Night Prey

by John Sandford

  haven't, uh..."

  "Greave the fuckup?"

  "Haven't heard anything like that," Lucas lied.

  "Don't bullshit me, Davenport." Greave studied him for a minute, then said, "That's what they call me. Greave-the-fuckup, one word. The only goddamned reason I'm in homicide is that my wife is the mayor's niece.

  She got tired of me being Officer Friendly. Not enough drama.

  Didn't give her enough to gossip about."

  "Well..."

  "So now I'm doing something I can't fuckin' do and I'm stuck between my old lady and the other guys on the job."

  "What do you want from me?"

  "Advice."

  Lucas spread his hands and shrugged. "If you liked being an Officer Friendly..."

  Greave waved him off. "Not that kind of advice. I can't go back to Officer Friendly, my old lady'd nag my ears off. She doesn't like me being a cop in the first place. Homicide just makes it a little okay.

  And she makes me wear these fuckin' Italian fruit suits and only lets me shave on Wednesdays and Saturdays."

  "Sounds like you gotta make a decision about her," Lucas said.

  love her," Greave said.

  Lucas grinned. "Then you've got a problem."

  "Yeah." Greave rubbed the stubble on his chin. "Anyway, the guys in homicide don't do nothing but fuck with me. They figure I'm not pulling my load, and they're right. Whenever there's a really horseshit case, I get it. I got one right now. Everybody in homicide is laughing about it.

  That's what I need your advice on."

  "What happened?"

  "We don't know," Greave said. "We've got it pegged as a homicide and we know who did it, but we can't figure out how."

  "Never heard of anything like that," Lucas admitted.

  "Sure you have," Greave said. "All the time."

  "What?" Lucas was puzzled.

  "It's a goddamned locked-room mystery, like one of them old-lady English things. It's driving me crazy."

  Connell pushed through the door. She was wearing a navy suit with matching low heels, a white blouse with wine-colored tie, and carried a purse the size of a buffalo. She looked at Greave, then Lucas, and said, "Ready."

  "Bob Greave, Meagan Connell," Lucas said.

  "Yeah, we sorta met," Greave said. "A few weeks ago."

  A little tension there. Lucas scooped Connell's file from his desk, handed it to Greave. "Meagan and I are going out to the bookstores.

  Read the file. We'll talk tomorrow morning."

  "What time?"

  "Not too early," Lucas said. "How about here, at eleven o'clock?"

  "What about my case?" Greave asked.

  "We'll talk tomorrow," Lucas said.

  As Lucas and Connell walked out of the building, Connell said, "Greave's a jerk. He's got the Hollywood stubble and the Miami Vice suits, but he couldn't find his shoes in a goddamn clothes closet."

  Lucas shook his head, irritated. "Cut him a little slack. You don't known him that well."

  "Some people are an open book," Connell snorted. "He's a fuckin' comic."

  Connell continued to irritate him: their styles were different.

  Lucas liked to drift into conversation, to schmooze a little, to remember common friends. Connell was an interrogator: just the facts, sir.

  Not that it made much difference. Nobody in the half-dozen downtown bookstores knew Wannemaker. They picked up a taste of her at the suburban Smart Book. "She used to come to readings," the store owner said. He nibbled at his lip as he peered at the photograph. "She didn't buy much, but we'd have these wine-and-cheese things for authors coming through town, and she'd show up maybe half the time. Maybe more than that."

  "Did you have a reading last Friday?"

  "No, but there were some."

  "Where?"

  "Hell, I don't know." He threw up his hands. "Goddamn authors are like cockroaches. There're hundreds of them. There's always readings somewhere. Especially at the end of the week."

  "How'd I find out where?"

  "Call the Star-Trib. There'd be somebody who could tell you."

  Lucas called from a corner phone, another number from memory. "I wondered if you'd call." The woman's voice was hushed. "Are you bringing up your net?"

  "I'm doing that now. There're lots of holes."

  "I'm in."

  "Thanks, I appreciate it. How about the readings?"

  "There was poetry at the Startled Crane, something called Prairie Woman at The SaintþI don't know how I missed that oneþGynostic at Wild Lily Press, and the Pillar of Manhood at Crosby's. The Pillar of Manhood was a male-only night. If you'd called last week, I probably could have gotten you in."

  "Too late," Lucas said. "My drum's broke."

  "Darn. You had a nice drum, too."

  "Yeah, well, thanks, Shirlene." To Connell: "We can scratch Crosby's off the list."

  The owner of the Startled Crane grinned at Lucas and said, "Cheese it, the heat... How you been, Lucas?" They shook hands, and the store owner nodded at Connell, who stared at him like a snake at a bird.

  "Not bad, Ned," Lucas said. "How's the old lady?"

  Ned's eyebrows went up. "Pregnant again. You just wave it at her, and she's knocked up."

  "Everybody's pregnant. I gotta friend, I just heard his wife's pregnant. How many is that for you? Six?"

  "Seven... what's happening?"

  Connell, who had been listening impatiently to the chitchat, thrust the photos at him. "Was this woman here Friday night?"

  Lucas, softer, said, "We're trying to track down the last days of a woman who was killed last week. We thought she might've been at your poetry reading."

  Ned shuffled through the photos. "Yeah, I know her. Harriet something, right? I don't think she was here. There were about twenty people, but I don't think she was with them."

  "But you see her around?"

  "Yeah. She's a semiregular. I saw the TV stuff on Nooner. I thought that might be her."

  "Ask around, will you?"

  "Sure."

  "What's Nooner?" Connell asked.

  "TV3's new noon news," Ned said. "But I didn't see her Friday. I wouldn't be surprised if she was somewhere else, though."

  "Thanks, Ned."

  "Sure. And stop in. I've been fleshing out the poetry section."

  Back on the street, Connell said, "You've got a lot of bookstore friends?"

  "A few," Lucas said. "Ned used to deal a little grass. I leaned on him and he quit."

  "Huh," she said, thinking it over. Then, "Why'd he tell you about poetry?"

  read poetry," Lucas said.

  "Bullshit."

  Lucas shrugged and started toward the car.

  "Say a poem."

  "Fuck you, Connell," Lucas said.

  "No, c'mon," she said, catching him, facing him. "Say a poem."

  Lucas thought for a second then said, "The heart asks pleasure first/And then excuse from pain/and then those little anodynes/that deaden suffering. And then to go to sleep/and then if it should be/the will of its inquisitor/the privilege to die."

  Connell, already pale, seemed to go a shade paler, and Lucas, remembering, thought, Oh, shit.

  "Who wrote that?"

  "Emily Dickinson."

  "Roux told you I have cancer?"

  "Yes, but I wasn't thinking about that...."

  Connell, studying him, suddenly showed a tiny smile. "I was kind of hoping you were. I was thinking, Jesus Christ, what a shot in the mouth.

  " "Well... ?"

  She stepped toward the car. "Where's next?"

  "The Wild Lily Press over on the West Bank."

  She shook her head. "I doubt it. That's a feminist store. He'd be pretty noticeable."

  "Then The Saint, over in St. Paul."

  On the way to St. Paul, Connell said, "I'm in a hurry on this, Davenport. I'm gonna die in three or four months, six at the outside.

  Right now I'm in remission, and I don't feel too bad. I'm out of chemo for the time bei
ng, I'm getting my strength back. But it won't last.

  A couple weeks, three, and it'll come creeping up on me again. I want to get him before I go."

  "We can try."

  "We gotta do better than that," she said. "I owe some people."

  "All right."

  don't mean to scare you," she said.

  "You're doing it."

  The owner at The Saint recognized Wannemaker immediately. "Yes, she was here," he said. His voice was cool, soft. He looked at Lucas over the top of his gold-rimmed John Lennon specs. "Killed? My God, she wasn't the kind to get killed."

  "What kind was she?" Lucas asked.

  "Well, you know." He gestured. "Meek. A wallflower. She did ask a question when Margaret finished the reading, but I think it was because nobody was asking questions and she was embarrassed. That kind of person."

  "Did she leave with anyone?"

  "Nope. She left alone. I remember, cause it was abrupt. Most readings, she'd hang around, she'd be the last to leave, like she had nothing else to do. But I remember, she headed out maybe fifteen minutes after we broke things up. There were still quite a few people in the store.

  I thought maybe she didn't like Margaret."

  "Was she in a hurry?"

  The store owner scratched his head, looked out his window at the street. "Yeah. Now that you mention it, she did sort of seem like she was going somewhere."

  Lucas looked at Connell, who was showing just the faintest color.

  The store owner, frowning, said, "You know, when I think about it, the question she asked was made up, like maybe she was dragging things out.

  I was sort of rolling my eyes, mentally, anyway. Then she leaves in a hurry...."

  "Like something happened while she was in the store?" Connell prompted.

  hate to say it, but yes."

  "That's interesting," Lucas said. "We'll need a list of everybody you know was here."

  The store owner looked away, embarrassed. "Hmm. I think, uh, a lot of my clients would see that as an invasion of privacy," he said.

  "Would you like to see the pictures of Wannemaker?" Lucas asked gently.

  "The guy ripped her stomach open and all her intestines came out.

  And we think he might be hanging around bookstores."

  The store owner looked at him for a moment, then nodded. "I'll get a list going," he said.

  Lucas used the store phone to call Anderson, and told him about the identification. "She left here at nine o'clock."

  "We got her car fifteen minutes ago," Anderson said. "It was in the impound lot, towed out of downtown St. Paul. Hang on a minute...."

  Anderson spoke to somebody else, then came back. "It was towed off a hill on Sixth. I'm told that's next to Dayton's."

  "So she must have been headed somewhere."

  "Unless she already was somewhere, and walked back to the store."

  don't think so. That'd be eight or ten blocks. There's a lot of parking around here. She would have driven."

  "Is there anything around Dayton's at nine? Was the store open?"

  "There's a bar up thereþHarp's. On the corner. Connell and I'll stop in."

  "Okay. St. Paul'll process the car," Anderson said. "I'll pass on what you found out at this bookstore. You're getting a list of names?"

  "Yeah. But it might not be much."

  "Get me the names and I'll run em."

  Lucas hung up and turned around. Connell was marching toward him from the back of the store, where the owner had gone to talk with one of his clerks about people at the reading.

  "One of the men here was a cop," she said fiercely. "A St. Paul patrolman named Carl Erdrich."

  "Damnit," Lucas said. He picked up the phone and called Anderson back, gave him the name.

  "What?" Connell wanted to know when he got off the phone.

  "We'll check the bar," Lucas said. "There'll have to be some negotiations before we can get a mug of Erdrich."

  Connell spun around and planted herself in front of him. "What the fuck is this?" she asked.

  "It's called the Usual Bullshit," he said. "And calm down. We're talking about an hour or two, not forever."

  But she was angry, heels pounding as they walked back to Lucas's Porsche. "Why do you drive this piece of crap? You ought to buy something decent," she snapped.

  Lucas said, "Shut the fuck up."

  "What?" She goggled at him.

  said shut the fuck up. You don't shut the fuck up, you can take the bus back to Minneapolis."

  Connell, still angry, trailed him into Harp's and muttered, "Oh, Lord" when she saw the bartender. The bartender was a dark-haired pixieish woman with large black eyes, two much makeup, and a bee-stung lower lip.

  She wore a slippery low-cut silk pullover without a bra, and a black string tie with a turquoise clasp at her throat. "Cops?" she asked, but she was smiling.

  "Yeah." Lucas nodded, grinned, and tried to meet her eyes. "We need to talk to somebody who was here Friday night."

  was," she said, dropping her elbows on the bar and leaning toward Lucas, glancing at Connell. The bartender smelled lightly of cinnamon, like a dream, she had a soft freckled cleavage. "What do you need?"

  Lucas rolled out the photo of Wannemaker. "Was she here?"

  The bartender watched his eyes, and, satisfied with her effect, picked up the photo and studied it. "She look like this?"

  "Pretty much," Lucas said, steadfastly holding her eyes.

  "What'd she do?" the bartender asked.

  "Was she here?" Lucas asked again.

  "Meanie," she said. "You don't want to tell me." The bartender frowned, pushed out her lower lip, studied the picture, and slowly shook her head. "No, I don't think she was. In fact, I'm sure she wasn't, if she dressed like this. Our crowd's into black. Black shirts, black pants, black dresses, black hats, black combat boots.

  I'd have noticed her."

  "Big crowd?"

  "In St. Paul?" She picked up her bar rag and scrubbed at a spot on the bar.

  "Okay...."

  As they started out, the bartender called after them, "What'd she do?"

  "It was done to her," Connell said, speaking for the first time.

  She made it sound like a punishment.

  "Yeah?"

  "She was killed."

  The bartender recoiled. "Like, murdered? How?"

  "Let's go," said Lucas, touching Connell's coat sleeve.

  "Stabbed," said Connell.

  "Let's go," Lucas repeated.

  " Do not wait for the last judgment. It takes place every day,' " the bartender said solemnly, in a quotation voice.

  Now Lucas stopped. "Who was that?" he asked.

  "Some dead French dude," the bartender said.

  "That was disgusting," Connell fumed.

  "What?"

  "The way she was throwing it at you."

  "What?"

  "You knew."

  Lucas looked back at the bar, then at Connell, a look of utter astonishment on his face. "You think she was coming on to me?"

  "Kiss my ass, Davenport," she said, and stalked off toward the car.

  Lucas called Anderson again. "Roux's still talking to St. Paul," Anderson said. "She wants you back here, ASAP."

  "What for?"

  don't know. But she wants you back."

  Connell complained most of the way back. They had something, she said.

  They should stay with it. Lucas, tired of it, offered to drop her at the St. Paul police headquarters. She declined. Roux was up to something, she said. When they walked into the chief's outer office, the bony secretary flipped a thumb toward the chief's door and they went through.

  Roux was smoking furiously. She glanced at Connell, then nodded.

  guess you better stay and hear this."

  "What's going on?" Lucas asked.