Night Prey

by John Sandford

  "Pretty bad in there?" Sloan asked. He threw his hat in the back and downshifted as they rolled up to a stop sign at Highway 280.

  "They executed him. Shot him in the teeth," Lucas said. "Think it might be the Seeds."

  "Miserable assholes," Sloan said without too much heat. He accelerated onto 280.

  "What happened to what's-her-name?" Lucas asked. "Wannabe."

  "Wannemaker. She dropped out of sight three days ago. Her friends say she was going out to some bookstore on Friday night, they don't know which one, and she didn't show up to get her hair done Saturday. We put out a missing persons note, and that's the last we know until this morning, when Hudson called. We shot a Polaroid over there, it wasn't too good, but they think it's her."

  "Shot?"

  "Stabbed. The basic technique is a ripþa stick in the lower belly, then an upward pull. Lots of power. That's why I'm looking into it."

  "Does this have something to do with what's-her-name, the chick from the state?"

  "Meagan Connell," Sloan said. "Yeah."

  hear she's trouble."

  "Yeah. She could use a personality transplant," Sloan said. He blew the doors off a Lexus SC, allowing himself a small smile. The guy in the Lexus wore shades and driving gloves. "But when you actually read her files, the stuff she's put togetherþshe's got something, Lucas.

  But Jesus, I hope this isn't one of his. It sounds like it, but it's too soon. If it's his, he's speeding up."

  "Most of them do," Lucas said. "They get addicted to it."

  Sloan paused at a stoplight, then ran the red and roared up the ramp onto Highway 36. Shifting up, he pushed the Porsche to seventy-five and kept it there, cutting through traffic like a shark. "This guy was real regular," he said. "I mean, if he exists. He did one killing every year or so. Now we're talking about four months. He did the last one just about the time you were getting' shot. Picked her up in Duluth, dumped the body up at the Carlos Avery game reserve."

  "Any leads?" Lucas touched the pink scar on his throat.

  "Damn few. Meagan's got a file."

  They took twenty minutes getting to Wisconsin, out the web of interstates through the countryside east of St. Paul, the landscape green and heavy after a wet spring. "It's better out here in the county," Sloan said. "Christ, the media's gonna get crazy with this cop killed."

  "Lotta shit coming down," Lucas said. "At least the cop's not ours."

  "Four killed in five days," Sloan said. "Wannemaker will make five in a week. Actually, we might have six. We're looking into an old lady who croaked in her bed. A couple of the guys think she might've been helped along. They're calling it natural, for now."

  "You cleared the domestic on Dupont," Lucas said.

  "Yeah, with the hammer and chisel."

  "Hurts to think about it." Lucas grinned.

  "Got it right between the eyes," Sloan said, impressed. He'd never had a hammer-and-chisel job before, and novelty wasn't that common in murder. Most of it was a half-drunk guy scratching his ass and saying, Jesus, she got me really pissed, you know? Sloan went on: "She waited until he was asleep, and whack. Actually, whack, whack, whack. The chisel went all the way through to the mattress. She pulled it out, put it in the dishwasher, turned the dishwasher on, and called 911.

  Makes me think twice about going asleep at night. You catch your old lady staring at you..."

  "Any defense? Long-term abuse?"

  "Not so far. So far, she says it was hot inside, and she got tired of him laying there snoring and farting. You know Donovan up in the prosecutor's office?"

  "Yeah."

  "Says he'd of taken a plea to second if it'd been only one whack," Sloan said. "With whack-whack-whack, he's gotta go for first degree."

  A truck moved in front of them suddenly, and Sloan swore, braked, swung behind it to the right and passed.

  "The Louis Capp thing," Lucas said.

  "We got him," Sloan said with satisfaction. "Two witnesses, one of them knew him. Shot the guy three times, got a hundred and fifty bucks."

  chased Louis for ten years, and I never touched him," Lucas said.

  There was a note of regret in his voice, and Sloan glanced at him, grinned. "He got any defense?"

  "Two-dude," Sloan said. Some other dude done ir. "Ain't gonna work this time."

  "He was always a dumb sonofabitch," Lucas said, remembering Louis Capp.

  Huge guy, arms like logs, with a big gut. Wore his pants down under his gut, so the crotch of his pants dropped almost to his knees. "The thing is, what he did was so simple, you had to be there to catch him.

  Sneak up behind a guy, hit him on the head, take his wallet. The guy must have fucked up to two hundred people in his career."

  Sloan said, "He's as mean as he was dumb."

  "At least," Lucas agreed. "So that leaves what The Hmong gangbanger and the felljumped-pushed waitress."

  don't think we'll get the Hmong, the waitress had skin under her fingernails," Sloan said.

  "Ah." Lucas nodded. He liked it. Skin was always good.

  Lucas had left the department two years earlier, under some pressure, after a fight with a pimp. He'd gone full-time with his own company, originally set up to design games. The computer kids he worked with had pushed him in a new direction, writing simulations for police dispatch computers. He'd been making a fortune when the new Minneapolis chief asked him to come back.

  He couldn't return under civil service, he'd taken political appointment as deputy chief. He'd work intelligence, as he had before, with two main objectives: put away the most dangerous and the most active criminals, and cover the department on the odd crimes likely to attract media attention.

  "Try to keep us from getting ambushed by the fruitcakes out there," the chief said. Lucas played hard to get for a little while, but he was bored with business, and he finally hired a full-time administrator to run the company, and took the chief's offer.

  He'd been back on the street for a month, trying to rebuild his network, but it had been harder than he'd expected. Things had changed in just two years. Changed a lot.

  "I'm surprised Louis was carrying a gun," Lucas said. "He usually worked with a sap, or a pipe."

  "Everybody's got guns now," Sloan said. "Everybody. And they don't give a shit about using them."

  The St. Croix was a steel-blue strip beneath the Hudson bridge.

  Boats, both sail and power, littered the river's surface like pieces of white confetti.

  "You oughta buy a marina," Sloan said. "I could run the gas dock.

  I mean, don't it look fuckin' wonderful?"

  "Are you getting off here, or are we going to Chicago?"

  Sloan quit rubbernecking and hit the brakes, cut off a station wagon, slipped down the first exit on the Wisconsin side, and headed north into Hudson. Just ahead, a half-dozen emergency vehicles gathered around a boat ramp, and uniformed Hudson patrolmen directed traffic away from the ramp. Two cops were standing by a dumpster, their thumbs hooked in their gun belts. To one side, a broad-backed blond woman in a dark suit and sunglasses was facing a third cop. They appeared to be arguing.

  Sloan said, "Ah, shit," and as they came up to the scene, ran his window down and shouted, "Minneapolis police" at the cop directing traffic. The cop waved him into the parking area.

  "What?" Lucas asked. The blonde was waving her arms.

  "Trouble," Sloan said. He popped the door. "That's Connell."

  A bony deputy sheriff with a dark, weathered face had been talking to a city cop at the dumpster, and when the Porsche pulled into the lot, the deputy grinned briefly, called something out to the cop who was arguing with the blond woman, and started over.

  "Helstrom," said Lucas, digging for the name. "D. T. Helstrom.

  Remember that professor that Carlo Druze killed?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Helstrom found him," Lucas said. "He's a good guy."

  They got out of the car as Helstrom came up to Lucas and stuck out his hand. "Davenport. Heard
you were back. Deputy chief, huh?

  Congratulations."

  "D. T. How are you?" Lucas said. "Haven't seen you since you dug up the professor."

  "Yeah, well, this is sorta worse," Helstrom said, looking back at the dumpster. He rubbed his nose.

  The blond woman called past the cop, "Hey. Sloan."

  Sloan muttered something under his breath, and then, louder, "Hey, Meagan."

  "This lady working with you?" Helstrom asked Sloan, jerking a thumb at the blonde.

  Sloan nodded, said, "More or less," and Lucas tipped his head toward his friend. "This is Sloan," he said to Helstrom. "Minneapolis homicide."

  "Sloan," the woman called. "Hey, Sloan. C'mere."

  "Your friend's a pain in the ass," Helstrom said to Sloan.

  "You'd be a hundred percent right, except she's not my friend," Sloan said, and started toward her. "I'll be right back."

  They were standing on a blacktopped boat ramp, with striped spaces for car and trailer parking, a lockbox for fees, and a dumpster for garbage.

  "What you got?" Lucas asked Helstrom as they started toward the dumpster.

  "A freak... He did the killing on your side of the bridge, I think.

  There's no blood over here, except what's on her. She'd stopped bleeding before she went in the dumpster, no sign of anything on the ground.

  And there must've been a lot of blood... Jesus, look at that."

  Up on the westbound span of the bridge, a van with yellow flashing roof lights had stopped next to the rail, and a man with a television camera was shooting down at them.

  "That legal?" Lucas asked.

  "Damned if I know," Helstrom said.

  Sloan and the woman came up. The woman was young, large, in her late twenties or early thirties. Despite her anger, her face was as pale as a dinner candle, her blond hair was cropped so short that Lucas could see the white of her scalp. "I don't like the way I'm being treated," the woman said.

  "You've got no jurisdiction here. You can either shut up or take yourself back across the bridge," Helstrom snapped. "I've had about enough of you."

  Lucas looked at her curiously. "You're Meagan O'Connell?"

  "Connell. No O. I'm an investigator with the BCA. Who are you?"

  "Lucas Davenport."

  "Huh," she grunted. "I've heard about you."

  "Yeah?"

  "Yeah. Some kind of macho asshole."

  Lucas half-laughed, not sure she was serious, looked at Sloan, who shrugged. She was. Connell looked at Helstrom, who had allowed himself a small grin when Connell went after Lucas. "So can I see her, or what?"

  "If you're working with Minneapolis homicide..." He looked at Sloan, and Sloan nodded. "Be my guest. Just don't touch anything."

  "Christ," she muttered, and stalked down to the dumpster. The dumpster came to her collarbone, and she had to stand on her tiptoes to look in.

  She stood for a moment, looking down, then walked away, down toward the river, and began vomiting.

  "Be my fuckin' guest," Helstrom muttered.

  "What'd she do?" Lucas asked.

  "Came over like her ass was on fire and started screaming at everyone.

  Like we forgot to scrape the horseshit off our shoes," Helstrom said.

  Sloan, concerned, started after Connell, then stopped, scratched his head, walked down to the dumpster, and looked inside. "Whoa." He turned away, and said, "Goddamnit," and then to Lucas, "Hold your breath."

  Lucas was breathing through his mouth when he looked in. The body was nude, and had been in a green garbage bag tied at the top. The bag had split open on impact when it hit the bottom of the dumpster, or someone had split it open.

  The woman had been disemboweled, her intestines boiling out like an obscene corn smut. And Sloan's earlier description was right: she hadn't been stabbed, she'd been opened like a sardine can, a long slit running from her pelvic area to her sternum. He thought at first that maggots were already working on her, but then realized that the sprinkles of white on the body were grains of rice, apparently somebody's garbage.

  The woman's head was in profile against the green garbage sack.

  The garbage sack had a red plastic tie, and it snuggled just above the woman's ear like a bow on a Christmas package. Flies crawled all over her, like tiny black MiGs... Above her breasts, two inches above the top of the slash, were two smaller cuts in what might be letters.

  Lucas looked at them for five seconds, then backed away, and waited until he was a half-dozen strides from the dumpster before he started breathing through his nose again.

  "The guy who dumped her must be fairly strong," Lucas said to Helstrom.

  "He had to either throw her in there or carry her up pretty high, without spilling guts all over the place."

  Connell, white-faced, tottered back up the ramp.

  "What'd you just say?"

  Lucas repeated it, and Helstrom nodded. "Yeah. And from the description we got, she wasn't a complete lightweight. She must've run around 135.

  If that's Wannemaker."

  "It is," Sloan said. Sloan had walked around to the other side of the dumpster, and was peering into it again. From Lucas's perspective, eyes, nose, and ears over the edge of the dumpster, he looked like Kilroy. "And I'll tell you what: I've seen a videotape of the body they found up in Carlos Avery. If the same guy didn't do this one, then they both took cutting' lessons at the same place."

  "Exactly the same?" Lucas asked.

  "Identical," Connell said.

  "Not quite," Sloan said, backing away from the Dumpster. "The Carlos Avery didn't have the squiggles above her... breasts."

  "The squiggles?" Connell asked.

  "Yeah. Take a look."

  She looked in again. After a moment, she said, "They look like a capital S and a capital J."

  "That's what I thought," Lucas said.

  "What does that mean?" Connell demanded.

  "I'm not a mind reader," Lucas said, "Especially with the dead."

  He turned his head to Helstrom. "No way to get anything off the edge of this thing, is there? Off the dumpster?"

  doubt it. It's rained a couple times since Friday, people been throwing stuff in there all weekend... Why?"

  "Better not take a chance." Lucas went back to the Porsche, popped the trunk, took out a small emergency raincoat, a piece of plastic packed in a bag not much bigger than his hand. He stripped the coat out, carried it back to the dumpster, and said, "Hang on to my legs so I don't tip inside, will you, D.T.?"

  "Sure...."

  Lucas draped the raincoat carefully over the edge of the dumpster and boosted himself up until he could lay his stomach over the top. His upper body hung down inside, his face not more than a foot from the dead woman's.

  "She's got, uh..."

  "What?"

  "She's got something in her hand... Can't see it. Like maybe a cigarette."

  "Don't touch."

  "I'm not." He hung closer. "She's got something on her chest. I think it's tobacco... stuck on."

  "Garbage got tossed on her."

  Lucas dropped back onto the blacktop and started breathing again.

  "Some of it's covered with blood. It's like she crumbled a cigarette on herself."

  "What're you thinking?" Helstrom asked.

  "That the guy was smoking when he killed her," Lucas said. "That she snatched it out of his mouth. I mean, she wouldn't have been smoking, not if she was being attacked."

  "Unless it wasn't really an attack," Sloan said. "Maybe it was consensual, they were relaxing afterwards, and he did her."

  "Bullshit," Connell said.

  Lucas nodded at her. "Too much violence," he said. "You wouldn't get that much violence after orgasm. That's sexual excitement you're looking at."

  Helstrom looked from Lucas to Connell to Sloan. Connell seemed oddly satisfied by Lucas's comment. "He was smoking when he did it?"

  "Get them to make the cigarette, if that's what it is. I can see the paper," Lucas told He
lstrom. "Check the lot, see if there's anything that matches."

  "We've picked up everything in the parking lot that might mean anythingþcandy wrappers, cigarettes, bottle tops, all that."

  "Maybe it's marijuana," Connell said hopefully. "That'd be a place to start."

  "Potheads don't do this shit, not when they're smoking," Lucas said.