Prey - 03 - Eyes of Prey by John Sandford

Author:John Sandford
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Mystery, Thriller
Published: 2007-03-05T02:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17

Lucas punched the Porsche down the country highway, hissing along the wet blacktop, past woodlots of unleafed trees and the sodden, dark fall-tilled fields. The day was overcast, the clouds the color of slag iron. A deer, hit by a car, probably the night before, lay folded like an awkward, bone-filled backpack in a roadside ditch. A few hundred yards farther along, a dead badger had been flung like a rag over the yellow line.

He’d been to two hundred murder scenes, all of them dismal. Were murders ever done in cheerful surroundings, just by accident? He’d once gone to a murder scene at an amusement park. The park hadn’t yet opened for the season, and although it made a specialty of fun, the silent Ferris wheels, the immobile roller coasters, the awkward Tilt-A-Whirls, the Empty House of Mirrors were as sinister as any rotting British country house on a moor . . . .

He crested a low hill, saw the cop cars parked along the road, with an ambulance facing into a side road. A fat deputy sheriff, one thumb hooked under a gunbelt, gestured for him to keep moving. Lucas swung onto the shoulder, killed the engine and climbed out.

“Hey, you.” The fat deputy was bearing down on him. “You think I was doin‘ aerobics?”

Lucas took his ID out of his coat pocket and said, “Minneapolis police. Is this . . . ?”

“Yeah, down there,” the deputy said, gesturing at the side road, backing off a step. He tried a few new expressions on his face and finally settled for suspicion. “They told me to keep people moving.”

“Good idea,” Lucas said mildly. “If the word gets out, you’re gonna get about a million TV cameras before too long . . . . How come everybody’s parked out here?”

Lucas’ collegial attitude loosened the deputy up. “The guy who answered the call thought there might be tracks down there in the mud,” the fat man said. “He thought we ought to get some lab people out here.”

“Good call,” Lucas said, nodding.

“I don’t think we’ll see any television,” the fat man said. Lucas couldn’t tell if that made him happy or unhappy. “Old D.T. put a lid on everything. D.T.‘s the guy running the show down there.”

“Hope we can keep it on,” Lucas said, heading toward the side road. “But if they do turn up, don’t take any shit from them at all.”

“Right on.” The deputy grabbed his gunbelt in both hands and gave it a hitch.

The side track was two hundred yards long. At the end of it, Lucas found a nervous gray-haired woman and a pipe-smoking man sitting on the narrow porch of a cabin, both in cable-knit sweaters and slickers. Beyond the cabin, in a tangle of brush and brambles, Swanson was standing in a pod of people, some in uniform, others in civilian clothes.

Lucas walked past the cabin and gingerly into the scrub, staying away from a long strip of yellow police tape that outlined the original track into the raspberry bushes.

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