Rules of Prey

by John Sandford

  "... don't understand why we didn't have automatic stop on all Thunderbirds the instant something started happening," Daniel was saying.

  "We should have, but nobody decided who was going to call. When it went down and the fight started and Blaney started hollering for backup and then for the ambulances, we just lost it," said the surveillance crew's supervisor. "Lucas was on the air pretty quick, six minutes-"

  "Six minutes, Jesus," said Daniel, leaning back in his chair, his eyes closed. He was talking calmly, but his voice was shaky. "If one of the surveillance crews had called the instant it started going down, it would have been rebroadcast and we'd have had cars on the way before Blaney got on the air. That would have eliminated the foul-up by the dispatcher. We'd have been eight minutes or nine minutes faster. If Lucas is right and he was parked up near the entrance to the Interstate, he was downtown having a drink by the time we started looking for his car."

  There was a long silence.

  "What about this Werschel guy?" asked one of the deputy chiefs.

  Daniel opened an eye and looked at an assistant city attorney who sat at the back of the room, a briefcase between his feet.

  "We haven't figured it out yet," the attorney said. "There's going to be some kind of lawsuit, but we were clearly within our rights to go into his yard in pursuit of the killer. Technically, his dogs should have been restrained, no matter how high the fence was. And when he came out and opened fire, Sickles was clearly within his rights to defend himself and his partner. He did right."

  "So we got no problem there," said one of the deputy chiefs.

  "A jury might give the wife a few bucks, but I wouldn't worry about it," the attorney said.

  "Our problem," Daniel said in his remote voice, "is that this killer is still running around loose, and we look like a bunch of clowns running around killing civilians and each other. To say nothing of beating each other up afterward."

  There was another silence. "Let's get back to work," Daniel said finally. "Lucas? I want to talk to you."

  ***

  "What else you got?" he asked when they were alone.

  "Not a thing. I had... a feeling about the McGowan thing-"

  "Bullshit, Lucas, you set her up and you know it and I know it, and God help me, if we could do it again I'd say go ahead. It should have worked. Motherfucker. Motherfucker." Daniel pounded the top of his desk. "We had him in the palm of our hand. We had the fucker."

  "I blew it," Lucas said moodily. "That gunfight went up and I came across the fence and saw Werschel lying there and I knew he wasn't the maddog because the maddog was all dressed in black. And Sally was down and still pumping some blood and Sickles was there to help her, and the other guys, and I should have kept going. I should have gone over the back fence after the maddog and left Sally to the other guys. I thought that. I had this impulse to keep going, but Sally was pumping blood and nobody else was moving..."

  "You did all right," Daniel said, stopping the litany. "Hey, a cop got blown up right in front of you. It's only human to stop."

  "I fucked up," Lucas said. "And now I don't have a thing to go on."

  "Nails," Daniel said.

  "What?"

  "I can hear the media getting out the nails. We're going to be crucified."

  "It's pretty hard to give a shit anymore," Lucas said.

  "Wait for a couple days. You'll start giving a shit." He hesitated. "You say Channel Eight got some film of you and Cochrane?"

  "Yeah. God damn, I'm sorry about that. He's a rookie. I just lost it."

  "From what I hear, it's going to be pretty hard to take back what you said. Most of the cops out there think you're right. And Sally had some years in. If Cochrane had just taken it easy, he'd have been right down that alley before the maddog knew you were coming. You'd have squeezed him between you and nobody would ever have gone into the yard with those fuckin' dogs."

  "Doesn't make it better to know how close we came," Lucas said.

  "Get some sleep and get back here in the afternoon," Daniel said. "This thing should start shaking out by then. We'll know what to expect from the media. And we can start figuring out what to do next."

  "I can't tell you what to do," Lucas said. "I'm running on empty."

  CHAPTER

  23

  They didn't come for him.

  Somewhere, in the back of his head, he couldn't believe it, that they didn't come for him.

  He staggered through the connecting door from the garage into his apartment, took a step into the front room, realized that he was tracking sticky yellow clay onto the carpet, and stopped. He stood for a minute, breathing, reorganizing, then carefully stepped back onto the kitchen's tile floor and stripped. He took off everything, including his underwear, and left it in a pile on the floor.

  His leg was bleeding and he sat on the edge of the bathtub and looked at it. The bites were not too deep, but they were ragged. In other circumstances, he would go to an emergency room and get stitches. He couldn't now. He washed the wounds carefully, with soap and hot water, ignoring the pain. When he had cleaned them as well as he could, he pulled the shower curtain around the tub and did the rest of his body. He washed carefully, his hands, his hair, his face. He paid special attention to his fingernails, where some of the clay might have lodged.

  Halfway through the shower, he broke down and began to gag. He leaned against the wall, choking with adrenaline and fear. But he couldn't let himself go. He didn't have the luxury of it. Nor did he have the luxury of contemplating his situation. He must act.

  The maddog fought to control himself. He finished washing, dried with a rough towel, and bandaged the leg wounds with gauze and adhesive tape. Then he went into the bedroom, dressed in clean clothes, and returned to the kitchen.

  All of the clothing he'd worn that night was commonly available: Levi's, an ordinary turtleneck shirt, a black ski jacket purchased from an outdoor store. Jockey underwear. An unmarked synthetic watch cap. Running shoes. He emptied the pockets of the jacket. The Kotex pad, the gloves, the tape, the sock and potato, the pack of rubbers, all went into a pile on the floor. He'd lost the pry bar when he was running, but it should be clean; the cops wouldn't get anything from it. He carried the pile of clothing and shoes to the laundry room and dumped it in the washing machine.

  With the clothes washing, he got a small vacuum cleaner, went out to the garage, and cleaned the car. Some of the clay was still damp and stuck tenaciously to the carpet. He went back in the house, got a bottle of dishwashing liquid and a pan, went back out, and carefully shampooed each area that showed a sign of the clay. If the cops sent the car to a crime laboratory, they might still find some particles of the stuff. He would have to think about it. And he would, for sure, vacuum it again after the damp carpet had dried.

  When he was finished with the car, the maddog went back inside and checked the washing machine-the wash cycle was done-and transferred the clothing and shoes to the dryer. Then he found the box of surgeon's gloves he used in his attacks and pulled on a pair. From under the kitchen sink he got a roll of black plastic garbage bags, opened one, took the dust bag out of the vacuum, and threw it inside. Next he threw in the equipment he'd taken from his clothing, along with the box of remaining Kotex pads that he'd kept in a back closet.

  Anything else? The potatoes. But that was ridiculous. Everyone had potatoes in the house. On the other hand, maybe there was some kind of genetic examination that could show they came from the same place. The potatoes went in the garbage bag.

  The clothes were still in the dryer, and the maddog went back to the bedroom and pulled out the file of newspaper clippings. SERIAL KILLER STALKS TWIN CITIES WOMEN said the first. He slipped it out and read through it quickly, one last time, as he carried the file to the bathroom. Removing the clips one by one, he tore them into confetti and flushed them down the toilet.

  The clothes, when they were dry, went in another bag. By eleven o'clock he had finished collecting all of his equipment and
the clothing he'd worn to McGowan's. He phoned a car-rental agency at the airport and was told that it would be open for another hour. He reserved a car on his Visa card, called for a cab, rode out to the airport, signed for a car, and brought it back. It would be best, he thought, to keep his car off the streets for a while. There had been so much commotion back at McGowan's, the gunfire, the whole neighborhood must have waked up. If somebody had noticed his car leaving... And the cops just might be desperate enough to stop any Thunderbird they found on the highway, taking names and running checks.

  Back at the apartment, he loaded the garbage bags of clothing and equipment into the rental car. A few minutes after midnight he drove onto Interstate 94, driving east, through St. Paul and into Wisconsin. He stopped at each rest area between St. Paul and Eau Claire, disposing of different pieces of equipment and clothing in separate trashcans.

  He'd paid a hundred and sixty dollars for the ski jacket and hated to see it go. But it must go. It could have microscopic particles of the yellow clay inextricably impressed in the fabric. He couldn't throw it in a trashcan. It was too expensive. Somebody might wonder why it had been discarded, and publicity about the attempt on McGowan by a black-clad maddog would be intense. He finally left the jacket hanging on a hook in a rest room at an all-night truck stop, as though it had been forgotten. With any luck, it would wind up in Boise.

  He had the same problem with the shoes. They were new Reeboks, a fashionable matte black. He liked them. He pitched them separately out the car window into the roadside ditch, a mile or so apart. He would have to buy a new pair, to replace his aging Nike Airs. He'd better stick with the Airs, he thought, just in case the cops found prints in that muddy ditch and matched them to Reeboks.

  At Eau Claire the maddog checked into an out-of-the-way motel and paid with his Visa card. The receipt had no time stamp. Should the police someday come after him, the sleepy clerk almost certainly wouldn't remember him, much less what time he had arrived. And he would have a receipt to prove that he was in Eau Claire the night of the McGowan attack.

  In his room, he stripped, showered again, and put a new dressing on the dog bites. By three in the morning it was all done and he was in bed, the lights out, the blankets pulled up under his chin.

  Time to think. He lay awake in the dark and mentally retraced his steps from the car to McGowan's house. Down the dark side streets. The car starting. Where was he? The maddog had not yet turned into the alley. Then the second car starting.

  They'd had McGowan's house under surveillance, he realized. They had ambushed him, and the ambush should have worked. Davenport? Almost certainly. He had been manipulated into an attack, probably with the woman's cooperation.

  The maddog knew that he might someday be caught. He had no illusions about that. But he had supposed that if he were caught, it would be through a combination of uncontrollable and unforeseeable circumstances. He had imagined, in waking nightmares, the struggle with a woman, perhaps like the struggle with Carla Ruiz. And the intervention of another man, or maybe even a crowd; a lynch mob. Somehow, in these visions, the mob seemed to pursue him through a department store, with women's clothing racks flying helter-skelter and shoppers screaming and glass cases breaking. It was ludicrous, but felt real, the endless aisles of clothing through which he fled, with the crowd only a rack or two behind and closing on the flanks.

  He had not imagined being manipulated, being tricked, being suckered. He had not imagined losing the game through inferior play.

  But he nearly had.

  In the back of his head he still couldn't believe that they hadn't come for him. That they didn't now know who he was.

  He reviewed in his mind the destruction of the evidence at his apartment. He had done a good job, he concluded, but was there a telling trace of mud somewhere? Was it possible that somebody had seen his car license?

  The videotape. Damn. He had forgotten the videotape with the news broadcasts on it. But wait: he had never known when the news broadcasts would carry stories about the maddog, so he'd carefully taped whole broadcasts. Some carried nothing at all about the maddog... not that there had been many of those these last few weeks. So the tape should be okay. It wasn't as specific to the maddog as individual newspaper clips.

  He felt a twinge of regret about the destruction of the clips. Maybe he could have kept them, maybe he should have carried them out to the car, and in Eau Claire tomorrow he could have rented a safe-deposit box. Too late. And probably foolish. When he was done with the women, when he was leaving the Twin Cities-maybe it was time-he could get copies from the library.

  With the evening's events rattling through his mind like a pachinko ball, the maddog pulled the blankets a little higher, his calf now burning like fire, and waited for dawn.

  CHAPTER

  24

  Before he went home, Lucas returned to McGowan's. There were a half-dozen squad cars, three city cars, and a technician's van at the Werschel house. Two more squads were parked in the street at McGowan's. A Channel Eight truck with a microwave remote dish mounted on top had backed into her yard and a half-dozen black cables snaked out of the back of the truck to the house and disappeared inside.

  A patrol lieutenant saw Lucas coming down the sidewalk and got out of his car.

  "Lucas. Thought you'd gone home," the lieutenant said.

  "On my way. How's it look?"

  "We're covering everything. We got some footprints out of that ditch, looks like he fell right in it. Could have hurt himself."

  "Any blood?"

  "No. But we put out a general alert to the hospitals with the description on the fliers and added some stuff about the clay. They should have an eye out for him."

  "Good. Have you found anybody who saw him after he got out of the ditch? Further north?"

  "Nobody so far. We're going to knock on doors six or seven blocks up-"

  "Concentrate on the street that leads out to the expressway. I'd bet my left nut that's where he parked."

  The lieutenant nodded. "We've already done that. Started while it was still dark, getting people out of bed. Nothing."

  "How about the footprints? Anything clear?"

  "Yeah. They're pretty good. He was wearing-"

  "Nike Airs," Lucas interjected.

  "No," the lieutenant said, his forehead wrinkling. "They were Reeboks. When we called in, we told the tech we had some prints and he brought along a reference book. They're making molds, so they can look at them back at the lab, but there's no doubt. They were brand-new Reeboks. No sign of wear on the soles."

  Lucas scratched his head. "Reeboks?"

  ***

  Annie McGowan was sparkling. Seven o'clock in the morning and she looked as though she'd been up for hours.

  "Lucas," she called when she caught sight of him by the door. "Come on in."

  "Big show tonight?"

  "Noon, afternoon, and night is more like it. Right now we're setting up for a remote for the Good-Morning Show." She glanced at her watch. "Fifteen minutes."

  A producer came out of the living room, saw Lucas, and hurried over. "Lieutenant, what's the chance of getting a few minutes of tape with you?"

  "On what?"

  "On the whole setup. How it worked, what went wrong."

  Lucas shrugged. "We fucked up. You want to put that on the air?"

  "With this case, if you want to say it, I think we could get it on," the producer said.

  "You going to use your tape of the fight?"

  The producer's eyes narrowed. "It's an incredible piece of action," he said.

  "I won't comment if you're going to use it," Lucas said. "Hold it back and I'll talk."

  "I can't promise you that," the producer said. "But I can talk to the news director about it."

  "Okay," Lucas said wearily. "I'll do a couple of minutes. But I want to know what questions are coming and I don't want any tricky stuff."

  "Great."

  "And you'll see about holding the fight tape?"


  "Yeah, sure."

  ***

  The taping took almost an hour, with a break for McGowan's remote. When he got home, Lucas unplugged the telephones and fell facedown on the bed, not bothering to undress. He woke to a pounding noise, sat up, looked at the clock. It was a little before one in the afternoon.

  The pounding stopped and he put his feet on the floor, rubbed the back of his neck, and stood up. A sharp rapping sound came from the bedroom window and he frowned and pulled back the Venetian blind. Jennifer Carey, out on the lawn.