Eyes of Prey

tonight.”

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. Halfwayback, a uniformed deputy, working on his hands and knees, was pouring casting compound into a footprint. He looked up briefly as Lucas went by, then turned back to his work. He’d already poured some casts farther along the trail.
    “Davenport,” Swanson said, when Lucas pushed through to the end of the track. Two funeral home attendants in cheap dark suits were waiting to one side, a carry litter with pristine sheets for the uncaring body set carefully by their feet. Two more men, deputies, were working in a muddy foxhole, excavating the body with plastic hand trowels, like archaeologists on a dig. The body was half uncovered, but the face was still down. Swanson stepped away from the group, his face gloomy.
    “It’s for sure? George?” Lucas asked.
    “Yeah. When they went into the hole, they got his foot, and the deputy stopped the digging and called for help. When they started again, they got to his hip, took his billfold out of his pocket. The same guy who found him recognized the name and called for help again. The clothes are right. It’s him.”
    Lucas stepped off to the side to get a better look at the hole. A foot stuck up awkwardly, like a grotesque tree shoot struggling for the sun. A sheriff’s deputy in a ball cap and a raincoat came over and said, “You’re Davenport?”
    “Yeah.”
    “D.T. Helstrom,” the deputy said, sticking out a bony hand. He was a thin man, with a dark, weathered face. Smile lines creased his cheeks at the corners of his mouth. “I’ve seen