Night Prey

by John Sandford

  "A boyfriend of somebody in the office, a secretary picks up the key, lays it off...."

  Lucas stood up, yawned, wandered around the apartment, stopped to look at a framed black-and-white photograph. It wasn't much, a flower in a roundish pot, a stairway in the background. Lucas didn't know much about art, but this felt like it. A tiny penciled signature said Andre something, something with a K. He yawned again and rubbed the back of his neck and looked at Connell going through the paper.

  "How'd you feel this morning?"

  She looked up. "Hollow. Empty."

  don't understand how it works, the whole chemotherapy thing," Lucas said.

  She put down the paper. "Basically, the kind of chemo I get is poisonous. It knocks down the cancer, but it also knocks down my body," she said. Her voice was neutral, informed, like a medical commentator on public television. "They can only use it so long before the chemotherapy starts doing too much damage. Then they take me off it, and my body starts recovering from the chemo, but so does the cancer. The cancer gains a little every time. I've been on it for two years. I'm down to seven weeks between treatments. I've been five.

  I'm feeling it again."

  "Lots of pain?"

  She shook her head. "Not yet. I can't really describe it. It's a hollow feeling, and a weakness, and then a sickness, like the worst flu in the world. I understand, toward the end, it'll get painful, when it gets into my bone marrow... I expect to opt for other measures before then."

  "Jesus," he said. Then: "What are the chances that the chemo will knock it down completely?"

  "It happens," she said with a brief, ghostly smile. "But not for me."

  don't think I could handle it," Lucas said.

  The balcony door was closed, and Lucas moved over toward it, staying six feet back from the glass, and looked out at the park. Nice day.

  The rain had quit, and the light-blue sky was dappled with fairweather clouds, cloud shadows skipping across the lake. A woman dying.

  "But the other problem," Connell said, almost to herself, "besides the key, I mean, is why he hasn't come up here. Four days. Nothing."

  Lucas was still thinking about cancer, had to wrench himself back.

  "You're talking to yourself," Lucas said.

  "That's because I'm going crazy."

  "You want a pizza?" Lucas asked.

  don't eat pizza. It clogs up your arteries and makes you fat."

  "What kind don't you eat?"

  "Pepperoni and mushroom," Connell said.

  "I'll get one delivered to the manager. I can run down and get it when it comes in," he said, yawning again. "This is driving me nuts."

  "Why doesn't he come?" Connell asked rhetorically. "Because he knows we're here."

  "Maybe we just haven't waited long enough," Lucas said.

  Connell continued: "How does he know we're here? One: he sees us.

  Two: he hears about us. Okay, if he sees us, how does he know we're cops? He doesn'tþunless he's a cop, and he recognizes people coming and going. If he hears about us, how does he hear about us? We've been over that."

  "Pepperoni and mushroom?"

  "No fuckin' anchovies."

  "No way." Lucas picked up the phone, frowned, hung it up, and walked back to the glass door. "Did somebody check the roof on the other side of the street?"

  Connell looked up. "Yeah, but Jensen was right. It's below the level of her window. She doesn't even bother to pull the drapes."

  "It's not below the level of the air-conditioner housing," Lucas said.

  "C'mere. Look at this."

  Connell stood up and looked. "There's no way to get up on it."

  "He's a cat burglar," Lucas said. "And if he got up on it, he'd be looking right into the apartment. Who went over the roof?"

  "Skooragþbut he just strolled around the roof. I saw him do it.

  Said there wasn't anything up there."

  "We ought to take a look," Lucas said.

  Connell looked at her watch. "Greave and O'Brien'll be here in an hour.

  We could go over then."

  . O'Brien carried a brown paper sack with a magazine inside, and tried to hide it from Connell. Greave said, "I've been thinking: how about if we picked up all three of them, the brothers and Cherry, separatethem, tell them we've got a break, and tell them the first one who talks gets immunity."

  Lucas grinned but shook his head. "You're thinking right, but you've got to have something If you don't, they'll either tell you to go fuck yourself, or, which is worse, the guy who actually did the killing is the one who talks. He walks, and Roux hangs you out the window by your nuts. So, you gotta get something."

  "I've gotten something," Greave said.

  "What?"

  "I've gotten desperate."

  "O'Brien had a Penthouse," Connell said.

  "It's a very boring job," Lucas said mildly.

  "Think about this," Connell said. "What if women brought porno magazines to work, pictures of men with huge penises? And the women sat there and looked at the pictures, then looked at you, then looked at the picture. Wouldn't you find that just a little demeaning?"

  "Not me, personally," Lucas said, face straight. "I'd just see it as another career opportunity."

  "Goddamn you, Davenport, you always weasel away."

  "Not always," Lucas said. "But I do have a well-developed sense of when to weasel." Then, as they crossed the street, "This is where the woman was killed and the guy fucked up."

  They climbed the steps and buzzed the manager. A moment later, a door opened in the lobby and a middle-aged woman looked out. Her hair was not quite blue. Lucas held up his badge, and she let him in.

  "I'll get somebody to let you up on the roof," the woman said when Lucas explained what they wanted. "That was awful, that poor guy stabbed."

  "Were you here when those two people were attacked outside?"I "No, nobody was here. Except tenants, I mean," she said.

  understand the guy was between the inner and outer doors when he was attacked."

  The woman nodded. "One more second and he would have been inside.

  His key was in the lock."

  "Sonofabitch," Lucas said. To Connell: "If somebody wanted to get a key and cover what they were doing... The whole attack didn't make sense, so they said gang kids did it. Trouble is, the gang unit hasn't heard a thing from the gangs. And they should have heard."

  The janitor's name was Clark, and he opened the door to the roof and blocked it with an empty Liquid Plumber bottle. Lucas walked across the gravel-and-tar-paper roof. Greave and O'Brien were standing in Jensen's apartment, visible from the shoulders up.

  "Can't see much from here," Lucas said. He turned to the airconditioner housing.

  "It looks high enough," Connell said. They walked around it: it was a gray cube, with three featureless metal faces. A locked steel service hatch, and a warranty sticker with a service number, were the only items on the fourth side. There was no access to the top of the cube.

  can get a stepladder," Clark offered.

  "Why don't you just give me a boost," Lucas said. He slipped out of his shoes and jacket, and Clark webbed his fingers together. Lucas put his foot in the other man's hands and stepped up. When his shoulders were over the edge of the housing, he pushed himself up with his hands.

  The first thing he saw were the cigarette butts, forty or fifty of them, water-stained, filterless. "Oh, Christ." One butt was fresh, and he duckwalked over to it, peered at it.

  "What?" Connell called.

  "About a million cigarette butts."

  "Are you serious? What kind?"

  Lucas duckwalked back to the edge, peered down, and said, "Unfiltered Camels, each and every one."

  Connell looked across the street. "Can you see in the apartment?"

  can see O'Brien's shoes," Lucas said.

  "The sonofabitch knew," Connell cried. "He was up here, he looked in, he saw us. We were this fuckin' close." The crime-scene tech lifted the single fresh Camel w
ith a pair of tweezers, put it in a bag, and passed it down. "We can try," he said to Lucas, "but I wouldn't count on much. Sometimes you get a little skin stuck to the butts, sometimes enough to do a DNA or at least get a blood type, but these have been out here a while." He shrugged. "We'll try, but I wouldn't hold my breath." "What're the chances of DNA?" Connell demanded.

  He shrugged. "Like I said, we'll try."

  Connell looked at Lucas. "We've had cold matches on DNA."

  "Yeahþtwo," Lucas said.

  "We gotta make a run at it," she said.

  "Sure." He looked across the street. Sloan waved. "We'll put a night-vision scope over there, in case he comes back. Goddamnit. I hope we haven't scared him completely."

  "If we haven't, he's nuts," Connell said.

  "We know he's nuts," Lucas answered. "But I'm afraid that if he has seen us, we're frustrating the hell out of him. I hope he doesn't go for another. I hope he comes in first...."

  John Posey's house was a three-level affair, like a white-brick-andcedar layer cake, overlooking a backyard duck pond rimmed by weeping willows.

  From a street that ran at a ninety-degree angle to Posey's street, Koop could see the back of the house. Two separate balconies overlooked the pond, one above the other, slightly offset.

  A security-system warning sign was stuck in the front yard, by the door. Koop knew the system: typically magneto-offset doors, usually with motion detectors sweeping the first floor.

  If the detectors were tripped, they'd automatically dial out to an alarm service after a delay of a minute to two minutes. The alarm service would make a phone check, and if not satisfied, would call the cops. If the phone wires were cut, an alarm would go off at the monitoring service. If other phones in the neighborhood weren't out, the cops would be on their way.

  Which didn't make the place impossible. Not at all. For one thing, Posey had a dog, an old Irish setter. The setter was often in the front window, even when Posey wasn't home. If there was a motion detector, it was either turned off or it only guarded the pans of the house that the dog couldn't get to.

  He would wait until Posey left and then go straight in, Koop decided.

  No hiding, nothing subtle. Smash and grab.

  Koop was in no condition for subtlety. He thought about Sara Jensen all the time. Reran his mental tapes. He would see her in another womanþwith a gesture or a certain step, a turn of the head.

  Jensen was a sliver under the skin. He could try to ignore her, but she wouldn't go away. Sooner or later, he'd have to deal with her.

  Bodyguards or no bodyguards.

  But Koop knew something about the ways of cops. They'd watch her for a while, and then, when nothing happened, they'd be offchasing something else.

  The only question was, could he wait?

  At eight-thirty, Koop stopped at a downtown parking garage. He followed a Nissan Maxima up the ramp, parked a few slots away from it, got slowly out of the truck. The Maxima's owners took the elevator, Koop took the plates off the Maxima.

  He carried them back to the truck, stepped out of sight for a moment when another car came up the ramp, then clipped the stolen plates on top of his own with steel snap-fasteners. A matter of two minutes.

  Posey had an active social life and went out almost every night, mostly to sports bars. Koop checked by calling, calling again, calling a third time, never getting an answer, before heading back to the house.

  The night was warm, humid, and smelled like cut grass. The whole neighborhood hummed with the air conditioners tucked in at the sides of the houses. Windows and doors would be closed, and he could get away with a little more noise, if he had to.

  Four blocks from Posey's, a group of teenagers, three girls, two boys, stood on a street corner smoking, long hair, long shirts hung out over their jeans, looking at him with narrowed eyes as he passed in the truck.

  A few porch lights were still on, yellow and white, and the sound of easy-listening music seeped from an open, lit garage. There were carsþnot manyþparked on the street, the neighborhood was too aflluent for that.

  He cruised the house. It looked rightþPosey usually left two lights on when he was out. Koop had an eight-ball with him: he did a hit, then another, got his tools from under the passenger seat, and drove back to the house. Pulled into the driveway. Waited a second, watching the curtains, checking the street, picked up his tools and got out, walked up to the front door, and rang the doorbell.

  The dog barked, the bark was loud, audible in the street. Nobody came to the door. The dog kept barking. Koop walked back down the front of the house, checked the neighborhood one last time, then walked down the side of the garage.

  l The side of the garage was windowless, and faced the windowless garage next door. Between them, he couldn't be seen. The backyard, though, was different, potentially dangerous. He stopped at the corner of the garage and scanned the houses on the next street, facing Posey's. There were lights, and a man reading a newspaper behind a picture window two houses down. Okay....

  Koop wore a jogging suit, the jacket open over a white T-shirt. In the hand-warmer pocket he carried a pair of driving gloves. A sailing compass, called a "hockey puck," was stuffed in one glove, a small plastic flashlight in the other. He carried an eighteen-inch crowbar down his pants' leg, the hook over the waistline of the pants.

  He waited two minutes, three, his heartbeat holding up, then zipped the jacket and pulled on the gloves. Nearly invisible, he edged around the corner of the house until he was standing behind a dwarf spruce, looking up at the first balcony.

  The bottom of the balcony was eight feet overhead. He bent the spruce, found a branch two feet above the ground that would bear his weight.

  He stepped up, feeling the spruce sag, but hooked the lower bar of the railing with one hand, then the other. He swarmed up like a monkey, scuffing his kneecap on the concrete edge of the balcony. He waited a few seconds, ignoring the pain in his knee, listening, hearing nothing, then tested the balcony railing for rigidity.

  Solid. He stood on it, balancing carefully, reached around the edge of the upper balcony, grabbed the railing, and let himself swing free.

  When his swinging motion slowed, he pulled himself up and clambered over the railing onto the higher balcony.

  Again he stopped to listen. The dog had stopped barking. Good. He was now on the third floor, outside a room he believed was unused.

  He'd spotted Posey's bedroom in a second-floor corner. This should be a guest room, if the moving man's map was correct. And it wouldn't be rigged for an alarm, unless Posey was truly paranoid.

  Hearing nothing, he stood up and looked at the sliding glass doors.

  The track was not blocked: that made things easier. He tried the door itself, on the chance that it was unlocked. It was not. He took the crowbar out of his pants, pressed the point of it against the glass, and slowly, carefully put his weight against it. The glass cracked, almost silently. He started again, just above the first point, bearing down.

  .. and got another crack.

  The third time, the glass suddenly collapsed, leaving a hole the size of his palm. He hadn't made a sound louder than a careful cough. He reached through the hole, flipped up the lock and pulled the latch, and slid the door back. Stopped. Listened. Inside, he turned on the flashlight. Yes. A bedroom, with a feel of disuse.

  He crossed the room to the bedroom door, which was closed, took out the compass, waited until the needle settled, then ran it along the edge of the door. The needle remained steady, except at the handle, where it deflected. The door was not protected, he hadn't expected it to be, but it took only a moment to check.

  He opened the door, half expecting the dog to be there, but found an empty hall, dimly lit from the lights downstairs.

  Down the stairs, slowly, listening. Nothing. Through the hall.

  Then: the dog's nails on the kitchen's vinyl floor, with a tentative woof. A few woofs were okay, but if the dog got out of hand...

  He reverse
d his grip on the crowbar, holding it by the flat end.

  The dog came around the corner of the kitchen, saw him standing there, barked. Old dog, his legs stiff, his muzzle hair going white...

  "Here, boy, c'mere," Koop said, his voice soft. "C'mere, boy..

  ." He walked toward the dog, his left hand out, cupped, right hand behind him.

  The dog backed away, upright, barking, but let Koop get closer....

  "Here, boy." One more step, one more.