Ocean Prey (A Prey Novel #31) - John Sandford Page 0,117
designs.
One of them, a tall, fortyish woman with salt-and-pepper hair, gunmetal rimmed glasses, skinny like a runner, said to Lucas, “I’m Ann Wright with the U.S. Attorney’s Office. We need to speak privately for a moment.”
“In the kitchen.”
One of the other women said, “Jill and I need a place to change. We’re not doing this in heels.”
Devlin pointed down the hall toward the bedrooms, but said, “Don’t go through the door on the left. There’s a chicken in there that already attacked Davenport and drew some blood.”
“Fuckin’ cockatoo,” said the old man.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT
Lucas and Ann Wright went into the kitchen and shut the door behind them. Wright took a black spiral notebook and a pen out of her bag, opened it on the kitchen counter and said, “All right. We’ll begin the search as soon as Jill and Ivy change clothes. Tell me what happened here. Was there any resistance?”
Lucas filled her in on the entry, the old lady with the gun, the younger woman with the fingernails. Wright wrote it down in what appeared to be excellent shorthand.
“But she didn’t actually get to you? With her nails?”
“No, she fell on her dachshund.”
“Dachshund,” she said, and made a note. “Then . . .”
“There was this bird . . .” Lucas stepped to the kitchen counter and ripped a paper towel off a roll hung next to the sink, wiped through his hair and showed her the spots of blood. He told her about the attack.
“There was no evidence, though, that the Currys were directing the attack?”
Lucas suspected sarcasm, but Wright showed innocent brown eyes and no sign of a smile. “Well, no, but it’s obviously a dangerous bird, a sulphurous cockatoo, as I understand it.”
She finished with, “You saw no sign of the heroin?”
“Not yet, but we haven’t looked for it.”
* * *
Lucas glanced at his watch as Wright led the way back to the front room: three o’clock, and they hadn’t started yet with Curry. Too late to call Virgil and tell him to bail.
“Too late,” he said, aloud.
Wright turned: “What?”
He shook his head, but Devlin looked at him and said, “Fuck me.”
* * *
In the living room, the four inhabitants of the house were seated in a line, like a jury. Devlin introduced them, pointing at them one at a time. “Paul Curry on the end, and then Sophia Curry, Paul’s wife, and Sophia’s mother and father, David Bruno and Carol Bruno.”
Wright, standing in front of them with a clutch of paper, peeled off a piece of it and handed it to Paul Curry. “You are under arrest. This is a search warrant for your house. We are searching for heroin and money, currency. These two women . . .” she turned and nodded at the two search specialists, “. . . are going to tear this house apart looking for the heroin and the currency. I mean that literally. They have tools with them, wrecking bars and so on. They’ll take apart furniture, pull up baseboards, clean out closets, and so on. If you wish to concede the presence of the heroin and the currency, that won’t be necessary.”
Paul Curry held up a finger and said, “I . . .”
“Let me finish,” Wright interrupted. “You’ve been under surveillance for several days. We have high-resolution movies of you picking up the heroin at the Clean N Go car wash and making contact with your dealers on the street. You are a criminal, Mr. Curry, and your past history makes you liable for a life sentence in prison, if we find as much as an ounce of heroin in this house. And you will get life in prison, without the possibility of parole, I can promise that.”
She continued: “But we’re prepared to offer you a deal. In return for your testimony against Douglas Sansone and for surrendering the heroin and the currency, we will place you and your family in the U.S. Marshals Service’s witness protection program. No one who ever entered in the program, who has followed the rules of the program, has ever been traced and killed by his former colleagues. You will be safe.”
“Not in New York. You wouldn’t let us live in New York,” Sophia Curry blurted.
“I don’t know the details of the Marshals Service’s protection program, but I will tell you, there are some nice places outside of New York,” Wright said. “I actually come from one of them—Charleston, South Carolina. Charleston is far, far better than any prison in the federal prison system.”