Night Prey

by John Sandford

  "Woof." Sensing danger, trying to back away...

  Koop swatted the dog like a fly. The crowbar caught it in the center of the skull, and the dog went down without a whimper, just a final woof.

  Dead when it hit the floor, its legs jerked, running spasmodically on the vinyl.

  Koop turned away. No need to be quiet anymore. He checked the front door. There was a keypad next to it showing an alarm light: the system was armed, but he wasn't sure what that meant. At the basement door, he again checked with the compass. Again, nothing. Must only be the outer doors.

  He eased the door open, took a step. Okay. Walked down to the bottom of the stairs, into the basementþand the moment he stepped into the basement, heard the rapid beep-beep-beep of the alarm system's warning, a bit louder than an alarm clock.

  "Shit," he said.

  One minute. He started a running count at the back of his head.

  Sixty, fifty-nine...

  The safe was there, just as the moving man said. He worked the combination the first time and looked inside. Two sacks, two jewelry l boxes. He took them out. One sack was cash. The other was as heavy as a car battery. Gold, probably. No time to think.

  Thirty. Twenty-nine, twenty-eight...

  He ran back up the stairs, to the front door, the alarm making its urgent beep-beep-beep warning. He hit it with the crowbar, silencing it.

  The call would be made anyway, but if someone was passing in the street, he wouldn't hear the beeping.

  Koop walked out the front door, back to the truck. Tossed the tools and the money bags on the front seat, started the truck, backed into the street.

  Thinking: Fourteen, thirteen, twelve...

  At zero, he'd turned the corner and was heading down the hill to West Seventh Street. Fifteen seconds later, he was in heavy trafEc. He never did see a cop.

  Koop checked the bags in a Burger King parking lot. The Srst contained forty-Sve hundred dollars in cash: twenties, Sfties, and hundreds.

  The second bag held Sfty gold coins, Krugerrands. Already, one of the best scores he'd ever had. The first box held a gold chain with a ten-diamond cross. The diamonds were small but not tiny. He had no idea what they were worth. A lot, he thought, if they were real. In the second box, earrings to go with the necklace.

  A wave of pleasure ran through him. The best score, the best he'd ever done. Then he thought of Jensen, and the pleasure began to fade.

  Shit. He looked at the gold in his lap. He really didn't want this.

  He could get money anytime.

  He knew what he wanted.

  He saw her every time he closed his eyes.

  Koop cruised Jensen's apartment. The apartment was lit up. He slowed, and thought he might have seen a shadow on the window. Was she naked?

  Or was the place full of cops?

  He couldn't loiter. The cops might be watching.

  He thought about the dog, the feet scratching on the vinyl floor.

  He wondered why they did that....

  The night had pushed him into a frenzy: exhilaration over the take at Posey's, frustration over the lights at Jensen's. He drove down to Lake Street, locked up the truck, and started drinking. He hit Flower's Bar, Lippy's Lounge, the Bank Shot, and Skeeter's. Shot some pool with a biker at Skeeter's. Scored another eight-ball at Lippy's and snorted most of it sitting on the toilet in the Lippy's men's room.

  The coke gave him a ferocious headache after a while, tightening up his neck muscles until they felt like a suspension spring. He bought a pint of bourbon, went out to his truck and drank it, and started doing exercises: bridges, marine push-ups.

  At one o'clock, Koop started back downtown, drunk. At five after one, drunk, he saw the woman walking back toward the hotel off Lyndale.

  A little tentative, a little scared. Her high heels going clacketyclack on the street....

  "Fuck her," he said aloud. He didn't have his ether, but had muscle and his knife. He passed the woman, going in the same direction, pulled the truck to the curb, put it in neutral. He popped the passenger seat, groped beneath it until he found the bag, stripped out the knife, and threw the keys back in the box. Did a quick pinch of cocaine, then another. Groped behind the seat until he found his baseball hat, put it on.

  "Fuck her," he said. She was walking up to the back of the truck, on the sidewalk. The night was warm for Minnesota, but she wore a light three-quarters trench coat. Koop wore a T-shirt that said "Coors."

  Out of the truck, around the nose, a gorilla, running.

  The woman saw him coming. Screamed, "Don't!"

  Dropped her purse.

  Everything cocaine sharp, cocaine powerful.

  Plenty of fuel, plenty of hate: "FUCK YOU!"

  Koop screamed it, and the knife blade snicked out, and she backed frantically away. He grabbed her, got the shoulder of her coat.

  "Get in the fuckin' truck."

  He could see the whites of her eyes, turning up in terror, pulled at her. The coat came away, the woman thrashing, slipping out of it, trying to run. She went through a sidewalk flower garden, crushing pink petunias, lost one of her shoes, backed against the building and began to scream, the odor of urine rode out on the night air.

  And she screamed. A high, piercing, loud scream, a scream that seemed to echo down the sidewalks.

  Koop, drunk, stoned, teeth as large as tombstones, on top of her: "Shut the fuck up." He hit her backhanded, knocked her oflf her feet. The woman sobbing, trying to crawl.

  Koop caught her by the foot, dragged her out of the flower garden, the woman trying to hold on to petunias. Petunias...

  She began screaming again, no more words, screaming, and Koop, angrier and angrier, dragged her toward the truck.

  Then, from above: "You stop that." A woman's voice, shrill, as angry as Koop was.

  "You stop that, you asshole, I'm calling the police."

  Then a man's voice: "Get away from her...."

  From the apartment across the street, two people yelling down at him, one two or three floors up, the other five or six. Koop looked up, and the woman began to sob.

  "Fuck you!" Koop screamed back.

  Then a flash: the woman had taken a picture of him. Koop panicked, turned to run. The woman on the sidewalk looked at him, still screaming, pulling away.

  Christ: she'd seen him close, from two inches.

  Another flash.

  Man's voice: "Get away from that woman, police are coming, get away."

  And another light, steady this time: somebody was making movies.

  The rage roared out of him, like Sre, the knife with a mind of its own.

  Koop grabbed the woman by the throat, lifted her off the sidewalk, the woman kicking like a chicken.

  And the knife took her. She slipped away from him, onto the sidewalk, almost as though she had fainted.

  Koop looked down. His hands were covered with blood, blood ran down the sidewalk, black in the streetlight....

  "Get away from that woman, get away...."

  No need to be told. Panic was on him, and he ran to the truck, climbed in, gunned it.

  Around the corner, around another.

  Two minutess up the interstate ramp. Cop cars everywhere, down below lights flashing, sirens screeching. Koop took the truck off the interstate, back into the neighborhoods, and pushed south. Side streets and alleys all the way.

  He stayed inside for ten minutes, then jumped on the Crosstown Expressway for a quick dash to the airport. Took a ticket, went up the ramp, parked. Crawled in the back.

  "Motherfucker," he breathed. Safe for the moment. He laughed, drank the last mouthful from the pint bottle.

  He got out of the truck, hAched his pants, walked around behind, and climbed in. Safe, for the time being.

  He rolled up his jogging jacket to use as a pillow, lay down, and went to sleep.

  Eloise Miller was dead in a pool of black blood before the cops got there.

  In St. Paul, a patrol cop looked at Ivanhoe the dog and wonder
ed who in the fuck would do that....

  CHAPTER

  "We got pictures of him," Connell said. Lucas found her on the sixth floor, in the doorway of a small apartment, walking away from a grayhaired woman.

  Connell was as cranked as Lucas had ever seen her, a cassette of thirty-five-millimeter film in her fist. "Pictures of him and his truck."

  heard we got movies," Lucas said.

  "Aw, man, come on..." Connell led him down the stairs. "You gotta see this."

  On four, two cops were talking to a thin man in a bathrobe. "Could you run the tape?" Connell asked.

  One of the cops glanced at Lucas and shrugged. "How's it going, chief?"

  "Okay. What've we got?"

  "Mr. Hanes here took a videotape of the attack," the older of the two cops said, pointing a pencil at the man in the bathrobe.

  didn't think," the man said. "There wasn't any time."

  The younger cop pushed the button on the VCR. The picture came up, clear and steady: a picture of a bright light shining into a window.

  At the bottom of it, what appeared to be two sets of legs doing a dance.

  They all stood and watched silently as the tape rolled on: they could see nothing on the other side of the window except the legs. They saw the legs only for a few seconds. "If we get that downtown, we should be able to get a height estimate on the guy," Lucas said.

  The bathrobe man said, mournful as a bloodhound, "I'm sorry."

  The older cop tried to explain. "See, the light reflected almost exactly back at the lens, so whatever he pointed it at is behind the light."

  was so freaked out...."

  In the hallway, Lucas said, "How do we know we don't have the same thing on the film?"

  " Cause she went out on her terrace and shot it," Connell said.

  "There was no window to reflect back at her... There's a one-hour development place at Midway, open all night."

  "Isn't there a betterþ" She was shaking her head. "No. I've been told that the automated processes are the most reliable for this Kodak stuff. One is about as good as another."

  "Did you see enough of the woman on the street?" Lucas asked.

  saw too much," Connell said. She looked up at Lucas. "He's flipped out. He started out as this sneaky, creepy killer, really careful.

  Now he's Jack the Ripper."

  "How about you?"

  flipped out a long time ago," she said.

  mean... are you hanging in there?"

  "I'm hanging in," she said.

  The Quick-Shot operator was by himself, processing film. He could stop everything else, he said, and have prints in fifteen minutes, no charge.

  "There's no way they can get messed up?" Lucas asked.

  The operator, a bony college kid in a Stone Temple Pilots T-shirt, shrugged. "One in a thousandþmaybe less than that. The best odds you're going to get."

  Lucas handed him the cassette. "Do it."

  Seventeen minutes later, the kid said, "The problem is, she was trying to take a picture from a hundred and fifty or two hundred feet away, at night, with this little teeny flash. The flash is supposed to light up somebody's face at ten feet." ing.

  "There's nothing fuckin' there," Connell shouted at him, spit fly "Yeah, there isþyou can see it," the kid said, indignant, peering at one of the almost-black prints. That particular print had a yellow smudge in the middle of it, what might have been a streetlight, above what might have been the roof of a truck. "That's exactly what you get when you take pictures in the dark with one of those little fuckin' cameras."

  There was something going on in the prints, but they couldn't tell what. Just a lot of smudges that might have been a woman being stabbed to death.

  don't believe it," Connell said. She slumped in the car seat, sick.

  don't believe in eyewitnesses or cameras," Lucas said.

  Another three blocks and Connell said suddenly, urgently, "Pull over, will you? Right there, at the corner."

  "What?" Lucas pulled over.

  Connell got out and vomited. Lucas climbed out, walked around to her.

  She looked up weakly, tried to smile. "Getting worse," she said.

  "We gotta hurry, Lucas."

  "We're talking firestorm," Roux said. She had two cigarettes lit at the same time, the one on the window ledge burning futilely by itself.

  "We'll get him," Lucas said. "We've still got the surveillance at Sara Jensen's. There's a good chance he'll come in."

  "This week," Roux said. "Gotta be this week."

  "Very soon," Lucas said.

  "Promise?"

  "No."

  Lucas spent the day following the Eloise Miller routine, reading histories, calling cops. Connell did the same, and so did Greave.

  Results from the street investigation began coming in. The guy was big and powerful, batted the woman like a rag doll.

  There were three eyewitnesses: one said the killer had a beard, the other two said he did not. Two said he wore a hat, the other said he had black hair. All three said he drove a truck, but they didn't know what color. Something and white. There wasn't much dirt in the street to pick up tire tracks, even if two cop cars and an ambulance hadn't driven over them.

  The autopsy came in. Nothing good. No DNA source. No prints. Still checking for hair.

  At four o'clock, he gave up. He went home, took a nap. Heather got home at six.

  At seven, they lay on top of the bedsheet, sweat cooling on their skin.

  Outside the window, which was cracked just an inch or two, they could hear the cars passing in the street a hundred feet away, and sometimes, quietly, the muttering of voices.

  Heather rolled up on her elbow. "I'm amazed at the way you can separate yourself from what you're doing," she said. She traced a circle on his chest. "If I was as stuck on a problem as you are, I couldn't think of anything else. I couldn't do this."

  "Waiting is part of the deal," Lucas said. "It has always been that way. You can't eat until the cake is baked."

  "People get killed while you're waiting," she said.

  "People die for bad reasons all the time," Lucas said. "When we were running around in the woods last winter, I begged you to stay away.

  You refused to stay away, so I'm alive. If you hadn't been out there

  .."

  He touched the scar on his throat.

  "Not the same thing," she objected. She touched the scar. Most of it, she'd made herself. "People die all the time because of happenstance.

  Two cars run into each other, and somebody dies. If the driver of one of them had hesitated five seconds at the last stoplight, they wouldn't have collided, and nobody would die. That's just life. Chance. But what you do... somebody might die because you can't solve a problem that's solvable. Or like last winter, you seemed to reach out and solve a problem that was unsolvable, and so people who probably would have died, lived."

  He opened his mouth to reply, but she patted him on the chest to stop him. "This isn't criticism. Just observation. What you do is really..

  . bizarre. It's more like magic, or palm reading, than science. I do science. Everybody I work with does science. That's routine. What you do... it's fascinating."

  Lucas giggled, a startling sound, high-pitched, unlike anything she'd ever heard from him. Not a chuckle. A giggle. She peered down at him.

  "Goddamn, I'm glad you moved in with me, Harkinnen," he said.

  "Conversations like this could keep me awake for weeks at a time.

  You're better than speed."

  "I'm sorry...."

  "No, no." He pushed up on his elbow to face her. "I need this.

  Nobody ever looked into me before. I think a guy could get old and rusty if nobody ever looked into him."

  When Heather went into the bathroom, Lucas got up and wandered around, naked, hunting from room to room, not knowing exactly what. A picture of the dead Eloise Miller hung in his mind's eye: a woman on the way to feed a friend's dog while the friend was out of town. She'd made
that walk, late at night, just once in her life. Once too often.

  Lucas could hear Heather running water in the bathroom, and thqught guiltily about the attractions of Jan Reed. He sighed, and pushed the reporter out of his mind. That's not what he was supposed to be thinking about.