Easy Prey (47 page)

“He ain't home,” Friar said, looking at the dark house. They'd all gotten out of the truck and gathered next to one of the Explorers.

“How do you know?” Del asked. “Maybe he's asleep.”

“He burns wood, and the wood-stove ain't going,” Friar said. “That smoke there”—he pointed at a thin stream of smoke burbling out of a four-inch-wide stack—“that's from the propane burner. You only turn that on when you ain't home, to keep the wood stove going.”

“Why don't you guys wait,” Lucas said to the sheriff. “Del . . .”

Lucas and Del took out their pistols and walked up toward the house. Lucas knocked, then pounded on the door; no sign of life. He opened the storm door and tried the door knob. Locked. The sheriff came up and said, “Let's look around back.”

The house had a back porch, but the door apparently wasn't used much: It hadn't been shoveled since the last snow fall, and there were no tracks crossing it. Lucas stood up on the back porch and tried to peer through the window. “Want a flash?” the sheriff asked. He handed Lucas a flashlight. Lucas shined it in the window and saw a kitchen.

Gold shirt had wandered over to the garage and pulled the center-opening doors far enough apart to see inside. “Truck's gone,” he said.

Lucas started down the far side of the house, Del and the sheriff trailing behind. One window showed a five-inch slit in the curtains. Lucas looked at Del and said, “If I boosted you up, could you look in there?”

“I guess.”

Lucas made a stirrup out of his hands, Del stood in it, and Lucas boosted him up the side of the house. The sheriff handed him a flashlight, and Del looked through the window. A minute later he said, “All right,” and Lucas let him down.

Del handed the flashlight to the sheriff and said to Lucas, “This is the guy.”

“What'd you see?” The four shirts and two deputies and the sheriff pressed around.

“I'll let you look,” Del said. “Could you pull one of those pickups up here?”

Gold shirt ran back to his pickup, gunned it out of the driveway and up to the house. Lucas took the flashlight from Del, and they all scrambled into the truck bed. Lucas shined the light though the window.

They were looking into what might have been a bedroom at one time; now it was a shrine. The walls were covered with the thousand faces of Alie'e Maison, all carefully cut out, all pasted flat to the wall, thousands of green eyes looking out at them from the wall opposite. In the center of the room sat a single lonely wooden chair, where a man might sit to look into the eyes.

The sheriff took it in, muttered something under his breath, then turned to a deputy. “Go yank Swede out of bed and get a warrant. Tell him I need it right now. Tell him I need it ten minutes ago, because I'm already in the house.”

And Lucas added, “Get this guy's tag number and the make on his truck and call me. Quick as you can.”

“Nineteen ninety-seven Dodge ram, metallic black in color, black-pipe running boards, impact bars on the front, and red script on the door that reads, ‘Martin Scott,'” gold shirt said.

As they walked around the front of the house, Lucas called Rose Marie. “We ain't got him, but we know who he is,” he said. “A deputy up here's gonna call Dispatch, and we need to get a truck description and tag out on the streets.”

 
 
THE SHERIFF OPENED the house by the simple expedient of punching out the window on the front door, reaching inside, and unlocking it. He told the four shirts to hang around, but wouldn't let them inside.

The sheriff, Lucas, Del, and one other deputy went into the house. The house smelled bad from the first step, “like he's been skinning some mink in here,” the sheriff said. They went back to the shrine and looked in. From the outside, they could see only the wall opposite; from the inside, they could see that all four walls, plus the ceiling, had been done in Alie'e's face.

The sheriff shook his head. “This gives me the creeps,” he said. “If he'd showed me this on a nice summer day with Alie'e running around alive, it'd give me the creeps.”

“It's a little too much,” Lucas agreed.

Green shirt was up on the porch. “Us guys just want to come in and take a quick look, or go back to McLeod's. It's too goddamn cold out here to be hanging around.”

The sheriff looked at Lucas, who shrugged. “I don't care . . . maybe they'll see something we don't.”

So the sheriff let them come in as Del and Lucas probed Scott's bedroom and kitchen; they found a box of twelve-gauge shotgun shells—skeet shot—in a bedroom closet, but no shotgun; a scoped .300 Winchester Magnum; and a Ruger .22 semiauto carbine.

“So maybe he's got a shotgun with him, too,” Lucas said.

“I'll call it in,” Del said.

A small living room had black velvet curtains to block the light; a love seat was pushed against one wall; opposite the couch was a projection TV, a Sony, with a screen five feet wide; and next to the TV, a rack of tuning and sound equipment. A Nintendo console sat on the floor next to the couch, with a dozen game boxes—and next to that, a Dreamcast console with even more games. Five small speakers were spotted around the room, with a sub-woofer the size of a trash can next to the TV.

“Nine hundred and ninety-nine channels of shit on the TV to choose from,” Del said, sounding like he might be quoting someone.

In the kitchen, they found nothing at all. The last of the shirts had taken a look at the shrine, and gold shirt came out in the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, took out a beer, and screwed off the top.

“What the hell are you doing?” the sheriff asked.

“He ain't gonna need it,” gold shirt said. “Gonna go to waste.”

“Gimme one of those,” Friar said. Gold shirt opened the refrigerator, handed him a beer. As he unscrewed the cap, Friar said, “The thing about Martin is, he always thought he'd be famous. That might be
all
he thought about. He thought he could do it by starting small here in Burnt River, and if he worked hard and kept his nose clean, Coke would take care of him. He's been working his ass off, driving that goddamned truck for ten years, and I'd have to say he ain't made much progress up the corporate ladder.” He took a pull on the bottle, then added, “Such as the corporate ladder is around here.”

“You think he could kill a guy?” Lucas asked.

“Nobody'll go huntin' with him,” blue shirt said. “He likes them guns a little too much. One time this guy I know was walking in from his deer stand--”

Gold shirt jumped in. “Ray McDonald.”

Blue shirt continued. “--and he bumps into Martin, and Martin goes, ‘You smoke cigarettes and the deer'll smell it a mile away.' So Ray goes on home and he's laying in bed that night about to go to sleep, thinking about nothing, and then all of a sudden he realizes that he was about a half-mile away when he stripped that butt and threw it away.”

Blue shirt looked at Lucas, Del, and the sheriff, a look that said,
This is of significance.
Lucas took a minute to decipher the look. “He'd been watching him through his scope.”

“Yup. Ray said he almost shit in his pants, laying there in bed. Martin Scott had been looking at him smoking, through a scope on that .300 Magnum.”

“Didn't shoot him,” Del said.

“But I bet he was thinking about it,” blue shirt said. “Martin is fuckin' loony tunes, and he was a loony tunes when I met him in kindergarten.”

LATE THAT NIGHT, when Lucas and Del and a pensive Tom Olson were a hundred miles out of the Sheridan airport, on the way back to the Twin Cities, the sheriff called. “I got some sorta bad news,” he said.

“Ah, God, I don't need any,” Lucas said. “No time for it.”

“We didn't find Scott, but we found his truck,” the sheriff said. “It's parked next to the Coke truck, at the distribution center. We talked to Randy Waters again, and he said that Scott parks it there on nights he thinks will be extra cold, because his garage doesn't have heat.”

“It's not gonna be that cold tonight,” Lucas protested. “What's it gonna be?”

“Maybe ten below,” the sheriff said.

“That's nothing,” Lucas said.
“Nothing.”

“Yeah, I know. And we can't find Scott—I don't think he's in town. But even if he is in the Twin Cities, looking for his truck won't do you any good.”

“Keep an eye out,” Lucas said. “If we don't find Scott, maybe he'll show up for work.”

 
 
LUCAS TOLD DEL, who shook his head. “Gotta be him, though,” Del said. “You saw the room.”

“But what do you think? He's hitchhiking down to the Cities?”

“No, he just got down somehow. Be nice to know the car, though.”

 
 
HALFWAY BACK, LUCAS said, “I just thought of something else. You know that Oriental chick at the Matrix? She saw the guy we think was the shooter—only for a second or two—but she thought it was the vending machine guy. She also thought he looked a little porky, and so did Jael, when a guy tried to break into her house that night. . . . But when St. Paul picked up the vending machine guy, he wasn't porky. He was skinny.”

“Yeah?”

“I bet this asshole Martin Scott was wearing his Coke coveralls. One of those guys said he wore them twenty-four hours a day. I bet that's what this chick was reacting to—the coveralls, the kind a vending machine guy would wear.”

“That's thin,” Del said.

“But it's there,” Lucas said.

 
 
“MY ASS IS kicked,” Del said, just before they landed. “You gonna drop me?”

“Yeah. But I'm gonna cruise up and take a look at Jael's place, make sure they've spread out that perimeter.”

“I'll ride along for that,” Del said.

They'd left Lucas's car at the motel, because it could only handle two, and had ridden over in Olson's rattle-trap Volvo. “I'm going back to the valley,” Olson said as he drove them back to the motel. “Back to Fargo. Tomorrow. Have somebody call me when you're gonna release the bodies. I'll come and bury them, but I won't wait here anymore. This place is a suburb of hell.”

“Oh, bullshit. It's a pretty nice place,” Del said irritably.

“Think about the last week,” Olson said. His voice was mild, quiet. “Ten days ago, I had a family—now I don't. But it's not so much individual people who did this: They're just souls trying to get through life. It's the culture that does it. It's a death culture, and it's here, right now. It comes out of TV, it comes out of magazines, it comes out of the Internet, it comes out of video games. Look at that television set that poor Martin Scott had. The biggest, most expensive thing he owned, except for his truck. And all those video games. And he was a hardworking man; worked hard. But the culture burned him out, reached out through that satellite dish and grabbed him. We see it in Fargo, but you can still fight it there. Here . . . this place is gone. Too late for this place. Too late. You'll see.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Del said.

29

SUNDAY. DAY NINE.

Six o' clock in the morning.

Olson parked at the hotel and said, “Call me when the bodies are ready.”

Lucas said he would.

As they got in Lucas's car, Del said, “He could still have a finger in it.”

“Nah. There's no conspiracy here, Del. A bullshit drug murder and then a nutcase on the loose.”

“Where do you think Scott is?”

“Here,” Lucas said.

“In the suburb of hell?”

“Yup. Somewhere.”

THERE WERE TWO guys in Jael's yard. “We get a car about once every five minutes,” one of them said. “They're getting a little more traffic up at the Kinsley place, but man, there's just nothing going on.”

“All right.” They went inside, quietly as they could. A cop was sitting on an easy chair in a hallway, watching a TV on the floor. “We didn't want to get any TV flicker on the windows,” he explained.

“Is Jael asleep?”

“Yeah.”

“Where's the perimeter?”

“Two blocks out on every side; we got every street covered. He's gonna have to parachute in, if he's coming.”

“What I'm worried about, if he comes, is a suicide run,” Lucas said. “He's got that shotgun.”

“I just wish he'd come,” the cop said. “This is boring my goddamned brains out.”

 
 
BACK IN THE car, Lucas said, “I'd like to go up to Kinsleys', if you don't mind. Take ten minutes, look around.”

“It's all right with me.”

 
 
TWO BLOCKS FROM Jael's, at a four-way stop, a crossing car paused as Lucas approached, then pulled slowly across the intersection. “Old goat,” Del said.

“Yeah . . .” Lucas crossed the street, going straight ahead, then said, “Wait a minute.” He swerved, did a quick U-turn, and said, urgently, “We're going after the goat. Get your goddamn pen out, write down the tag number, call it in.” They were back at the intersection, the old slow-moving GTO already at the end of the block. Lucas went after him.

The GTO paused at a stop sign; the driver seemed unsure of his destination, looked both ways. Lucas closed up behind, putting his headlights on the license plate of the other car. Del said, “Got it.”

“Call it in, tell them we want an answer right fuckin' now.”

“What . . . ?”

“Remember back in the motel, when we called in Lynn Olson's driver's license and asked them to run down his vehicle registrations? He had a Volvo, an Explorer, and an old collector GTO. I bet that fuckin' Scott parked his truck with the Coke truck and walked over to the Olsons' place and took the GTO. How many GTOs do you see around anymore—at six o'clock in the morning?”