Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(8)

“Thank you.”


WHEN HE GOT HOME, Lucas’s wife, Weather, was asleep. Lucas tried tiptoeing around the bedroom, but she woke up and asked, “Talk to Virgil?”

“Yeah. He’s all over the place about the kids,” Lucas said. “We gotta get them up here this summer. More than once. Maybe you can calm him down. He asked me the difference between Huggies and Pampers and wanted me to recommend one, for Christ’s sakes.”

“How about next week?”

“Ah, Rae called. She might have a job I want to look at,” Lucas said.

“Louisiana?” Weather asked.

“Yeah.”

“Talk in the morning,” she said.


LUCAS HAD an office in Minneapolis, but didn’t work out of Minneapolis. He worked out of Washington, D.C., and reported to a bureaucrat named Russell Forte. The relationship was purely notional.

Because of the political arrangement that had brought Lucas to the U.S. Marshals Service—he was a deputy U.S. Marshal—he was free to pick his own cases. There was a caveat: if a Washington politician called for help, he was bound at least to listen. The arrangement initially created some dissension within the Minneapolis office, but that had mostly gone away. The U.S. Marshal for the Minnesota District, Hal Oder, had been warned to keep his hands off Lucas, and he did, though he didn’t like it.

If that were to change, Lucas would quit; and he’d proven valuable to a number of powerful politicians of both parties, so his protection was unlikely to go away. Not that he completely trusted any of them—even the best politicians were, in his mind, sneaky, unreliable motherfuckers. While he did occasional errands for them and sometimes took cases for the Minnesota District, his main occupation was chasing down hard-core killers.

Not just any killers. Because of the way the federal law enforcement bureaucracy divided up tasks, he was mostly limited to killers who’d already had some contact with the federal court system. He didn’t have the backup resources of the FBI, but that was okay. Chasing down fugitives was more a matter of street work than technical processes, and that was what he was best at.

He was happy, as much as he’d ever been inside a law enforcement unit. Being a vigilante would be even better, but, of course, that was both expensive and illegal.

He and Weather talked at dawn, before her first surgery—she was a plastic surgeon, and for reasons that seemed crazy to Lucas, most surgeries were begun when normal people were still asleep. A bit later, when he woke up the second time, he called Russell Forte in Washington.

“I’ve gotten some rumblings that the Davenport machine may be cranking up,” Forte said. “I looked into it, and while the FBI might not necessarily actively seek your help down there in New Orleans, they probably wouldn’t drive you away with nunchucks.”

“Bob and Rae?”

“Absolutely. Bob sent me a note yesterday saying that you might call and beg to get in on it, poor bastard,” Forte said. “Listen, this guy, this Deese, this cannibal—man, it would be nice if a marshal were to nail him. The PR would be, like, galactic.”

“So I can pack my bag?”

“Yes. The FBI guy in charge of the site is named Sandro Tremanty, and my friends among the FBI say that he is competent, which means he’s probably on his way up. Try to treat him as an equal.”

“That’s not realistic, but I’ll try.”

“Then we’re set. Sally’s cutting your travel orders now. Usual terms. Did you ever get your LEO traveling armed certification?”

“Yeah, I’m all set.”

“Keep me up on what happens. And try to keep better track of your expenses. Sally said that last batch of your forms looked like it was compiled by chickens.”


THREE DAYS after Rae’s late-night call, Lucas kissed his wife and two at-home kids and flew out of MSP and into MSY—Minneapolis–St. Paul International to Louis Armstrong New Orleans International—his Walther PPQ tucked away in his carry-on pack. Bob met him in baggage claim wearing a black T-shirt, tan cargo shorts, and cross-training shoes. Bob was a wide man, with a neck that extended out past his ears.

“Nice to see you, man. Bring your gun?” he asked, as they shook hands.

“Right in my pack. I’d take it out and show you, but somebody would shoot me,” he said, looking around the crowded baggage claim area.

They got Lucas’s bag and went out the door, which was like stepping into a bowl of Slap Ya Mama hot sauce: fiery and wet. Bob was driving a Tahoe and was parked in a police-only zone: “I showed them my badge and told them I was undercover, investigating aggravated interstate mopery, and they said okay,” Bob explained. “We gotta get out of here before they look up ‘mopery’ in the dictionary.”

“Like a cop would have a dictionary,” Lucas said. “Where’s Rae?”

“She’s still up at the site,” Bob said. “I’ll tell you, Lucas, I’ve seen some disgusting shit in this job, but this one takes the cake. These bodies are straight out of a horror show. And that fuckin’ Deese was eating these people. Most people, he eats what Tremanty says is the tenderloin, or would be the tenderloin on a deer, but this one guy, it looks like he ate his liver.”

“Jesus.”

“And then he buries them in this boggy ground. When they bring them up . . . ah, you’ll see. The FBI brought in cadaver hounds, and we’re going over his property inch by inch, but it’s six acres of jungle and it’s nasty out there. We think we’ve got another grave spotted and we’re not even halfway through yet.”