Rules of Prey

by John Sandford

  "Hear what?" he asked.

  "That gay guy they arrested, that they thought was the maddog killer? He's not the one."

  "Yes. I saw it on the news last night. That's too bad. I thought they had him," the maddog said, struggling to keep his voice level. The police press conference, the portions he'd seen on TV3, had delighted him. He took another step toward his office.

  "They say he can't get it up," said Wilson.

  He stopped again, confused. "Pardon?"

  "Channel Eight, Annie McGowan? The reporter with the short dark hair-bob like the ice skater. What's-her-name? She talked to somebody in the police. They say he's impotent and that's what's driving him to do it," she said. Was she taunting him? There seemed to be an element of challenge in her tone.

  "Well, they were wrong about the homosexual..." the maddog started tentatively.

  "It's all that pop psychology," the maddog's secretary said scornfully. "Everybody else says he rapes them. If he can't get it up, how does he... ?"

  "They never found any semen," said Wilson. "They think he uses something."

  All the women looked at each other, and the maddog said, "Well," and went into his office and shut the door. He stood there, just for a second, suffused with rage. Impotence? Uses something? What were they talking about?

  There was a burst of laughter from outside, and he knew they were laughing about him. Uses something. Probably like old Louis there, I wonder what Louis uses? they were saying. They didn't know who he was, what he was; they didn't know the power. And they were laughing at him.

  He walked to his desk, dropped his briefcase, sat down, and stared at the duck print on the wall. Three mallards coming into a cattail swamp at dusk. The maddog stared at it without seeing it, the rage growing. There was another burst of laughter from beyond the door. If he'd had a pistol with him, he would have stepped into the hallway and killed them all.

  ***

  He left the office at eleven-thirty and drove home to watch the noon news. He watched TV3 by preference, believing that what little dignity was allotted to news coverage by television could best be found there.

  But he might have to change channels if this McGowan had special sources. He left his car in the driveway and hurried inside. He was a little early and had time to make a cup of hot soup before the news came on. He sat in the overstuffed chair in the living room sipping the salty hot concoction, and when the news came up, McGowan's was the lead story. It was apparently a rehash of the night before, with tape of McGowan interviewing the homosexual on the steps of the county jail and later repeating the impotence story. Her pretty, clear face was intent with the seriousness of her information; as the camera closed in on her face for the last shot, the maddog felt himself stir, even as the anger began to rekindle. He controlled it, breathing hard, and punched off the television. Annie McGowan. Her face hung in the bright afterimage of the television screen. She was an interesting one. Better than the blonde on TV3.

  The morning copy of the Star-Tribune was still on the kitchen table. He checked it again. There was a large story on the release of Smithe, but there was no reference to the impotence allegations.

  Why would the police tell McGowan that he was impotent? They must know he was not. They must know that it was wrong. Could it be an attempt to draw him out? Something to deliberately anger him? But that was... crazy. They would do anything to avoid angering him. Wouldn't they?

  He went back to work, the anger still roiling his mind. There was a temptation to find Heather, to take her immediately. But not yet, he decided as he sat with his books and his yellow pads. He could feel the strength building, but it had not reached the urgency that guaranteed the kind of transcendent experience he had come to require. To kill Heather now was to strike at the cops, but it would do something... unpleasant to his need for her. It would be, he thought, premature, and therefore disappointing. He would wait.

  The maddog worked through the weekend, feeling the need for the girl developing, blossoming within him.

  He enjoyed himself. The office was empty on Saturday afternoon and Sunday, leaving him alone, as he preferred to be. And he'd found an interesting case. Since it would go to trial, he would not handle it, but the senior trial attorney had passed it down through the assignment system, asking for research.

  The defendant was named Emil Gant. He had been harassing his ex-wife and her current boyfriends. He followed them, exchanged words with them, finally threatened violence. The threats were believable. Gant was on parole, having served thirty months of a forty-five-month prison term on a conviction of aggravated assault. The woman was worried.

  The current charge came after Gant was caught in his ex-wife's garage. The woman was in her house alone, at night. A neighbor saw Gant sneak in through an open door. The neighbor called the woman, the woman called 911, and the cops arrived in less than a minute. Gant was found hiding behind a car.

  Once he would have been charged with lurking. That charge no longer existed. He couldn't be charged with assault because he hadn't assaulted anyone. He couldn't be charged with breaking and entering, because he hadn't broken into the garage. He was finally charged with trespassing.

  Actually, the prosecutors didn't much care what he was charged with. A conviction on any charge would send Gant back to Stillwater State Prison for the remaining fifteen months of his original forty-five-month term.

  But the maddog, studying the state trespassing law, found a tidy little loophole. The law had been designed to deal with hunters who were trespassing on farms without permission, not with criminal harassment. Nobody wanted to arrest thousands of hunters every fall. Most of them were voters. So the trespass laws had some special provisions.

  Most important, the trespasser had to be warned and given a chance to leave-and refuse, or substantially delay-before the act of trespass was complete. The maddog looked over the police reports. Nobody had said anything to the man before the cops arrived. He was never given a chance to leave.

  The maddog smiled and started writing the brief. This would never go to trial: Gant had not completed the basic elements of the crime under Minnesota law. So he had been caught hiding in a private garage just before midnight? So what? Nobody told him to go away....

  The maddog left the brief on his secretary's desk before he left the office Sunday afternoon. On Monday morning he happened to get on an elevator with the chief trial attorney and his assistant. They nodded to the maddog and turned their backs on him, watching the numbers change.

  Halfway up the assistant cleared his throat. "Got something for you on that Gant case," he said.

  "Oh yeah?" Olson was a sharp dresser. Gray suits, paisley ties, big white teeth in an easy grin. "I thought I already put a stamp on that turkey and mailed him back to Stillwater."

  "Not quite, O wise one," the assistant said. "I got to thinking about the state trespass law and came in over the weekend to look it up. Sure enough. There's a provision in there..."

  The assistant then related, paragraph by paragraph, the maddog's research. Olson was laughing by the time they got to the skyway level and he slapped the assistant on the back and crowed, "God damn, Billy, I knew there was a reason I hired you."

  The maddog stood thunderstruck at the back of the car. Neither of the others noticed. In a half-hour, he was in a rage. He couldn't go to Olson and claim the work as his own. That would seem petty. The assistant would claim he simply had similar ideas.

  It had always been like this. He had always been ignored. The rage fed the need for the girl. It built like a thunderhead, and he went home, the need crawling in his blood.

  ***

  Heather Brown was back on the block. She wore a short leather skirt and a turquoise blouse open to her belt. Glass beads dangled over her thin freckled chest; a headband pinned back her hair.

  The maddog walked down the sidewalk toward her, his eyes running over her body. He was most carefully dressed; more carefully dressed than for any of the other killings, because t
his pickup would be in public and might well be witnessed.

  The maddog wore jeans and boots, a red nylon athletic jacket, and a billed John Deere hat. He was slightly out of place on Hennepin. Not enough to be outrageous, but enough that his clothes might stick in somebody's mind. He was a farmer, clear and simple. In a crowd of farmers, he would fit without the slightest wrinkle, he thought, as long as he kept his mouth shut.

  He had cut a hole through the back seam of the jacket pocket and a long wicked blade from Chicago Cutlery nestled in the lining.

  "Heather," he said as he approached. He glanced around. The nearest person was a black man sitting on a bus bench across the street. He turned away from the man. Heather had been looking past him and her eyes snapped back.

  "How are you, honey?"

  "I talked to you the other night..."

  "I don't remember you."

  "I offered fifty for a half-'n'-half..."

  "Oh, yeah." She tipped her head in bemusement. "You look a lot different."

  The maddog looked down at himself, nodded, and changed the subject. "You said you might come up with something more exciting, if I could get the money."

  "You get the money?"

  "I got a hundred."

  "So what you got in mind, cowboy?"

  ***

  The motel was pleasingly decrepit. Heather went into the office, got a key, and returned a minute later. Inside, the maddog looked around the room, sniffed. Disinfectant. They must spray the place, he decided. The bathroom was tiny, the floor was missing tiles, the bedspread was thin and badly worn.

  "Why don't we get the money out of the way first?" Heather Brown asked.

  "Oh, yes. A hundred?" The maddog took the bills out of his pants pockets and tossed them on the dresser. Five twenties. "And if we can really do... you know... I've got another fifty."

  "Hey, I like you, guy," she said with a bright smile. "Why don't we just go in here and discuss it while we take a little shower."

  "Start it, I'll be right there," he said. He started taking off his jacket, and when she stepped into the bathroom, took the knife out of his pocket and slipped it under the bed.

  The shower was agonizing. She carefully washed his penis, and when nothing happened, said, "Have a little trouble there?" She frowned, a wrinkle between her eyes. The impotent ones weren't the worst of the trade, but certainly slowed down the turnover.

  "No, no, no, not if we can..."

  She had silk scarves in her handbag, four of them, one for each wrist and ankle.

  "Don't tie them too tight," she said. "Just looping them is enough."

  "I can do this," he said through his teeth. He tied her feet first, one out to each corner at the foot of the bed, then her hands, out to the sides, tied to the sideboards.

  "How we doing, honey?"

  "Fine," he said, turning toward her. He had a half-erection now, his penis standing away from his body.

  "If you want to bring it up here for a minute, I can help you out," she offered.

  "No, no, I'm fine; but I want to use a rubber... I'm sorry..."

  "No, that's good," she said encouragingly. He turned and picked his jacket up off the floor, found a rubber, ripped it out of the package, and unrolled it on himself. Then he took the Kotex from the same pocket and lay down beside her.

  "Open wide," he said.

  Sensing that something was wrong, she tried to sit up, opened her mouth, perhaps to scream, and the maddog grabbed her by the sides of the throat and squeezed and pushed her down on the bed. She flopped, twisting her shoulders, struggling against the binding scarves. As he squeezed and squeezed, her mouth opened wider, and she managed to force out a moan, not loud enough to attract attention in a motel like this, and then he forced the Kotex into her mouth, stuffing it in.

  When it was in, he covered her mouth with one hand and fished in the pocket of the jacket with the other, found his gloves and slipped them on, one at a time. The girl watched him, still bucking against the scarves, her eyes wide and terrified now. When the gloves were on, he took his tape from the other pocket and wrapped it twice around her head and across the gag. Next he checked the bonds again; they were holding nicely.

  "Look at it now," he said to the girl, kneeling over her. "That's the real thing. And they tried to say I was impotent."

  She had stopped struggling and shrank back on the bed, watching him.

  "So now we'll have a little fun," he said. He found the knife under the bed, took it out, and showed it to her, the steel blade shimmering in the lamplight. "It won't hurt too much; I'm very good at this," he said. "Try to keep your eyes open when it goes in; I like to watch the eyes," he said.

  She looked away, and there was suddenly a smell in the room and he looked down at her pelvis and realized that she had wet herself.

  "Oh, for Christ's sake," he said. But he was delighted. She'd wet herself in fear. She knew the power.

  But he wouldn't rape her now. The thought of lying in cold urine was distasteful. And rape wasn't necessary, anyway. The maddog stretched out beside her, reached over and kissed her gently on the cheek as she strained away from him. "It'll just take a second," he said. She began frantically jerking her arms against the bonds. He laid the point of the knife just below her breastbone and felt the orgasm rising up within him as he pressed the knife up and in. The girl's eyes opened, straining, straining, and then the light went out and it all stopped for her. The maddog peered into her eyes as the light faded, felt the waves of the orgasm receding and the pressure lifting off his mind.

  It had gone very well, he thought. Very well.

  He stepped back from the bed and looked at her. Not pretty, he thought, but there was something beautiful in her attitude. He stripped off the rubber and tossed it in the toilet and flushed and began to get dressed, stopping frequently to look at his work. Inside, he rejoiced.

  When he was dressed, he took a last long look, reaching out to stroke her cooling leg, and started toward the door.

  "Whoops," he said aloud. "Can't forget the note." He fished it out of his jacket pocket and dropped it on her body.

  Outside, it was a beautiful crisp fall night. He walked across the blacktopped parking lot, risking a quick glance toward the motel office. The clerk was visible inside the window, the blue light of a television bathing his face. He didn't look out. Keeping his head carefully averted, the maddog walked down the sidewalk and around the corner, where he pulled off the jacket and hat. He rolled the jacket with the hat inside and tucked it under his arm. He turned another corner and was at his car. He climbed inside and tossed the jacket on the floor of the car. If anybody had seen him get in the car, it would not have been a man in a red jacket wearing a billed hat.

  He drove six blocks back toward the loop and stopped at a bar. A police car, flashing red lights but without a siren, sped past down Hennepin while he had the first drink. He nursed it, then nodded at the bartender for a refill. When he came out, an hour had passed since he'd left the motel room.

  "Another unnecessary risk," he told himself. "I won't drive by, though. Only close enough to watch."

  From a traffic signal a block away, he could see at least four police cars at the motel. As he waited for the light to change, a television truck rolled up to the motel and a dark-haired girl got out of the passenger side. He recognized her at once, Annie McGowan, the woman who said he was impotent.

  A car horn sounded from behind and he glanced in the rearview mirror and then at the traffic signal, which had turned green. He turned the corner and pulled over to the curb. McGowan was talking to a cop and the cop was shaking his head. A group of people walked down the sidewalk past the maddog's car, attracted by the police lights and the television truck.

  The maddog was tempted to join them, but decided against it. Too risky; he'd taken risks enough. Besides, there was enough of a glow from the killing that he should go home where he could relax and enjoy it. A long hot bath, close the eyes, and rerun the part where the light went
out in Heather Brown.

  CHAPTER

  14

  It had been one of the best weekends of the year, with warm days and crisp, cold nights. Brilliant color lingered in the woods, and the faint scent of burning birch logs hung in the air.

  "We've got at least another week for the leaves. Maybe two," Carla said. A stand of maples on the north end of the lake was a flaming orange. "Too bad you don't have more maples."

  "I thought about that when I bought the place," Lucas said. "I didn't want maples. They're pretty, but I wanted the pines. They give the place a North Woods feel. A little further south, down in the maples and oaks, it feels like farm country."