Night Prey

by John Sandford

"Hello," he said.

  The woman pushing the buggy had her hair in curlers, covered with a rayon scarf. The other one had dishwater-blonde hair with streaks of copper through it. They stopped. "Are you police?"

  Neighbors always knew.

  "Yes. Have you seen Mr. Koop recently?"

  "What'd he do?" asked the copper-streaked one. The kid in the buggy was sucking on a blue pacifier, looking fixedly at Lucas with pale-blue eyes. h "He's been arrested in connection with a burglary," Lucas said.F "Told you," Copper Streak said to Hair Curler. To Lucas, she said, "We always knew he was a criminal."

  "Why? What'd he do?"

  "Never got up in the morning," she said. "You'd hardly ever see him at all. Sometimes, when he put his garbage out. That was it. He was never in his yard. His garage door would go up, always in the afternoon, and he'd drive away. Then he'd come back in the middle of the night, like three o'clock in the morning, and the garage door would go up, and he'd be inside. You never saw him. The only time I ever saw him, except for garbage, was that Halloween snowstorm a couple of years ago. He came out and shoveled his driveway. After that, he always had a service do it."

  "Did he have a beard?"

  Copper Streak looked at Hair Curler, and they both looked back at Lucas. "Sure. He's always had one."

  One more thing, Lucas thought. They talked for another minute, then Lucas broke away and went inside.

  Connell was in the kitchen, scribbling notes on a yellow pad.

  "Anything?" Lucas asked.

  "Not much. How about the truck?"

  "Nothing so far. No weapon?"

  "Kitchen knives. But this guy isn't using a kitchen knife. I'd be willing to bet on it."

  just talked to a couple of neighbors," Lucas said. "They say he's always had a beard."

  "Huh." Connell pursed her lips. "That's interesting... C'mere, down the basement." Lucas followed her down a short flight of stairs off the kitchen. The basement was finished. To the left, through an open door, Lucas could see a washer, dryer, laundry sink, and a water heater, sitting on a tiled floor. The furnace would be back here too, out of sight. The larger end of the basement was carpeted with a seventies-era twotone shag. A couch, a chair, and a coffee table with a lamp pressed against the walls. The center of the rug was dominated by a plastic painter's drop cloth, ten feet by about thirteen or fourteen, laid flat on the rug. A technician was vacuuming around the edges of the drop cloth.

  "Was that plastic sheet like that?" Lucas asked.

  "No. I put it there," Connell said. "C'mere and look at the windows."

  The windows were blacked out with sheets of quarter-inch plywood.

  went outside and looked," Connell said. "He's painted the outside of them black, so unless you get down on your knees and look into the window wells, it just looks like the basement is dark. He went to a lot of trouble with it: the edges are caulked."

  "Yeah?"

  "Yeah." She looked down the sheet. "I think this is where he killed Wannemaker. On a piece of plastic. There're a couple of three-packs of drop cloths in the utility room. One of them is unopened. The other one only had one cloth in it. I was walking around down here, and it looked to me like the rug was matted in a rectangle. Then I noticed the furniture: it's set up to look at something in the middle of the rug.

  When I saw the drop cloths..." She shrugged. "I laid it out, and it fit perfectly."

  "Jesus..." Lucas looked at the tech. "Anything?"

  The tech nodded and said, "A ton of shit: I don't think the rug's ever been cleaned, and it must've been installed fifteen years ago. It's gonna be a goddamned nightmare, sorting everything out."

  "Well, it's something, anyway," Lucas said.

  "There's one other thing," Connell said. "Up in the bedroom."

  Lucas followed her back up the stairs. Koop's bedroom was spare, almost military, though the bed was unmade and smelled of sweat. Lucas saw it right away: on the chest of drawers, a bottle of Opium.

  Lucas: "You didn't touch it?"

  "Not yet. But it wouldn't make any difference."

  "Jensen said he took it from her place. If her fingerprints are on.....

  called her. Her bottle was a half-ounce. She always gets herself a half-ounce at Christmas because it lasts almost exactly a year."

  Lucas peered at the perfume bottle: a quarter-ounce. "She's sure?"

  "She's sure. Damnit, I thought we had him."

  "We should check it anyway," Lucas said. "Maybe she's wrong."

  "Yeah, we'll checkþbut she was sure. Which brings up the question, why Opium? Does he obsess on the perfume? Does the perfume attract him somehow? Or did he go out and buy some of his own, to remind him of Jensen?"

  "Huh," Lucas said.

  "Well? Is it the perfume or the woman?" She looked at him, expecting to pull a rabbit out of a hat. Maybe he could. Lucas closed his eyes.

  After a moment, he said, "It's because Jensen uses it. He's creeping into her apartment in the dark, goes into her bedroom, and something sets him off. The perfume. Or maybe seeing her there. But the perfume really brings it back to him. It's possible, if he's really freaked out, that he used everything in the bottle he stole from her."

  "Do you think it's enough? The beard being shaved, and the perfume bottle?"

  He shook his head. "No. We've got to find something. One thing."

  Connell moved around until she was looking straight into Lucas's eyes from no more than two feet. Her face was waxy, pale, like a dinner candle. "I was sick again this morning. In two weeks, I won't be able to walk. I'll be back in chemo, I'll start shedding hair. I won't be able to think straight."

  "Jesus, Meagan...."

  want the sonofabitch, Lucas," she said. "I don't want to be dead in a hole and have him walking around laughing. You know he's the one, I know he's the one."

  "So?"

  "So we gotta talk. We gotta figure something out."

  Koop got out of jail a few minutes after noon, blinking in the bright sunshine, his lawyer walking behind, a sport coat over his shoulder, talking.

  Koop was very close to the edge. He felt as though he had a large crack in his head, that it was about to split in half, that a wet gray worm would spill out, a worm the size of a vacuum-cleaner hose.

  He didn't like jail. He didn't like it at all.

  "Remember, not a thing to anybody, okay?" the lawyer said, shaking his finger into the air. He'd learned not to shake it at his clients: one had almost pulled it off. He was repeating the warning for at least the twentieth time, and Koop nodded for the twentieth time, not hearing him.

  He was looking around at the outdoors, feeling the tension falling away, as though he were coming unwrapped, like a mummy getting its sheet pulled.

  Jesus. His head was really out of control. "Okay."

  "There's nothing you can say to the cops that would help you.

  Nothing.

  If you want to talk to somebody, talk to me, and if it's important, I'll talk to them. Okay?"

  "No deals," Koop said. "I don't want to hear about no fuckin' deals."

  "Is there any chance you can find the guy who sold you the stuff?"

  The lawyer looked like a mailman on PCP. Ordinary enough, but everything in his face too tight, too stretched. And though each of his words was enunciated clearly, there were far too many of them, spoken too quickly, a torrent of "I thinks" and "Maybe we'd bests."

  Koop couldn't keep up with them all, and had begun ignoring them.

  "What do you think, huh? Any chance you could find him? Any chance?"

  Koop finally heard him, and shrugged, and said, "Maybe. But what should I do if I find him? Call the cops?"

  "No-no. Nuh-nuh-no. No. No. You call me. You don't talk to the cops."

  The lawyer's eyes were absolutely flat, like old pasteboard poker chips.

  Koop suspected he didn't believe a word of his story.

  Koop had told him that he bought the diamond cross and the matching earrings from a white boyþliteral
ly a boy, a teenagerþ wearing a Minnesota National Guard fatigue shirt, who hung around the Duck Inn, in Hopkins. The kid had a big bunch of dark hair and an earring, Koop had said. He said he bought the brooch and earrings for $200. The kid knew he was getting ripped off, but didn't know what else to do with them.

  "How do we explain that you sold them to Schultz?" the attorney had asked.

  Koop had said, "Hell, everybody knows Schultz. The cops call him Just Plain Schultz. If you've got something you want to sell, and you're not quite sure where it came from, you talk to Schultz. If I was really a smart burglar like the cops said, I sure as shit would never have gone to him. He's practically on their payroll."

  The attorney had looked at him for a long time, and then said, "Okay.

  Okay. Okay. So you've been out of steady work since the recession started, except for this gig at the gym, and you saw a chance to pick up a few bucks, took it, and now you're sorry. Okay?"

  That had been fine with Koop.

  Now, with the lawyer following him out of the jail, babbling, Koop put his hands over his ears, pushed his head together. The lawyer stepped back, asked, "Are you all right?"

  "Don't like that place," Koop said, looking back over his shoulder.

  Koop hurt. Almost every muscle in his body hurt. He could handle the first part of the detention. He could handle the bend-over-andspread-'em. But he could feel his blood draining away the closer he got to a cell. They'd had to urge him inside the cell, prod him, and once inside, the door locked, he'd sat for a moment, the fear climbing up into his throat.

  "Motherfucker," he'd said aloud, looking at the corners of the cells.

  Everything was so dose. And pushing in. He could have gone over the edge at that moment. Instead, he started doing sit-ups, push-ups, bridges, deep knee bends, toe-raises, push-offs, leg lifts. He did step-ups onto the bunk until his legs quit He'd never worked so hard in his life, he didn't stop until his muscles simply quit on him. Then he slept, he dreamed of boxes with hands and holes with teeth. He dreamed of bars. When he woke up, he started working again.

  Halfway through the next morning, they'd taken him down to his lawyer.

  The lawyer'd said the cops had his truck, had searched his house.

  "Is this charge the only thing you see coming? The only thing, the only thing?" he'd asked. He seemed a bit puzzled. "The cops are all over you.

  All over you. This chargeþthis is minor shit. Minor shit."

  "Nothing else I know of," Koop said. But he thought, Shit. Maybe they knew something else.

  The lawyer met him again at the courthouse, for the arraignment.

  He waived a preliminary hearing at the advice of the lawyer. The arraignment was quick, routine: five thousand dollars bail, the bail bondsman right there to take the assignment of his truck.

  "Don't fuck with the truck," Koop said to the bail bondsman. "I'll be coming to you with the cash, as soon as I get it."

  "Yeah, sure," the bondsman said. He said it negligently. He'd heard all this too many times.

  "Don't fuck with it," Koop snarled.

  The bondsman didn't like Koop's tone, and opened his mouth to say something smart, but then he saw Koop's eyes and understood that he was a very short distance from death. He said, "We won't touch it," and he meant it. Koop turned away, and the bondsman swallowed and wondered why they'd let an animal like that out of jail once they had him in.

  Koop had not decided what to do. Not exactly. But he knew for sure that he wouldn't be going back to jail. He couldn't handle that. Jail was death. There would be no deals, nothing that would put him inside.

  There was an excellent chance he'd be acquitted, his attorney said: the state's case seemed to be based entirely on Schultz's testimony.

  "In fact, I'm surprised they bothered to arrest you. Surprised," the attorney said.

  If he was convicted, though, Koop'd have to do some small amount of timeþcertainly not a year, although technically he could get six years.

  After the conviction, the state would continue bail through a presentencing investigation. He'd be free for at least another month....

  But if he was convicted, Koop knew, he'd be gone. Mexico. Canada.

  Alaska. Somewhere. No more jail....

  The attorney had told him where he could get the truck. "I checked, and they're finished with it." He needed the truck. The truck was his, gave him security. But what if the cops had him on some kind of watch list?

  What if they tagged him to the bank, where he had his stash? He needed to get at the stash, for the money to pay the bondsman.

  Wait, wait, wait....

  The trial wasn't even going to be for a month. He didn't have to do anything in the next fifteen minutes. If they were watching him, he'd spot it. Unless they'd bugged the truck. Koop put his hands to his head and pushed: holding it together.

  He got the truck backþit was all routine, clerical, the bureaucrats didn't give a shit, as long as you had the paperþand drove to his house.

  Two of the neighborhood cunts were walking on the street and stepped up on a lawn when they saw him coming, wrenching a baby buggy up on the grass with them.

  Bitches, he mouthed at them.

  He pushed the button on the garage-door opener when he was still a half-block away, and rolled straight into the garage stall, the door dropping behind him. He took ten minutes to walk around the house.

  The cops had been all over the place. Things were moved, and hadn't been put back quite right. Nothing was trashed. Nothing was missing, as far as he could tell. The basement looked untouched.

  He walked through the front room. An armchair sat facing the television. "Cocksucker," he screamed. He kicked the side of it, and the fabric caved in. Koop, breathing hard, looked around the room, at the long wall reaching down toward the bedrooms. Sheetrock. A slightly dirty, inoffensive beige. "Cocksucker," he screamed at it.

  He hit the wall with his fist, the sheetrock caved in, a hole like a crater on the moon. "Cocksucker." Struck again, another hole.

  "Cocksucker..."

  Screaming, punching, he moved sideways down the hall, stopped only when he was at the end of it, looked back. Nine holes, fist-size, shoulder height. And pain. Dazed, he looked at his hand: the knuckles were a pulp of blood. He put the knuckles to his mouth, licked them off, sucked on them. Tasted good, the blood.

  Breathing hard, blowing like a horse, Koop staggered back to the bedroom, sucking his knuckles as he went.

  In the bedroom, the first thing he saw was the bottle of Opium, sitting on the chest. He unscrewed the top, sniffed it, closed his eyes, saw her.

  White nightgown, black triangle, full lips...

  Koop put some Opium on his fingertips, dabbed it under his nose, stood swaying with his eyes closed, just visiting....

  Finally, with the dreamlike odor of Sara Jensen playing with his mind, and the pain in his hand helping to reorder it, he got a flashlight and went back out to the garage. He began working through the truck, inch by inch, bolt by bolt, sucking his knuckles when the blood got too thick....

  Lucas hovered in the men's accessories, next to the cologne, | behind a rotating rack of wallets, keeping the top of Koop's _J head in sight.

  He carried a fat leather briefoase. Koop loitered in the men's sportswear, his hands in his pockets, touching nothing, not really looking.

  Connell beeped. "What's he doing?"

  "Killing time," Lucas said. A short elderly lady stopped to look at him, and he turned away. "Can you see him?"

  "He's two aisles over."

  "Careful. You're too close. Sloan?"

  "Yeah, I got him. I'm going over to the north exit. That's the closest way out now. I'll go on through the skyway if he moves that way."

  "Good. Del?"

  "Just coming up to sportswear. I can't see him, but I'm right across from Connell. I can see Connell."

  "You're real close to him. He's behind the shirt rack," Connell chirped.

  "Excuse me, could you tell m
e where men's bathrobes are?" Lucas turned around, and looked down at the short elderly lady. She had ear curls like a lamb, and small thick glasses.

  "Down by that post where you see the Exit sign," Lucas said.

  "Thank you," she said, and tottered away.

  Lucas angled through Ralph Lauren into Guess. A blond woman in a black dress stepped up to him and said, "Escape?" "What?" He stepped toward her, and she stepped back and held up a cylindrical bottle as though she were defending herself.