Extreme Prey: A Novel [Lucas Davenport - Prey 26] by John Sandford

Author:John Sandford
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Fiction - Thriller
ISBN: 9780698407107
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC
Published: 2016-04-26T04:00:00+00:00

SIXTEEN

Lucas was starting to feel like a yo-yo, and Iowa City was the finger.

When he got back, off I-80, he threaded his way through town to Anson Palmer’s house and found a half-dozen cop cars coagulated in the street outside. Randy Ford’s state sedan was among them.

He had Ford’s number on his cell phone, called it, and Ford said, “Yeah?”

“I’m outside.”

“Come on in,” Ford said.

• •

FORD WAS STANDING in Palmer’s living room, looking disgusted. “I don’t know,” he said, when Lucas appeared in the doorway. “It’s like amateur night at the slaughterhouse, but we can’t find the goddamn amateur who’s doing the killing.”

“You’re sure it’s a murder . . .”

“Unless he hit himself on the head about three times with a rock, and after crushing his own skull, put the rock in a sink, washed it, and then tied a plastic bag around his head.”

“Okay. When do you think it happened?”

One of the crime-scene people said, “No scientific estimate, but looking at the blood when we got here . . . we’re thinking maybe between one and two o’clock, give or take.”

• •

LUCAS WENT TO LOOK. Two crime-scene technicians were working Palmer’s office, collecting samples of everything the killer might have touched. One of them was working over a visitor’s chair with tape, pulling off any residue.

Lucas had once gone to a murder scene at a fishing cabin in northern Minnesota where a man had been beaten to death with a souvenir cribbage board, which had been shaped like a short canoe paddle. The heavy oaken board had been swung edge-on, like an ax, a half-dozen times, and the victim’s skull had been crushed.

Anson Palmer was lying facedown in his home office, his head cocked back, propped against the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet. His bladder had released as he was dying, and the room still stank of urine. His head was wrapped with a transparent plastic bag, but was misshapen in the same way the cribbage-board victim’s had been. The bag had been tied around his neck and a pint of blood had collected below his chin.

No sign of a weapon near the body.

“You said he was hit with a rock?”

“We think so,” Ford said. “There’s a rock in the kitchen sink, it’s been washed with soap. But some of the victim’s hair, with a couple flakes of scalp, were caught in the sink drainer. The killer didn’t notice.”

Lucas went to look. The bun-shaped chunk of speckled granite was a bit larger than a baseball, but smaller than a softball, and had a laser-cut slogan carved in the surface: Molon Labe.

“Come and take it,” Lucas said.

“Yeah, I looked it up on the Internet, it’s pretty famous,” Ford said. “A lot of the pro-gun guys use it and radical political groups. The Texans used it during the Texas revolution. The Greeks supposedly said that to the Persians before a battle when the Persians told them to surrender.”

“I knew about the gun guys and the Greeks,” Lucas said. “I didn’t know about the Texans.

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