Night Prey

by John Sandford

  "You're going to him me again," she wailed.

  "It'll be fine," Heather said quickly.

  "HuAs bad," the girl said, tears running down. "I don't want to get fixed anymore."

  "Well, you've got to get better," Heather said, and as she reached out a finger to touch the girl's cheek, the dam burst, and the girl began to cry, clutching at her mother's dress with her bandaged arms like tree stumps.

  "This won't him so bad today. Just a little pinch for the IV and that's all," Heather said, patting her. "And when you wake up, we'll give you a pill, and you'll be sleepy for a while."

  "That's what you said last time," the girl wailed.

  "You've got to get better, and we're almost done," Heather said.

  "Today, and one more day, and we should be finished." Heather stood and looked at the mother. "She hasn't eaten anything?"

  "Not since nine o'clock," the woman said. Tears were running down her cheeks. "I've got to get out of here," she said desperately. "I can't stand this. Can we get going?" "Sure," Heather said. "Come on, Lucy, take my hand."

  Lucy slipped slowly out of the chair, took one of Heather's fingers.

  "Don't hurt me."

  "We're gonna try really hard," Heather said. "You'll see."

  Heather left the girl with the nurses and took Lucas along to an office where she started going through an inch-high stack of papers, checking them and signing. "Preop stuff," she said. "Who was the girl last night?"

  "A teenager from out of state. From Worthington."

  Heather looked up. "Pretty bad?"

  "You'd have to see it to believe it."

  "You sound a little pissed," she said.

  "On this one, I am," he said. "This girl looked like... she looked like somebody who did her first communion last week."

  The routine of the operation caught him: precise, but informal.

  Everybody in the room except Lucas and the anesthesiologist was female, and the anesthesiologist left for another operation as soon as the girl was down, leaving the job in the hands of a female anesthetist. The surgical team put him in a rectangular area along a wall and suggested that he stay there.

  Heather and the surgical assistant worked well together, the assistant ready with the instruments almost before Heather asked for them.

  There was less blood than Lucas expected, but the smell of the cautery bothered him, burning blood...

  Heather explained quickly what she was doing, expanding and spreading skin to cover the burns on the girl's arms. Heather ran the show with quick, tight directions, and there were no questions.

  And she spoke to Lucas from time to time, distractedly, focusing on the work. "Her father was running a power line from a 220 outlet to a pump down by the lake using an extension cord. The connection where the two cords came together... started to pull apart. That's what they think.

  Lucy grabbed them to put them back together. They don't know exactly what she was doing, but there was a flash and she'd gotten hit on both arms, and around her back on her shoulder blades.... We'll show you.

  We're doing skin grafts where we can, and in some places we're expanding the skin to cover."

  After a while, talk around the table turned to a book about a love affair that was dominating the best-seller lists. About whether the lovers should have gone off together, destroying a marriage and a family.

  "She was living a lie afterwards, she was hurting everyone," one of the nurses declared. "She should have gone."

  "Right. And the family is wrecked and just because she has a fling doesn't mean she still doesn't love them."

  "This was not exactly a fling."

  In the background, music oozed from a portable radio tuned to an easy-listening station, on the table, under Heather's gloved hands and knife, Lucy bled.

  They harvested skin from Lucy's thigh to cover a part of the wound.

  The skin harvester looked like a cross between an electric sander and a sod cutter.

  "This looks like it's going to hurt, Lucas said finally. Hurts a lot."

  "Can't help it," Heather grunted, not looking up. "These are the worst, burns are. Skin won't regenerate, but you've got to cover the wounds to prevent infection. That means grafts and expansions.... We put the temporary skin on because we couldn't get enough oflf her the first couple of times, but you can't leave the temporary stuff, she'll reject it."

  "Maybe you should have told her it was going to huX, Lucas said.

  "When you were talking to her outside."

  Heather glanced up briefly, as though considering it, but shook her head as she continued to tack down the advanced skin on one of the expansions. "I didn't tell her it wouldn't hurt. The idea was to get her in here, quiet, with a minimum of resistance. Next time, I can tell it's the last time."

  "Will it be?"

  hope so," Heather said. "We might need a touch-up if we get some rough scar development. Might have to release scar tissue. But the next one should be the last one for a while."

  "Huh."

  She looked at him, grave, quiet, over the top of her mask, her pink-stained fingers held in front of her, away from the girl's open wounds, the nurses were looking at him as well. "I don't do therapy," she said. "I do surgery. Sometimes you can't get around the pain.

  All you can do is fix them, and eventually the pain stops. That's the best I can do." And later, when she was finished, they sat together in the surgeon's lounge for a few minutes and she asked, "What do you think?"

  "Interesting. Impressive."

  "Is that all?" There was a tone in her voice.

  "I've never seen you before as the commander in chief," He said.

  "You do it pretty well."

  "Any objections?"

  "Of course not."

  She stood up. "You seemed disturbed. When you were watching me."

  He looked down, shook his head. "It's pretty strong stuff. And it wasn't what I'd expected, the blood and the smell of the cautery and that skin harvester thing... It's kind of brutal."

  "Sometimes it is," she said. "But you were most bothered about my attitude toward Lucy."

  don't know...."

  can't get involved," she said. "I have to turn off that part of me.

  I can like patients, and I like Lucy, but I can't afford to go into the operating room worrying that I'll him them, or wondering if I'm doing the right thing. I've worked that out in advance. If I didn't, I'd screw up in there."

  "It did seem a little cold," he admitted.

  wanted you to see that," she said. "Lucas, as pan of my...

  surgeon persona, I guess you'd call it, I'm different. I have to make brutal decisions, and I do. And I run things. I run them very well."

  "Well..."

  "Let me finish. Since I moved down here, we've had some very good times in bed. We've had nice runs at night, and some fun going out and fooling around. But this is what I am, right here. What you saw."

  Lucas sighed, and nodded. "I know that. And I admire you for it.

  Honest to God."

  She smiled then, just a little. "Really?"

  "Really. It's just that what you do... is so much harder than I thought."

  Much harder, he thought again as he left the hospital.

  In his world, or in Jan Reed's world, for that matter, very few things were perfectly clear: the best players were always figuring odds.

  Mistakes, stupidity, oversights, lies, and accidents were part of the routine. In Heather's world, those things were not routine, they were, in fact, virtually unforgivable.

  The surgery was another thing. The blood hadn't bothered him, but he was bothered by that moment where the knife hovered above the uncut skin, as Heather made her last-minute decisions on how she would proceed. Cutting in hot blood was one thing, doing it in cold bloodþdoing it on a child, even for the child's own goodþwas something else. It took an intellectual toughness of an order that Lucas hadn't encountered on the street. Not outside a psychopath.

  That was what
she'd wanted him to see.

  Was she trying to tell him something?

  Lucas's head felt large and fuzzy as he walked through the doors of City Hall and up to the chiefss office. Lack of sleep. Getting older.

  Roux's secretary thumbed him through the door, but Lucas stopped for a second.

  "Check around and see if Meagan Connell's in the building, will you?

  Tell her where I am."

  "Sure. Do you want me to send her in?"

  "Yeah, why not?"

  "Because she and the chief might get in a fistfight?"

  Lester and Anderson were in visitor's chairs. Lonnie Shantz, Roux's press aide, leaned on the windowsill, arms crossed, an accusation on his jowly ward heeler's face. Roux nodded when Lucas arrived.

  "They're pissed over at the Strib, " she said. "Have you seen the paper?"

  "Yeah. The big thing on Junky."

  "With this killing last night, they think we sandbagged them," Shantz said.

  Lucas sat down. "What can you do? The guy's flipped out. Any other time, it might've held them for a few days."

  "We're not looking good, Lucas," Roux said.

  "What about the St. Paul cop?" Shantz asked. "Anything there?"

  "I'm told that St. Paul had a shrink talk to him," Lester said.

  "They don't think he's capable of it."

  "Beat up his wife," Shantz suggested.

  "The charges were dropped. More like a brawl. His old lady got her licks in," Anderson said. "Hit him in the face with a Mr. Coffee."

  heard it was an iron," Lucas said. "Where was he last night, by the way?"

  "Bad news," Lester said. "His old lady moved out after the last big fight, and he was home. Alone. Watching TV."

  "Shit," Lucas said.

  "St. Paul's talking to him again, pinning down the shows he saw."

  "Yeah, yeah, but with VCR time delays, he could have been anywhere," Shantz said.

  "Bullshit," said Anderson.

  Shantz was talking to Roux. "All we'd have to do is leak a name and the spousal-abuse charge. We could do it a long way from hereþI could have one of my pals at the DFL do it for me. Hell, they like doing favors for media, for the paybacks. TV3'd pee their pants with that kind of tip.

  And it really does smell like a cover-up."

  "They'd crucify him," Lester said. "They'd make it look like the charges were dropped because he's a cop."

  "Who's to say they weren't?" Shantz asked. "And it would take some of the heat off us. Christ, this killing over at the lakes, that's a goddamn disaster. The woman's dead and the guy's a cabbage. Now we get this serial asshole again, knocking offsome country milkmaid, we're talking firestorm."

  "If you feed the St. Paul guy to the press, you'll regret it. It'd kill the Senate for you," Lucas said to Roux.

  "Why is that?" Shantz demanded. "I don't see how...."

  Lucas ignored him, spoke to Roux. "Word would get out. When everybody figured out what happenedþthat you threw an innocent cop to the wolves to turn the attention away from youþthey'd never forget and never forgive you."

  Roux looked at him for a moment, then shifted her gaze to Shantz.

  "Forget it."

  "Chief..."

  "Forget it," she snapped. ,Davenport is right. The risk is too big."

  Her eyes moved to her left, past Lucas, hardened. Lucas turned and saw Connell standing in the doorway.

  "Come on in, Meagan," he said. "Do you have the picture?"

  "Yeah." Connell dug in her purse, took out the folded paper, and handed to Lucas. Lucas unfolded it, smoothed it, and passed it to Roux.

  "This is not bullshit, this could be our man. More or less. I'm not sure you should release it." Roux looked at the picture for a moment, then at Connell, then at Lucas. "Where'd you get this?" she asked.

  "Meagan found a woman yesterday who remembers a guy at the St. Paul store who was there the same time Wannemaker was there. He's not on our list of names and this fits some of the other descriptions we've had. A guy last night who definitely saw him says he has a beard."

  "And drives a truck," said Connell.

  "Everybody who drives a truck has a beard," Lester said.

  "Not quite," Lucas said. "This is actually... something. A taste of the guy."

  "Why wouldn't I release it?" Roux asked.

  "Because we're not getting enough hard evidence. Nothing that can tie him directly to a killingþa hair or a fingerprint. If this isn't a good picture of him, and we do finally track him down, and we're scraping little bits and pieces together to make a case... a defense attorney will take this and stick it up our ass. You know: Here s the guy they were looking forþuntil they decided to pin it on my client."

  "Is there anything working today? Anything that'd give us a break?"

  "Not unless it comes out of the autopsy on Lane. That'll be a while yet."

  "Um, Bob Greave got a call from TV3þa tip on a suspect," Connell said.

  "It's nothing."

  "What do you mean, nothing? What is this, Lucas?" Roux asked.

  "Beats me. First I heard of it," he said.

  "Get his ass down here," Roux said.

  Greave came down carrying a slip of yellow paper, leaned in the door way.

  "Well?" Roux said.

  He looked at the paper. "A woman out in Edina says she knows who the killer is."

  Lucas: "And the bad news is...."

  "She called TV3 first. They're the ones who called us. They want to know if we're going to make an arrest based on their information."

  "You should have come and told us," Roux said. "We've been sitting here beating our heads against the wall."

  Greave held up a hand. "You have to understand, the woman doesn't have any actual proof."

  Roux said, "Keep talking."

  "She remembers the killer coming back from each of the murders, washing the blood off the knife and his clothes, and then raping her. She repressed all this until yesterday, when the memories were liberated with the help of her therapist."

  "Oh, no," Lucas groaned.

  "It could be," Shantz said, looking around.

  "Did I mention that the killer is her father?" Greave asked.

  "Sixtyyears old, the former owner of a drive-in theater? A guy with :eriosclerosis so bad that he can't walk up a flight of stairs?"

  "We gotta check it," Shantz said. "Especially with the TV all over a "It's bullshit," Lucas said.

  "We gotta check," Roux said.

  "We'll check," Lucas said, "But we really need to catch this guy, and talking to old heart-attack victims isn't gonna do it."

  "This one time, Lucas, goddamnit," Roux said, adamant. "I want you out there interviewing the guy, and I want you giving the statement to TV3."

  "When the fuck did the TV start running our investigations?" Lucas asked.

  "Jesus, Lucasþwe're entenainment now. We're cheap film footage. We sell deodorant and get votes. Or lose votes. It's all a big loop, I've been told you were the first guy to realize that."

  "Christ, it wasn't like this," Lucas said. "It was more like one hand washing the other. Now it's..."

  "Entenainment for the unwashed."

  As Lucas walked out the door, Roux called, "Lucas. Heyþdon't kill this old guy, huh? When you talk to him?"

  They took a company car, all three of them, Greave sprawled in the back.

  "Let me do the TV interview," he suggested to Lucas. "I did them all the time when I was Officer Friendly. I'm good at that shit. I got the right suits."

  "You were Officer Friendly?" Connell snorted, looking over the seat at him. Then, "You know, it fits."

  She said it as an insult. Lucas glanced at her and almost said something, but Greave was rambling on. "Really? I thought so. Go into all those classrooms, tell all the little boys that they'd grow up to be firemen and policemen, all the little girls that they'd be housewives and hookers."