Format: 400 pages, Hardcover
Release Date: April 7, 2026
Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons
Source: Publisher
Genre: Thrillers, Suspense
Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons
Source: Publisher
Genre: Thrillers, Suspense
Lucas Davenport must track down a ruthless Russian hit team, in this latest thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling author John Sandford.
Leonard Summers—not his real name—is on the run. A former high-ranking Russian intelligence officer who defected to the U.S. after providing critical information about Russian spies in U.S. government service, Leonard, his wife Martha, and son Bernard have spent the past year holed up in a CIA facility near Washington. After the CIA makes a deal with the U.S. Marshal Service’s Witness Protection Program (WPP), Leonard’s family is transported to Minneapolis. The plan is to hide them in a wooded Minneapolis suburb that resembles their former home and dacha near Moscow.
The Summers are received at their destination by Lucas Davenport and fellow marshal Shelly White. Unbeknownst to them, the WPP group has been tracked by a Russian hit team. And while nobody in the WPP has ever been attacked…Leonard might be the first victim. As shots are fired and enemies dodged, Lucas must move quickly to uncover where the leak is coming from, before the hit team can strike again.
Leonard Summers—not his real name—is on the run. A former high-ranking Russian intelligence officer who defected to the U.S. after providing critical information about Russian spies in U.S. government service, Leonard, his wife Martha, and son Bernard have spent the past year holed up in a CIA facility near Washington. After the CIA makes a deal with the U.S. Marshal Service’s Witness Protection Program (WPP), Leonard’s family is transported to Minneapolis. The plan is to hide them in a wooded Minneapolis suburb that resembles their former home and dacha near Moscow.
The Summers are received at their destination by Lucas Davenport and fellow marshal Shelly White. Unbeknownst to them, the WPP group has been tracked by a Russian hit team. And while nobody in the WPP has ever been attacked…Leonard might be the first victim. As shots are fired and enemies dodged, Lucas must move quickly to uncover where the leak is coming from, before the hit team can strike again.
Revenge Prey is the 36th installment in author John Sandford's Lucas Davenport series. Lucas Davenport is a true maverick; whether he's working for the law or skirting procedure, he utilizes his exceptional ability to get inside the mind of a killer, along with his select contacts in the government, the media, and the criminal underworld to get the job done. He's worn many hats during his career in Minnesota—police officer, detective, BCA investigator, state troubleshooter—but his newest job takes him into the biggest arena of all.
Leonard Summers (real name: Leonid Sokolov), a high-ranking former Russian intelligence officer, has defected to the U.S. after exposing Russian spies embedded in American government circles. He, his wife, Martha, and their son, Bernard, enter the Witness Protection Program and are relocated to a wooded Minneapolis suburb designed to resemble their old dacha near Moscow. U.S. Marshal Lucas Davenport and partner Shelly White are on hand for the handoff, alongside CIA involvement.
Almost immediately, a Russian hit team—acting on orders from the highest levels—strikes. What follows is a relentless cat-and-mouse game as Lucas teams up with a sharp, sarcastic CIA agent named John Sherwood to hunt the assassins, plug a suspected leak in the protection apparatus, and keep the family alive. The story balances Lucas’s perspective with glimpses into the hit team’s operations, adding depth to the antagonists.
The novel starts with a bang (literally) and maintains high tension through multiple assassination attempts and chases. Brief appearances by Weather, Letty, and Virgil Flowers provide welcome continuity without overshadowing the main plot. John Sherwood stands out as a memorable new ally—snarky, competent, and a good banter partner for Lucas. The Russian hit team members are surprisingly well drawn: professional, under pressure, and humanized by their own motivations and moral gray areas (they’re targeting a man with a dark past). This avoids cartoonish villains. If you like gritty cop thrillers with spy-novel elements, moral complexity, and top-tier banter, Revenge Prey delivers. Just don’t expect revolutionary changes to the formula—Sandford knows what his audience loves and serves it up reliably.
.png)
1
She had long blond hair and was almost pretty, in the manner of tennis jocks and female gymnasts; too much muscle in the face and arms and butt for the smooth baby-fat look of fashion models or movie stars.
Because she wasn't one.
Despite the cold, she was lying on her parka, instead of wearing it, the better to anchor the rifle against her shoulder. She put the crosshairs on the target, took up the trigger slack, and squeezed. The recoil was sharp, but manageable.
The man lying in the dirt next to her, looking through a spotting scope, said, "Two centimeters high, a centimeter right. Once more."
She took her time and squeezed again. The spotter said, "Same hole."
She said, "I'm so fucking cold, I feel like a goddamned фруктовый лёд." In English, literally, a "fruit ice," or not so literally, a "Popsicle."
"Forget the cold," the man said. He had a hard, narrow face and black hair over black eyes. "Three rounds, fast."
The three rounds went out in less than three seconds, and he said, "All over the place, left right and high, all within six centimeters of the ten-ring."
"So it's good."
"Better than good. I've seen what it does to gelatin. If you hit the target anywhere above the waist, he's dead," the man said, rolling on his side to look at her. "These copper bullets won't defeat Level 4, but armor-piercing will. Shoots so flat . . . I want to take one home with me."
"If I could shoot as well as you do, I would find a way to do that," the woman said, handing him the rifle. "Maybe a custom barrel with handloads. The perfect weapon."
They were lying in a ditch ten miles west of the small town of Owatonna, Minnesota, an informal shooting range, located by their concierge, who was waiting nervously by the car.
"I wish it was suppressed," the woman added.
"You know the English proverb, 'If wishes were horses, beggars would ride'?"
Some wrinkles appeared in her forehead: "I'm not sure what that means . . ."
The proverb didn't quite translate, because they were speaking in Russian.
Because they were Russian.
A snaky blacktopped driveway led up a gentle slope to the hideout. Two other houses were fed from the same cul-de-sac, all three out of sight of one another, a carefully contrived privacy set in a suburban forest. Natural shingle siding, a gray-stone chimney, and high peaked roof gave the hideout the vibe of a Minnesota lake chalet, although the nearest big water was a mile away.
The marshals arrived in separate vehicles, Lucas Davenport pushing his Porsche Cayenne up the driveway, while Shelly White left her 4Runner in the street and walked up to meet Lucas.
"The guy gets this place for free? They just gave it to him?" White asked, peering squint-eyed at the house of her dreams, which were unlikely to be realized.
The afternoon light was draining away, a sullen, tangible gathering of gloom, as happens in Minnesota on overcast February days. "The way of the world, sweetheart. You get big enough, you get bad enough, they hand you the fat stacks."
The hideout was one of twelve houses nestled on four back-to-back cul-de-sacs. Seen from a satellite, the cul-de-sacs resembled a four-leaf clover, set down in a winter landscape of barren broad-leafed trees and evergreens that appeared black in the murky afternoon light.
Shelly White looked like a semi-starved Depression-era farm wife, maybe caught on black-and-white film rattling out of Oklahoma, six snot-nosed kids in a broke-down Model T Ford. She had the knife-edge cheekbones, the pale gray eyes fixed in a thousand-yard stare, the parched lips held in a tight straight line.
White had never been in Oklahoma, wasn't starving, and she drove a Toyota SUV much too fast for the crappy suspension. She was a deputy U.S. Marshal who'd grown up in East Grand Forks, Minnesota, looking across the Red River at North Dakota. Four years as an Air Force cop and a degree in criminology got her a job with the U.S. Marshals Service.
She and Lucas, another deputy marshal, hadn't particularly liked each other when they first met, but they got along, and after a couple of years, had warmed up. Lucas had three natural children with two different women, plus an adoptive daughter; White had three children with two different men, so they had blended families to talk about. Along with guns, fugitives, and mandatory overtime.
White was on the short side, thin and tough as a razor strop. A Glock 9mm hung on her right hip. Below that hip, out of sight beneath her winter cover-ups, she had a massive scar on her thigh where she'd been shot with a fast-expanding jacketed hollow-point bullet from a deer rifle.
Just . . . life in the Marshals Service.
As they stood side-by-side, Lucas loomed over her, a substantial opposite, with expensively cut dark hair threaded with gray and crystalline blue eyes. He was tall, wide across the shoulders. A hairline scar tracked across his left eye from his forehead to his cheek, a relic of a fishing trip. Another puckered scar sat on his throat, where a teenaged girl had shot him with a piece-of-crap .22 that he hadn't seen coming. He had a nonstandard Walther 40 S&W on his left hip, in a cross-draw holster, for easier access under a suit coat.
Lucas had a tendency toward depression, exacerbated by the gloom of winter, and by the sporadic violence of the job. White shared the depressive gene, and they sometimes compared notes. When Lucas was younger, he hadn't worried about it. Now, in his later fifties, he had a tendency to think he'd been shot too often and to brood about the near-death experiences. About what he'd miss, if he were dead; about not seeing his younger children grow into adults.
White had thoughts that ran down in the same trench.
Still, they both were hunters, trackers. They liked the intensity of the work, if not always the consequences, because the intensity went some way toward offsetting the blues.
“I don’t know why they put us out here,” White said, looking around like a curious cat, her nose twitching in the wind. Although she was wearing a down parka, ski gloves, and a cashmere watch cap over her streaky brown hair, she shivered. They were standing at the top of the driveway, in a grove of paper birches, the kind the Ojibwe once turned into canoes.
The ground, hard as pig iron, was covered with half an inch of crunchy snow. There'd been almost no snow over the winter months, but they'd gotten all the usual cold weather. The temperature, according to Lucas's weather app, was six degrees and falling, and a persistent breeze whipped the steam away from their mouths. "I'm not a babysitter," she added.
"This guy is no baby," Lucas said. He coughed once, covering his mouth with a gloved fist. He wasn't sick; the bitter cold set him off. He could feel his lips cracking, and he'd left his ChapStick sitting on his dresser. "He was in some kind of enforcement branch of the Russian spy agency. He's probably killed more people than the Marshals Service."
"Yeah, but why us in particular?" White asked. "Why not Remy, or that asshole Clark? They'd jump at it, hanging out with headquarters guys."
"Because I'm the smartest guy in the office, and you're a close second? They thought the job might take some brains."
"You're almost smart enough to get that almost right," White said, shivering again. She'd been a National Merit Scholar in high school and Lucas hadn't been; but then, he'd been a hockey jock, and what could you expect from somebody who'd been hit in the head with a puck, and more than once? "But really?"
"Because Witness Protection doesn't babysit, either," Lucas said. "They plug a guy into a hideout and that's it. This guy . . . The Russians would like to get at him. They need somebody with guns close by, or think they do. That's not usually Witness Protection."
“All right,” White said. She’d done time with fugitive task forces and considered her Glock to be a species of musical instrument. Lucas had a reputation as a shooter, which he didn’t entirely appreciate, because it suggested he was too fast on the trigger. He felt he was barely fast enough, and he had the scars to prove it.
At the moment, White was in the Minnesota winter stance, shoulders squeezed tight, elbows to rib cage, fingers pulled out of the fingers of her gloves, hands clenched in fists. "Why aren't you cold? You're standing there in your plutonium suit and tie . . . and that coat. What's that coat made of? Pubic hair from virgins? What?"
"Wool, from goats, but highly refined, college-educated, Italian goats," Lucas said. He was a hopeless fashion plate. He leaned toward White: "Don't tell anyone, but I'm also wearing long underwear. Smartwool. Of course, if I have to pee, I'm in trouble."
"Well, that's it: you are smarter than me. I'm wearing cotton bikini briefs." White looked at her watch: "They're late. Jerks left us standing out here freezing our balls off."
"Not mine. They're like two chestnuts roasting on an open fire."
White: "Hey: you don't have to top me every time, okay?"
Lucas’s cell phone buzzed. He dug it out of the pocket of his coat, looked at the screen: “Now they’re going to tell us why they’re late.”
He answered, listened for a moment, and when the person on the other side stopped talking, he said, "Okay. We'll take a look around here," and rang off.
White: "What?"
Lucas said, "They're still half an hour out. They had to find a suitcase. Knowing the Marshals Service, they probably flew last-class on Trans-New Jersey Airways."
"If we had a key . . ." White looked wistfully up at the locked and alarmed house, furnace steam puffing from a rooftop chimney. The place had what were once called "grounds." Nothing rural about it, a four-acre fenced lot heavy with white-trunked birches and brooding blue conifers and maples, a few red leaves still attached to the maples. A line of bare-naked bridal wreath bushes were strung along the driveway, while leafless lilacs waited in the dooryard for spring.
"We could sit in the truck, but I'd like to take a look around," Lucas said. "You know, in case we ever had to come back out here."
"Not a bad idea. We can at least see through the woods right now," White said. "Gotta be pretty dense in the summer."
"Let me change my shoes . . ."
Lucas popped the back of his truck and took out a pair of Sorel Caribous, pulled them on, tucked in the bottom of his suit pants, and carefully placed his John Lobbs on the truck's floor.
Together, they marched around the lot, past a frozen picnic table that sat next to a frozen firepit made with frozen stones with frozen logs next to it, through the maples and pines and birches and around the withered shrubs. They found a hard-frozen coiled hose that somebody had forgotten under a dwarf mugo pine, two wickets from a croquet set that somebody had forgotten to pull, and, at the back of the yard, a shovel with a rusted blade and a broken handle. Having crisscrossed the yard, they went out a gate at the back.
They discovered that the hideout was on one of four circles, which they hadn't known, with a narrow, frozen creek winding through the common area between the circles. They stumbled across whitetail deer beds tucked under balsams and racoon and coyote tracks along the iced-over creek.
There were three houses on each of the four circles. All of the houses were showing furnace exhaust, and two had older cars in the driveways, which White thought must belong to housekeepers. Nobody with common sense would park outside in this cold, if they had a heated garage.
"If the guy's a bowhunter, he could put up some venison," White said, checking out a line of deer tracks. She scuffed at one of the bigger prints and said, "Nice buck."
They were puffing out clouds of steam, and tiny icicles were forming on the tips of White's hair.
"Given his reputation, I'm pretty sure he ain't a vegetarian," Lucas said.
They’d just gotten back to the house when two SUVs pulled into the driveway, both Ford Explorers, both with the tired look of rental cars. A bulky marshal, head like a half-gallon milk jug, climbed out of the first vehicle, saw them: “Davenport and White?”
"Davenport and White," Lucas answered. "Are you Derrick?"
"Yeah. You look like your pictures. You guys check out the site?"
"We did," White said. "There are four cul-de-sacs back-to-back, three houses on each circle, a common area in between them. Looks like all the lots are about the same size, three or four acres each, all fenced. Nothing but animal tracks in the snow."
"Excellent." Derrick Beard turned back toward the SUVs and waved. Seven more doors popped open, and seven more people got out. Three were marshals, all in tactical winter wear, all from Washington, as was Beard.
Another of the arrivals, an American, but not a marshal, was thinner, taller, quicker, wearing a wool knee-length camel coat with matching wool-and-leather gloves. He sported black rectangular sunglasses and a brown Borsalino hat. The clothes were well cut and subtly aristocratic. Looking at them, Lucas, the fashion plate, was stroked by the feather of jealousy. He liked browns, admired them, but given his coloring, couldn't wear them.
The final three to get out of the trucks were a short sixty-year-old gray-haired man with broad shoulders, a stub nose, and ruddy face, in a blue L.L.Bean parka. He was followed by a scowling fortysomething woman with tight-cut blond hair, small gold earrings, and narrow shoulders; she was several inches taller than the man Lucas presumed was her husband. She was also wearing a blue Bean parka.
The third was a tall youngish man, midtwenties, whose face resembled the woman's. His dishwater-blond hair fell to his shoulders and his face was covered with dishwater blond fuzz, like a holy card Jesus. Despite the cold, the son was wearing tight fashion jeans and a hip-length black leather jacket worn open.
"Hope to God somebody has a key," Lucas said.
"We're good," Beard said. "Let's get inside. I'm already numb."
The older man said to the woman, "Look at the birches, Martha, like home. I told you." His face looked carved, rather than grown, with snarl lines starting beside his nose and extending to the corners of his mouth. The quarried look of his face was matched by that of his wife.
She had long blond hair and was almost pretty, in the manner of tennis jocks and female gymnasts; too much muscle in the face and arms and butt for the smooth baby-fat look of fashion models or movie stars.
Because she wasn't one.
Despite the cold, she was lying on her parka, instead of wearing it, the better to anchor the rifle against her shoulder. She put the crosshairs on the target, took up the trigger slack, and squeezed. The recoil was sharp, but manageable.
The man lying in the dirt next to her, looking through a spotting scope, said, "Two centimeters high, a centimeter right. Once more."
She took her time and squeezed again. The spotter said, "Same hole."
She said, "I'm so fucking cold, I feel like a goddamned фруктовый лёд." In English, literally, a "fruit ice," or not so literally, a "Popsicle."
"Forget the cold," the man said. He had a hard, narrow face and black hair over black eyes. "Three rounds, fast."
The three rounds went out in less than three seconds, and he said, "All over the place, left right and high, all within six centimeters of the ten-ring."
"So it's good."
"Better than good. I've seen what it does to gelatin. If you hit the target anywhere above the waist, he's dead," the man said, rolling on his side to look at her. "These copper bullets won't defeat Level 4, but armor-piercing will. Shoots so flat . . . I want to take one home with me."
"If I could shoot as well as you do, I would find a way to do that," the woman said, handing him the rifle. "Maybe a custom barrel with handloads. The perfect weapon."
They were lying in a ditch ten miles west of the small town of Owatonna, Minnesota, an informal shooting range, located by their concierge, who was waiting nervously by the car.
"I wish it was suppressed," the woman added.
"You know the English proverb, 'If wishes were horses, beggars would ride'?"
Some wrinkles appeared in her forehead: "I'm not sure what that means . . ."
The proverb didn't quite translate, because they were speaking in Russian.
Because they were Russian.
A snaky blacktopped driveway led up a gentle slope to the hideout. Two other houses were fed from the same cul-de-sac, all three out of sight of one another, a carefully contrived privacy set in a suburban forest. Natural shingle siding, a gray-stone chimney, and high peaked roof gave the hideout the vibe of a Minnesota lake chalet, although the nearest big water was a mile away.
The marshals arrived in separate vehicles, Lucas Davenport pushing his Porsche Cayenne up the driveway, while Shelly White left her 4Runner in the street and walked up to meet Lucas.
"The guy gets this place for free? They just gave it to him?" White asked, peering squint-eyed at the house of her dreams, which were unlikely to be realized.
The afternoon light was draining away, a sullen, tangible gathering of gloom, as happens in Minnesota on overcast February days. "The way of the world, sweetheart. You get big enough, you get bad enough, they hand you the fat stacks."
The hideout was one of twelve houses nestled on four back-to-back cul-de-sacs. Seen from a satellite, the cul-de-sacs resembled a four-leaf clover, set down in a winter landscape of barren broad-leafed trees and evergreens that appeared black in the murky afternoon light.
Shelly White looked like a semi-starved Depression-era farm wife, maybe caught on black-and-white film rattling out of Oklahoma, six snot-nosed kids in a broke-down Model T Ford. She had the knife-edge cheekbones, the pale gray eyes fixed in a thousand-yard stare, the parched lips held in a tight straight line.
White had never been in Oklahoma, wasn't starving, and she drove a Toyota SUV much too fast for the crappy suspension. She was a deputy U.S. Marshal who'd grown up in East Grand Forks, Minnesota, looking across the Red River at North Dakota. Four years as an Air Force cop and a degree in criminology got her a job with the U.S. Marshals Service.
She and Lucas, another deputy marshal, hadn't particularly liked each other when they first met, but they got along, and after a couple of years, had warmed up. Lucas had three natural children with two different women, plus an adoptive daughter; White had three children with two different men, so they had blended families to talk about. Along with guns, fugitives, and mandatory overtime.
White was on the short side, thin and tough as a razor strop. A Glock 9mm hung on her right hip. Below that hip, out of sight beneath her winter cover-ups, she had a massive scar on her thigh where she'd been shot with a fast-expanding jacketed hollow-point bullet from a deer rifle.
Just . . . life in the Marshals Service.
As they stood side-by-side, Lucas loomed over her, a substantial opposite, with expensively cut dark hair threaded with gray and crystalline blue eyes. He was tall, wide across the shoulders. A hairline scar tracked across his left eye from his forehead to his cheek, a relic of a fishing trip. Another puckered scar sat on his throat, where a teenaged girl had shot him with a piece-of-crap .22 that he hadn't seen coming. He had a nonstandard Walther 40 S&W on his left hip, in a cross-draw holster, for easier access under a suit coat.
Lucas had a tendency toward depression, exacerbated by the gloom of winter, and by the sporadic violence of the job. White shared the depressive gene, and they sometimes compared notes. When Lucas was younger, he hadn't worried about it. Now, in his later fifties, he had a tendency to think he'd been shot too often and to brood about the near-death experiences. About what he'd miss, if he were dead; about not seeing his younger children grow into adults.
White had thoughts that ran down in the same trench.
Still, they both were hunters, trackers. They liked the intensity of the work, if not always the consequences, because the intensity went some way toward offsetting the blues.
“I don’t know why they put us out here,” White said, looking around like a curious cat, her nose twitching in the wind. Although she was wearing a down parka, ski gloves, and a cashmere watch cap over her streaky brown hair, she shivered. They were standing at the top of the driveway, in a grove of paper birches, the kind the Ojibwe once turned into canoes.
The ground, hard as pig iron, was covered with half an inch of crunchy snow. There'd been almost no snow over the winter months, but they'd gotten all the usual cold weather. The temperature, according to Lucas's weather app, was six degrees and falling, and a persistent breeze whipped the steam away from their mouths. "I'm not a babysitter," she added.
"This guy is no baby," Lucas said. He coughed once, covering his mouth with a gloved fist. He wasn't sick; the bitter cold set him off. He could feel his lips cracking, and he'd left his ChapStick sitting on his dresser. "He was in some kind of enforcement branch of the Russian spy agency. He's probably killed more people than the Marshals Service."
"Yeah, but why us in particular?" White asked. "Why not Remy, or that asshole Clark? They'd jump at it, hanging out with headquarters guys."
"Because I'm the smartest guy in the office, and you're a close second? They thought the job might take some brains."
"You're almost smart enough to get that almost right," White said, shivering again. She'd been a National Merit Scholar in high school and Lucas hadn't been; but then, he'd been a hockey jock, and what could you expect from somebody who'd been hit in the head with a puck, and more than once? "But really?"
"Because Witness Protection doesn't babysit, either," Lucas said. "They plug a guy into a hideout and that's it. This guy . . . The Russians would like to get at him. They need somebody with guns close by, or think they do. That's not usually Witness Protection."
“All right,” White said. She’d done time with fugitive task forces and considered her Glock to be a species of musical instrument. Lucas had a reputation as a shooter, which he didn’t entirely appreciate, because it suggested he was too fast on the trigger. He felt he was barely fast enough, and he had the scars to prove it.
At the moment, White was in the Minnesota winter stance, shoulders squeezed tight, elbows to rib cage, fingers pulled out of the fingers of her gloves, hands clenched in fists. "Why aren't you cold? You're standing there in your plutonium suit and tie . . . and that coat. What's that coat made of? Pubic hair from virgins? What?"
"Wool, from goats, but highly refined, college-educated, Italian goats," Lucas said. He was a hopeless fashion plate. He leaned toward White: "Don't tell anyone, but I'm also wearing long underwear. Smartwool. Of course, if I have to pee, I'm in trouble."
"Well, that's it: you are smarter than me. I'm wearing cotton bikini briefs." White looked at her watch: "They're late. Jerks left us standing out here freezing our balls off."
"Not mine. They're like two chestnuts roasting on an open fire."
White: "Hey: you don't have to top me every time, okay?"
Lucas’s cell phone buzzed. He dug it out of the pocket of his coat, looked at the screen: “Now they’re going to tell us why they’re late.”
He answered, listened for a moment, and when the person on the other side stopped talking, he said, "Okay. We'll take a look around here," and rang off.
White: "What?"
Lucas said, "They're still half an hour out. They had to find a suitcase. Knowing the Marshals Service, they probably flew last-class on Trans-New Jersey Airways."
"If we had a key . . ." White looked wistfully up at the locked and alarmed house, furnace steam puffing from a rooftop chimney. The place had what were once called "grounds." Nothing rural about it, a four-acre fenced lot heavy with white-trunked birches and brooding blue conifers and maples, a few red leaves still attached to the maples. A line of bare-naked bridal wreath bushes were strung along the driveway, while leafless lilacs waited in the dooryard for spring.
"We could sit in the truck, but I'd like to take a look around," Lucas said. "You know, in case we ever had to come back out here."
"Not a bad idea. We can at least see through the woods right now," White said. "Gotta be pretty dense in the summer."
"Let me change my shoes . . ."
Lucas popped the back of his truck and took out a pair of Sorel Caribous, pulled them on, tucked in the bottom of his suit pants, and carefully placed his John Lobbs on the truck's floor.
Together, they marched around the lot, past a frozen picnic table that sat next to a frozen firepit made with frozen stones with frozen logs next to it, through the maples and pines and birches and around the withered shrubs. They found a hard-frozen coiled hose that somebody had forgotten under a dwarf mugo pine, two wickets from a croquet set that somebody had forgotten to pull, and, at the back of the yard, a shovel with a rusted blade and a broken handle. Having crisscrossed the yard, they went out a gate at the back.
They discovered that the hideout was on one of four circles, which they hadn't known, with a narrow, frozen creek winding through the common area between the circles. They stumbled across whitetail deer beds tucked under balsams and racoon and coyote tracks along the iced-over creek.
There were three houses on each of the four circles. All of the houses were showing furnace exhaust, and two had older cars in the driveways, which White thought must belong to housekeepers. Nobody with common sense would park outside in this cold, if they had a heated garage.
"If the guy's a bowhunter, he could put up some venison," White said, checking out a line of deer tracks. She scuffed at one of the bigger prints and said, "Nice buck."
They were puffing out clouds of steam, and tiny icicles were forming on the tips of White's hair.
"Given his reputation, I'm pretty sure he ain't a vegetarian," Lucas said.
They’d just gotten back to the house when two SUVs pulled into the driveway, both Ford Explorers, both with the tired look of rental cars. A bulky marshal, head like a half-gallon milk jug, climbed out of the first vehicle, saw them: “Davenport and White?”
"Davenport and White," Lucas answered. "Are you Derrick?"
"Yeah. You look like your pictures. You guys check out the site?"
"We did," White said. "There are four cul-de-sacs back-to-back, three houses on each circle, a common area in between them. Looks like all the lots are about the same size, three or four acres each, all fenced. Nothing but animal tracks in the snow."
"Excellent." Derrick Beard turned back toward the SUVs and waved. Seven more doors popped open, and seven more people got out. Three were marshals, all in tactical winter wear, all from Washington, as was Beard.
Another of the arrivals, an American, but not a marshal, was thinner, taller, quicker, wearing a wool knee-length camel coat with matching wool-and-leather gloves. He sported black rectangular sunglasses and a brown Borsalino hat. The clothes were well cut and subtly aristocratic. Looking at them, Lucas, the fashion plate, was stroked by the feather of jealousy. He liked browns, admired them, but given his coloring, couldn't wear them.
The final three to get out of the trucks were a short sixty-year-old gray-haired man with broad shoulders, a stub nose, and ruddy face, in a blue L.L.Bean parka. He was followed by a scowling fortysomething woman with tight-cut blond hair, small gold earrings, and narrow shoulders; she was several inches taller than the man Lucas presumed was her husband. She was also wearing a blue Bean parka.
The third was a tall youngish man, midtwenties, whose face resembled the woman's. His dishwater-blond hair fell to his shoulders and his face was covered with dishwater blond fuzz, like a holy card Jesus. Despite the cold, the son was wearing tight fashion jeans and a hip-length black leather jacket worn open.
"Hope to God somebody has a key," Lucas said.
"We're good," Beard said. "Let's get inside. I'm already numb."
The older man said to the woman, "Look at the birches, Martha, like home. I told you." His face looked carved, rather than grown, with snarl lines starting beside his nose and extending to the corners of his mouth. The quarried look of his face was matched by that of his wife.
No comments:
Post a Comment