Sudden Prey (6 page)

''Shut up,'' the deputy screamed, pointing the pistol at her. ''Where's the prison guy? Where's the prison guy?''

Logan poked a finger toward the back. ''In there . . .''

''What's wrong with him?'' Sandy asked.

The deputy ran through the door into the back, and Logan said, ''Well, he's dead. LaChaise cut his throat.''

Sandy closed her eyes: ''Oh, no.''

A HIGHWAY PATROLMAN ARRIVED FIVE MINUTES LATER. Then two more sheriff's deputies. The deputies split Amy LaChaise and Sandy, made them sit apart.

''And keep your mouths shut,'' one of the deputies said, a porky man with a name tag that said Graf.

LaChaise, Sandy thought, was at Elmore's daddy's trailer, out at the hill place. Had to be. That whole story about Martin and Butters needing a place to stay--it sounded like bullshit as soon as Elmore had told her about it.

But the problem was, she was Candy's sister, LaChaise's sister-in-law. She'd been present when LaChaise had escaped and murdered a man. And now LaChaise was up at a trailer owned by her senile father-in-law.

She'd seen LaChaise railroaded by the cops for conspiracy to commit murder: they'd do the same to her, and with a lot more evidence.

Sandy Darling sat and shivered, but not with the cold; sat and tried to figure a way out.

THE TRAILER WAS A BROKEN-DOWN AIRSTREAM, SITTING on the cold frozen snow like a shot silver bullet. Buttersand LaChaise crunched through the sparse snow on fourwheel drive, then they got out of the truck into the cold and Butters unlocked the trailer. ''I come by this morning and dropped off some groceries and turned on the heat . . . Can't nobody see you in here, but you might want to keep the light down at night,'' he said. ''You don't have to worry about smoke. Everything's electric and it works. I turned the pump on and filled up the water heater, so you oughta be okay that way.''

''You done really good, Ansel,'' LaChaise said.

''I owe you,'' Butters said. And he turned away from the compliment: ''And there's a TV and a radio, but you can only get one channel--sort of--on the TV, and only two stations on the radio, but they're both country.''

''That's fine,'' LaChaise said, looking around. Then he came back to Butters, his deep black eye fixing the other man like a bug: ''Ansel, you ain't owed me for years, if you ever did. But I gotta know something for sure.''

Butters glanced at him, then looked out the window over the sink: ''Yeah?''

''Are you up for this?''

Ansel glanced at him again, and away: it was hard to get Crazy Ansel Butters to look directly at you, under any conditions. ''Oh yeah. I'm very tired. You know what I mean? I'm very tired.''

''You can't do nothin' crazy,'' LaChaise said.

''I won't, 'til the time comes. But I am getting close to my dying day.''

The words came out with a formal stillness.

''Well, that's probably bullshit, Ansel,'' LaChaise said, but he said it gravely, without insult intended or taken.

Butters said, ''I come off the interstate, down home, up an exit ramp at night, with pole lights overhead. And I seen an owl's shadow going up the ramp ahead of me--wings allspread, six or eight feet across, the shadow was. I could see every feather. Tell me that ain't a sign.''

''Maybe it's a sign, but I got a mission here,'' LaChaise said. ''We all got a mission now.''

''That's true,'' Butters said, nodding. ''And I won't fuck you up.''

''That's what I needed to know,'' LaChaise said.

Chapter
Four.

A CLERK NAMED ANNA MARIE KNOCKED ON LUCAS'S office door, stuck her head inside, struggled for a moment with her bubble gum and said, ''Chief Lester said to tell you, you know Dick LaChaise?''

''Dick?''

She paused for a quick snap of her gum: ''Dick, who was married to that one woman who got shot, and was brother to the other one? Last week?''

Lucas had one hand over the phone mouthpiece and said, ''Yeah?''

''Well, he escaped in Wisconsin and killed a guy. A prison guard. Chief Lester said you should come down to Homicide.''

''I'll be down in two minutes,'' Lucas said.

A HEAVYSET PATROL COP, WITH A GRAY CREW CUT, WAS walking down the hall when Lucas came out of the office. He took Lucas's elbow and said, ''Guy comes home fromwork and he finds his girlfriend with her bags packed, waiting in the doorway.''

''Yeah?'' The cop was famous for his rotten jokes.

''The guy's amazed. He says, 'What's going on? What happened?' 'I'm leaving you,' says the girlfriend. 'What'd I do? Everything was okay this morning,' says the guy. 'Well,' says the girlfriend, 'I heard you were a pedophile.' And the guy looks at his girlfriend and says, 'Pedophile? Say, that's an awwwwfully big word for a ten-year-old . . . ' ''

''Get away from me, Hampsted,'' Lucas said, pushing him off; but he was laughing despite himself.

''Yeah, you'll be tellin' all your friends . . .''

LESTER WAS TALKING TO THE HOMICIDE LIEUTENANT, turned when Lucas came in, dropped his feet off the lieutenant's desk and said, ''Dick LaChaise cut the throat of a prison guard during the funeral of Candace and Georgia LaChaise, and vanished. About an hour ago.''

''Vanished?'' Lucas said.

''That's what the Dunn County sheriff said: vanished.''

''How'd he cut the guy's throat? Was there a fight?''

''I don't know the details,'' Lester said. ''There's a clusterfuck going on at the funeral home. It's over in Colfax, ten, fifteen miles off I-94 between Eau Claire and Menomonie. Probably an hour and a half drive.''

''Hour, in a Porsche,'' the lieutenant said lazily.

''I think you ought to send one of your group over there,'' Lester said.

''Hell, I'll go,'' Lucas said. ''I'm sitting on my ass anyway. Do we have any paper on LaChaise?''

''Anderson's getting it now,'' Lester said. ''Anyway, the sheriff over there says LaChaise might be heading this way. LaChaise's mama says he's gonna get back at us for Candace and Georgia. 'Eye for an eye,' she says.''

Lucas looked at the lieutenant. ''Can I take Sloan?''

''Sure. If you can find him.''

Lucas picked up a half-pound of paper from Anderson, the department's computer jock, beeped Sloan, and when he called back, explained about LaChaise.

''You want to go?'' Lucas asked.

''Let me get a parka. I'll meet you at your house.''

LUCAS DIDN'T DRIVE THE PORSCHE MUCH DURING THE winter, but the day, though bitterly cold and sullenly gray, showed no sign of snow. The highway had the hard bone-dry feel that it sometimes got in midwinter.

''Are we in a hurry, I hope?'' Sloan asked as they rolled north along the Mississippi.

''Yeah,'' Lucas said. As soon as they got on I-94 at Cretin, he called Dispatch and asked them to contact the Wisconsin highway patrol, to tell that he was coming through on an emergency run. They dropped on the interstate at noon, and at 12:20 crossed the St. Croix bridge into Wisconsin. Lucas put the snap-on red flasher in the window and dropped the hammer, cranking the Porsche out to one-twenty before dropping back to an even hundred.

The countryside looked as though it had been carved out of ice, hard sky, round hills, the creek lines marked by bare gray trees, snapped-off golden-yellow cornstalks sticking out of the snow, suburban homes and then isolated farmsteads showing plumes of straight-up gray wood smoke.

Sloan watched it roll by for a few minutes, then said, ''I get to drive back.''

DUNN COUNTY SHERIFF BILL LOCK WAS A FUSSY, officious, bespectacled man, a little overweight, who, if he'd put on a fake white beard, would make an adequate departmentstore Santa. He met Lucas and Sloan among the coffins in theEternal Comfort Room at Logan's Funeral Home, where Logan had set up coffee and doughnuts for the cops.

''Come on and take a look,'' Lock said. ''We'd appreciate it if one of our guys could talk to Duane Cale--you still got him over there in Hennepin County jail. He might have some ideas where they went.''

''No problem,'' Lucas said. He dug out a card, scribbled a number on the back and handed it to Lock. ''Ask for Ted, tell him I said to call, and what you want to do.''

''Good enough.'' Lock walked them through the staging room, where the bodies of Georgie and Candy LaChaise were still waiting for a funeral. ''You want to look?'' he asked.

''No, thanks,'' Lucas said hastily. ''So what happened?''

''Logan says LaChaise insisted that he open the coffins. They came back here and he opened them. Then LaChaise asked if there was a Coke machine around, and Logan told them where the machine was. That was one of the cooler things he did: he was so routine, taking his time with the bodies, saying good-bye, then asking for a Coke . . .''

Lock walked them through it, a couple other deputies standing around, watching. They wound up in the back room, next to the Coke box. Sand's body was still on the floor, in the middle of a drying puddle of blood. Sand looked small, white and not particularly tough, his head cocked up at an odd angle, his chin squarely on the floor, his nose off the ground.

''Logan figures he was gone for five minutes. When he came back to the staging room, there was nobody here. He looked into the back, and found this.''

''Never saw LaChaise again?'' Lucas asked.

''Never saw him again,'' Lock said, shaking his head. ''Never heard any noise, nothing. Now we got the sonofabitch running around the countryside somewhere.''

''He's long gone,'' Lucas said.

''Yeah, but we're doing a house-to-house check anyway,'' Lock said.

''He had to have help.'' Lucas walked around the body, squatted, and looked at Sand's hands as they stuck out of the cuffs. ''There aren't any defensive cuts, so it wasn't like LaChaise pulled a shank on him.'' Lucas stood up and made a hand-washing motion. ''If LaChaise was cuffed and wearing leg irons, there's no way he could have taken this guy without some kind of fight. There must've been somebody else here.''

''Unless he'd cut a deal with Sand to turn him loose, and make it look like an escape--then double-crossed him.''

''Huh. What'd he have to offer Sand? Candy and Georgie were dead, so the source of money had dried up . . .''

''We're checking with Michigan, see if Sand had any problems back there. Something to blackmail him with . . .''

''Nobody saw him walking away.'' Lucas made it a statement.

''Nope. Nobody saw nothing.''

Sloan jumped in: ''I heard his mother says he's coming after us.''

''That's what she says,'' Lock said, nodding. ''And she could be right. Dick is nuts.''

''You know him?'' Lucas asked.

''From when I was a kid,'' Lock said. ''I used to run a trap line up the Red Cedar in the winter. The LaChaises lived down south of here on this broken-ass farm--Amy LaChaise is still out there. I used to see the LaChaise kids every now and then. Georgie and Dick. Their old man was a mean sonofabitch, drunk, beat the shit out of the kids . . .''

''That's how it is with most psychos,'' said Sloan.

''Yeah, well, I wouldn't be surprised if somebody told me he'd been screwing Georgie, either. She always knew too much, there in school.'' Lock scratched his head, caught him-self and slicked back his thinning hair. ''The old man came after me once, said I was trespassing on his part of the river, and they didn't even live on the river.''

''What happened?'' Sloan asked.

''Hell, I was seventeen, I'd baled hay all summer, built fence in the fall and then ran the trap line. I was in shape, he was a fifty-year-old drunk: I kicked his ass,'' Lock said, grinning at them over Sand's body.

''Good for you,'' Sloan said.

''Not good for his kids, though--living with him,'' Lock said. ''The whole goddamn bunch of them turned out crazier'n bedbugs.''

''There's more? Besides Georgie and Dick?'' Lucas asked.

''One more brother, Bill. He's dead,'' Lock said. ''Ran himself into a bridge abutment up on County M, eight or ten years back. Dead drunk, middle of the night. There was a hog in the backseat. Also dead.''

''A hog,'' said Sloan. He looked at Lucas, wondering if Lock was pulling their legs.

Lock, reading Sloan's mind, cracked a grin. ''Yeah, he used to rustle hogs. Put them in the car, leave them off at friends' places. When he got five or six, he'd run them into St. Paul.''

''Hogs,'' Sloan said, shaking his head sadly.

Lock said the only two people who'd showed up for the funeral were Amy LaChaise and Sandy Darling, Candy's sister. ''They're both still sitting out there. They say they don't know what the heck happened.''

''You believe them?'' Sloan asked.

''Yeah, I sorta do,'' Lock said. ''You might want to talk to them, though. See what you think.''

AMY LACHAISE WAS A MEAN-EYED, FOULMOUTHED waste of time, defiant and quailing at the same time, snappingat them, then flinching away as though she'd been beaten after other attempts at defiance.

''You're gonna get it now,'' she crowed, peering at them from beneath the ludicrous hat-net. ''You're the big shots going around killing people, thinking your shit don't stink; but you're gonna see. Dickie's coming for you.''