Stolen Prey

coming.
    He rubbed his face with the fingers of his left hand, which protruded from a slightly dirty-looking cast. Del Capslock followed him out onto the porch. Del looked back over his shoulder and said, “I don’t think I’ve ever been to a crime scene this quiet.”
    “Whatta you gonna say?” Lucas asked. He sniffed at the cast. Nasty. He needed to wash it again.
    “You know what freaked me out?” Del asked. “It wasn’t the kids. It was the dogs. The dogs couldn’t tell us anything. They weren’t witnesses. They weren’t attack dogs. Two miniature poodles and a golden retriever? They killed them anyway. Hunted them down. They were killing everything, because they liked it.”
    “I don’t know. There’s a lot going on in there,” Lucas said. “Maybe they killed the dogs first, to extort information. Went around and shot them just to prove that they’d do it. Then the boy, then the wife and daughter, then the guy. They wanted something from the guy.”
    “We don’t know they did it that way,” Del said. Del was too thin—grizzled, some would say—unshaven, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and Nike cross-trainers. The T-shirt said
Menard’s
, which was a local building supply chain. His comment reflectedan ingrained skepticism about any unsupported assertion: he wanted facts.
    “I feel like they did,” Lucas said. He was more comfortable with assumption and speculation than Del. He looked up and down the street, past the cluster of official cars and vans. He could see pieces of two houses, one in each direction. There were more along the way, but out of sight. “The thing is, they shot the dogs, that’s three shots. They shot the boy three or four times. That’s a lot of gunshots. Even in a neighborhood like this, with the doors closed and the air conditioners going, and boats … that’s a lot of shots. Makes me think they had silencers, makes me think they were pros, here for a reason. Then the guy, they go to work with a knife. They started out terrorizing him, ended up torturing him.”
    “Drugs?”
    “Gotta be. Gotta be, here in the Twin Cities. Too calculated for anything else. Shaffer says the guy ran a software place that peddles Spanish-language software down in Mexico. It looks custom-made as a money laundry,” Lucas said. He looked back into the house, though he couldn’t see anything from the porch.
    Del said, “Here’s something.”
    Lucas turned back to see a lone patrolman jogging back down the street. He was overweight, and his stomach jiggled as he ran. The patrolman cut across the lawn.
    “The neighbors,” he said to Lucas. He was red-faced and seemed to run out of words, tried to catch his breath.
    “Yeah?”
    “The neighbors, the Merriams, they’re three houses down.” The cop pointed down the street. “The husband, Dave, saw avan parked in the driveway yesterday afternoon. He saw it three times, coming home, going out, and coming back from town. There for a couple hours, at least. He says it was a blue van, a Chevy, and he says the first three letters of the plate were S-K-Y. He thinks it stuck with him because of sky-blue. Sky on the plate and blue on the van.”
    Lucas nodded. “Okay, that’s good stuff.” He turned and yelled back into the house, “Shaffer? Shaffer?” He said to the cop, “Go tell that to Shaffer. We need to run that right now.”
    The cop went inside and Del asked, “What are we going to do?”
    Lucas shrugged: “Call everybody. Look for blue vans. Push the DNA on the wife and daughter … I wouldn’t bet on semen. If they were professionals, they were probably wearing rubbers. We might pick up some blood or something, maybe one of them scratched or bit somebody.”
    Del nodded. “You look around the house, around the neighborhood, and it’s screaming
rich
. Could have been a couple of crazy dopers thinking they kept a lot of money in the house.”
    Lucas said, “Nah.”
    Del scratched an ear and then said, “All right.”
    “They were looking for something,” Lucas said. “It
looks
like drugs. It looks like that stuff in Mexico. So harsh. So cruel.”
    “Maybe they’ll pop right up in the DNA bank,” Del said.
    “Fat chance.”
    “Yeah.” Del looked up in the sky. “It’s gonna rain.”
    “We need it,” Lucas said. “Been hot for a long time. First cool day in a while.”
    “Fall’s coming,” Del said.
    T HEY WENT back inside, where an agent named Bob Shaffer was talking to the patrolman. When he saw