This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Broken Prey
A ROC Book / published by arrangement with the author
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2005 by John Sandford
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A ROC BOOK®
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Electronic edition: November, 2005
ALSO BY JOHN SANDFORD
Rules of Prey
Shadow Prey
Eyes of Prey
Silent Prey
Winter Prey
Night Prey
Mind Prey
Sudden Prey
The Night Crew
Secret Prey
Certain Prey
Easy Prey
Chosen Prey
Mortal Prey
Naked Prey
Hidden Prey
KIDD NOVELS
The Fool’s Run
The Empress File
The Devil’s Code
The Hanged Man’s Song
For Barb Farmer and Sally Shannon
1
CHARLIE POPE TRUDGED down the alley with the empty garbage can on his back, soaked in the stench of rancid meat and rotten bananas and curdled blood and God knew what else, a man whose life had collapsed into a trash pit—and still he could feel the eyes falling on him.
The secret glances and veiled gazes spattered him like sleet from a winter thunderstorm. Everyone in town knew Charlie Pope, and they all watched him.
He’d been on the front page of the newspaper a half dozen times, his worried pig-eyed face peering out from the drop boxes and the shelves of the supermarkets. They got him when he registered as a sex offender, they got him outside his trailer, they got him carrying his can.
Pervert Among Us, the papers said, Sex Maniac Stalks Our Daughters, How Long Will He Contain Himself Before Something Goes Terribly Wrong? Well—they didn’t really say that, but that’s exactly what they meant.
Charlie tossed the empty garbage can to the side, stooped over the next one, lifted, staggered, and headed for the street. Heavy motherfucker. What’d they put in there, fuckin’ typewriters? How can they expect a white man to keep up with these fuckin’ Mexicans?
All the other garbagemen were Mexicans, small guys from some obscure village down in the mountains. They worked incessantly, chattering in Spanish to isolate him, curling their lips at the American pervert who was made to work among them.
CHARLIE WAS A LARGE MAN, more fat than muscle, with a football-shaped head, sloping shoulders, and short, thick legs. He was bald, but his ears were hairy; he had a diminutive chin, tiny lips, and deep-set, dime-sized eyes that glistened with fluid. Noticeable and not attractive. He looked like a maniac, a newspaper columnist said.
He was a maniac. The electronic bracelet on his ankle testified to the fact. The cops had busted him and put him away for rape and aggravated assault, and suspected him in three other assaults and two murders. He’d done them, all right, and had gotten away with it, all but the one rape and ag assault. For that, they’d sent him to the hospital for eight years.
Hospital. The thought made his lips crook up in a cynical smile.
St. John’s was to hospitals what a meat hook was to a hog.
CHARLIE PUSHED BACK the thought of St. John’s and wiped the sweat out of his eyebrows, wrestled the garbage cans out to the truck, lifting, throwing, then dragging and sometimes kicking the cans back to the customers’ doors. He could smell himself in the sunshine: he smelled like sweat and spoiled cheese and rotten pork, like sour milk and curdled fat, like life gone bad.
He’d thought he’d get used to it, but he never had. He smelled garbage every morning when he got to work, smelled it on himself all day, smelled it in his sweat, smelled it on his pillow in that hot, miserable trailer.
Hot and miserable, but better than St. John’s.
EARLY MORNING.
Charlie was across the park from the famous Sullivan Bank when the chick in the raspberry-colored pants went by. The last straw? The straw that broke the camel’s back?
Her brown eyes struck Charlie as cold raindrops, then flicked away when he turned at the impact; he was left with the impression of soft brown eyebrows, fine skin, and raspberry lipstick.
She had a heart-shaped ass.
She was wearing a cream-colored silk blouse, hip-clinging slacks, and low heels that lengthened her legs and tightened her ass at the same. She walked with that long busy confident stride seen on young businesswomen, full of themselves and still strangers to hard decision and failure.
And honest to God, her ass was heart shaped. Charlie felt a catch of desire in his throat.
Her hips twitched sideways with each of her steps: like two bobcats fighting in a gunny sack, somebody had once said, one of the other perverts at St. John’s, trying to be funny. But it wasn’t like that at all. It was a soft move, it was the motion of the world, right there in the raspberry slacks, with the slender back tapering down to her waist, her heels clicking on the sidewalk, her shoulder-length hair swinging in a backbeat to the rhythm of her legs.
Jesus God, he needed one. He’d been eight and a half years without real sex.
Charlie’s tongue flicked out like a lizard’s as he looked after her, and he could taste the garbage on his lips, could feel—even if they weren’t there at this minute, he could feel them—the flies buzzing around his head.
Charlie Pope, thirty-four, a maniac, smelling like old banana peels and spoiled coffee grounds, standing on the street in Owatonna, passing eyes like icy raindrops, looking at a girl with a heart-shaped ass in raspberry slacks, and telling himself,
“I gotta get me some of that. I just gotta . . .”
2
THE MIST CAME IN WAVES, now almost a rain, now so light it was more like a fog. Across the Mississippi, the night lights of St. Paul shimmered with a brilliant, glassy intensity in the rain phases, and dimmed to ghosts in the fog.
After two weeks of Missourilike heat, the mist was welcome, pattering down on the broad-leafed oaks and maples, gurgling down the gutters, washing out the narrow red-brick road, stirring up odors of cut grass, damp concrete, and sidewalk worms.
A rich neighborhood, generous lawns, older houses well kept, a Mercedes here, a Land Rover there, window stickers from the universities of Minnesota and St. Thomas and even Princeton . . .
And now the smell of car exhaust and the murmur of portable generators . . .
SIX COP CARS, a couple of vans, and a truck jammed the street. Light bars turned on four of the vehicles, the piercing red-and-blue LED lights cutting down toward the river and up toward the houses perched on the high bank above it. Half of the cops from the cars were standing in the street, which had been blocked at both ends; the other half were down the riverbank, gathered in a spot of brilliant white light.
r /> People from the neighborhood clustered under an oak tree; they all wore raincoats, like shrouds in a Stephen King chorus, and a few had umbrellas overhead. A child asked a question in an excited, high-pitched voice, and was promptly hushed.
Waiting for the body to come up.
LUCAS DIDN’T WANT to get trapped, so he left his Porsche at the top of the street, pulled a rain shirt over his head, added a green baseball cap that said John Deere, Owner’s Edition, and headed down the sidewalk toward the cop cars.
When he stepped into the street, a young uniformed cop, hands on her hips, maybe twenty-three or twenty-four, in a translucent plastic slicker said, “Hey! Back on the sidewalk.”
“Sloan called me,” Lucas said.
He was about to add “I’m with the BCA,” when she jumped in, sharp, officious, defensive about her own inexperience—part of the new-cop scripture that said you should never let a civilian get on top of you: “Get on the sidewalk. I’ll see if Detective Sloan wants to talk to you.”
“Why don’t I just yell down there?” Lucas asked affably. Before she could answer, he bellowed, “HEY, SLOAN!”
She started to poke a finger at his face, and then Sloan yelled, “Lucas: Down here!”
Instead of shaking her finger at him, she twitched it across the road and turned away from him, hands still on her hips, shoulders square, dignity not quite preserved.
A PORTABLE HONDA GENERATOR had been set up on the street, black power cables snaking down the riverbank where a line of Caterpillar-yellow work lights, on tripods, threw a couple of thousand watts of halogen light on the body. Nobody had covered anything yet.
Lucas eased down the hillside, the grass slippery with churned-up mud. Twenty feet out, he saw the body behind a circle of legs, a red-and-white thing spread on the grass, arms outstretched to the sides, legs spread wide, faceup, naked as the day she was born.
Lucas moved through the circle of cops, faces turning to glance at him, somebody said, “Hey, Chief,” and somebody else patted him on the back. Sloan stood on the slope below, leaning into the bank. Sloan was a narrow-faced, narrow-shouldered man wearing a long plastic raincoat, shoe rubbers, and a beaten-up snap-brim canvas hat that looked like it had just been taken out of the back closet. The hat kept the rain out of his eyes. He said to Lucas, “Look at this shit.”
Lucas looked at the body and said, “Jesus Christ,” and somebody else said, “More’n you might think, brother. She was scourged.”
SCOURGED. The word hung there, in the mist, in the lights. She’d been a young woman, a few pounds too heavy, dark hair. Her body, from her collarbone to her knees, was crisscrossed with cuts that had probably been made with some kind of flail, Lucas thought: a whip made out of wire, maybe. The cut lines were just lines: the rain had washed out any blood. There were dozens of the cuts, and the way they wrapped around her body, he expected her back to be in the same condition.
“You got a name?” he asked.
“Angela Larson,” Sloan said. “College student at the U, from Chicago. Worked in an art store. Missing since yesterday.”
“Cut her throat like she was a goddamn beef,” said one of the cops. A strobe went off, a flash of white lightning. Lucas walked around the body, down to stand next to Sloan.
Because his feet were lower than the victim, he could get closer to her face. He looked at the cut in the throat. As with the wire cuts, it was bloodless, washed clean by the rain, resembling a piece of turkey meat. He didn’t doubt that he could have buried a finger in it up to the knuckle. He could smell the rawness of the body, like standing next to the meat counter in a supermarket.
“The neck wound’s what killed her, I think,” Sloan said. “No sign of a gunshot wound or a stab wound. He beat her, whipped her, until he was satisfied, and then cut her throat.”
“Ligature marks on her wrists,” said a man in plainclothes. His name was Stan, and he worked as an investigator for the Hennepin County Medical Examiner, and was known for his grotesque sense of humor. His face was as long as anyone’s.
“We got a call last night when Larson didn’t get back to her apartment,” Sloan said. “Her roommate called. We found her car in the parking lot behind Chaps; she worked at a place called the MarkUp down the block . . .”
“I know it,” Lucas said. Chaps was a younger club, mixed straights and gays, dancing.
“. . . and used to park at Chaps because the store didn’t have its own parking, the street is metered, and the Chaps lot has lights. She got off at nine o’clock, stopped and said hello to a bartender, had a glass of white wine. Bartender said just enough to rinse her mouth. Probably about twenty-after she walked out to her car. She never got home. We found her car keys in the parking lot next to the car; no blood, no witnesses saw her taken.”
Lucas looked at the ligature marks on her wrists. The rope, or whatever she’d been tied with—it was rope, he thought—had been a half inch thick and had both cut and burned her. There were more burns and chafing wounds at the base of her thumbs. “Hung her up,” Lucas said.
“We think so,” Sloan said. He tipped his head down the bank. “Give me a minute, will you?”
THEY STEPPED AWAY, twenty feet down the bank, into the privacy of the darkness.
Sloan took off his hat, brushed his thinning hair away from his eyes, and asked, “What do you think?”
“Pretty bad,” Lucas said, turning back to the circle of lights. Even from this short distance, the body looked less than human, and more like an artifact, or even an artwork. “He’s nuts. You’ve checked her friends . . .”
“We’ve started, but we’re coming up empty,” Sloan said. “She was dating a guy, sleeping with him off and on, until a couple of months ago. Until the end of the school year. Then he went back home to Pennsylvania.”
“Didn’t come back to visit?”
“Not as far as we can tell—he says he hasn’t, and I sorta believe him. He was there when she disappeared, we talked to him ten hours after she dropped out of sight—and the Philadelphia cops called a couple people for us, and he checks out.”
“Okay.”
“He said they were a little serious, but not too—she knew he planned to go in the army when he got out of school, and she didn’t like the idea. Her friends say he’s a pretty straight guy, they can’t imagine that he’s involved. They don’t know she was involved with anyone else, yet. And that’s what we’ve got.”
Lucas was still looking at the body, at the rain falling around the cops. “I’d put my money on a semistranger. Whoever did this . . . This guy is pushed by brain chemistry. He’s got something wrong with him. This isn’t a bad love affair. The way she’s displayed . . .”
Sloan half turned back to the lights: “That’s what I was thinking. The goddamned display.”
THEY JUST STOOD AND WATCHED for a minute, the cops moving around the lights, talking up and down the bank. The two of them might have done this two hundred times. “So what can I do for you?” Lucas asked. Lucas worked with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Minneapolis had its own murder investigators, who would tell you that they were better than any BCA cherry who ever walked the face of the earth.
Lucas, who had been a Minneapolis cop before he moved to the state, mostly bought that argument: Minneapolis saw sixty or eighty murders a year; the BCA worked a dozen.
“You agree he’s a nut?”
Lucas wiped his eyebrows, which were beading up with rain. “Yeah. No question.”
“I need to talk to somebody who is really on top of this shit,” Sloan said. “That I can get to whenever I need to. I don’t need some departmental consultant who got his BA three years ago.”
“You want to talk to Elle,” Lucas said.
“Yeah. I wanted to see if you’d mind. And I wanted you to look at the body, too, of course. I’m gonna need all the brains on this I can get,” Sloan said.
“Elle’s an adult,” Lucas said. “She can make up her own mind.”
“C’mo
n, man, you know what I’m saying. It’s a friendship thing. If you said not to call her, I wouldn’t. I’m asking you.”
“Call her,” Lucas said. “I would.”
SLOAN CALLED ELLE—Sister Mary Joseph in her professional life. She was the head of the department of psychology at St. Anne’s College and literally Lucas’s oldest friend; they’d walked to kindergarten together with their mothers.
When Lucas became a cop and she became a teacher, they got back in touch, and Elle had worked on a half dozen murders, as an unofficial advisor, and not quite a confessor. Then, once, a crazy woman with a talent for misdirection caught Elle outside at night and had nearly beaten her to death. Since then, Lucas had shied from using her. If it happened again . . .
Elle didn’t share his apprehension. She liked the work, the tweezing apart of criminal psyches. So Sloan called Elle, and Elle called Lucas, and they all talked across town for two weeks. Theories and arguments and suggestions for new directions . . .
Nothing. The murder of Angela Larson began to drift away from them—out of the news, out of the action. A black kid got killed in a bar outside the Target Center, and some of the onlookers said it had been a racial fight. Television news pushed Larson back to an occasional mention, and Sloan stopped trudging around, because he had no place farther to trudge.
“Maybe a traveler?” Elle wondered. She had a thin, delicate bone structure, her face patterned with the white scars of a vicious childhood acne; Lucas had wondered if the change from a pretty young blond girl in elementary school to a irredeemably scarred adolescent might have been the impulse that pushed her into the convent.
She’d known he’d wondered and one time patted him on the arm and told him that no, she’d heard Jesus calling . . .
“A traveler? Maybe,” Lucas said. Travelers were nightmares. They might kill for a lifetime and never get caught; one woman disappearing every month or so, most of them never found, buried in the woods or the mountains or out in the desert, no track to follow, nobody to pull the pieces together. “But real travelers tend to hide their victims, and that’s why you never hear much about them. This guy is advertising.”