Broken Prey

some people out in the woods, looking for the . . .” Lucas stopped. He knew the phrase, but he didn’t want to say it.
    The sheriff said it for him. “The gut dump.”
    “Yeah. I would think it would be close by,” Lucas said. “He chose this place for display. Look for crows. You should see crows flocking around.”
    “I’ll put it out right now.”
    “Tell everybody to walk easy. When we find it, we’ll backtrack to where he held her, we gotta see if any of the neighbors saw cars in the night, anybody coming or going . . .” The sheriff nodded, and Lucas finished: “Shit, Gene, you know the routine. We know Pope is involved, somehow, so processing isn’t so important . . . unless we can come up with a second name. What’s important is the car—what are they driving, where were they headed?”
    “I’ll put it out. You gonna be here?”
    “No. I’m going home for a while.”
     
    LUCAS WAS WALKING back down the hill to the parking lot when he saw a brown Chevy slowing at the turnoff; the man inside showed an ID to the cop at the corner, and then the car continued into the parking lot and pulled in a slot down from Lucas. Sloan got out.
    “How’re you feeling?” Lucas asked, automatically.
    “Tell you in a minute,” Sloan said. He looked pale, and drawn, but he often did, especially in the morning. He headed up the hill toward the hanging bar. Lucas leaned against the truck, watching him go, waited.
     
    AS HE WAITED , another familiar face came up. Lucas searched for a name, and the man helped him out: “Lucas—Barry Anderson, Goodhue.” He was the sheriff of Goodhue County, wearing tired civilian clothes, tan slacks, and a red plaid shirt. Like Lucas, he’d been up all night; the chase the night before had started just inside Goodhue County.
    “I know where he was going last night,” he said grimly, looking up the hill. “We got a bar at a place called Old Church—there’s no church anymore, burned down twenty years ago, but there’s a bar and they’ve got a deer rack. Wasn’t five miles from where that first deputy jumped him.”
    “Ah, jeez . . .”
    “Wonder what made him pick the one up there?”
    Lucas thought about it for a moment, as he watched Sloan sloping back down the hill. “He was going for a deer rack, like you say. He went for the one that was closest to Northfield. Try to increase the shock. Hang her right up in front of her neighbors. When we closed him out of there, he came down here.”
    Anderson’s head bobbed. He said, “You know, I’m a good Christian, born again. I accept Jesus Christ in my life and know I will face him at judgment time. But if I caught this . . . this cocksucker . . . I would cut his head off.”
     
    SLOAN WAS BACK : “Not something I’d want to see a second time,” he said softly.
    “Shouldn’t have come out,” Lucas said. He introduced Sloan and Anderson, and Anderson said, “I better go up.”
    Lucas and Sloan stood there for a few seconds, for ten seconds, and then Sloan said, “Now what?”
    “Same thing we’re doing. Full-court press. He’s working fast now,” Lucas said. “I called Elle on the way over here, she said he’s breaking, he’s losing control of his own actions. We’re gonna see another dead one in the next few days.”
    “If it’s like we think . . . if it’s two people . . . she thinks they’re both breaking?”
    “She doesn’t think it’s two people. Or if it is, they’ve somehow meshed their personalities. One of them has taken over the other.”
     
    ANOTHER LONG SILENCE , cops trudging by, up the hill or down. Lucas said, “I can’t figure out how he’s avoiding us.”
    “He’s not. We almost caught him last night,” Sloan said.
    “We didn’t,” Lucas grunted.
    Sloan said, “Here’s a possibility: suppose he’s in some kind of closed van. The driver is a woman. They come up to a checkpoint, he hides—under a rug, or somehow, so nobody sees him just looking in the window. In the meantime, the woman shows the cop her ID, and they wave her through. We were moving so fast that we don’t know who we stopped; we must’ve stopped ten thousand people last night, all over the state.”
    “Wasn’t a van. It was a small SUV. A Subaru, like that. Had vertical taillights.”
    After another pause, Sloan said, “I don’t know what to tell you,” and a moment later he added, “I’m talking bullshit. I’m babbling.”
    “The next time, we not only stop