Shadow Prey by John Sandford Page A

say ‘Boo,’ this guy—he’s an Indian, by the way—he grabs Andretti, pulls his head back and slits his throat with a weird-looking stone knife.”
    “Oh, fuck,” said Lucas. Sloan was sitting in his chair with his mouth open. Anderson watched them in amusement, while Lester looked worried.
    “That’s exactly right,” said Daniel. He leaned forward, took a cigar from a brand-new humidor, held it under his nose, sniffed, then put the cigar back in the humidor. “ ‘Oh, fuck.’ The Indian also shot one of Andretti’s aides, but he’ll be okay.”
    Anderson picked up the story. “The Andretti family went berserk and started calling in debts. The governor, the mayor, everybody is getting in on the act.” Anderson was wearing plaid pants, a striped shirt and shiny yellow-brown vinyl shoes. “The New York cops are running around like chickens with their heads cut off.”
    “Andretti was one of the best-connected guys in New York City,” Daniel added. “He’s got twenty brothers and sisters and cousins and his old man and his old lady. They got an ocean of money and two oceans of political clout. They want blood.”
    “And they think whoever killed Andretti was working with this Bluebird guy?” asked Lucas.
    “Look at the killings,” Daniel said, spreading his arms. “It’s obvious. And there’s more to it. Andretti’s office building had a videotape monitor on a continuous loop. The witnesses picked out the killer. It’s a horseshit picture and they’ve only got him for about ten seconds, walking throughthe lobby, but they released it to the television stations an hour ago. A few minutes after they put it on TV, a motel owner from Jersey called up and said the guy might have been at his motel. The Jersey cops checked and they think he’s right. They’ve got no license-plate number—it wasn’t that kind of motel—but the owner remembers the guy had Minnesota plates. He remembers that when the guy was checking out, he said he was heading back home. The motel owner said there was no question about him being an Indian. And then there was the other thing.”
    “What’s that?” Sloan asked.
    “The New York cops held back the part about the stone knife,” Daniel said. “They told the media that Andretti had been stabbed, but nothing about the knife. So this motel owner asked the Jersey cops, ‘Did he stab him with that big fucking stone knife?’ The cops say, ‘What?’ And this motel owner, he says his Indian wore a stone knife around his neck, on a leather thong. He saw him at the Coke machine, wearing an undershirt with the knife hanging down.”
    “So we know for sure,” Sloan said.
    “Yeah. And he seems to be coming this way.” Daniel leaned back in his chair, put his hands on his stomach and twiddled his thumbs.
    Lucas pulled his lip, thinking about it. After a moment of silence, he looked up at the chief. “This guy have braids?”
    “The killer? Didn’t say anything about braids . . .” He hunted around his desktop for a moment, picked up a piece of computer printout, read it and said, “Nope. Hair down over the tops of his ears and just over his shirt collar. Longish, but not long enough for braids.”
    “Shit.”
    “Why?”
    “Because the guy who did Cuervo had braids.”
    The others glanced at each other and Daniel said, “He could have cut it.”
    “I said the same thing about Bluebird, when we took him down,” Lucas said.
    “Oh, boy,” Lester rasped, rubbing the back of his neck. He was the department’s front man on cases that drew media attention. “That’d make three. If there are two, themedia’s gonna go nuts. If there’s three . . . I’ve been burned before, I don’t need this shit.”
    Sloan grinned at him. “It’s gonna be bad, Frank,” he said, teasing. “This guy sounds like big headlines. When the networks and the big papers get a whiff of conspiracy, they’ll be on you like white on rice. Especially with the part about the stone