Night Prey

by John Sandford

  "What do you mean?"

  "I'm afraid to touch you. With the ribs." She had tears in her eyes.

  need to touch you, and I don't know what to do."

  "Come over and sit on my lap," he said. "Just sit very carefully."

  "Lucas, I can't. I'd push on you," she said. She stepped closer.

  "It'll be okay, as long as I don't move quick. It's quick that hurts.

  If you sort of snuggle onto my lap...."

  "If you're sure it won't hurt," she said.

  The snuggling hurt only a little, and made everything feel better.

  He closed his eyes after a while and went to sleep, with her head on his chest.

  At six o'clock, they watched the news together.

  Roux triumphant.

  And generous, and sorrowful, all at once. She paraded the detectives who worked on the case, all except Del, who hated his face to be seen.

  She mentioned Lucas a half-dozen times as the mastermind of the investigation. She painted a mournful portrait of Connell struggling for women's rights, dedicating herself to the destruction of the monster.

  The mayor spoke. The head of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension took a large slice of the credit. The president of the AFSCME said she could never be replaced. Connell's mother flew in from Bimidji, and cried.

  Wonderful television, much of it anchored by Jan Reed.

  was so scared," Heather said. "When they called..."

  "Poor Connell," Lucas said. Reed had great eyes.

  "Fuck Connell," Heather said. "And fuck you too. I was scared for myself. I didn't know what I'd do if you'd been-killed."

  "You want me to quit the cops?"

  She looked at him, smiled, and said, "No."

  Another television report showed the front of Lucas's house. Why, he didn't know. Another was shot from the roof of the apartment across the street from Jensen's, looking right into Jensen's place. The word fishbowl was used.

  "Makes my blood run cold," Heather said. She shivered.

  "Hard to believe," Lucas said. "A hot-blooded Finn."

  "Well, it does. It's absolutely chilling."

  Lucas looked at her, thought about her ass, that day in the bathroom.

  The aesthetic ass that led to all of this...

  Lucas urged her off his lap, stood up, creaking, hurting. He stretched carefully, like an old arthritic tomcat, one piece at a time, and suddenly his smile flicked on and he looked happy.

  The change was so sudden that Heather actually stepped away from him.

  "What?" she asked. Maybe the pain had flipped him out. "You better sit down."

  "You're a beautiful woman, with a good mind and a better-thanaverage ass," he said.

  "What?" Really perplexed.

  gotta run into town," he said.

  "Lucas, you can't." Angry now.

  "I'm stoned on Advil," he said. "I'll be all right. Besides, the docs said I'm not that badly injured, I'm just gonna have a little pain."

  "Lucas, I've had a broken rib," she said. "I know what it feels like.

  What could be important enough... ?"

  "It's important," he said. "And it won't take long. When I get back, you can kiss the hurt for me."

  He walked very carefully down toward the garage, feeling each and every bruise. Heather tagged behind. "Maybe I should drive you."

  "No, I'm okay, really," he said. In the kitchen, he picked up the phone, dialed, got homicide and asked for Greave. Greave picked up.

  "Man, I thought you were incommunicado," Greave said.

  "You know that kid that does chores over at the Eisenhower Docks?"

  Lucas asked.

  "Yeah?"

  "Get him. Hold him there. I'll meet you in the lobby. And bring one of the cellulars, I'm gonna want to make a phone call."

  Greave was waiting in the lobby when Lucas arrived. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt under a light wool sports jacket, with his pistol clipped over his left front pelvic point, like Lucas. The kid was sitting in a plastic chair, looking scared. "What's going on, sir?" he asked.

  "Let's go up on the roof," Lucas said, leading them toward the elevator. Inside, he pushed the button for the top floor.

  "What're we doing up there?" Greave asked. "You've got something?"

  "Well, Koop's gone, so we oughta solve this case," Lucas said.

  "Since the kid here won't talk, I thought we'd hold him off the roof by his ankles until he gave us something we could use."

  "Sir?" The kid squeezed back against the elevator wall.

  "Just kidding," Lucas said. He grinned, painfully, but the kid still pressed against the wall of the elevator. From the top floor, they walked up the short flight of stairs to the roof, wedged the door open, and Lucas asked, "Did you bring the phone?"

  "Yeah." Greave fumbled in his pocket and pulled it out. "Tell me, goddamnit."

  Lucas walked to the air-conditioner housing. The housing was new, no sign of rust on its freshly painted metal. "When did they put this in?" he asked the kid.

  "When they were remodeling the building. A year ago, maybe."

  High up on the edge of it was the manufacturer's tag with a service phone number, just like the tag he'd seen on the air conditioner across from Sara Jensen's building. Lucas opened the portable and dialed the number.

  "Lucas Davenport, deputy chief, Minneapolis Police Department," he told the woman who answered. "I need to talk to the service manager.

  Yeah, it has to do with repair work on one of your installations."

  Greave and the kid watched him as he waited, then: "Yes, Davenport, D-a-v-e-n-p-o-r-t. We're conducting a homicide investigation. We need to know if you repaired an air conditioner at the Eisenhower Docks apartment complex last month. You installed it about a year ago.

  Huh? Uh, well, you could call the department and ask. Then you could call me back... Okay." Lucas looked at Greave, his ear to the phone.

  To Greave he said, grinning, "He's got to call up a listing on his computer, but he doesn't remember it."

  "What?" Greave was as perplexed as Heather. He looked at the air conditioner, then at the kid. The kid shrugged.

  Lucas said into the phone, "You didn't? Isn't it under warranty?

  Un-huh. And that would cover all repairs, right? Okay. Listen, a detective named Greave will be coming over to take a statement from you later today. We'll try to make it before five o'clock."

  Lucas rang off, folded the phone, handed it back to Greave, and looked at the kid. "When I talked to you, you said you were helping Ray with the air-conditioning."

  "Yeah. It was broke."

  "But nobody came from the air-conditioner company?"

  "Not that I saw." The kid swallowed.

  "What'd you do to it?" Lucas asked.

  "Well, I don't know. I just handed him screwdrivers and helped him take shit apart. Sir."

  "The ducts."

  "Those big tubes," the kid said. Ducts wasn't solid in his vocabulary.

  "You didn't mess with the motor or anything."

  "No, sir, not me. Not anybody. Just the tubes."

  "What?" asked Greave. "What? What?"

  "They froze her," Lucas said.

  Greave half-smiled. "You're fuckin' joking."

  "Well. Not exactly froze. They killed her with hypothermia,'' Lucas said. "She was an older woman, underweight because of her thyroid condition. She took sleeping pills every night with a beer, or maybe two. Cherry knew about the pills and the booze. She apparently joked about her medicine. So he watched her window until her lights went out, waited a half hour, and turned on the air-conditioning. They pumped cold air meant for the entire building into that one apartment.

  I bet it was colder in her apartment than the inside of a refrigerator."

  "Jesus," Greave said, scratching his chin. "Would that do it?"

  Lucas nodded. "Everybody says it was hot inside, because the air-conditioning was broken. The pictures of the body sXhowed her curled up on a sheet, no blanket, becau
se it was hot when she lay down.

  By age and body weight, she was the kind of person most susceptible to hypothermia," Lucas said. "The only thing that would make somebody even more susceptible is booze."

  Greave said, "Huh."

  "The thing that cinches it," Lucas said, "is that the cheapest goddamn real estate hustlers in town never called for warranty service. The air conditioner is covered. The service guy just told me that they'll fix anything that goes wrong for five years. He said if a screw falls out of the housing, they'd come out and put it back in."

  don't see..." Greave said, still not believing.

  "Think about the body shots again, the photographs," Lucas said.

  "She was on her side, curled, fetal position, as if she might have been cold, and unconsciously trying to protect herself. But the drugs knocked her down and out. She couldn't get back up. And it worked: they killed her.

  Not only did it work, there was no sign of what they did. No toxicology.

  The doors were bolted, the windows were locked, the motion sensors were armed. They killed her with cold."

  Greave looked at the kid. The kid said, "Jeer. I helped Ray disconnect all them tubes and put them back together, but I didn't know what he was doing."

  "They ran the air conditioner after he pulled the tubes, I bet," Lucas said.

  "Yeah. They said they was testing it," the kid said.

  "Kiss my ass," said Greave, a sudden light in his eye. "They froze the old bat. A batsicle."

  think so," Lucas said.

  "Can I bust them?" Greave asked. "Let me bust em, huh?"

  "It's your case," Lucas said. "But if I were you, I'd think about playing them off against each other. Offer one of them a plea.

  They're all assholes, every one of them. Now that you know how they did it, one of them'll turn on the others."

  "Froze her," Greave said, marveling.

  "Yeah," Lucas said, looking around off the roof at the city. He could see just a sliver of the Mississippi in the distance. "It makes your blood run cold, doesn't it?"

  Lucas stopped to talk to Roux, and told her about the batsicle. "Is your butt saved?"

  "For the time being," she said. She sounded unhappy. "But you know

  ."

  "What?"

  She had a half-inch-thick sheaf of paper in her hands. "We've had seven bank robberies in the last two months, by the same people. There were two here in town, one in St. Paul, four in various suburbs. I'm starting to get some heat from the banking community."

  "That's supposed to be the Feds," Lucas said. "The Feds do banks."

  "The Feds don't want to run for the Senate," Roux said.

  "Oh, my achin' ass..." Lucas groaned.

  As he was leaving, he ran into Jan Reed, looking very good. "Oh, my God, I was worried," she said, and she looked worried. She touched his chest with an open hand. "I heard you got banged around pretty badly."

  "Not that bad," he said. He tried to chuckle in a manly way, but winced.

  "You look beat up," she said. She glanced at her watch. "I've got an hour before I've got to be back at the station.... Would you have time to finish that croissant and coffee we started last time?"

  Jesus, she was pretty.

  "God, I'd like to," Lucas said. "But, you know... I gotta go home."

  The End