Shadow Prey (27 page)

"I don't think I could stand it," Lucas said.

"He's really smart," she said. "He might be the smartest man I ever knew well."

"Sounds like fuckin' Mahatma Gandhi."

"What?"

"You once told me he was the gentlest man you ever knew. Now you say he's the smartest."

"He's really quite the guy."

"Yeah, I doubt Gandhi rode a racing bike, so he's one up..."

"I don't think I want to talk about this anymore."

"All right."

But a few minutes later she said, "Sometimes, I don't know..."

"What?"

"He's so centered. David is. Peaceful. Sometimes..."

"It bores the shit out of you," Lucas suggested.

"No, no... I just feel like I'm so taken care of, I can't hardly stand the weight of it. He's such a good guy. And I hang out at the refrigerator and eat too much and I walk around with a gun and I've shot people.... He was freaked out when I went back home. I mean, he wanted to know all about it. He had this friend come over, a shrink, Shirley Anstein, to make sure I was all right. He was wild when he heard I was coming back. He said I was damaging myself."

"You think he's screwing this Anstein broad?"

"Shirley?" She laughed. "I don't think so. She's about sixty-eight. She's like an adoptive mother."

"He's faithful, then."

"Oh, yeah. He's so faithful it's almost like it's part of the weight on me. I can't even get away from that."

"Walnut Grove," Lily said, looking at a highway sign as they rolled through the edge of another small town. The sun was dipping toward the horizon. It'd be dark before they got to Brookings. "When I was a kid, I used to read the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. I loved them. Then they put the TV show on. you know, Little House on the Prairie. I was grown-up and the show was pretty bad, but I watched anyway, because of Laura.... The show was set in a place called Walnut Grove."

"This is it," Lucas said.

"What?" Lily looked at the sign again. "Same place?"

"Sure."

"Jesus..." She looked out the windows as they went through and saw a small prairie town, a little shabby, very quiet, with side streets that Huckleberry Finn would have been comfortable on. When they were out of the town, she still looked back, and said, "Walnut Grove... Damn. You know, given the change in time, it looks right."

They found Louise Liss through the Brookings Police Department and went to her motel. She was in the coffee shop, sitting by herself, staring into a glass of Coke. She was overweight, worn, with tired eyes now rimmed with red. She'd been crying, Lucas thought.

"This'll be bad," Lily muttered.

"Let's get her down to her room," Lucas said.

"I'll talk," Lily said.

They closed in the last few steps to the table and Lily took her ID case from her purse. "Mrs. Liss?"

Louise Liss looked up. Her eyes were flat, dazed. "Who are you?"

"We're police, Mrs. Liss. I'm Lily Rothenburg and this is Lucas Davenport from Minneapolis...."

"I'm not supposed to talk to police," Louise said defensively. "Mr. Meadows said I wasn't supposed..."

"Mrs. Liss, we don't want to talk about your husband. We want to talk about your son, Harold." Lily sounded like somebody's mother, Lucas thought, then remembered thai she was.

"Harold?" Louise reached out and gripped the Coke, her knuckles turning white. "What happened to Harold? Harold's okay, I talked to him before I left...."

"I think we should talk in your room...." Lily took several steps away from the table and Louise slipped out of the booth, following.

"Your purse," Lucas said.

She reached back to get her purse, saying, "What happened, what happened?" And she started to cry. The cashier was watching them. Lucas handed him three dollars, flashed his badge and said, "Police."

Outside the coffee shop, they turned toward the room. Louise grabbed Lily's coat and said, "Please..."

"He was arrested on cocaine charges, Mrs. Liss."

"Cocaine..." She suddenly pulled herself together and looked at Lucas; her voice rose to a screech. "You did this, didn't you? You framed my boy to get at John."

"No, no," Lucas said as he tried to keep her walking toward her room. "He'll tell you himself. The Narcotics people saw him touch a dealer. They stopped him and found two eight-balls in his pockets...."

"Eight-balls?"

"Eighth-ounce packets. That's a lot of cocaine, Mrs. Liss." They got to her room and she opened the door with the key. Lily followed her inside and Lucas stepped in and closed the door. Louise sat on the bed. "It's what they call a presumptive amount. With that big an amount of cocaine, the law presumes he's dealing and it's a felony."

"He's just seventeen," Louise said. She seemed barely able to hold up her head.

Lucas put a sad expression on his face. "With that much cocaine, the county attorney will put him on trial as an adult. If he's convicted, it'd be a minimum of three years in prison."

The blood drained out of Louise's face. "What do you want?" she whispered.

"We're not Narcotics people," Lily said. She sat on the bed beside Louise and touched her on the shoulder. "We're investigating these murders with the Indians, like the one with your husband. So anyway, one of the Narcotics guys, his name is Sloan, came in this afternoon and said, 'Guess what? You know that guy they got out in South Dakota? The guy who killed the attorney general? We just busted his kid.' And then he said, 'I guess the whole family is rotten.' "

"We're not rotten," Louise protested. "I work hard...."

"Well, we've got some room to maneuver with Harold, your son," Lily said in a quiet voice. "The court could treat him as a juvenile. But we have to give something to the Narcotics people. Some reason. We said, 'Well, his father is refusing to talk, and that thing is a lot more important than another dope charge.' We said, 'If we can get him to tell us just a few things, could we promise that we'd treat Harold as a juvenile?' The Narcotics officers thought it over, and we talked to the chief, and they said, 'Yes.' That's why we're here, frankly. To see if we can make a deal."

"You want John to sell out his friends," Louise said bitterly. "Sell out the people."

"We don't want any more murders," Lucas said. "That's all we want to do. We want to stop them."

Louise Liss had been pressing her hands to her cheeks as she listened to the pitch; now she dropped them into her lap. It was a gesture of either despair or surrender. Lily leaned closer to her. "Hasn't your family paid enough? Your husband is going to prison. He'll never walk again. You don't see the people who are behind this thing, you don't see those people in prison. They're still out walking around. Walking around, Louise."

"I don't know anything myself..." she said tentatively.

"Could you talk to John?" Lily asked gently.

"It would really be good if he could just give us a few names. We don't need a lot of details, just a few names. Nobody would have to know, even," Lucas said.

There was a moment of silence, and then Louise said, "Nobody would have to know?"

"Nobody," Lily said flatly. "And it would save your family a lot of grief. I hate to bring this up, but I noticed that Harold was a very good-looking youth. I mean, if they put him in the prison up in St. Cloud, with some men who have not had sexual relationships in a long time... Well."

"Oh, no, not Harold."

"It's not like they really have a choice," Lucas said. "Some of those guys up there are bigger than football players...."

When Louise had gone, Lily asked, "How bad do you feel?"

Lucas cocked his head and rolled his eyes up, as though thinking about it, and said, "Actually, not that bad."

"I don't feel that bad myself. And I think we should. It makes me a little sad that we don't feel worse," Lily said. "We're missing some parts, Davenport."

Lucas shrugged. "They got worn off. And..."

"What?"

"It's a game, you know," he said, testing her. "You can't back off in a game and win. You either go balls to the wall, or somebody takes you out and you're no good anymore."

Louise Liss was back from the hospital an hour later.

"I had trouble getting in," she apologized.

"Did you talk to John?"

"Yes... you'll help Harold?"

"If you help us, Mrs. Liss, I'll do everything I can to see that Harold is released," Lucas promised.

"It's some people named Crow," she said in a low voice. "They may be brothers or cousins. They're big Dakota medicine men."

"Dakota?" asked Lily.

"That's Minnesota Sioux," Lucas said. "Where are they at?"

"I wrote it down," Louise said, fumbling a piece of paper out of her purse. It was the corner of an envelope, with a street address. "He thinks this is right...."

"Are there any more killings planned?" Lily pressed.

"All he would give me are the names and that address," Louise said. "I think it might kill him, just doing that."

"Okay, that's fine," Lily said. "We'll see about Harold tonight. We'll call on the telephone."

"Please," Louise Liss said, snatching at Lily's coat sleeve, "help him. Please?"

"The Crows? He said the Crows?" Larry Hart was astonished.

"You know them?" asked Daniel. Lucas was in a phone booth. Daniel, Anderson, Sloan and Hart were in Daniel's office, using a speaker phone.

"I know about them." There was a long pause, as Hart thought it over. "God damn. I might even have seen them once. They're famous. Two old men, they travel around the country and up in Canada, organizing the Indian nations. They've been on the road all their lives. Aaron is powerful medicine. Sam is supposed to be brilliant.... Jesus, you know, it all fits. They'd be right."

"What was that on their names? Aaron?" Anderson asked.

"Aaron and Sam. They supposedly come through the Cities a lot. It's like their home base. They have a son here, you see him from time to time. I went to school with him, years ago. Shit, you might even see the Crows from time to time, but I wouldn't know them...."

"What about the son?" asked Sloan.

"The son is a freak. He has visions. He doesn't know which one of the Crows is his father. They were both sleeping with his mother that winter.... That's how he got his name, Shadow Love, love-in-the-shadows... it's like an Indian joke, based on his mother's last name. He's supposed to have some of the power of Aaron...."

"Wait a minute, jvait a minute," Lucas said. "Shadow Love?"

"Yeah. Skinny guy..."

"With tattoos. God damn." Lucas slapped his forehead. He took the phone away from his mouth and spoke to Lily. "We got them. These are the right motherfuckers." He went back to the phone. "Shadow Love's the guy I saw with Yellow Hand, before Yellow Hand was killed. Sonofabitch. Shadow Love. And two guys named Crow?"

"Yeah." Hart sounded distant, almost pensive.

"All right, listen," Lucas said. He hesitated a moment, trying to remember each step of his brief encounter with Shadow Love. "All right: Shadow Love's got a South Dakota driver's license and it's in his own name. I looked at it and that's how I remember the name, because it was so strange. And I don't know why, I can't remember, but something he said made me think he'd done time in prison. Harmon, can you run that down? Check with the NCIC or whatever?"

"I got it," said Anderson.

"We'll get some guys on the way to that address, check it out," Daniel said. "We ought to know something in an hour."

"Call us," Lucas said. He gave them his room number. "We'll get something to eat, then I'll be in my room."

"Soon as we know," Daniel promised. "This is fuckin' great, you two. This is what we needed. We got those motherfuckers."

"That's Minnesota Sioux," Lucas said. "Where are they at?"

"I wrote it down," Louise said, fumbling a piece of paper out of her purse. It was the corner of an envelope, with a street address. "He thinks this is right...."

"Are there any more killings planned?" Lily pressed.

"All he would give me are the names and that address," Louise said. "I think it might kill him, just doing that."

"Okay, that's fine," Lily said. "We'll see about Harold tonight. We'll call on the telephone."

"Please," Louise Liss said, snatching at Lily's coat sleeve, "help him. Please?"

"The Crows? He said the Crows?" Larry Hart was astonished.

"You know them?" asked Daniel. Lucas was in a phone booth. Daniel, Anderson, Sloan and Hart were in Daniel's office, using a speaker phone.

"I know about them." There was a long pause, as Hart thought it over. "God damn. I might even have seen them once. They're famous. Two old men, they travel around the country and up in Canada, organizing the Indian nations. They've been on the road all their lives. Aaron is powerful medicine. Sam is supposed to be brilliant.... Jesus, you know, it all fits. They'd be right."

"What was that on their names? Aaron?" Anderson asked.