Broken Prey

five minutes and then he was going to throw the phone in a ditch. You’ve got four minutes to decide.”
    “Give him the number,” Lucas said.
     
    LUCAS CALLED THE co-op center on one of the Northfield center’s phones and told them about the cell-phone call. “Find the cell,” he said. “He’s gonna call me. You got my number. He’s probably using Peterson’s phone again. Find the fuckin’ cell. Find the fuckin’ cell.”
     
    AND THEN POPE CALLED.
    “Agent Davenport,” he drawled. He spoke slowly, with the same whispery voice that Ignace had described. Lucas tried to penetrate it: husky, a middle tenor. Could it be a woman? “That was you that chased me through that crick, wasn’t it?”
    Lucas was astonished. The question froze him, and he asked, inanely, “Where are you?”
    “Out here in the woods where I always am. Miz Peterson is still okay. Well, she wouldn’t say that, I guess. I had me a little pussy before dinner. And after dinner. And for dessert. She’s right here. You want to talk to her?”
    Not a woman. A woman wouldn’t talk like that—unless she were very, very manipulative. “Listen, man, you really need our help . . .” Lucas felt absolutely stupid as he said it.
    “Nah. I’m doing okay. I thought you had me there for a minute, those first two cops, and then you. When I got loose I heard them talking about you on my scanner, said you almost wrecked your truck in that crick. I wondered what happened to you. I hit that sonbitch just right, I guess. Never saw it—nothing but luck.”
    “Listen, Mr. Pope . . .”
    “Didn’t call me no Mr. Pope when you had my ass in St. John’s. But listen, don’t you want to talk to Miz Peterson? She was in the back the whole time. Here . . . Miz Peterson. This is the law. Talk to him . . .”
    There was the sound of flesh against flesh, as though somebody had been slapped, the tenor, “Talk to him, bitch,” and then a dry, ragged woman’s voice, “ Help me . . . ”
    “That’s good enough,” Pope said in his whisper. “We gotta go.” And then: “Well, it’s been fun, but I gotta say good-bye, Agent Davenport.”
    “You gotta . . .”
    Click.
     
    LUCAS WAS SCREAMING at the co-op center, and they came back: “The cell’s in Owatonna. It’s Peterson’s. He got around you and went straight south.”
    “Get the goddamned people moving around there, get them moving . . .”
    “They’re moving now, everything we’ve got.”
    Five hours later, Lucas was on a dirt road west of Owatonna when he got a call from the Blue Earth County Sheriff’s Department. There were a couple of clicks and he was patched through: “Lucas, this is Gene Nordwall, I’m down south of Mankato, little west of Good Thunder.”
    “Gene, you heard?”
    “Yeah. We found her,” he said.
    “You found her?” Lucas asked. “She’s alive?”

15
    WAYNE’S FOUR CORNERS INN was a rambling white structure that sat on top of a ridge where Blue Earth County 122 and County 131 crossed each other. There were two nonfunctional gas pumps out front, with crown-shaped glass globes on top, left over from the 1950s, and left in the parking area as a statement of the inn’s antiquity. To the left side of the inn, just outside the gravel parking area, was a pi-shaped structure that might have been a medieval gallows, built of rough four-by-four lumber.
    Lucas recognized the structure as soon as he pulled into the parking lot, outside the collection of cop cars. They were rare, in recent times, but as recently as the 1960s and 1970s they had been ubiquitous in the countryside. They were hanging bars, meant to display the carcasses of the biggest local bucks taken during deer season.
    Carlita Peterson’s body hung by the neck from the crossbar.
    Not so much a body, as a carcass; Lucas had already been told, and walked toward the hanging bar with his eyes averted, not wanting to look.
    A cop was there, and said to Lucas, “This is awful.”
    Lucas looked now: no way to avoid it.
    Peterson’s throat had been slashed; that had been the killing stroke. But after she’d been killed, she’d been gutted, and her empty body, slashed from throat to anus with a cutting tool, hung in the cool still morning air.
     
    LUCAS LOOKED AWAY , then stepped away, shaking his head, his hands trembling. He’d thought that they might get her back.
     
    NORDWALL SCUFFED UP in his cowboy boots, not looking: “He fuckin’ gutted her.”
    “You gotta get