Sudden Prey

down.”
    Stadic looked at him, a flat, confused stare, and then suddenly he nodded: “Yeah. Okay. Let’s do it.”
    He used a sharp command voice, out of place, out of time. Lucas looked at the other cop: “Take him.” And, as they walked away, “Hey: Thanks again.”
     
     
     
    LUCAS WENT BACK to the wallet, looking for anything: a scrap of paper with an address, a note, a name, but Butters carried almost nothing: a Mobil credit card, a Sears card, a Tennessee hunting license, the driver’s license, an old black-and-white picture of a woman wearing a dress from the ’40s, and a more recent, color photograph of a Labrador retriever. Not much to work with.
    The lieutenant ran up, said, “Dispatch is calling the FAA, they’ll try to get these assholes out of here.” They both looked up at the chopper, and then the lieutenant said, looking at Butters’s body, “You know how lucky we are?”
    “What?” Lucas looked up. His scalp had begun to hurt, as though somebody had pressed a hot wire against it.
    “He was in that house,” the lieutenant said, and Lucas turned to look.
    A man, a woman and a kid were looking out through the shattered door, past a patrol cop who’d run up to see that everybody was okay. The woman kept pushing the kid back, but the kid wanted to see. “If he’d holed up in there, there wouldn’t have been a goddamn thing we could do. We could’ve had some kind of nightmare out here.”
    “Yeah . . .” And Lucas suddenly laughed, all the tension of the last ten minutes slipping away. “But look what he did to your cars.”
    The lieutenant looked at the car, which showed a ragged line of holes starting in the front fender and running all the way to the back bumper. A couple of slugs had grooved the roof, the windows were gone. The lieutenant did a little Stan Laurel walk down the length of the car and said, “They hurt m’ auto-mobile, Ollie.”
    “I guess. He didn’t miss a single piece of sheet metal,” Lucas said.
    “Sure, it’s a little rough,” the lieutenant said, switching to a car salesman’s voice. “But look at the tires: the tires are in A-1 condition.”
    They both laughed, shaking their heads. They laughed from relief, the lifting of the fear, the safety of the other cops and the people in the house.
    Another chopper, TV3 this time, arriving late, swept over the house with its lights and beating blades and caught them standing over the body of Ansel Butters, looking at the car, laughing, unable to stop.

12
    THE DAWN CAME like a sheet of dull steel pushed over the eastern horizon, cold, sullen and stupid. Fifteen cop cars blocked off the neighborhood, and yellow crime-scene tape wrapped the trail along which Butters had fled. A half-dozen cops were walking the route, looking for anything he might have thrown from his pockets—a piece of paper, a receipt, anything.
    Tennessee cops had been to Butters’s broken-down acreage since the night before, when his prints had been nailed down. They’d discovered what looked like a fresh grave in a decrepit apple orchard, opened it and found a Labrador retriever, shot once in the head.
    “Old dog, had bones sticking out of his back, all gray on his muzzle,” a Tennessee state cop told Lucas. “Probably shot him a couple of weeks ago. It’s been cold enough that the body’s still intact.”
    Lucas, standing in the street next to the shot-up cop car, was impatient with the dog information: “We need anything in the house that might point to associates,” Lucas said. “Any piece of paper, phone records, anything.”
    “We’re tearing the place apart,” the Tennessee cop said. “But when we saw the grave, we thought we had to do something about it.”
    “Screw the grave, we gotta find out where he’s been and who he was hanging out with . . .”
    “We’re watching you on TV, we know you got a problem,” the Tennessee cop said dryly. “We’re turning over everything.”
     
     
     
    LUCAS RECOGNIZED THE truck the moment he saw it: the truck that had slowed through the intersection. He couldn’t be absolutely sure, but he was sure enough. Butters had been on his way in to Small’s house. Whoever had called him had known, had saved Sarah’s life, and probably Jennifer’s and Small’s and the boy’s . . .
    “Belongs to Elmore Darling,” the St. Paul cops told him when he walked up. “Wisconsin cops are on the way out to his house.”
    “Goddamnit,” Lucas said. The woman had suckered them.