Mind Prey (7 page)

"Doesn't exist, Frank," Lucas said. "Subpoena the records. Don't talk about it. If you talk about it, it'll turn into a big deal and the media will be wringing their wrists. Get a judge out of bed, get the subpoena. I'll take it over myself, if you want."

"That'd be good, but not tonight," Lester said. "We've got too much going on already. I'll have it here at seven o'clock tomorrow morning."

Lucas nodded. "I'll pick it up as early as I can drag my ass out of bed," he said. He didn't get up early. "I'm gonna stop and see the kid, too. Tonight."

"Bob talked to her," Lester said, uncomfortably.

"Yeah, he did," Lucas said. And after a moment, "That's your problem."

"Bob's a nice guy," Lester said.

"He couldn't catch the clap in a whorehouse, Frank."

"Yeah, yeah... did you talk to the kid's folks?"

"Two minutes ago," Lucas said. "I told them I was on the way."

Clarice Bernet wore a suit and tie. Her husband, Thomas, wore a cashmere sweater and a tie. "We don't want her frightened any more than she is," Clarice Bernet said. She hissed it, like a snake. She was a bony woman with tight blonde hair and a thin nose. Her front teeth were angled like a rodent's, and she was in Lucas's face.

"I'm not here to frighten her," Lucas said.

"You better not," Bernet said. She shook a finger at him: "There's been enough trouble from this already. The first officer questioned her without allowing us time to get there."

"We were hoping to stop the kidnapper's van," Lucas said mildly, but he was getting angry.

Thomas Bernet waggled his jowls: "We appreciate that, but you have to understand that this has been a trauma."

They were standing in the quarry-tiled entry of the Bernets' house, a closet to one side, a framed poster on the opposite wall, a souvenir from a Rembrandt show at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam in 1992. A sad, middle-aged Rembrandt peered out at Lucas. "Youhave to understand that this is a kidnapping investigation and it could become a murder investigation," Lucas snapped, his voice developing an edge. "One way or another, we'll talk to your daughter and get answers from her. We can do it pleasantly, here, or unpleasantly down at Homicide, with a court order." He paused for a half-beat. "I'd rather not get the court order."

"Wedon't need threats," Thomas Bernet said. He was a division manager at General Mills and knew a threat when he heard one.

"I'm not threatening you; I'm laying out the legal realities," Lucas said. "Three people's lives are in jeopardy and if your daughter has a bad night's sleep over it, or two bad nights, that's tough. I've got to think about the victims and what they're going through. Now, do I talk to, uh, Mercedes, or do I get the court order?"

Mercedes Bernet was a small girl with a pointed chin, a hundred-dollar haircut, and eyes that were five years too old. She wore a pink silk kimono and sat on the living room couch, next to a Yamaha grand piano, with her ankles crossed. She had recently developed breasts, Lucas thought, and sat with her back coyly arched, making the best of what was not yet too much. With her mother sitting beside her, and her father hovering behind the chair, she told Lucas what she'd seen.

"Grace was standing there, looking back and forth, like she didn't know what was going on. She even walked back toward the door for a minute, then she went back out. Then this van pulled around in front, going that way." She pointed to her left. "And this guy jumps out, and he runs up to her and she started to back up and the guy just grabbed her by her blouse and by her hair and he jerked her right off the porch-thing..."

"The portico," Clarice Bernet said.

"Yeah, whatever," said Mercedes, rolling her eyes. "Anyway, he pulled her toward the van and slid the door back and threw her inside. I mean, he was thishuge dude. He just threw her. And before he closed the door, I saw two other people in there. Mrs. Dunn..."

"Mrs. Manette," her mother said.

"Yeah, whatever, and she had blood on her face. She was, like,crawling . Then there was another kid in there that I thought was Genevieve, but I couldn't see her face. She was, like, lying down on the floor, and then the guy closed the door."

"Where was Mr. Girdler during all of this?"

"I didn't see him until afterwards. He was behind me somewhere. I told him to call 911, but he was like,Duh ." She rolled her eyes again and Lucas smiled.

Then: "Think about this," Lucas said. "Tell me exactly what the kidnapper looked like."

Mercedes leaned back, closed her eyes, and a minute later, eyes still closed, said, "Big. Yellow hair, but it looked kinda weird, like it was peroxided or something. 'Cause his skin looked dark, not like a black dude, but you know... dark." She opened her eyes, and studied Lucas's face. "like you, kinda. His face didn't look like yours--he had, like, a real narrow face--but he was about your color and big like you."

"What was he wearing? Anything special?"

She closed her eyes again and lived through the scene, then opened her eyes, looking surprised, and said, "Oh, shit."

"Young lady!" Clarice Bernet was shocked, Lucas wagged his head once and asked, "What?"

"He was wearing a GenCon shirt. Iknew there was something..."

He said, "GenCon? Are you sure? Did you see what year?"

"You know what it is?" A skeptical eyebrow went up.

"Sure. I write role-playing games..."

"Really? My boyfriend..."

"Mercedes!" Her mother's voice took a warning tone and Mercedes swerved into safer territory.

"A friend at school has one. I recognized it right away--the shirt isn't the same as my friend's, but it was a GenCon. Great big Gen-Con right on the front, and one of those weird dice. Everything black and white, kinda cheap..."

"What's a GenCon?" asked Thomas Bernet, looking suspiciously from his daughter to Lucas, as though GenCon might somehow be linked to ConDom.

"It's a gamer's convention, over in Lake Geneva," Lucas said. To Mercedes: "Why didn't you tell the other officer?"

"I could barely get his attention," she said. "And that asshole Girdler..."

"Mercedes!" Her mother was on the word like a wolf on a lamb.

"Well, he is," she said, barely defensive. "He kept talking all over me--I don't think he saw hardly any of it. He was mostly hiding down the hall."

"Okay," Lucas said. "What about the truck? Anything unusual about it?"

She nodded. "Yeah, there was, and I told the other cop. They'd painted over the sign on the truck. I don't know what it said, but there were letters on the door and they were painted right over."

"What letters?"

She shrugged. "I don't know. It was just something I sorta noticed when I went up closer to the windows and he was driving away. It wasn't a good paint job, you know? They just slopped right over the old letters."

Lucas used the Bernets' phone to call back to the office, and dropped the't-shirt and truck information with Anderson.

"Heading home?" Anderson asked.

"Not much more to do tonight, unless we get a call. Are we still doing the door-to-door?"

"Yeah, up in Manette's neighborhood now. Asking for suspicious activities. Haven't heard anything back."

"Let me know."

"Yeah, I'll be putting together a book on it... Have you asked Weather yet?"

"Jesus Christ..." Lucas laughed.

"Hey, it's primo gossip."

"I'll let you know," Lucas said. He could feel the engagement ring in his pants pocket. Maybe ask her, he thought.

"I got a feeling about this," Anderson said.

"About Weather?"

"No. About the Manettes. There's something going on here. So they're not dead yet. They're out there waiting for us."

Weather Karkinnen made a bump on the left side of the bed, near the window. The window was open an inch or two, so she could get the fresh cold air.

"Bad?" she asked, sleepily.

"Yes." He slipped in beside her, rolled close, kissed her on the neck behind the ear.

"Tell me," she said. She rolled onto her back.

"It's late," he said. She was a surgeon. She operated almost every day, usually starting at seven o'clock.

"I'm okay; I've got a late starting time tomorrow."

"It's Tower Manette's daughter and her two children, her daughters." He outlined the kidnapping, told her about the blood on the shoe.

"I hate it when there are kids involved," she said.

"I know."

Weather was a surgeon, but she looked like a jock--a fighter, actually, somebody who'd gone a few rounds too many. She had wide shoulders and she tended to carry her hands in front of her, fists clenched, like a punch-drunk boxer. Her nose was a little too large and bent slightly to the left; her hair was cut short, a soft brown touched with white. She had the high Slavic cheekbones of a full-blooded Finn, and dark blue eyes. For all of her jockiness, she was a small woman. Lucas could pick her up like a parcel and carry her around the house. Which he had done, on occasion; but never fully clothed.

Weather was not pretty, but she reached him with a power he hadn't experienced before: His attraction had grown so strong that it scared him at times. He'd lie awake at night, watching her sleep, inventing nightmares in which she left him.

They'd met in northern Wisconsin, where Weather had been working as a surgeon in a local hospital. Lucas had run down a child-sex ring, and the killer at the heart of it. In the final moments of a chase through the woods, he'd been shot in the throat by a young girl, and Weather had saved his life, opening his throat with a jack knife.

Hell of a way to get together...

Lucas put his hands on her waist. "Just how late can you go in?" he whispered.

"Men are animals," she said, moving closer.

When she went to sleep, Lucas, relaxed, warm, moved against her. She snuggled deeper into her pillow, and pushed her butt out against him. The best time to ask her to marry him, he thought, would be now: he was awake, articulate, feeling romantic... and she was sleeping like a baby. He smiled to himself and patted her on the hip, and let his head fall on his pillow.

He kept the ring in the bottom of his sock drawer, waiting for the right moment. He could feel it there and wondered if it made black sparkles in the dark.

Chapter
5

>

The room was a concrete-and-stone hole that smelled like rotten potatoes. Four fist-sized openings pierced the top of one wall, too high to see through. The openings reminded Andi of the holes that a child would punch in the top of a Ball jar, to give air to his insect collection.

A stained double-bed mattress lay in one corner, and the girls slept on it. John Mail had been gone for three hours, by Andi's watch. When he'd left, the steel door banging behind him, they'd all crouched on the mattress, waiting wide-eyed for his return.

He hadn't come back. The fear burning them out, the girls eventually curled up and fell asleep like kittens in a cat box, too exhausted to stay awake. Grace slept badly, groaning and whimpering, Genevieve slept heavily, her mouth open, even snoring at times.

Andi sat on the cold floor, with her back to the gritty wall, taking inventory for the fiftieth time, trying to find something, anything, that would get them out.

There was a light socket overhead, with a single sixty-watt bulb and a pull-chain. She hadn't yet had the courage to turn the light off. A Porta-Potti sat in a corner, smelling faintly of chemical rinse. The portable toilet was meant for small sailboats and campers, and was made of plastic. She could think of no way to use it as a weapon, or as anything other than a toilet. A Coleman cooler sat next to the door, half-full of melting ice and generic strawberry soda. And beside her, on a low plastic table, a game console and a monitor. The console and monitor were plugged into a four-socket power bar, which was plugged into an outlet above the light bulb.

And that was all.

A weapon? Perhaps one of the cans could be used as a club... somehow? Could the cord could be used to strangle him?

No. That was all absurd. Mail was too big, too violent.

Could you wire the door, somehow? Strip the wire out of the cord to the computer, connect it to the door handle?

Andi knew nothing about electricity--and if all Mail got was a shock, he'd simply turn off the power, and then come down, and... what?

That was what she couldn't deal with: what did he want? What would he do?

He'd obviously planned for this.

Their cell had once been a root cellar in a farm house, a deep hole, well below the frost line, with walls of granite fieldstone and concrete. Mail had knocked out part of an interior wall and had rebuilt it with concrete block to accommodate a steel fire door. The wiring was all new, nothing more than a cord run in from the outside.

Although the walls were old, except for the part Mail had redone, they were solid: Andi had pushed or kicked at every stone, had probed the interstices with her fingernails. Her hands were raw from it, and she'd found no weaknesses.