail. She’s talking about, what? A Charlie Manson type. A Manson family guy. He calls himself Pilot.”

  “Pilot.”

  “Yeah. Pilot. She flat out says he’s a killer,” Letty said. “She didn’t come up with that today, she said it weeks ago, when we first met in San Francisco, when there was no money in it. As far as working me goes, she tried to work me a little in San Francisco, because they weren’t making any money with their singing. Then she realized she didn’t have to work me, because I was going to buy them a McDonald’s anyway. She’s not dumb.”

  Lucas sat on the porch next to her and said, “Okay. First of all, you know, she is crazy. Somehow, someway, because all street people are. Not necessarily schizophrenic, or clinically paranoid, but almost certainly sociopathic to some extent, because they can’t survive otherwise. If they’re too sane, their whole worldview breaks down, and they wind up in treatment or in a hospital or dead: dope or booze.”

  “She’s not exactly street,” Letty said. “She’s a traveler. They’re kind of street, but they’re differ
ent. A lot of street people are . . . bums. Beggars. Travelers are different. For one thing, they travel. They’re usually pretty put together—they buy good outdoor gear, they stay neat, they try to stay clean. Lots of them have dogs that they take care of. They have objectives. They make plans. They know each other, they meet up.”

  “More like hobos,” Lucas suggested.

  “I don’t exactly know what a hobo is. Aren’t they on trains?”

  “Yeah, but these travelers sound like hobos,” Lucas said. “They have a certain status.”

  “Exactly,” Letty said. “Will you come with me, when I meet her? She’ll be in around noon.”

  “Yeah, sure. I might have to push a meeting around, nothing important,” Lucas said.

  “She said they had Henry’s heart in a Mason jar,” Letty said.

  “Ah, the old heart-in-the-jar story,” Lucas said.

  “That Pilot made a guy eat Henry’s penis . . . roast it and eat it.”

  “Ah, the old roasted penis story . . .”

  “What if it’s true?”

  “It’s not,” Lucas said.

  Lucas stood up and dusted off the seat of his running shorts. “There are certain kinds of stories that pop up around crazy people, especially street people. Apocryphal stories, urban legends. Slander: cannibals are the big crowd favorite. I’ve run into all kinds of stories like that—the most extreme ones you can think of, people eating babies or feeding babies to dogs, and so on. Exactly none of them have been true.”

  “But . . .”

  Lucas held up a finger: “There are cannibals out there, but there aren’t any true stories about them. Cannibals are quiet about what they do. When you hear cannibal stories, it’s always about somebody trying to get somebody else in trouble. And usually about roasting and eating somebody’s dick. Or somebody’s breasts. Sexual fantasies, made up to get somebody else in trouble.”