Sudden Prey

had the hard bone-dry feel that it sometimes got in midwinter.
    “Are we in a hurry, I hope?” Sloan asked as they rolled north along the Mississippi.
    “Yeah,” Lucas said. As soon as they got on I-94 at Cretin, he called Dispatch and asked them to contact the Wisconsin highway patrol, to tell that he was coming through on an emergency run. They dropped on the interstate at noon, and at 12:20 crossed the St. Croix bridge into Wisconsin. Lucas put the snap-on red flasher in the window and dropped the hammer, cranking the Porsche out to one-twenty before dropping back to an even hundred.
    The countryside looked as though it had been carved out of ice, hard sky, round hills, the creek lines marked by bare gray trees, snapped-off golden-yellow cornstalks sticking out of the snow, suburban homes and then isolated farmsteads showing plumes of straight-up gray wood smoke.
    Sloan watched it roll by for a few minutes, then said, “I get to drive back.”
     
     
     
    DUNN COUNTY SHERIFF Bill Lock was a fussy, officious, bespectacled man, a little overweight, who, if he’d put on a fake white beard, would make an adequate department-store Santa. He met Lucas and Sloan among the coffins in the Eternal Comfort Room at Logan’s Funeral Home, where Logan had set up coffee and doughnuts for the cops.
    “Come on and take a look,” Lock said. “We’d appreciate it if one of our guys could talk to Duane Cale—you still got him over there in Hennepin County jail. He might have some ideas where they went.”
    “No problem,” Lucas said. He dug out a card, scribbled a number on the back and handed it to Lock. “Ask for Ted, tell him I said to call, and what you want to do.”
    “Good enough.” Lock walked them through the staging room, where the bodies of Georgie and Candy LaChaise were still waiting for a funeral. “You want to look?” he asked.
    “No, thanks,” Lucas said hastily. “So what happened?”
    “Logan says LaChaise insisted that he open the coffins. They came back here and he opened them. Then LaChaise asked if there was a Coke machine around, and Logan told them where the machine was. That was one of the cooler things he did: he was so routine, taking his time with the bodies, saying good-bye, then asking for a Coke . . .”
    Lock walked them through it, a couple other deputies standing around, watching. They wound up in the back room, next to the Coke box. Sand’s body was still on the floor, in the middle of a drying puddle of blood. Sand looked small, white and not particularly tough, his head cocked up at an odd angle, his chin squarely on the floor, his nose off the ground.
    “Logan figures he was gone for five minutes. When he came back to the staging room, there was nobody here. He looked into the back, and found this.”
    “Never saw LaChaise again?” Lucas asked.
    “Never saw him again,” Lock said, shaking his head. “Never heard any noise, nothing. Now we got the sonofabitch running around the countryside somewhere.”
    “He’s long gone,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah, but we’re doing a house-to-house check anyway,” Lock said.
    “He had to have help.” Lucas walked around the body, squatted, and looked at Sand’s hands as they stuck out of the cuffs. “There aren’t any defensive cuts, so it wasn’t like LaChaise pulled a shank on him.” Lucas stood up and made a hand-washing motion. “If LaChaise was cuffed and wearing leg irons, there’s no way he could have taken this guy without some kind of fight. There must’ve been somebody else here.”
    “Unless he’d cut a deal with Sand to turn him loose, and make it look like an escape—then double-crossed him.”
    “Huh. What’d he have to offer Sand? Candy and Georgie were dead, so the source of money had dried up . . .”
    “We’re checking with Michigan, see if Sand had any problems back there. Something to blackmail him with . . .”
    “Nobody saw him walking away.” Lucas made it a statement.
    “Nope. Nobody saw nothing.”
    Sloan jumped in: “I heard his mother says he’s coming after us.”
    “That’s what she says,” Lock said, nodding. “And she could be right. Dick is nuts.”
    “You know him?” Lucas asked.
    “From when I was a kid,” Lock said. “I used to run a trap line up the Red Cedar in the winter. The LaChaises lived down south of here on this broken-ass farm—Amy LaChaise is still out there. I used to see the LaChaise kids every now and then. Georgie and Dick. Their old man was a mean