Secret Prey

  ‘‘Are you the Porsche outside?’’ asked the one with the gut.

  ‘‘Yeah. That’s us,’’ Lucas said.

  ‘‘So you’re the guys from Minneapolis.’’

  ‘‘Yeah. What can we do for you?’’

  ‘‘We were just wondering if you’re done here,’’ said the lanky one. His voice was curt: his cop voice.

  ‘‘I don’t know,’’ Lucas said. He was just as curt. Across the table, Sherrill had swiveled slightly on her butt so that her back was to the wall, and her legs, still curled up, projected toward the deputies. Their attitude was wrong; and other patrons in the restaurant had noticed. ‘‘We didn’t get very far today. We weren’t getting a lot of cooperation.’’

  ‘‘We were just talking over at the office about how everybody was cooperating, and you were being pretty damn impolite about it,’’ said Gut.

  ‘‘Not trying to be impolite,’’ Lucas said. Swiveling a bit, as Sherrill had. ‘‘We’re trying to conduct an investigation.’’

  ‘‘Yeah. I bet you were investigating the hell out of this chick up to the Sugar Beet,’’ Gut said.

  Sherrill said, ‘‘Hey, you . . .’’ But Lucas held up a peremptory finger to silence her, and she stopped and looked at him; then Lucas said to Gut, ‘‘Fuck you, you fat hillbilly cocksucker.’’

  Gut looked at the slender man, who stepped back a bit and said, ‘‘Let’s cool this off,’’ but Gut put his fists on the table and leaned toward Lucas and said, ‘‘If you said that outside, I’d drag your ass all over the goddamn parking lot.’’

  ‘‘Let’s go,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘I’m tired of this rinky-dink bullshit.’’

  • • •

  LUCAS TOSSED A TWENTY ON THE TABLE AND FOLLOWED Gut toward the entrance; the lanky man said, ‘‘Hey, whoa, whoa,’’ and Sherrill said, ‘‘Lucas, this is a bad idea . . .’’

  But six feet outside the door, Gut took a slow, short step, feeling Lucas closing behind him, spun and threw a wild, looping right hand at Lucas’s head.

  Lucas stepped left and hit the heavy man in the nose, staggering him, bringing blood. As Gut turned, bringing his hands up to his face, Lucas hooked him in the left-side short ribs with another right; when Gut pulled his arms down, Lucas hit him in the eye with a left, the other eye with a right, then took the right-side short ribs with a left, then crossed a right to the face. Gut was trying to fall, staggering backward, got his back wedged against a pickup truck, and Lucas beat him like a punching bag, face, face, gut, face, ribs, face, face, like a heavy workout in the gym.

  Lucas felt it all flowing out: the frustration with Weather, the attacks on Weather and Elle, the uncertainty, the depression. And heard Sherrill screaming, flicked somebody’s arm off his shoulder, was hit from the left and turned, almost punched Sherrill in the forehead, felt another man moving behind him, spun, and saw the lanky man covering Gut, holding his hands in front of him, shouting something . . .

  The world began to slow down, and Lucas backed up, hands up, Marcy pushing him, shouting. He could barely hear her. ‘‘Okay,’’ he said finally, through the roaring in his head. ‘‘Okay, I’m done.’’

  Marcy faded in. ‘‘You’re done. Are you done?’’

  ‘‘I’m done . . .’’ He dropped his hands. They were dappled with blood, and blood from Gut’s nose was sprayed across his shirt. He said, ‘‘This shirt’s fucked.’’

  Gut was stretched on the ground next to the pickup running board, groaning, the lanky man leaning over him, saying, ‘‘Breathe easy. Come on, you’re okay.’’

  But he wasn’t okay. He said, ‘‘I can’t, I can’t, I can’t . . .’’ Every time he tried to sit up, he moaned, holding his sides; he was blowing streams of blood from his nose. ‘‘We better get an ambulance,’’ the lanky man said. ‘‘Get him over to the clinic.’’

  ‘‘Can you call from your car?’’ Sherrill asked.

  ‘‘Yeah, I can do that,’’ he said, as if the concept were new to him. He hurried to the squad car, parked at the edge of the lot, pushing through a narrow ring of spectators. As he went, Marcy asked, quietly, ‘‘Are you okay?’’

  ‘‘Yeah, yeah, he never touched me,’’ Lucas said.

  ‘‘That’s not what I meant.’’

  He looked at her: ‘‘Yeah, I’m okay. I sorta let it all out, there.’’

  ‘‘I’d say.’’

  The lanky deputy was back, said, ‘‘The ambulance’ll be here in a minute.’’ Then to Lucas, ‘‘I ain’t gonna try to take you in, ’cause we all got guns, but you’re under arrest.’’

  ‘‘Bullshit,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘You two came here to try to push us out of a murder investigation and he took the first swing. If I don’t get some answers, I’ll get the goddamn BCA up here and we’ll tear a new asshole for your department. You two are gonna be lucky to get out of this with your badges.’’

  ‘‘We’ll see,’’ the lanky man said. ‘‘Why don’t you go on down to the courthouse. I’m gonna get the sheriff in. And you’re not helping around here.’’

  ‘‘Why don’t you just come up to the Sugar Beet,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘We’ve got a big room.’’

  A siren started down in the town, the ambulance. The lanky man looked at Sherrill and then at Lucas. ‘‘All right. We’ll see you up there.’’

  ‘‘THIS IS JUST FUCKIN’ AWFUL,’’ SHERRILL SAID, ON THE way back to the motel.

  ‘‘The fight?’’ That was odd; she’d always been one of the first to get in.

  ‘‘Not the fight. The way the fight turns me on. You could bend me over the front fender right now, in front of all those people, I swear to God. Whoo. But you sorta hung me up there, dude. I don’t think I coulda taken that skinny guy.’’ She was vibrating, talking a hundred miles an hour. ‘‘Maybe I could have slowed him down. Didn’t take you long with the fat guy, that’s for sure. Man, if the skinny guy had gone for his gun, though, I’d’ve had to do something, and we coulda wound up with dead people out there. Whoa, what a rush. Man, the fuckin’ adrenaline is coming on, now. It always comes about ten minutes too late.’’

  Lucas grinned at her: ‘‘About once a year. It cleans out the system.’’

  ‘‘What’re you gonna tell the sheriff? I mean, we could be in some trouble.’’

  Lucas shook his head. ‘‘There’s something going on. We know it, and now they know we know. I think we might learn something.’’

  ‘‘Jeez—I wish I hadn’t used you up before dinner. I’m serious here, Lucas, I could really use some help.’’

  ‘‘We might have a couple minutes.’’

  ‘‘It won’t take that long . . .’’

  THE SHERIFF SHOWED UP A LITTLE MORE THAN AN hour later. Lucas was walking back from the Coke machine with a Diet and a regular Coke, his hair still wet from another shower, when they arrived in two cars; the sheriff, the older deputy named Jimmy, the young, lanky man from the restaurant, all in the sheriff’s squad car, and Dr. Stephen Landis in a two-year-old Buick.

  Lucas continued to the room, pushed through the door, said, ‘‘They’re here.’’

  Sherrill tucked her shirt in: she’d been worried the room would smell too much like sex, which she thought would seem perverted so close to the fight—which Lucas told her was perverted—so she’d turned up the shower full blast, cold water only, and sprayed it against the back wall of the shower stall. Now the room smelled faintly of chlorine, with a hint of feminine underarm deodorant. ‘‘We’re ready,’’ she said, looking around. ‘‘Put your gun over on the nightstand. That’ll look nice and grim. I’ll keep mine, but I’ll let them see it.’’ She was wearing her .357 in the small of her back.

  He nodded: ‘‘You could be good at this.’’

  She came over and stood on her tiptoes and kissed him on the lips. ‘‘Remember that,’’ she said.

  The sheriff knocked a second later. Sherrill opened the door and let them in.

  ‘‘DAMN NEAR KILLED HIM,’’ THE SHERIFF SAID. HE
WAS standing in front of the dresser, looking at Lucas, who was sitting on the bed, his back to the headboard. The other three men were standing near the door, while Sherrill stood at the head end of the bed, near Lucas. ‘‘He could still be in trouble.’’

  ‘‘Bullshit. I cracked his short ribs and busted his nose. He won’t be sneezing for a month or six weeks, that’s all,’’ Lucas said.

  ‘‘That’s a fairly clinical judgment,’’ Landis said. ‘‘You must’ve done this before.’’

  ‘‘I’ve had a few fights,’’ Lucas agreed.

  ‘‘In all my time as sheriff, I haven’t had a man hurt that bad, except one who was in a car accident,’’ the sheriff said. ‘‘We’re talking to the county attorney to see if an arrest would be appropriate. We don’t want you going anyplace.’’

  ‘‘We’re leaving tomorrow, I think,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘But we’ll be available down in Minneapolis. I’m gonna talk to a couple of friends over at the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, maybe a guy in the attorney general’s office. About coming up here and deposing you people on the murder of George Lamb: to ask you why you’ve been covering it up all these years. Why you’d send a couple of cops to roust us, in the middle of a murder investigation that you’d been reading about in the Star-Trib.’’

  The sheriff shook his head: ‘‘We didn’t send anybody to roust you. These idiots thought of it themselves.’’ He tipped his head toward the lanky man, who shrugged and looked at the curtains covering the single window.

  ‘‘The thing is, we can take care of Larry,’’ the older deputy drawled. ‘‘Cops get beat up from time to time. The real question I got—not the sheriff, just me—is whether you can be talked to. Or if you’re just some big-city asshole up here to kick the rubes.’’

  ‘‘I’ve got a cabin outside a town half this size, in Wisconsin. The sheriff’s a friend of mine, and he’s been bullshitting me about moving up to run for the office when he quits, and I’ve thought about it. I’ve worked with a halfdozen sheriffs all over this state and Wisconsin, and this is the first time I’ve had trouble,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘You want some references?’’

  ‘‘Already made some calls,’’ the older man said. After a few seconds’ silence, he said, ‘‘You want to talk, or do we do this all legal?’’

  ‘‘Talk,’’ Lucas said.

  The sheriff looked at the older deputy and said, ‘‘You think?’’

  ‘‘Yeah, I think.’’

  The sheriff nodded and said, ‘‘The thing is, we don’t know whether or not George Lamb was murdered. But he might have been.’’

  ‘‘There were some problems at the time, with the way the death happened,’’ the older man said. ‘‘Happened way too early in the morning. He got up early, for his job, but not in the middle of the night. It looked to us like he’d gotten sick the evening before, and they’d let him lay there until he died.’’

  ‘‘He came to see me twice in the month before he died. He was feeling sicker and sicker, and at first I thought it was the flu. He’d had some diarrhea, he’d had some episodes of vomiting, dizzy spells, and so on. We’d had some flu going around at the time, and it fit,’’ Landis said. He pulled a chair out from the dresser/desk and sat down. ‘‘I gave him some antibiotics for a lung infection he’d developed—nothing serious, he was coughing up some phlegm with pus in it. And we had an argument the second time he came in, and he never came back. Then he dropped dead. Could have been a heart attack.’’

  ‘‘But you don’t really think so,’’ Lucas said.

  Landis shook his head. ‘‘I think maybe it was rat poison. Arsenic. The thing is, when I went out and looked at this body, he had a rash, a particular kind of rash that flakes off the skin when you’ve been taking in arsenic for a while.’’

  ‘‘You didn’t take any tissue samples?’’

  ‘‘If we’d taken tissue samples, and sent them to a lab, then the fat would be in the fire,’’ Landis said. ‘‘Other people would know about it . . .’’

  ‘‘You didn’t want other people to know?’’ Sherrill asked. The sheriff took off his hat, smoothed his hair back, and said, ‘‘My daughter went to high school with the Lamb girls. And the older Lamb girl had a reputation as knowing way too much about sex for a girl her age. Then, a couple of months before George died . . .’’

  Landis picked it up. ‘‘The mother brought in the older girl, Audrey, to the clinic. Said she’d been fooling around with one of the boys at school, wanted me to keep it quiet, but wanted her tested to see if she was pregnant. She wasn’t. But I gave her a little standard lecture that I gave back then, about staying out of trouble, about saying no to boys, about using some protection . . . She sort of went along with the lecture until she got tired of it, then she got up and left,’’ Landis said. ‘‘As she was going out the door, she turned and looked at me. The look was like ninety-five percent hate and fear. And she said, ‘That’s all fine and good, but not relevant in my case.’ ’’

  ‘‘Not relevant in my case,’’ the sheriff quoted. ‘‘Hell of a line for a kid that age. The fact is, George had been f—’’ He glanced at Sherrill. ‘‘Having sex with her.’’

  ‘‘When I told you that his wife had some bruises,’’ Landis said, ‘‘I was telling you the truth. But not all of it. The woman had been beaten from head to foot.’’

  ‘‘The whole goddamn house was a reign of terror,’’ the sheriff said. ‘‘Steve told me what he thought was going on. I talked to the sheriff at the time, Johnny James, and he told me that there was nothing to do, unless somebody complained. So I caught up with George on his mail route one day and said if I ever heard of him screwing that little girl, I’d kill him.’’

  ‘‘Did he believe you?’’

  ‘‘I don’t know, but he should of, ’cause I would of,’’ the sheriff said. ‘‘But it never came up, because he dropped dead.’’

  ‘‘He was lying there on the floor, looking okay, except for this rash,’’ Landis said. ‘‘We knew he’d been screwing at least the older girl, and maybe the younger one too; we knew he’d been beating the bejesus out of his wife. So the question was, do we do tissue samples? Didn’t have to. No requirement.’’

  ‘‘Steve came and talked to me, and we said screw it. Leave it alone. And we did. Shipped George off to the funeral home. And that was the end of it, until you showed up this morning.’’

  They all thought about that for a moment; then Lucas rubbed his chin and changed the subject: ‘‘That fat kid I beat up,’’ he said to the sheriff. ‘‘He’s gonna be nothing but a pain in the ass for you. He’s gonna be in trouble for the rest of his career.’’

  ‘‘He’s had a couple problems,’’ the sheriff said.

  ‘‘You oughta get rid of him before it’s too late. And this guy,’’ Lucas said, nodding at the lanky man. ‘‘He rode along a little too easily. He’s gotta learn to stand up. He wanted to stop the whole thing, but he couldn’t get the job done.’’

  ‘‘I learned something,’’ the lanky man said.

  ‘‘I hope the hell you have,’’ the sheriff said. To Lucas: ‘‘What do you think?’’

  ‘‘I think if you recast exactly what you told me here tonight, you’d have a perfectly good story if you ever had to go to court to testify. You know, that you thought it was a heart attack at the time—still think it was possible—but sometime later worked out that it might have been a poisoning. But by then it was too late, the body had been cremated. That kind of thing happens all the time. That’s why we have exhumations.’’

  ‘‘You think we might have to testify?’’

  Lucas stood up, yawned, stretched. ‘‘We’re putting together a circumstantial case. So you might have to. But we’ve got a way to go, before we get anything together.’’

  ‘‘But her husband . . . The papers say he was beating her, just like her father beat her mother. It seems to me there might be some justification.’’

  ‘‘We’re looking at eight murders
and several ag assaults over the last ten years, including a couple of out-and-out executions of absolutely innocent people,’’ Lucas said.

  After a moment of stunned silence, the sheriff said, ‘‘Eight?’’

  Lucas nodded.

  ‘‘God in heaven.’’

  And Landis stood up and looked at the sheriff and said, ‘‘Old George did a lot more damage than we knew about. You shoulda killed him.’’

  The older man pushed himself away from the wall. ‘‘So what’re we going to do about tonight?’’

  Lucas shrugged. ‘‘Nothing happened to me. If you guys want to say nothing happened, nothing happened.’’

  The sheriff took a quick eye-poll, then nodded to Lucas: ‘‘Nothing happened.’’

  ‘‘If we need to talk to you again, an assistant county attorney’ll be calling,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘I’ll give you a warning call ahead of time.’’

  ‘‘I appreciate it,’’ the sheriff said. ‘‘I’d also appreciate it if you’d get the hell out of my town.’’

  ‘‘We’re going tomorrow morning,’’ Lucas said.

  ‘‘And I surely wish you hadn’t taken Larry out in the parking lot. I’m always shorthanded when the snow starts to fly.’’

  ‘‘Sorry.’’

  ‘‘But not too sorry,’’ the sheriff said.

  ‘‘Not too,’’ Lucas agreed, and grinned at him.

  The sheriff showed the faintest hint of a smile, and eased out the door. The older man was the last to leave, and at the threshold, he turned and looked at Sherrill, and then back at Lucas. ‘‘I once had a woman looked just about like that,’’ he said to Lucas. ‘‘When I was just about your age.’’

  ‘‘Oh yeah?’’

  ‘‘Yeah.’’ He gave Sherrill a long look, and said, ‘‘She flat wore me out.’’

  ‘‘Better to wear out than to rust,’’ Sherrill said, from her corner.

  ‘‘Yeah.’’ And he laughed, a nasty laugh for an old codger, and closed the door.