Текст книги "Lucas Davenport Novels 1-5"

Автор книги: John Sandford

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 105 страниц)

“Okay,” he said after a minute. “Can we borrow this, Mrs. Rice? We can give you a receipt.”

“Sure. But I don’t need no receipt. You’re cops.”

“Okay. We’ll get it back to you.”

Outside, Sloan said, “What?”

“I think we’ve got our friend Alan Nester by the short and curlies, but I also think I know what he’s lying about. And it isn’t the maddog,” Lucas said gloomily. He opened his hand to look at the mouse. “Everything I know about art you could write on the back of a postage stamp. But look at this thing. Nester bought fifteen of them for five hundred bucks. I bet this thing is worth five hundred bucks by itself. I’ve never seen anything like it. Look at the expression on the mouse’s face. If this isn’t worth five hundred bucks, I’ll kiss your ass on the courthouse lawn.”

They were both peering into Lucas’ hand. The mouse was exquisite, its tiny front and back legs clenching a straw, so that a hole ran between the legs from front to back. “They must have used it for something, a button or something,” Lucas said.

Sloan looked up and Lucas turned to follow his gaze. A patrol car was in the street, almost at a stop, the two cops peering out the driver’s-side window at them.

“They think we’re doing a dope deal,” Sloan laughed. He pulled his badge and walked toward the car. The cops rolled down the window and Lucas called, “Want to see a great-lookin’ mouse?”

The Institute of Art was closed by the time they left Rice’s house, and Lucas took the mouse home overnight. It sat on a stack of books in his workroom, watching him as he finished the last of the hit tables on the Everwhen game.

“God damn, I’d like to have you,” Lucas said just before he went to bed. Early the next morning he got up and looked at it first thing. He thought it might have moved in the night.

It took a while to find out about it. Lucas picked up Sloan at his house. Sloan’s wife came out with him and said, “I’ve heard so much about you I feel like I know you.”

“It’s all good, I expect.”

She laughed and Lucas liked her. She said, “Take care of Sloan,” and went back inside.

“Even my wife calls me Sloan,” Sloan said as they drove away.

A curator at the art institute took one look at the mouse, whistled, and said, “That’s a good one. Let’s get the books.”

“How do you know it’s a good one?” Lucas asked as he tagged along behind.

“Because it looks like it might walk around at night,” the curator said.

The search took time. Sloan was wandering through the photo gallery when Lucas returned.

“What?” he said, looking up.

“Eight thousand,” Lucas said to him.

“For what? For the mouse or for all fifteen?”

“For the mouse. That’s his low estimate. He said it could be twice as much at an auction. So if it’s eight thousand and the others are as good, Nester paid a man dying of cancer five hundred dollars for netsukes worth something between a hundred and twenty thousand dollars and a quarter-million.” He said “net-skis.”

“Whoa.” Sloan was nonplussed. The amounts were too big. “That’s what they are? Net-skis?”

“I guess. That’s what the curator was saying.”

“I didn’t know.”

“I bet Alan Nester does.”

They stopped at Rice’s house.

“Eight thousand dollars?” she said in wonderment. A tear trickled down one cheek. “But he bought fifteen of them . . .”

“Mrs. Rice, I expect that when your husband asked Mr. Nester to come over here, all he really wanted was an evaluation so he could sell them later, isn’t that what you told us?” Lucas asked.

“Well, I don’t really remember . . .”

“I remember your saying that in the first interview,” Sloan said insistently.

“Well, maybe,” she said doubtfully.

“Because if he did, then he cheated you,” Lucas said insistently. “He committed a fraud, and you could recover them.”

“Well, that’s what he come over for, to valuate them,” Mary Rice said, nodding her head vigorously, her memory suddenly clearing up. She picked up the mouse, handling it tenderly. “Eight thousand dollars.”

“Now what? Get a warrant?” Sloan asked. They were on the walk outside Rice’s house again.

“Not yet,” Lucas said. “I don’t know if we have enough. Let’s hit Nester first. Tell him what we’ve got, ask him to cooperate on the gun thing. Tell him if he cooperates, we’ll let it go as a civil matter between his attorney and Rice’s attorney. If he doesn’t, we get a warrant, bust him, and put it in the press. How he ripped off a man who was dying of cancer and was trying to leave something for his wife.”

“Oooh, that’s ugly.” Sloan smiled. “I like it.”

“Where’s Nester?”

The man behind the counter was small, dark, and much younger than Nester.

“He’s not here,” the man said. There was a chill in the air; Lucas and Sloan didn’t look like customers. “Might I ask who is inquiring?”

“Police. We need to talk to him.”

“I’m afraid you can’t,” the young man said, raising his eyebrows. “He left for Chicago at noon. He’ll already be there and I have no idea where he’s staying.”

“Shit,” Sloan said.

“When’s he due back?” Lucas asked.

“Tuesday morning. He should be in by noon.”

“Do you have any netsukes?” Sloan asked.

The young man’s eyebrows went up again. “I believe we do, but you’d have to ask Alan. He handles all the more expensive items.”

CHAPTER

22

Lucas took off his coat and tossed it on the mattress. The two surveillance cops, one tall, one short, were sitting on folding chairs, facing each other, with another chair between them. They were playing gin, the cards laid out on the seat of the middle chair. One of the cops watched the window while the other surveyed his hand. They were good at it. Their shift covered the prime time.

“Nothing?” asked Lucas.

“Nothing,” said the tall cop.

“Anything from the cars?”

“Not a thing.”

“Who’s in them?”

“Davey Johnson and York, up north, behind McGowan’s. Sally Johnson and Sickles, out east. Blaney is over on the west side with a new guy, Cochrane. I don’t know him.”

“Cochrane’s that tall blond kid, plays basketball in the league,” the short cop chipped in. He fanned his cards, dropped them on the seat of the chair between them, and said, “Gin.”

A radio against one wall played golden-oldie rock. A police radio sat silently next to it.

“He’s about due,” Lucas said, peering out into the street.

“This week,” the short one agreed. “Which is odd, when you think about it.”

“What’s odd?”

“Well, one of the notes he left said something about ‘Don’t set a pattern.’ So what does he do? He kills somebody every two weeks. That’s a pattern if I ever saw one.”

“He kills when he needs to,” Lucas said. “The need builds up, and eventually he can’t stand it.”

“Takes two weeks to build up?”

“Looks like it.”

The police radio burped and all three of them turned to look at it. “Car,” it said. And a moment later, “This is Cochrane. It’s a red Pontiac Bonneville.”

The tall cop leaned back, picked up a microphone, and said, “Watch it. It’s the right size, even if it’s the wrong color.”

“Coming your way,” Cochrane said. “We got the tag, we’ll run it.”

Lucas and the surveillance cop watched the car roll down the street and ease to the curb two houses down. It sat with its lights on for one minute, two, and Lucas said, “I’m going down there.”

He was at the stairs when the tall cop said, “Hold it.”

“What?”

“It’s the girl.”

“High-school girl down the street,” said the short cop. “She’s going up to the house now. Must be a date.”

Lucas walked back in time to see her going through the porch door. The car left.

“Could be something going on with her phones,” the short cop said a while later. The phone-monitoring station was at the other surveillance post, behind McGowan’s house.

“What? You mean McGowan’s?” asked Lucas.

“There were a bunch of calls last week and over the weekend. There’d be a whole group, a half-hour apart, more or less. But whoever it is doesn’t leave a message on the answering machine. The machine answers and they hang up.”

“Everybody does that—hangs up on machines,” Lucas said.

“Yeah, but this is a little different. It’s the first time it’s happened, for one thing, a bunch of calls. And she has an unlisted number. If it was a friend, you’d think he’d leave a message instead of calling over and over.”

“It’s like somebody’s checking on her,” said the tall cop.

“Can’t trace them?”

“It’s two rings and click, he’s gone.”

“Maybe we ought to change the machine,” said Lucas.

“Maybe. She’s due home in, what, an hour and a half?”

“Something like that.”

“We could do it then. Set it for five rings.”

Lucas went back to the mattress and the two cops started the gin game again.

“What do I owe you?” asked the tall cop.

“Hundred and fifty thousand,” said the short one.

“One game, double or nothing?”

Lucas grinned, closed his eyes, and tried to think about Alan Nester. Something there. Probably the fear that the netsuke purchase would be discovered and questioned. The purchase bordered on fraud. That was almost certainly it. Damn. What else was there?

Half an hour later, the cop radio burped again.

“This is Davey,” a voice said, carrying an edge of excitement. “It’s showtime, folks.”

Lucas rolled to his feet and the tall cop reached back and grabbed the microphone.

“What do you got, Davey?”

“We got a single white male dressed in dark slacks, dark jacket, dark gloves, watch cap, dark shoes, on foot,” Davey Johnson said. Johnson had been on the street for years. He didn’t get excited without reason, and his voice was crackling with intensity. “He’s heading your way, coming right down the street toward you guys. If he’s heading for McGowan’s, he’ll be in sight of the side of the back-lot house in one minute. This dude’s up to something, man, he ain’t out for no country stroll.”

“York with you?”

“He’s gone on foot, behind this guy, staying out of sight. I’m staying with the unit. God damn, he’s walking right along, he’s crossing the street, you other guys out on the wings, start moving up, goddam—”

“We see him out the side windows of our house,” said a new voice.

“That’s Kennedy at the other post,” the tall cop said to Lucas.

Lucas turned and headed for the stairs. “I’m going.”

“He’s going in the alley,” he heard Kennedy call as he ran down the first few steps. “He’s in her yard. You guys move . . .”

Lucas ran down the three flights of steps to the front door and brushed past the white-haired architect who stood in the hallway with a newspaper and a pipe, and ran out into the yard.

The maddog parked five blocks from McGowan’s house, facing the Interstate. Checked the street signs. Parking was okay. Lots of cars on the same side of the street.

The weather had turned bad early in the morning. A cold rain fell for a while in the afternoon, died away, started again, stopped. Now it felt like snow. The maddog left the car door unlocked. Not much of a risk in this neighborhood.

The sidewalk was still damp, and he walked along briskly, one arm swinging, the other holding a short, wide pry bar next to his side. Just the thing for a back door.

Down one block, another, three, four, onto McGowan’s block. A car started somewhere and the maddog turned his head in that direction, slowed. Nothing more. He glanced quickly around, just once, knowing that furtiveness attracts attention all by itself. His groin began to tingle with the preentry excitement. This would be a masterpiece. This would set the town on its ear. This would make him more famous than Sam, more famous than Manson.

Maybe not Manson, he thought.

He turned into the alley. Another car engine. Two cars? He walked down the alley, reached McGowan’s yard, glanced around again, took a half-dozen steps into the yard. A car’s wheel squealed in deceleration a block away, the other end of the alley.

Cops.

In that instant, when the turning wheels squealed against the blacktop, he knew he had been suckered.

Knew it. Cops.

He ran back the way he had come.

Another car, down the block. A tremendous clatter behind him; one of the cars had hit something. More cops. A door slammed. Across the street. Another one, behind McGowan’s.

He turned out of the alley, the pry bar slipping from beneath his jacket and falling to the grass, and he ran across the yard one house down from McGowan’s, through bridal wreath, running in the night, hit a lilac bush, fell, people shouting, “Hold it hold it hold it . . .”

The maddog ran.

The rookie Cochrane was at the wheel, and tires squealed as he slowed and cranked left into the alley, an unintended squeal, and his partner blurted “Jesus!” and quick as a turning rat, they saw the maddog run into the alley ahead of them. Cochrane wrenched the car straight in the alley, smashed through two empty garbage cans, and went after him.

The maddog was running between houses when the other wing car burst into the alley toward them and Cochrane almost hit it. The other car’s doors flew open and the two cops inside leapt out and went after the maddog. Cochrane’s partner, Blaney, yelled, “Go round, go round into the street . . .” and Cochrane swung the car past the other unit toward the street at the end of the alley.

Sally Johnson jumped out of her car and saw Lucas coming from across the street, running in a white shirt, and she turned and ran after her partner, Sickles, between houses as Cochrane’s car cranked around her car and went out toward the street.

The maddog had already crossed the next street, and Sally Johnson snatched her radio from her belt carrier and tried to transmit, but couldn’t find words as she ran fifteen feet behind Sickles, Sickles with his gun out. Another cop, York, came in from the side and behind her, gun out, and Sally Johnson tried to get her gun out and saw the maddog go over a board fence across the street and dead ahead.

The maddog, fear and adrenaline blinding him to anything but the tunnel of space in front of him, space with no cops, sprinted across the street, as fast as he had ever run, hit the board fence, and vaulted it in a single motion. He could never have done it if he’d thought about it, the fence four feet high, as high as his chest, but he took it like an Olympian and landed in a yard with an empty swimming pool, a small boat wrapped in canvas, and a dog kennel.

The dog kennel had two separate compartments with rugs for doors and inside each compartment was a black-and-tan Doberman pinscher, one named July and the other named August.

August heard the commotion and pricked up his ears and poked his head out and just then the maddog came sailing over the fence, staggered, sprinted across the yard, and went over the back fence. Either dog could have taken him, if they’d had the slightest idea he was coming. As it was, July, exploding from her kennel, got his leg for an instant, raked it, and then the man was gone. But there was more business coming. July had no more than lost the one over the back fence than another came over the front.

The maddog never saw the Doberman until it was closing in from the side. And a good thing, because he might have hesitated. He saw it just as he hit the fence, a dark shadow at his feet, and felt the ripping pain in his calf as he went over the back fence.

Carl Werschel and his wife, Lois, were almost ready for bed when the dogs went crazy in the backyard.

“What’s that?” Lois asked. She was a nervous woman. She worried about being raped on a remote North Woods highway by gangs of black biker rapists, though neither she nor anyone else had seen a black biker gang in the North Woods. Nevertheless, it was clear in her dreams, the bikers hunched over her, ravens circling overhead, as they did the foul deed on what seemed to be the hood of a ’47 Cadillac. “It sounds like . . .”

“Wait here,” Carl said. He was a very fat man who worried about black biker gangs himself and had stockpiled both ammo and plenty of camouflage clothing against the day. He got the Remington twelve-gauge pump from beneath the headboard and hustled for the back door, jacking a shell into the chamber as he went.

Just for an instant, Sickles, who was forty-five, felt a little kick of joy as he cleared the board fence. He was forty feet and one fence behind the maddog and he was in good shape, and with any luck, with the other guys coming in from the side . . .

The dogs hit him like a hurricane and he went down, clenching his gun but losing the flashlight he’d had in the other hand. The dogs were at his shoulders, his back, going crazy, barking, snarling, ripping his hands, the back of his neck . . .

Sally Johnson cleared the fence and almost landed in the tight ball of fury around Sickles, and one of the dogs turned toward her, slavering, coming, and Sally Johnson shot the dog twice and then the other one was coming and she turned and aimed the pistol, aware of Sickles on his hands and knees off to the left, enough clearance, and she pulled the trigger once, twice . . .

Carl Werschel ran out his side door with the twelve-gauge and saw the young punk in jeans and black jacket shooting his dogs, shooting them down. He yelled “Stop!” but he didn’t really mean “Stop,” he meant “Die,” and with an atavistic Prussian-warrior joy he fired the shotgun at a thirty-foot range into Sally Johnson’s young head. The last thing Sally Johnson saw was the long muzzle of the gun coming up, and she wished she could say something on the radio to stop it from happening . . . .

Sickles felt the dogs go, and he started to roll out, when the long finger of fire reached out and knocked back the partner who had just saved him from the dogs. He knew that much, that he’d been saved. The finger of fire flashed again and Sally went down. Sickles had been around long enough to think, “Shotgun,” and the cops’ tone poem muttered somewhere in his unconscious as he rolled half-blind with blood: “Two in the belly, one in the head, knocks a man down and kills him dead.” He fired three times, one shot piercing Werschel’s belly, wiping out his liver, knocking him backward, the second shot ruining his heart. Werschel was dead before he hit the ground, though his mind ticked over for a few more seconds. Sickles’ third shot went through the wall of the house, into the dining room, through a china cabinet and a stack of plates inside it, through the opposite wall, and, as far as cops investigating later could prove, into outer space. The slug was never found.

When Werschel opened up with the shotgun, the maddog had crossed the street and had fallen into a trench being dug to replace a storm sewer. It was full of wet, yellow clay. He clambered out the far side, a mud ball, not understanding why he had not yet been caught.

And he would have been, except that the north car, with Davey Johnson on board, had closed onto the block when the shotgun blast lit up the neighborhood. Johnson dumped the unit and headed into the fight. His partner, York, on foot, had been caught in mid-block when the maddog changed direction, hadn’t seen it happen, and wound up running behind Sickles and Sally Johnson and just ahead of Lucas, who had cut across McGowan’s yard.

Cochrane and Blaney had driven out of the alley intending to turn north, in the direction the maddog was running, when the firefight started. The firefight took all priority. They assumed Sickles and Sally Johnson had cornered the maddog, found him armed, and shot it out. And when the bad guy’s shooting a shotgun . . . Like Davey Johnson, they dumped their car and went in on foot.

Lucas had just crossed the fence, gun in hand, screaming for someone to call for ambulances and backup, when the maddog got out of the ditch and ran through another blacked-out yard, across an alley, another yard, and on. In forty seconds he reached his car. In another minute he was nearing the Interstate. No lights behind him. Something had happened, but what?

In the Werschels’ yard, Lucas was packing his shirt into a gaping hole in Sally Johnson’s neck, knowing it was pointless, and Sickles was chanting Oh my God, oh my God and Cochrane came over the fence with his gun in his fist and shouted What happened, what happened and pointed at the dead Werschel and shouted Is that him?

Lois Werschel came out the side door of her house and called, “Carl?”

Blaney called for backup within a few seconds of the firefight. The radio tape later released to the media showed that it was six minutes later when Lucas called in with Cochrane’s handset to request that all dark late-model Thunderbirds in South Minneapolis be frozen and the occupants checked.

The dispatcher momentarily lost it when she heard that a cop was down, and started calling for identity and condition and routing the ambulances and the backup into the neighborhood. She did not rebroadcast the request that all Thunderbirds be frozen for another two minutes, assuming that it was a lower priority than the other traffic. By that time, the maddog was passing downtown Minneapolis. Two minutes later he was at his exit, and less than a minute after that, waiting in the driveway as the automatic opener rolled up his garage door.

The paramedics got to the Werschels’ house before the maddog got home, but it was too late for Sally Johnson and Carl Werschel. The paramedics took one look at Werschel and wrote him off, but Sally still had a thin thready heartbeat and they started saline and tried to compress the neck wound and there was nothing to do about the head wound and they got her in the ambulance, where they lost the heartbeat, injected a stimulant, and started toward Hennepin Medical Center, but her pupils were fixed and dilated and they kept trying but they knew she was gone . . . .

Lucas knew she was gone. When they took her out, he stood on the boulevard outside the Werschel house and watched the flashers until they disappeared. Then he headed back to the fenced yard, where two more paramedics were working with Lois Werschel and Sickles, who were both descending into shock. Carl Werschel, looking like a beached whale, lay belly-up in a bed of brown, frost-killed marigolds.

“Who was that in the car, squealed the tires?” Lucas asked quietly. Blaney glanced at Cochrane and Lucas caught the glance and Cochrane opened his mouth to explain and Lucas hit him squarely in the nose. Cochrane went down and then the light hit them and Lucas grabbed Cochrane by the shirt and lifted him halfway to his feet and hit him again in the mouth with his other hand and York wrapped Lucas up from behind and wrestled him away.

“You motherfucker, you killed Sally, you ignorant shithead,” Lucas screamed and the light blinded him and York was hollering “Hold it hold it” and Cochrane was covering his broken nose and teeth with one hand and trying to push up off the ground with the other, his face cranked toward Lucas, his eyes wide with fear. Lucas struggled against York for a few seconds and finally slumped, relaxed, and York pushed him away and Lucas turned and saw the TV camera and lights over the fence, focused on the group in the yard. The figures behind the lights were unrecognizable and he started toward them, intending to pull down the lights, when Annie McGowan emerged from them and said, “Lucas? Did you get him?”

• • •

Daylight was leaking in the office windows when the meeting convened. Daniel’s face look stretched, almost gaunt. He had not shaved, was not wearing a tie. Lucas had never seen him in the office without a tie. The two deputy chiefs looked stunned and fidgeted nervously in their chairs.

“ . . . don’t understand why we didn’t have automatic stop on all Thunderbirds the instant something started happening,” Daniel was saying.

“We should have, but nobody decided who was going to call. When it went down and the fight started and Blaney started hollering for backup and then for the ambulances, we just lost it,” said the surveillance crew’s supervisor. “Lucas was on the air pretty quick, six minutes—”

“Six minutes, Jesus,” said Daniel, leaning back in his chair, his eyes closed. He was talking calmly, but his voice was shaky. “If one of the surveillance crews had called the instant it started going down, it would have been rebroadcast and we’d have had cars on the way before Blaney got on the air. That would have eliminated the foul-up by the dispatcher. We’d have been eight minutes or nine minutes faster. If Lucas is right and he was parked up near the entrance to the Interstate, he was downtown having a drink by the time we started looking for his car.”

There was a long silence.

“What about this Werschel guy?” asked one of the deputy chiefs.

Daniel opened an eye and looked at an assistant city attorney who sat at the back of the room, a briefcase between his feet.

“We haven’t figured it out yet,” the attorney said. “There’s going to be some kind of lawsuit, but we were clearly within our rights to go into his yard in pursuit of the killer. Technically, his dogs should have been restrained, no matter how high the fence was. And when he came out and opened fire, Sickles was clearly within his rights to defend himself and his partner. He did right.”

“So we got no problem there,” said one of the deputy chiefs.

“A jury might give the wife a few bucks, but I wouldn’t worry about it,” the attorney said.

“Our problem,” Daniel said in his remote voice, “is that this killer is still running around loose, and we look like a bunch of clowns running around killing civilians and each other. To say nothing of beating each other up afterward.”

There was another silence. “Let’s get back to work,” Daniel said finally. “Lucas? I want to talk to you.”

“What else you got?” he asked when they were alone.

“Not a thing. I had . . . a feeling about the McGowan thing—”

“Bullshit, Lucas, you set her up and you know it and I know it, and God help me, if we could do it again I’d say go ahead. It should have worked. Motherfucker. Motherfucker.” Daniel pounded the top of his desk. “We had him in the palm of our hand. We had the fucker.”

“I blew it,” Lucas said moodily. “That gunfight went up and I came across the fence and saw Werschel lying there and I knew he wasn’t the maddog because the maddog was all dressed in black. And Sally was down and still pumping some blood and Sickles was there to help her, and the other guys, and I should have kept going. I should have gone over the back fence after the maddog and left Sally to the other guys. I thought that. I had this impulse to keep going, but Sally was pumping blood and nobody else was moving . . .”

“You did all right,” Daniel said, stopping the litany. “Hey, a cop got blown up right in front of you. It’s only human to stop.”

“I fucked up,” Lucas said. “And now I don’t have a thing to go on.”

“Nails,” Daniel said.

“What?”

“I can hear the media getting out the nails. We’re going to be crucified.”

“It’s pretty hard to give a shit anymore,” Lucas said.

“Wait for a couple days. You’ll start giving a shit.” He hesitated. “You say Channel Eight got some film of you and Cochrane?”

“Yeah. God damn, I’m sorry about that. He’s a rookie. I just lost it.”

“From what I hear, it’s going to be pretty hard to take back what you said. Most of the cops out there think you’re right. And Sally had some years in. If Cochrane had just taken it easy, he’d have been right down that alley before the maddog knew you were coming. You’d have squeezed him between you and nobody would ever have gone into the yard with those fuckin’ dogs.”

“Doesn’t make it better to know how close we came,” Lucas said.

“Get some sleep and get back here in the afternoon,” Daniel said. “This thing should start shaking out by then. We’ll know what to expect from the media. And we can start figuring out what to do next.”

“I can’t tell you what to do,” Lucas said. “I’m running on empty.”