Sudden Prey

in a week, and in two weeks, nobody would be coming back to Harp.
     
     
     
    LUCAS CALLED A meeting for ten o’clock: at nine-fifteen he shut himself in his office and closed his eyes, feet up on the desk, and worked parts of it out. At nine-thirty, he started going through LaChaise’s file, everything that Harmon Anderson had managed to put together from Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois and the FBI.
    LaChaise’s criminal career had begun when he was a teenager, with game-law violations in Wisconsin, followed by timber rustling off state forestlands—cutting and selling walnut trees out of the hardwood forests in the southern part of the state. He’d been convicted twice of taking deer out of season, and twice on the tree rustling.
    Somewhere along the line he’d joined the Seed—called the Bad Seed at the time—a motorcycle club with ties to drug smuggling, pornography and prostitution. Then he’d apparently gone into business: he’d been convicted of failing to remit sales taxes to the state of Wisconsin, and the contents of a motorcycle shop had been seized.
    A year later, operating another shop, he’d been closed again, and again, his motorcycle stock was seized, apparently to cover the remaining principal and outstanding interest on the late sales taxes from the first shop.
    Two months after that, he was charged with underreporting his income for three years, but was acquitted. The next charges, illegal dumping of industrial waste, were filed in Michigan. Then there were charges of threatening a game warden, trespassing, two assaults that were apparently bar fights and two drunken driving convictions.
    The murder count was weak, as Sandy Darling had said it was.
    When Sandy Darling’s name popped into his head, Lucas dropped the file folder against his chest, thinking: if nothing turned up, he should make a quick run up to Darling’s place. She wasn’t all that far, and she knew LaChaise about as well as anyone alive. He had to be hiding somewhere . . .
    He went back to the file: there was a sheaf of newspaper accounts of LaChaise’s arrest and trial, and the reporters noted the difficulty of conviction—and the jubilation of the prosecutors and local lawmen when the guilty verdict came in.
    A county sheriff was quoted as saying, “Sooner or later he was going to kill an honest citizen or a law enforcement officer. Putting Dick LaChaise in prison is a public service.”
    But the conviction smelled—and he thought of Sandy Darling again.
    At nine-fifty, Del showed up; and in the next few minutes, Sloan, Franklin and Sherrill. Kupicek was out of it, for the time being: lost his shit, as Franklin put it, but he said the words with sympathy.
    Sherrill was holding tighter than Lucas expected.
    “I didn’t think there was any feeling left, until I saw him dead,” Sherrill said, slumped in her chair. Her face was dead-pale against her dark hair and eyes. “I served the papers on him two months ago, but Jesus, I didn’t want him dead.”
    “You can handle it?” Lucas asked.
    “Oh, yeah,” she said. She was ten years older in five hours, Lucas thought. She had a little harsh wrinkle running from the left side of her nose to the corner of her mouth, and it was not a smile line. “Yeah, I’ll tell you what: I’m in on this.”
    Lucas looked at her for a moment, then nodded and looked at the others. “I don’t know what Del and Sloan have told you, but we think LaChaise and friends of LaChaise might be involved somehow with Daymon Harp, a dealer around town. We’re gonna start pushing him. But what we need is to start working through Harmon’s paper on LaChaise, and all the paper we can find on Daymon Harp, and see if we get any crossover. LaChaise had to have a good contact here, because they got a list of our relatives. And it’s possible that the contact is a cop.”
    “A cop,” Sherrill said. She looked at Franklin, who shook his head once, as though he couldn’t believe it.
    “Could be,” said Sloan.
    “We need to chain LaChaise’s known associates into the Cities, looking for their associates. There must be some. And we start busting ass. And I mean, like, tonight. One more thing: I want everybody to call each and every street contact you’ve got, and you tell them that there’s big money for anyone who calls me with a location. Big money—ten grand. Ten grand, no questions asked, any way they want it.”
    “Where’s that coming from?” Franklin asked.
    “Outa my