Night Prey

by John Sandford

  "Does he smoke?" Carrigan asked Dex.

  Dex shrugged, but his mother said, "He smokes. He's all the time walking around with his head up in the sky with that crack shit."

  "We gotta get him," Lucas said again.

  don't know where he hangs out, I just knew him from the neighborhood when I was working dope five years ago," Carrigan said uncertainly.

  could call a guy, Alex Drucker, works dope up here."

  "Get him," Lucas said.

  l Carrigan glanced at his watch and chuckled. "Four-thirty.

  Drucker's been in bed about two hours now. He'll like this."

  As Carrigan went back to his car, one of the crime-scene crew came over and said, "No cigarettes from tonight, just old bits and pieces."

  "Forget it," Lucas said. "We're told she was dumped an hour ago.

  Might check the street from here back to... Nah, fuck it. We know who did it."

  "We'll check," the crime-scene guy said. "Camels...."

  "Unfiltered," Lucas said. He turned to the mother. "We need to send Dex downtown with an officer to make a statement, and maybe get him to describe this guy for an artist. We'll bring him back. Or, if you want, you can ride along."

  "Ride along?"

  "If you want."

  better do that," she said. "He's not in trouble?"

  "He's not in trouble."

  Carrigan came back. "Nobody at Drucker's place. No answer."

  "The guy's known around hereþwhy don't we walk down to the corner and ask?"

  Carrigan looked down to the corner, then back to Lucas and Connell.

  "You two are pretty white to be asking' favors from them."

  Lucas shrugged. "I'm not going to sweat them, I'm just gonna ask.

  Come on."

  They walked down toward the corner, and Connell asked, "Why can't I show him the picture? He could give us a confirmation."

  don't want to contaminate his memory. If we get a sketch out of him, I'd rather have it be what he remembers, not what he saw when you showed him a picture."

  "Oh." She thought about it for a minute, then nodded.

  As they reached the corner, the crowd went quiet, and Carrigan pushed right up to it. "Some white dude just cut open a little girl and dumped her body in the bushes back there," Carrigan said conversationally, without preamble. "A guy named Lawrence Wright saw him. We don't want to hassle Lawrence, we just want a statement: if anybody's seen him, or if he's here?"

  "That girl, black or white?" a woman asked.

  "White," Lucas said.

  "Why you need to talk to Lawrence? Maybe he didn't see nothin'."

  "He saw something," Carrigan said. "He was right next to this white dude."

  "The guy is nuts," Lucas said. "He's like that guy over in Milwaukee, killed all those boys. This has got nothing to do with nothing, he's just killing people."

  A ripple of talk ran through the crowd, and then a woman's voice said, "Lawrence went to Porter's." Somebody else said, "Shush," and the woman's voice said, "Shush, your ass, he's killing little girls, somebody is."

  "White girls... that don't make no difference... still white

  . What'd Lawrence do... ?"

  "We better get going," Carrigan said quietly. "Before somebody runs down to Porter's and tells Lawrence we're coming."

  Lucas and Connell rode with Carrigan. "Porter's is an after-hours place down on Twenty-ninth," Carrigan said. "We oughta get a squad to do some blocking for us."

  "Wouldn't hurt," Lucas said. "The place'd still be open?"

  "Another fifteen minutes or so. He usually closes about five in the summertime."

  They met the squad four minutes later at a Perkins restaurant parking lot. One patrolman was black, the other white, and Lucas talked to them through the car windows, told them who they were looking for.

  "Just hold anybody coming out... You guys know where it is?"

  "Yeah. We'll slide right down the alley. As soon as you see us going in, though, you better get in the front."

  "Let's do it," Carrigan said.

  "How bad might this get?" Connell asked.

  Carrigan glanced at her. "Shouldn't be bad at all. Porter's is an okay place, Porter goes along. But you know..."

  "Yeah. Lucas and I are white."

  "Better let me go first. Don't yell at anybody."

  They hesitated at the corner, just long enough for the squad to cut behind them, go halfway down the block, then duck into the mouth of the alley. Carrigan rolled up to the front of a 1920s-style four-square house with a wide porch. The porch was empty, but when they climbed out of the car, Lucas could hear a Charles Brown tune floating out through an open window.

  Carrigan led the way up the walk, across the porch. When he went through the door, Lucas and Connell paused a moment, making just a little space, then followed him through.

  The living room of the old house had been turned into a bar, the old parlor had a half-dozen chairs in it, three of them filled. Two men and two women sat around a table in the living room to the left.

  Everything stopped when Lucas and Connell walked in. The air was layered with tobacco smoke and the smell of whiskey.

  "Mr. Porter," Carrigan was saying to a bald man behind the bar.

  "What can I do for you gentlemen?" Porter asked, both hands poised on the bar. Porter didn't have a license, but it wasn't usually a problem.

  One of the men at the table moved his chair back an inch, and Lucas looked at him. He stopped moving.

  "One of your patrons saw a suspect in a murderþa white man who killed a white girl and dumped her body up in the park," Carrigan said, his voice formal, polite. "Guy's a maniac, and we need to talk to Lawrence Wright about it. Have you seen Lawrence?"

  really can't recall. The name's not familiar," Porter said, but his eyes drifted deliberately toward the hall. A door had a hand-lettered sign that said Men.

  "Well, we'll get out of your way, then," Carrigan said. "I'll just take a leak, if you don't mind."

  Lucas had moved until his back was to a Grain Belt clock and where he could still block the door. His pistol was clipped to his back belt line, and he put one hand on his hip, as if impatient about waiting for Carrigan. A voice said, "Cops out back," and another voice asked, "What's that mean?"

  Carrigan stepped down the hall, went past the door, then stepped back and pulled it open.

  And smiled. "Hey," he called to Lucas, smiling, surprised. "Guess what?

  Lawrence is right here. Sittin' on the potty."

  A whine came out of the room: "Shut that door, man. I'm doing my business. Please?"

  The voice sounded like something from a bad sitcom. After a moment of silence, somebody in the living room laughed, a single, throaty, feminine laugh, and suddenly the entire bar fell out, the patrons roaring. Even Porter put his forehead down on his bar, laughing.

  Lucas laughed a little, not too much, and relaxed. Lawrence was thin, almost emaciated. At twenty, he'd lost his front teeth, both upper and lower, and he made wet slurping sounds when he spoke: "..

  I don't know, slurp, it was dark. Blue and white, I think, slurp. And he had a beard. Shitkicker wheels on the truck."

  "Real big?"

  "Yeah, real big. Somebody say he had running boards? Slurp. I don't think he had running boards. Maybe he did, but I didn't see any. He was a white guy, but he had a beard. Dark beard."

  "Beard," Connell said.

  "How come you're sure he was a white guy?"

  Lawrence frowned, as if working out a puzzle, then brightened.

  "Because I saw his hands. He was takin' a pinch, man. He was tootin', that's why I looked at him."

  "Coke?"

  "Gotta be," Lawrence said. "Ain't nothing else looks like that, you know, when you're trying to toot while you're walkin' or doin' something else. Slurp. You just get a pinch and you put it up there.

  That's what he was doin'. And I saw his hands."

  "Long hair, short?" Connell asked.

  "C
ouldn't tell."

  "Bumper stickers, license plates, anything?" asked Lucas.

  Lawrence cocked his head, lips pursed. "Nooo, didn't notice anything like that, slurp."

  "Didn't see much, did you?" said Carrigan.

  told you he was tootin'," Lawrence said defensively. "I told you he was white."

  "Big fuckin' deal. That's Minneapolis outside, if you ain't noticed," Carrigan said. "There are approximately two point five million white people waLking around."

  "Ain't my fault," Lawrence said.

  Red-and-white truck, or maybe blue-and-white, maybe with silver running boards, but then again, maybe not. Cokehead. White. A beard.

  "Let's send him downtown and take him through the whole thing," Lucas said to Carrigan. "Get him on tape."

  They went back to the scene, but nothing had changed except that the sun had come up and the world had a pale, frosted look. Crime scene was videotaping the area, and trucks from TV3 and Channel 8 hung down the block.

  "Your pals from TV3," Lucas said, poking Connell with an elbow.

  "Cockroaches," she said.

  "C'mon." He looked back at the truck. A dark-haired woman waved.

  He waved back.

  "They make entertainment out of murder, rape, pornography, pain, disease," Connell said. "There's nothing bad that happens to humans that they can't make a cartoon out of."

  "You didn't hesitate to go to them."

  "Of course not," she said calmly. "They're cockroaches, but they're a fact of life, and they do have their uses." Connell wanted to hear the interview with Lawrence, and to press the medical examiner on the Marcy Lane autopsy. Lucas let her go, looked at his watch. Heather would be leaving home in fifteen minutes, he couldn't make it before she left. He drove back to the Perkins where they'd met the squad, bought a paper, and ordered pancakes and coffee.

  Junky Doog dominated the Strib's front page: two stories, a feature and a harder piece. The hard story began, "A leading suspect in a series of midwestern sex slayings was arrested in Dakota County yesterday...."

  The feature said, "Junky Doog lived under a tree at a Dakota County landfill, and one by one cut off the fingers of his left hand, and the toes...."

  "Good story." A pair of legsþnice legsþstopped by the table. Lucas looked up. A celebrity smiled down at him. He recognized her but couldn't immediately place her. "Jan Reed," she said. "With TV3?

  Could I join you for a cup?"

  "Sure...." He waved at the seat opposite. "I can't tell you much."

  "The camera guys said you were pretty good about us," Reed said.

  Reed was older than most TV reporters, probably in her middle thirties, Lucas thought. Like all of the latest crop of on-camera newswomen, she was strikingly attractive, with large dark eyes, auburn hair falling to her shoulders, and just a hint of the fashionable overbite. Lucas had suggested to Heather that a surgeon was making a fortune somewhere, turning out TV anchors with bee-stung lips and overbites. Heather told him that would be unethical, the next day, though, she said she'd been watching, and there were far too many overbites on local television to be accounted for by simple jaw problems.

  "Why is that?" she'd asked. She seemed really interested.

  Lucas said, "You don't know?"

  "No. I don't," she said. She looked at him skeptically. "You're gonna tell me it's something dirty?"

  "It's because it makes guys think about blow jobs," Lucas said.

  "You're lying to me," Heather said, one hand on her hip.

  "Honest to God," Lucas said. "That's what it is."

  "This society is out of luck," Heather said. "I'm sorry, but we're going down the tubes. Blow jobs."

  Jan Reed sipped her coffee and said, "One of our sources says it's the serial killer. We saw Officer Connell there, of course, so it's a reasonable presumption. Will you confirm it?"

  Lucas thought about it, then said, "Listen, I hate talking on the record. It gets me in trouble. I'll give you a little information, if you just lay it off on an unnamed source."

  "Done," she said, and she stuck her hand out. Lucas shook it: her hand was soft, warm. She smiled, and that made him feel even warmer. She was attractive.

  Lucas gave her two pieces of information: that the victim was female and white, and that investigators believed it was the work of the same man who killed Wannemaker.

  "We already had most of that," she said gently. She was working him, trying to make him show off.

  He didn't bite. "Well, what can I tell you," he said. "Another day in the life of a TV reporter, fruitlessly chasing down every possible scrap."

  She laughed, a nice laugh, musical, and she said, "I understand you used to date a reporter."

  "Yes. We have a daughter," Lucas said.

  "That's serious."

  "Well. It was," Lucas said. He took a sip of coffee. "Some time ago."

  "I'm divorced myself," she said. "I never thought it would happen."

  She looked at her hands.

  Lucas thought he ought to mention Heather, but he didn't. "You know, I recognized you right awayþI thought you were anchoring."

  "YesþI will be. I've done a little already, but I only got here three months ago. They're rotating me through the shifts so I can see how things work, while I anchor on a fill-in basis. In another month, I'll start getting more anchor time."

  "Smart. Get to know the place."

  They chatted for a few more minutes, then Lucas glanced at his watch and said, "Damn. I've got to go," and slid out of the booth.

  "Got a date?" She looked up at him, and he almost fell into her eyes.

  "Sort of," Lucas said, trying to look somewhere else. "Listen, uh.

  . see you around, huh?"

  "No doubt," she said, sending him off with a bee-stung smile.

  Heather had seen Lucas working at close range, as he broke a murder case in her small northern Wisconsin town. Lucas had seen Heather working as a coronerþdoctors were scarce up north, and they took turns at the county coroner's jobþbut the only time he'd been around when she was working on a live patient, he'd been unconscious: he'd been the patient.

  He had promised her he'd come and watch what she did, not thinking about it much. She'd become insistent, and they'd set the visit up a week earlier, before the Wannemaker killing. He could just squeeze it in, he thought.

  He touched the scar on his throat, thinking about Heather. Most of the scar had been caused by a Swiss Army knife that she'd used to open him up, the rest came from a.22 slug, fired by a little girl....

  Lucas left his car in a parking ramp three blocks from University Hospitals and walked down through the cool morning, among the medical students in their short white coats, the staff doctors in their longer coats. A nurse named Jim showed Lucas the men's locker room, gave him a lock and key for a locker, and told him how to dress: "There're scrub suits in the bins, three different sizes. The shoe covers are down there in the bottom bin. The caps and masks are in those boxes. Take one of the shower cap types, and take a mask, but don't put it on yet.

  We'll show you how to tie it when you're ready.... Take your billfold and watch and any valuables with you. Dr. Harkinnen'll be out in a minute."

  Heather's eyes smiled at him when he stepped out of the locker room.

  He felt like an idiot in the scrub suit, like an impostor.

  "How does it feel?" Heather asked.

  "Strange. Cool," Lucas said.

  "The girl who was killed... was it him?"

  "Yes. Didn't get much out of it. A kid saw him, though. He's white, he probably snorts coke, he drives a truck."

  "That's something."

  "Not much," he said. He looked down the hall toward the double doors that led to the operating rooms. "Is your patient already doped up?"

  "She's right there," Heather said, nodding.

  Lucas looked to his left. A thin, carefully groomed blond woman and a tiny redheaded girl sat in a waiting area, the little girl looking up at the woman, talking intently
. The girl's arms were bandaged to the shoulder. The woman's head was nodding, as if she were explaining something, the little girl's legs twisted and retwisted as they dangled off the chair. "I need to talk to them for a minute," Heather said.

  Heather went down the hall. Lucas, still self-conscious about the scrub suit, hung back, drifting along behind her. He saw the girl when she spotted Heather, her face contorted with fear. Lucas, even more uncomfortable, slowed even more. Heather said something to the mother, then squatted and started talking to the girl. Lucas stepped closer, and the little girl looked up at him. He realized that she was weeping, soundlessly, but almost without control. She looked back at Heather.