Night Prey

by John Sandford

  They knew so much about the killer, he thought. Generally what he looked like, his size, his strength, what he did, the kinds of vehicles he drove, if indeed he drove that Taurus sedan in addition to the truck.

  Anderson was now cross-indexing joint ownerships, green Taurus sedans against pickups.

  But so much of what they knew was conflicting, and confiicts were devastating in a trial.

  Depending on who you believed, the killer was a white, short or tall police officer (or maybe a convict), a cocaine user who drove either a blue-and-white or red-and-white pickup truck, or a green Taurus sedan, and he either wore glasses or he didn't, and while he probably wore a beard at one time, he might have shaved it offby now. Or maybe not.

  Terrific.

  And even if that could be sorted out, they had not a single convicting fact. Maybe the lab would come through, he thought. Maybe they'd pull some DNA out of a cigarette, and maybe they'd find the matching DNA signature in the state's DNA bank. It had been done.

  And maybe pigs would fly.

  Lucas wandered into the dining room, tinkled a few keys on the piano.

  Heather had offered to teach him how to playþshe'd taught piano in college, as an undergraduateþbut he said he was too old.

  "You're never too old," she'd said. "Here, have some more wine."

  "I am too old. I can't learn that kind of stuff anymore. My brain doesn't absorb it," Lucas said, taking the wine. "But I can sing."

  "You can sing?" She was amazed. "Like what?"

  sang I Love Paris' in the senior concert in high school," he said, somewhat defensively.

  "Do I believe you?" she asked.

  "Well, I did." He sipped.

  And she sipped, then put the glass on a side table and rummaged, somewhat tipsily, through the piano bench and finally said, "Ah-ha, she calls his bluff. I have here the music to I Love Paris."

  " She played and he sang, remarkably well, she said. "You have a really nice baritone."

  know. My music teacher said I had a large, vibrant instrument."

  "Ah. Was she attractive?"

  "It was a he," Lucas said. "Here. Have some more wine."

  Lucas struck a few more notes, then wandered back toward the bedroom, thinking again about his eyewitnesses. They had more than a dozen of them now. Several had been too far away to see much, a couple of them had been so scared that they were more confusing than helpful, two men had seen the killer's face during the attack on Evan Hart. One said he was white, the other said he was a light-skinned black.

  And some had seen the killer too long ago, and remembered nothing about him at all....

  Heather was naked, bent over the sink, her hair full of shampoo.

  "If you touch my butt, I'll wait until you're asleep and I'll disfigure you," she said.

  "Cut off your nose to spite your face, huh?"

  "We're not talking noses," Heather said, scrubbing.

  He leaned in the doorway. "There's something women don't understand about good asses," he said. "A really good ass is an object of such sublime beauty, that it's almost impossible to keep your hands off."

  "Try to think of a way," she said.

  Lucas watched for a moment, then said, "Speaking of asses, some deaf people thought they saw the killer's truck. They were sure of it.

  But l they gave us an impossible license plate number. A number that's not issuedþass, as in A-S-S." He touched her ass.

  swear to God, Lucas, just cause you've got me helpless...."

  "Why would they be so sure, and then have such a bad number?"

  Heather stopped scrubbing for a moment and said, "A lot of deaf people don't read English."

  "What?"

  She looked at him from under her armpit, her head still in the sink.

  "They don't read English. It's very difficult to learn English if you're nonhearing. A lot of them don't bother. Or they learn just enough to read menus and bus signs."

  "Then what do they do? To communicate?"

  "They sign," she said.

  mean, communicate with the rest of us."

  "A lot of them aren't interested in communicating with the rest of us.

  Deaf people have a complete culture: they don't need us."

  "They can't read or write?" Lucas was astonished.

  "Not English. A lot of them can't, anyway. Is that important?"

  don't know," Lucas said. "But I'll find out."

  "Tonight?"

  "Did you have other plans?" He touched her ass again.

  She said, "Not really. I've got to get to bed."

  "Maybe I'll make a call," he said. "It's not even ten o'clock."

  Annalise Jones was a sergeant with the St. Paul Police Department.

  Lucas got her at home.

  "We had an intern do the translating. A student at St. Thomas. He seemed to know what he was doing," she said.

  "Don't you have a regular guy?" Lucas asked.

  "Yeah, but he was out."

  "How do I get the names of these people? The deaf people?"

  "Jeer, at this time of night? I'd have to call around," Jones said.

  "Could you?"

  At eleven o'clock he had a name and address off St. Paul Avenue.

  Maybe two miles away. He got his jacket. Heather, in bed, called sleepily, "Are you going out?" "Just for a while. I gotta nail this down."

  "Be careful...."

  The houses along St. Paul Avenue were modest postwar cottages, added-to, modified, with small, well-kept yards and garages out back.

  Lucas ran down the house numbers until he found the right one.

  There were lights in the window. He walked up the sidewalk and rang the bell.

  After a moment, he heard voices and then a shadow crossed the picturewindow drapes, and the front door opened a foot, a chain across the gap.

  A small, elderly man peered out. "Yes?"

  "I'm Lucas Davenport of the Minneapolis Police Department." Lucas showed his ID card and the door opened wider. "Does Paul Johnston live here?"

  "Yes. Is he all right?"

  "There's no problem," Lucas said. "But he went in and talked to the St. Paul police about a case we're working on, and I need to talk to him about it."

  "At this time of night?"

  "I'm sorry, but it's pretty urgent," Lucas said.

  "Well, I suppose he's down at the Warrens'." He turned and called back into the house, "Shirley? Is Paul at the Warrens'?"

  think so." A woman in a pink housecoat walked into the front room, clutching the housecoat closed. "What happened?"

  "This is a policeman, he's looking for Paul...."

  The Warrens were a family of deaf people in Minneapolis, and their home was an informal gathering spot for the deaf. Lucas parked two houses away, at the end of a line of cars centered on the Warrens's house.

  A man and a woman were sitting on the front stoop, drinking beer, watching him. He walked up the sidewalk and said, "I'm looking for Paul Johnston?"

  The two looked at each other, and then the man signed at him, but Lucas shook his head. The man shrugged and made a croaking sound, and Lucas took out his ID, showed them, pointed toward the house and said, louder, "Paul Johnston?"

  The woman sighed, held up a finger, and disappeared inside. A moment later she came back, followed by a stringy blond teenage girl with a narrow face and small gray eyes. The first woman sat down again, while the blonde said, "Can I help you?"

  "I'm a Minneapolis police officer and I'm looking for a Paul Johnston who contacted the St. Paul police about a case we're working on."

  "The killings," the girl said. "We've been talking about that.

  Nothing ever happened."

  understand St. Paul took a statement."

  "Yeah, but we never heard any more... Wait, I'll get Paul."

  She went back inside and Lucas waited, avoiding eye contact with the two people on the porch. They knew it, and seemed to think he was amusing. Every once in a while he'd accidentally make eye conta
ct and either nod or lift his eyebrows, which made him feel stupid.

  A moment later, the stringy teenager came back with a stocky dark-haired man, who looked closely at Lucas and then croaked once, querulously. Heavy oversize glasses with thick lenses made his eyes seem moonlike. He stood under the porch light, and the light made a halo of his long hair.

  don't sign," Lucas said.

  The blonde said, "No shit. So what do you want to know?"

  "Just what he saw. We got a report with a license number, but the number was an impossible one. The state doesn't allow vulgarities or anything that might be a vulgarity, so there is no plate that says ASS on it."

  The girl opened her mouth to say something, then turned to Johnston, her hands flying. A second later, Johnston shook his head in exasperation and began signing back.

  "He says the guy at the police station is a jerk," the blonde said.

  don't know him," Lucas said.

  The blonde signed something, and Johnston signed back. "He was afraid that they might have messed up, but that jerk they had at the police station just couldn't sign," she said, watching his hands.

  "It wasn't ASS?"

  "Oh, yeah. That's why they remembered it. This guy almost ran over them, and Paul saw the plate, and started laughing, because it said ASS, and the guy was an ass."

  "There aren't any plates that say ASS."

  "How about ass backwards?"

  "Backwards?"

  She nodded. "To Paul, it doesn't make much difference, frontwards or backwards. He just recognizes a few words, and this ASS popped right out at him. That's why he remembered it. He knew it was backwards.

  He tried to explain all this, but I guess not everything got through.

  Paul said the guy at the police station was an illiterate jerk."

  "Jesus. So the plate was SSA?"

  "That's what Paul says."

  Lucas looked at Paul, and the deaf man nodded.

  q Lucas, on the phone, heard Connell running down the hall and smiled.

  She literally skidded into the office. Her face was ashen, bare of any makeup, tired, drawn.

  "What happened?"

  Lucas put his hand over the receiver. "We maybe got a break.

  Remember those deaf people? St. Paul got the license number wrong."

  "Wrong? How could they be wrong?" she demanded, fist on her hips.

  "That's stupid."

  "Just a minute," Lucas said, and into the phone, "Can you shoot that over? Fax it? Yeah. I've got a number. And listen, I appreciate your coming in. I'll talk to your boss in the morning, and I'll tell him that."

  "What?" Connell demanded when he hung up.

  Lucas turned in the chair to face her. "The deaf guy who saw the plateþthe translation got screwed up. The translator couldn't sign, or something. I looked at that report a half-dozen times, and I kept thinking, how could they screw that up? And I never went back and asked until tonight. The plate was SSAþass backwards."

  don't believe it."

  "Believe it."

  "It can't be that simple."

  "Maybe not. But there are a thousand SSA plates out there, and two hundred and seventy-two of them are pickups. And what I got from the deaf guy sounded pretty good."

  Anderson came in with two Styrofoam cups full of coffee. He sat down and started drinking alternately from the two cups. "You get the stuff?"

  "They're faring it to you."

  "There oughta be a better way to do this," Anderson said. "Tie everything together. You oughta get your company to write some software."

  "Yeah, yeah, let's go get it."

  Greave, wearing jeans and T-shirt, caught up with them as they walked through the darkened hallways to Anderson's cubicle in homicide.

  Lucas explained to him as they walked along the hall. "So we'll look at everything Anderson can pump out of his databases. Looking for a cop, or anybody with a prison record, particularly for sex crimes or anything that resembles cat burglary."

  At four o'clock in the morning, having found nothing at all, Lucas and Connell walked down to the coffee machine together.

  "How're you feeling?"

  "A little better today. Yesterday wasn't so good."

  "Huh." They watched the coffee dribble into a cup, and Lucas didn't know quite what to say. So he said, "There's a lot more paper than I thought there'd be. I hope we can get through it."

  "We will," Connell said. She sipped her coffee and watched Lucas's dribble into the second cup. "I can't believe you figured that out.

  I can't see how it occurred to you to check."

  Lucas thought of Heather's ass, grinned, and said, "It sorta came to me."

  "You know, when I first saw you, I thought you were a suit. You know, a suit, " she said. "Big guy, kind of neat-looking in a jockstrap way, buys good suits, gets along with the ladies, backslaps the good old boys, and he cruises to the top."

  "Change your mind?"

  "Partially," she said. She said it pensively, as though it were an academic question. "I still think there might be some of thatþbut now I think that, in some ways, you're smarter than I am. Not a suit."

  Lucas was embarrassed. "I don't think I'm smarter than you are," he mumbled.

  "Don't take the compliment too seriously," Connell said dryly. "I said in some ways. In other ways, you're still a suit."

  At six o'clock in the morning, with the flat early light cutting sharp through the window like summer icicles, Greave looked up from a stack of paper, rubbed his reddened eyes, and said, "Here's something pretty interesting."

  "Yeah?" Lucas looked up. They had seven possibilities, none particularly inspiring. One cop, one security guard.

  "Guy named Robert Koop. He was a prison guard until six years ago.

  Drives a 92

  Chevy S- 10, red over white, no security agreement, net purchase price of $17,340."

  "Sounds like a possibility," Connell said.

  "If he was a prison guard, he probably doesn't have the big bucks," Greave said, as though he were thinking aloud. "He says he works at a gym called Two Guy's...."

  know the place," Lucas said.

  "And he declares income of fifteen thousand a year since he left the prison. Where does he get off driving a new seventeen-thousand-dollar truck? And he paid cash, over a seven-thousand-dollar trade-in."

  "Huh." Lucas came over to look at the printout, and Connell heaved herself out of her chair. "Lives in Apple Valley. Houses out there probably average what, one-fifty?"

  "One-fifty for a house and a twenty-three-thousand-dollar truck is pretty good, on fifteen thousand a year."

  "Probably skips lunch," Greave said.

  "Several times a day," Lucas said. "Where's his license information?"

  "Right here..." Greave folded over several sheets, found it.

  "Five-ten, one-ninety," Lucas said. "Short and heavy."

  "Maybe short and strong," Connell said. "Like our guy."

  "What's his plate number?" Anderson called. His hands were playing across his keyboard. They had limited access to intelligence division's raw data files. Lucas read it off the title application, and Anderson punched it into the computer.

  A second later he said, surprise in his voice, "Jesus, we got a hit."

  "What?" This was the first they'd had. Lucas and Connell drifted over to Anderson to look over his shoulder. When the file came up, they found a long list of license plates picked up outside Steve's Fireside City.

  Intelligence believed that the stove and fireplace store was a front for a fence, but never got enough to make an arrest.

  "High-level fence," Lucas said, reading between the lines of the intelligence report. "Somebody who would be moving jewelry, Rolexes, that kind of thing. No stereos or VCRs." "Maybe he was buying a fireplace," Greave said.

  "Couldn't afford one, after the truck," Lucas said. He took his phone book out of his coat pocket, thumbed through it. "Tommy Smythe, Tommy

  .." He picked up a telephone and dialed, and
a moment later said, "Mrs. Smythe? This is Lucas Davenport, Minneapolis Police. Sorry to bother you, but I need to talk to Tommy... Oh, jeer, I'm sorry.