Stolen Prey (2 page)

The doc came back in five minutes, took them around to a computer screen, tapped on some keys. The X-rays came up on the high-def screen, and he said, “You busted your left scaphoid.”

“Ah, God,” Weather said. She peered at the digital image. “Yeah, it’s clear.” She pointed at a line on a wrist bone.

The line looked like somebody had dropped a white hair on the screen. Lucas said, “It can’t be too bad. The bone’s about the size of—”

“Never mind what it’s the size of,” Weather said. Lucas tended to compare the size of almost anything, either large or small, to his dick. “You’ll need a cast.”

“A cast?” He flexed his wrist. It hurt, but not all that bad. He looked at the doc, who nodded, and then at Weather. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“With luck, we can take it off in three months,” the doc said. “A lot of people go six.”

“What? For that?” He couldn’t believe it. A little crack, barely visible in the X-ray.

Weather explained in big words. He didn’t know all of the words, but understood that the carpal bones, of which the scaphoid
was one, and which was once called the navicular because it supposedly looked like a boat, allowed the wrist to turn and the hand to work. If the bone was cracked, and didn’t heal, it might die, and rot. Then his hand wouldn’t work right.

That didn’t sound good.

Forty-five minutes after they walked in, they walked back out of the emergency room, Lucas with a fiberglass cast from his elbow to knuckles, and a bottle of hydrocodone in his pocket.

“One good thing,” Weather said, “it’s your left hand.”

“This cast is like a fuckin’ rock,” Lucas said. “If I catch that fuckin’ tweeker, I’m gonna use it to fuckin’ beat him to death.”

“That’s your daily quota on the f-word,” Weather said. “And don’t worry about that guy. If he’s as far gone as you say, he’s a dead man anyway.”

“He’s a dead man if I catch him,” Lucas said.

When they got home, Letty said, “Whoa, that cast’s the size of—”

“Never mind,” Weather said.

T
HE CAST
was a constant annoyance. Lucas was a touch-typist and, unable to spread his fingers, had to learn to use the keyboard using only one finger on his left hand. And he had, over the years, gotten used to carrying an old-fashioned Colt .45 ACP, which really required two functioning hands. He switched to a double-action nine-millimeter, but never really liked it. He couldn’t hang on to a steering wheel, though he hardly ever held on tight with his left hand anyway.

The biggest frustration came one day when he was fishing off
the dock at his cabin and hooked into a small bluegill, only to watch the bluegill get chased down, right at the surface, by what he estimated to be a two-foot-long large-mouth bass. He got the bass back close to the dock, but he couldn’t just lift it out of the water: he wasn’t even sure it was hooked. He needed to hold the rod in one hand, and use a net with the other … and stood helplessly looking down at the fish as it ran crazily back and forth, finally did a heavy-bodied leap, and came off.

He was pretty sure, as the fish swam away, that it gave him the finger.

T
HE CAST
was cut off, momentarily, at three months, and his wrist was x-rayed again, and the doc said it needed another month. A scum of dead skin covered his arm, and the muscles looked too thin—withered, Lucas thought. His arm reminded him of the tweeker’s too-thin forearm. The doc let him scrub the dead skin off before he put the new cast on. Under his arm hair, the new skin was as pink and soft as a baby’s butt. “Come back in a month,” the doc said. “In a month, you’re good. And lucky. Some people go six.”

“That’s what the last guy said. But he said if I was lucky, I’d get out in three.”

“That’s really lucky,” the doc said. “You’re only a little lucky.”

T
HE SUMMER
of the cast and cell phones, though meteorologically excellent, was professionally slow. Lucas’s job at the BCA was mostly self-invented, and included politically sensitive cases,
or cases that might attract a lot of media attention. That summer, the politicians stayed away from ostentatious felonies, as far as anyone knew—something could always pop up at a later date. (“I didn’t know she was fourteen. Honest to God, she said she was thirty-two.”)

So Lucas focused on a self-invented, long-term, statewide intelligence project that involved finding, working, and filing police sources in Minnesota’s criminal underworld. The project was kept secret for fear that it would encounter media ridicule. Most people didn’t believe that there actually
was
a Minnesota criminal underworld, and those who did—the cops—often didn’t want to give up sources.

Just as in any other state, Minnesota had plenty of crooks. Ten thousand people sat in prison, from a population a little short of six million, with a constant coming and going. Of those, quite a few were one-timers, or criminals of a kind that didn’t interest him: repeat drunk drivers, people convicted of manslaughter or negligent homicide, or white-collar crime. Those kinds of people were singletons, who generally acted alone, out of stupidity and greed, and, aside from the drunk drivers, were not given to repeated mayhem.

He was interested in the repeaters, the professionals, the people who lived and worked in a criminal culture—bikers, gang members, burglars, robbers, pederasts, drug dealers. Lucas had a theory that every county, and every town, would have a “node” that pulled in criminals of that area—a bar, a bowling alley, a roadhouse.

Furthermore, he thought that criminals in one area would know most of the nodes for the surrounding areas, no matter
how urban or rural the countryside might be, and would be attracted to those nodes when away from home.

He wanted a thousand names of sources who’d talk to the cops, across that whole web of nodes; at least one or two sources for each.

They would all know him by name, and there would be certain implicit guarantees in their transactions. Like no police comebacks.

T
O SET UP
his system, he first had to learn about spreadsheets, and then a bit about computer secrecy: he had no interest in building a general criminal database, and needed a way to keep the work away from prying cop eyes. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to help other cops, it was just that as soon as more than one person began operating the database, it would stop functioning. Tipsters wanted a relationship: they didn’t want their names in a cop newspaper, and if they thought that was what was happening, they’d shut up or disappear.

So Lucas had spent the summer talking on the phone, taking long rides out into the countryside to meet unusual men and women at sandwich shops and parks, filling out the database.

H
E REALIZED
, at some point, what the computer had done for him. He’d been tempted, at one time or another, to move to a bigger police agency—one of the federal agencies, or to a really large city, like New York or Los Angeles. He’d not done that because he’d realized that the Minneapolis–St. Paul area was the largest size he could comprehend.

In Los Angeles, a cop was caught in a blizzard of shit, and there was never any way to tell where the shit was coming from. You get three murdered in Venice, and the killer was almost as likely to come from Portland or St. Louis as from LA; was likely to be unknown to the local cops. Serial killers had operated for decades in the LA area, without the cops even knowing about it. Chaos ruled.

That wouldn’t happen in the Twin Cities. There were three million people outside his St. Paul door, but he could just about understand who was out there, and where the shit was coming from.

There were another two million in the state of Minnesota, and with the help of a computer and a spreadsheet, he was beginning to hope that he might also come to comprehend the state’s criminal base.

The rise of the cell phone added another aspect to it: with the cell phone, an office was anywhere you wanted it to be. At one time, you might drive out to a crime scene, however many minutes or even hours from the office, and then drive back to get started on the case. With cell phones, you could constantly be hooked into a developing web of contacts, sources, and records.

The downside, of course, was that you were constantly hooked into a web of contacts, sources, and records, and didn’t often have the time needed to simply
think.

A
SIDE BENEFIT
to the construction of the intel network was that he had time to look for the robbers who’d taken his five hundred dollars and broken his wrist. He quickly found out that he’d been right about one thing: they’d done it before.

They’d done it four times on the south side of the Twin Cities and its suburbs, and a half dozen more times trailing down I-35 to the south, which made Lucas think they lived down that way.

As he pulled together his intelligence nodes south of town, he asked about them—thin shaky guy, big rough woman, up to their eyebrows in meth.

He hadn’t yet found them when, in August, the peace and quiet ended.

T
HE
BCA
SUPERINTENDENT
, who didn’t particularly like Lucas, but found him to be a valuable foil when it came to dealing with political issues, called him at home as Lucas was working his way through the
Times
and a bowl of steel-cut oatmeal, which his wife and daughter said was good for something—it was organic and saved the whales, or lowered his cholesterol, one of those things. He yearned for a simple glazed doughnut, but not if it doomed Mother Earth.

His cell phone began ringing, and simultaneously rattling like a snake, on the table next to his hand.

“Really big trouble,” the superintendent said. “There’s gonna be a lot of media. Shaffer and his crew are on the way. You’d better get out there, too, so you’re up to speed. I’m trying to find Rose Marie to tell her about it.”

Murder, he said. An entire family slaughtered.

Lucas backed the Porsche out of his garage and found a gray sky and a cool day going cold; rain coming, disturbing the summer, hinting at what all Minnesotans knew in their bones: winter always comes.

T
HE DEATH HOUSE
sat down a leafy blacktopped lane, a stone, brick, and white-board lakeside palace where the Great Gatsby might have lived, made for summer soirees with mimosas and mint juleps. The deep-green summer trees grew in close and dense, so thick that even nearby noises seemed muffled and distant, and a perfect lawn dropped down a gentle slope to Lake Minnetonka. A floating dock stuck into the lake like a finger; a fast fiberglass cruiser was tied to one side of the dock, an oversized pontoon boat to the other, ready to party.

The scene was dead quiet, except for the moaning wind in the trees. The incoming clouds were so gray and low, the house so touched with a cool decorator chic, a tightness, a foreboding, that a Hollywood camera corkscrewing down the lane to the front door would have automatically hinted at horrors to be found behind the well-scrubbed window glass. A crazy housewife with poison, a husband with a meat cleaver in his hand, a couple of robotic kids with a long-barreled revolver and blank gray eyes…

None of which would have done justice to the real horror behind the door.

L
UCAS GOT
to the house at a little after eleven o’clock in the morning, and walked back out on the front porch five minutes later, looking for a breath of fresh air and maybe a place to spit, to get the taste of death out of his mouth.

He was a tall, hard, very rich man with broad shoulders and
a hawkish nose, wearing a two-hundred-dollar white shirt and a dark blue Purple Label suit with a red Hermès necktie, the necktie twisted and pulled loose behind the knot. His face was tanned, and the thin white line of a scar dropped across one eyebrow onto his cheek; another white scar showed in the pit of his neck, where a young girl, barely into her teens, had shot him with a street pistol that he hadn’t seen coming.

He rubbed his face with the fingers of his left hand, which protruded from a slightly dirty-looking cast. Del Capslock followed him out onto the porch. Del looked back over his shoulder and said, “I don’t think I’ve ever been to a crime scene this quiet.”

“Whatta you gonna say?” Lucas asked. He sniffed at the cast. Nasty. He needed to wash it again.

“You know what freaked me out?” Del asked. “It wasn’t the kids. It was the dogs. The dogs couldn’t tell us anything. They weren’t witnesses. They weren’t attack dogs. Two miniature poodles and a golden retriever? They killed them anyway. Hunted them down. They were killing everything, because they liked it.”

“I don’t know. There’s a lot going on in there,” Lucas said. “Maybe they killed the dogs first, to extort information. Went around and shot them just to prove that they’d do it. Then the boy, then the wife and daughter, then the guy. They wanted something from the guy.”

“We don’t know they did it that way,” Del said. Del was too thin—grizzled, some would say—unshaven, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and Nike cross-trainers. The T-shirt said
Menard’s
, which was a local building supply chain. His comment reflected
an ingrained skepticism about any unsupported assertion: he wanted facts.

“I feel like they did,” Lucas said. He was more comfortable with assumption and speculation than Del. He looked up and down the street, past the cluster of official cars and vans. He could see pieces of two houses, one in each direction. There were more along the way, but out of sight. “The thing is, they shot the dogs, that’s three shots. They shot the boy three or four times. That’s a lot of gunshots. Even in a neighborhood like this, with the doors closed and the air conditioners going, and boats … that’s a lot of shots. Makes me think they had silencers, makes me think they were pros, here for a reason. Then the guy, they go to work with a knife. They started out terrorizing him, ended up torturing him.”

“Drugs?”

“Gotta be. Gotta be, here in the Twin Cities. Too calculated for anything else. Shaffer says the guy ran a software place that peddles Spanish-language software down in Mexico. It looks custom-made as a money laundry,” Lucas said. He looked back into the house, though he couldn’t see anything from the porch.