Night Prey

by John Sandford

  "Oh, Jesus...." Then, suddenly: "All right. Let's do it. Let's get him."

  The uniformed cop who'd been in the waiting room rapped on the door, stuck his head inside, and said to Jensen, "Dr. Ramihat is looking for you."

  Jensen took Lucas's forearm, her fingers digging in, as they went back down the hall to the waiting area. They found the surgeon greedily sucking on a cigarette and eating a Twinkie. "There's an awful lot of damage," he said, in light Indian accents. "There aren't any guarantees, but we've got him more or less stable and we've stopped the bleeding.

  Unless we get something unexpected, his chances are good. There'll be an infection problem, but he's in good physical shape and we should be able to handle it."

  Jensen collapsed in a chair, face in her hands, began to blubber.

  Ramihat patted her on the shoulder with one hand, ate the second Twinkie with his cigarette hand, and winked at Lucas. Connell pulled Lucas aside and said quietly, "If we can keep her in line, we got him."

  They spent the rest of the morning setting it up: Sloan came in to work with Lucas, Connell, and Greave in checking people with access to Jensen's keys. Five women from intelligence, narcotics, and homicide would rotate as close escorts.

  After some discussion, Jensen decided that she could stay in the apartment as long as an escort was always with her. That way, she wouldn't have to move anything out, and open the possibility that if the killer was in the building, she'd be seen doing it.

  Hart came out of surgery at three o'clock in the afternoon, hanging on.

  Koop was still in a rage as he fled the lakes. He couldn't think of the guy in bed with Jensen without hyperventilating, without choking the truck's steering wheel, gripping it, screaming at the windshield....

  In calmer moments, he could still close his eyes and see her as she was that first night, lying on the sheets, her body pressing up through the nightgown....

  Then he'd see her on Hart again, and he'd begin screaming, strangling the steering wheel. Crazy. But not entirely gone. He was sane enough to know that the cops might be coming for him. Somebody might have seen him getting in the truck, might have his license number.

  Koop had done his research in his years at Stillwater: he knew how men were caught and convicted. Most of them talked to the cops when they shouldn't. Many of them kept scraps and pieces of past crimes around themþtelevision sets, stereos, watches, guns, things with serial numbers.

  Some of them kept clothing with blood on it. Some of them left blood behind, or semen.

  Koop had thought about it. If he was taken, he swore to himself that he would say nothing at all. Nothing. And he would get rid of everything he wore or used in any crime: he would not give the cops a scrap to hang on to. He would try to build an alibiþanything that a defense attorney could use.

  He was still in psychological flight from the attack on Hart when he dumped the coat and hat. The coat was smeared with Hart's blood, a great liverish-black stain. He wrapped it, with the hat, in a garbage bag and dumped it with a pile of garbage bags on a residential street in Edina.

  The garbage truck was three blocks away. The bag would be at the landfill before noon. He threw the plain-pane glasses out the car window into the high grass of a roadside ditch.

  Turned on the radio, found an all-news station. Bullshit, bullshit, and more bullshit. Nothing about him.

  In his T-shirt, he stopped at a convenience store, bought a six-pack of springwater, a bar of soap, a laundry bucket, and a pack of Bic razors.

  He continued south to Braemar Park, climbed into the back of the truck, and shaved in the bucket. His face felt raw afterward, when he looked in the truck mirror, he barely recognized himself. He'd picked up a few wrinkles since he'd last been bare-faced, and his upper lip seemed to have disappeared into a thin, stern line.

  He couldn't bring himself to throw away the knife or the apartment keys. He washed the knife as well as he could, using the last of the springwater, sprayed both the knife and the keys with WD40, wrapped them in another garbage bag, knotted the mouth of the bag, walked up a hill near the park entrance, and buried the bag near a prominent oak.

  He felt almost lonely when he walked away from it. He'd recover it in a week or so... if he was still free.

  Cleansed of the immediate evidence of the crime, Koop headed east out of St. Paul.

  As he passed White Bear Avenue: Police are on the scene of a brutal murder attempt in south Minneapolis that took place about an hour and fifteen minutes ago. The site is less than a block from the building where a woman was murdered and a man was badly beaten last week, the man is still in a coma Srom that attack, and may not recover. In this latest attack, witnesses say a tall, bearded man wearing steel-rimmed glasses and a brown snap-brimmed hat attacked attorney Evan Hart as he left a Sriend's apartment this morning.

  Hart is currently in surgery at Hennepin General, where his condition is listed as critical. The attacker fled and may be driving a mint-green late-model Taurus sedan. Witnesses say that the attacker repeatedly slashed Hart with a knise....

  Green Taurus sedan? What was that? Tall? He was five-eight.

  Was either white or a light-skinned black man...

  What? They thought he was black. Koop stared at the radio in amazement.

  Maybe he didn't have to run at all. Still: He drove for an hour and a half, losing the Twin Cities radio stations sixty miles out. He stopped at a big sporting goods outlet off I-94, bought a shirt, a sleeping bag, a cheap spinning rod with a reel, a tackle box, and some lures. He stripped them of bags and receipts, threw the paper in a trash can, and turned north, plotting the roads in his head. At Cornell, he bought some bread, lunch meat, and a six-pack of Miller's, and carefully kept the receipt with its hour-and-day stamp, crumbled in the grocery sack, thrust under the seat. Before he left the store parking lot, he looked carefully around the lot for any discarded receipts, but didn't see any.

  North of Cornell, he turned into the Brunet Island State Park and parked at a vacant campsite away from the boat launching ramp. Two boat trailers were parked at the ramp, hooked onto pickups. When he had the ramp to himself, he dug around in a trash can for a moment.

  There were two grocery bags crumpled inside, he opened the first, found it empty, but in the second, he found another grocery receipt. There was no time on it, but the date and the store name were, and the date was from the day before.

  He carried it back to the truck and threw it in the back.

  He could see only one boat on the water, so far away that he could barely make out the occupants. Koop was not much of a fisherman, but he got the rod and reel, tied on a spinner bait, and walked back toward the ramp. Nobody around. Ducking through the brush, he moved up to one of the trailers, unscrewed a tire cap, and pushed the valve stem with his fingernails. When the tire was flat, he carefully backed away and tossed the cap into weeds.

  After that, he waited, wandered down the shoreline, casting.

  Thinking about Jensen's treachery. How could a woman do that? It wasn't right....

  Deep in thought, he was annoyed, five minutes later, when he got a hit.

  He ripped a small northern off the hook and tossed the fish back up in the weeds. Fuck it.

  An hour after he'd let the air out of the trailer tire, an aluminum fishing boat cut in toward the ramp. Two men in farm coveralls climbed out of the boat and walked back to the trailer with the flat. The older of the two backed the trailer into the water while the other stood on the side opposite the flat and helped the boat up to the ramp.

  After the boat was loaded and pulled out, the man on the ramp yelled something, and after some talk back and forth, the man in the car got out to look at the trailer tire. Koop drifted toward them, casting.

  "Got a problem?" he called.

  "Flat tire."

  "Huh." Koop reeled in his last cast and walked over toward them.

  The driver was talking to his friend about taking the boat off, pulling the wheel, and driving it into
town to get it fixed.

  got a pump up in my truck," Koop said. "Maybe it'd hold long enough to get you into town."

  "Well." The farmers looked at each other, and the driver said, "Where's your truck?"

  "Right over there, you can see it...."

  "We could give er a try," the driver said.

  Koop retrieved the pump. "Hell of a nice boat," he said as they pumped up the tire. "Always wanted a Lund. Had it long?"

  "Two years," the driver said. "Saved for that sucker for ten years, got it set up perfect." When the tire was up, they watched it for a moment, then the driver said, "Seems to hold."

  "Could be a real slow leak," Koop said. "Check it this morning before you went out?"

  "Can't say as I did," the driver said, scratching his head.

  "Listen, thank you much, and I think I'll get our butts into town before it goes flat again."

  So he had receipts and he'd been seen fishing on the ramp, and he took the boat registration number. He'd have to think about that: maybe he shouldn't be able to remember all of it, just that it was a red Lund and the last two registration letters were LS... Or maybe that the first number on it was 7. He'd have to think about it.

  On his way through town, he stopped at the store that issued the register receipt he'd found in the trash can, bought a Slim Jim and a can of beer, and stuffed the receipt and the sack under the seat.

  Maybe they'd remember his face in the store, maybe notþbut he'd been there, he could describe the place, and he could even describe the young woman who'd waited on him. Too heavy. Wore dark-green fashion overalls.

  A little before five, he started back to the Cities. He wanted to be within radio range, to pick up the news. To see if they were looking for him....

  They were not, as far as he could tell. One of the evening talk shows was devoted to the attack, and the attack the week before, but it was all a bunch of crazies calling in. Huh.

  They were looking for the wrong guy....

  He went back to the park, got the knife and keys. Felt better for it.

  At one o'clock in the morning, Koop wasn't quite drunk, but he was close. Driving around, driving around, up and down the Cities, Jensen was more and more on his mind.

  At one, he drove past her apartment. A light shone behind her window.

  A man was walking down the street, walking a small silvery dog. At one-fifteen, Koop cruised it again. Still the light. She was up late, couldn't sleep, after the fightþKoop thought about it as a fight.

  Blondy'd asked for it, fucking Koop's woman, what was a guy supposed to do?

  Koop's mind was like a brick, not working right. He knew it wasn't working right. He could not pull it away from Jensen. He had other things to think aboutþhe'd been cruising his next target, he was ready to make an entry. He couldn't think about it.

  At one-thirty, the light was still on in Jensen's apartment, and Koop decided to go up to his spy roost. He knew he shouldn't risk it, but he would. He could feel himself being pulled in, like a nail to a magnet.

  At one thirty-five, he went into the apartment across the street from Jensen's and climbed the stairs. Physically, he was fine, moving as smoothly and quietly as ever. It was his mind that was troubling....

  He checked the hall. Empty. Had to be quiet: everybody would be spooked. He went to the roof entry, climbed the last flight, pushed through the door, and quickly closed it behind himself. He stood there for a moment, the doorknob still in his hand, listening. Nothing.

  He stepped to the edge of the door hutch and looked up at Jensen's window.

  The light was on, but at the angle, he couldn't see anything.

  He crossed to the air-conditioner housing, grabbed the edge, and pulled himself up. He crawled to the vent and looked around the corner.

  Nobody in sight. He leaned back behind the vent, put his back to it.

  Looked up at the stars.

  He thought about what he'd become, caught by this passion. He would have to stop. He knew he would have to stop, or he was doomed. He could think of only one way to stop itþand that way touched him. But he would like to have her first, if he could.

  Before he killed her.

  Koop looked around the corner past the vent, and, shocked, almost snatched his head back. Almost, but not quite. He had the reflexes and training of a cat burglar, and had taught himself not to move too quickly. Across the street, in Jensen's window, a man was looking out.

  He was six feet back from the glass, as though he were taking care not to be seen from the street. He wore dark slacks and a white dress shirt, without a jacket.

  He wore a shoulder holster.

  A cop. They knew. They were waiting for him.

  Heather curled up on the couch. The television was tuned to CNN, and Lucas watched it without seeing it, brooding. "Nothing at all?" she asked.

  "Not a thing," he said. He didn't look at her, just pulled at his lip and stared at the tube. He was tired, his face gray. "Three days.

  The media's killing us."

  wouldn't worry so much about the media, if I were you."

  Now he turned his head. "That's because you don't have to worry.

  You guys bury your mistakes," Lucas said. He grinned when he said it, but it wasn't a pleasant smile.

  "I'm serious. I don't understand...."

  "The media's like a fever," Lucas explained. "Heat starts to build up.

  The people out in the neighborhoods get scared, and they start calling their city councilmen. The councilmen paniFthat's what politicians, do, basically, is panicoand they start calling the mayor. The mayor calls the chief. The chief is a politician who is appointed by the mayor, so she panics. And the shit flows downhill."

  don't understand all the panic. You're doing everything you can."

  "You have to look at Davenport's first rule of how the world really works," Lucas said.

  don't think I've heard that one," Heather said.

  "It's simple," he said. "A politician will never, ever, get a better job when he's out of office."

  "That's it?"

  "That's it. That explains everything. They're desperate to hang on to their jobs. That's why they panic. They lose the election, it's back to the car wash." After a moment of silence, Heather asked, "How's Connell?"

  "Not good," Lucas said.

  Connell's facial skin was stretched, taut, dark smudges hung under her eyes, her hair was perpetually disarranged, as though she'd been sticking her fingers into an electric outlet.

  "Something's wrong," she said. "Maybe the guy knows we're here.

  Maybe Jensen was imagining it."

  "Maybe," Lucas said. They waited in Jensen's living room, stacks of newspapers and magazines by their feet. A Walkman sat on a coflfee table. A television was set up in the second bedroom, but they couldn't listen to the stereo for fear that it would be heard in the hallway. "It sure felt good, though."

  know... but you know what maybe it could be?" Connell had a foot-high stack of paper next to her hand, profiles and interviews with apartment employees, residents of Jensen's floor, and everyone else in the building with a criminal record. She had been pawing through it compulsively. "It could be, like, a relative of somebody who works here.

  And whoever works here goes home and lets it slip that we're in here."

  Lucas said, "The keys are a big question. There are any number of ways that a cat burglar could get one key, but two keysþthat's a problem."

  "Gotta be an employee."

  "Could be a valet service at a restaurant," he said. "I've known valets who worked with cat burglars. You see the car come in, you get the plate number, and from that, you can get an address and you've got the key."

  "She said she hadn't used a valet since she got the new key," Connell said.

  "Maybe she forgot. Maybe it's something so routine that she doesn't remember it."

  bet it's somebody at her officeþsomebody with access to her purse.

  You know, like one of the messenger kids,
somebody who can go in and out of her office without being noticed. Grab the key, copy it...." "But that's another problem," Lucas said. "You've got to have some knowledge to copy it, and a source of blanks."

  "So it's a guy working with a cat burglar. The burglar supplies the knowledge, the kid supplies the access."

  "That's one way that it works," Lucas admitted. "But nobody in her office seems like a good bet."