Read Online Broken Prey by John Sandford - Free Book Online

effectively the office manager. She was a cheerful young woman with auburn hair and blue eyes and freckles, black plastic glasses, a little too heavy, and sometimes a little too loud. Despite her cheerful personality, she’d had a reputation around the Department of Public Safety for ruthless efficiency. Lucas had stolen her from the Highway Patrol, in a transfer arranged by Rose Marie Roux as a payoff for solving a series of horse shootings.
    She propped herself in the doorway as Lucas hung up his jacket: “You didn’t sign the overtime.”
    “You sign it,” he said. She’d have to forge his signature.
    “I did. I’m just saying. You gotta start signing it, or someday they’re gonna put me in jail. Also, Lanscombe called and said that Del put eight hundred miles on a state car last weekend.”
    “Ah, jeez, could you handle that? Make up some shit and tell him I said it.”
    “You want me to kick Del’s ass?”
    “Find out what he was doing, anyway. You get that stuff from Minneapolis?”
    “Yup.” She’d bound the paper into a blue report cover. “Photos are in the back. I borrowed the photo printer down in crime scene. You should buy one for us. You’re rich enough.”
    He ignored the suggestion. “Is Del coming in?”
    “He was in. He went back out on the Ransom thing. Dannie’s with him. Husband and wife.”
    “Christ, like Jack Sprat and his old lady.”
    She smiled, a white-tooth Wisconsin dairy smile as Lucas headed into his office: “But who’d suspect they were cops?” she called after him.
    Ransom was not a payoff. Ransom was a man who’d run a series of home-improvement scams with the help of a local lawyer and an outstate bank. Del and Dannie Carson were about to take out a second mortgage on a house they supposedly owned, to pay for a new roof, windows, garage door, and driveway, work that would never be done, even though the money had been paid. When the bank came around to foreclose on the mortgage, two or three months down the road, the governor would hold a press conference. Ransom would go to jail, the bank would cough up a few million dollars, and the governor would be hailed as the champion of the poor and benighted . . .
    With any luck.
    But why had Del driven eight hundred miles over the weekend? That was as far as Kansas City and back . . .
     
    LUCAS WAS HIGH ENOUGH in the BCA hierarchy to get an extra seventy square feet of office space and rich enough—Carol was right about that—to buy two comfortable chairs to fill it with. He got a steno pad from his desk, dropped into one of the chairs, and started reading through the bound murder file: much of it he already knew from talking with Sloan and Elle the week before.
    And he thought, “ Elle .” He should give her a call.
    He made a note to do that and pushed farther into the file. Made another note: Larson worked in some kind of artsy-crafty store, and Rice worked in a hardware store. A craft connection? Weak. A retail connection, people whom a killer might see in the routine course of business? Also weak. Larson was single, just breaking off a relationship, maybe. Rice was out looking?
    He was poring over the photos when Carol came to the door: “There’s a parole officer on the phone for you. About the case. He says it might be urgent.”
    Lucas nodded: “Put him through.”
     
    HE STEPPED OVER to his desk and when the phone rang, picked it up. “Davenport.”
    “Mr. Davenport, agent, uh . . . Yeah, this is Mark Fox down in Owatonna. I’m a parole officer. I just read the Star-Tribune story about this serial killing and I called Gene Nordwall and he said I should call you . . .”
    “What’s up?”
    “There’s this guy . . . A few weeks back a guy named Charlie Pope was turned loose from St. John’s,” Fox said. “He was a Level Two, convicted in St. Paul of raping a woman and trying to strangle her. There was evidence that he might have killed another woman or maybe two, way back.”
    “I