Broken Prey by John Sandford Read Free Book Online

done, he said, “Give me some names. I need to start at the bottom and confirm some of this shit from outsiders, before I go to Sloan.”
    Hubbard nodded. “Okay: the new victim’s name was Adam Rice, the kid’s name was Josh, and Adam’s mom’s name is Laurina Rice. She’s listed . . .”
    “What about a wife?”
    “I heard she died a while back, but I don’t know the details . . .”

    THEY TALKED FOR ANOTHER two minutes, and then Ignace folded the notebook and said, “Bob, I owe you. I truly do.”
    “Well, I’ll tell you what I want. Write this down in your fuckin’ notebook. There’s a new restaurant named Funny Capers in Uptown. I want a story about it. A good story. What a happenin’ place it is. Like that. They got music on Friday and Saturday nights.”
    “Girlfriend? Or investment?” He’d opened the notebook again and was taking it down.
    “A friend of mine,” Hubbard said. His eyes flicked away.
    “If I need some last-minute comments on the place, can I call you at home?”
    Hubbard flinched. “Jesus Christ, don’t do that.”
    Ignace said, “One more thing. We got no art for this murder. Suppose we went with a graphic of a straight razor. I mean, would that be fucked up? Are they saying razor, or could it be a box cutter or something?”
    “Fuck, I don’t know, I guess a razor would be all right,” Hubbard said. He ducked down a bit, to look through a bookshelf, looking for anyone who might know him. “Do what you want—and give me that Xerox.” He took the Xerox back, stuffed it into his jacket pocket. “Wait five minutes before you come out. Read something, or something.”
    “It’s a library, Bob, they might get suspicious.”
    “Okay, go look at blow jobs on the Internet. Just give me five minutes.”

    RUFFE’S RADIO WAS RUNNING hard on the way back to the paper: I shall not be moved; that’s what Ignace said, just before he led the attack on the hijackers. Tragically . . . Is that a cashmere sweater? It’s eighty degrees out here . . . Wonder if alpaca comes from alpacas? Four-wheel drift; could you do that in a Jeep? . . .
    He took the elevator up to the newsroom, bustled back to his desk. Most reporters dreaded calling survivors in a murder or tragic accident. Ignace didn’t mind. He called Laurina Rice first, got a sober, cold-voiced woman, and asked, “Laurina?”
    “Laurina is . . . indisposed,” the cold-voiced woman said. Ignace recognized her immediately: the officious neighbor or relative who was “protecting” somebody the media might want to talk to. “May I tell her who called?”
    “I just heard about Adam and Josh, and I really need to talk to her,” Ignace said. Then he pulled out a reporter’s cold-call trick, an implication of intimacy with the target. “Is this Florence?”
    “No, no, uh, just a minute.”
    Most people involved in tragedies want to talk, Ignace had found, if only you could get through to them. He waited ten seconds, and then had Laurina on the line: “Laurina: I’m terribly sorry about Adam and Josh . . .”
    “Oh, my God, oh, my God, they wouldn’t even let me see them . . .”
    “Do they know when it happened?” Ignace asked.
    “They think yesterday . . . uh, who is this?”
    “Ruffe Ignace from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. We’re alerting people around the state that we have this monster loose . . .”
    “He is! He is! He’s a monster.”
    She began sobbing and Ignace noted in Gregg, “Weeping, sobbing, disconsolate . . .”
    “People tell me that Adam and Josh were wonderful people, no bother to anyone,” Ignace said. “They can’t figure out who would do this. Do the police think anyone he knows . . . ?”
    “No, they told me this man is a monster, that he killed a woman in the Twin Cities . . .”
    “A beautiful young girl named Angela Larson from Chicago,” Ignace said. “She was just trying to work her way through college.”
    “Oh, God. And with Adam,