Night Prey ld-6

by John Sandford

  Harriet Wannemaker was frankly interested in a drink at McClellan’s: she had color in her face, the warmth of excitement. She’d meet him there, the slightly dangerous man with the mossy red beard.

  He left before she did. His nerves were up now. He hadn’t made a move yet, he was still okay, nothing to worry about. Had anybody noticed them talking? He didn’t think so. She was so colorless, who cared? In a few minutes…

  The pressure was a physical thing, a heaviness in his gut, an inflated feeling in his chest, a pain in the back of his neck. He thought about heading home, ditching the woman. But he wouldn’t. There was another pressure, a more demanding one. His hand trembled on the steering wheel. He parked the truck on Sixth, on the hill, opened the door. Took a nervous breath. Still time to leave…

  He fished under the seat, found the can of ether and the plastic bag with the rag. He opened the can, poured it quickly into the bag, and capped the can. The smell of the ether was nauseating, but it dissipated in a second. In the sealed bag, it quickly soaked into the rag. Where was she?

  She came a few seconds later, parked down the hill from him, behind the truck, spent a moment in the car, primping. A beer sign in McClellan’s side window, flickering with a bad bulb, was the biggest light around, up at the top of the hill. He could still back out…

  No. Do it.

  Sara Jensen had tasted of perspiration and perfume… tasted good.

  Sara moved when he licked her, and he stepped back, stepped away, toward the door… and stopped. She said something, a nonsense syllable, and he stepped quickly but silently out the door to his shoes: not quite running, but his heart was hammering. He slipped the shoes on, picked up his bag.

  And stopped again. The key to cat burglary was simple: go slow. If it seems like you might be getting in trouble, go slower. And if things get really bad, run like hell. Koop collected himself. No point in running if she wasn’t waking up, no sense in panic-but he was thinking asshole asshole asshole.

  But she wasn’t coming. She’d gone back down again, down into sleep; and though Koop couldn’t see it-he was leaving the apartment, slowly closing the door behind himself-the line of saliva on her forehead glistened in the moonlight, cool on her skin as it evaporated.

  Koop slipped the plastic bag in his coat pocket, stepped to the back of his truck, and popped the camper door.

  Heart beating hard now…

  “Hi,” she called. Fifteen feet away. Blushing? “I wasn’t sure you could make it.”

  She was afraid he’d ditch her. He almost had. She was smiling, shy, maybe a little afraid but more afraid of loneliness…

  Nobody around…

  Now it had him. A darkness moved on him-literally a darkness, a kind of fog, an anger that seemed to spring up on its own, like a vagrant wind. He unrolled the plastic bag, slipped his hand inside; the ether-soaked rag was cold against his skin.

  With a smile on his face, he said, “Hey, what’s a drink. C’mon. And hey, look at this…”

  He turned as if to point something out to her; that put him behind her, a little to the right, and he wrapped her up and smashed the rag over her nose and mouth, and lifted her off the ground; she kicked, like a strangling squirrel, though from a certain angle, they might have been lovers in a passionate clutch; in any case, she only struggled for a moment…

  Sara Jensen hit the snooze button on the alarm clock, rolled over, holding her pillow. She’d been smiling when the alarm went off. The smile faded only slowly: the peculiar nightmare hovered at the back of her mind. She couldn’t quite recover it, but it was there, like a footstep in an attic, threatening…

  She took a deep breath, willing herself to get up, not quite wanting to. Just before she woke, she’d been dreaming of Evan Hart. Hart was an attorney in the bond department. He wasn’t exactly a romantic hero, but he was attractive, steady, and had a nice wit-though she suspected that he suppressed it, afraid that he might put her off. He didn’t know her well. Not yet.

  He had nice hands. Solid, long fingers that looked both strong and sensitive. He’d touched her once, on the nose, and she could almost feel it, lying here in her bed, a little warm. Hart was a widower, with a young daughter. His wife had died in an auto accident four years earlier. Since the accident, he’d been preoccupied with grief and with raising the child. The office gossip had him in two quick, nasty affairs with the wrong women. He was ready for the right one.

  And he was hanging around.

  Sara Jensen was divorced; the marriage had been a one-year mistake, right after college. No kids. But the breakup had been a shock. She’d thrown herself into her work, had started moving up. But now…

  She smiled to herself. She was ready, she thought. Something permanent; something for a lifetime. She dozed, just for five minutes, dreaming of Evan Hart and his hands, a little bit warm, a little bit in love…

  And the nightmare drifted back. A man with a cigarette at the corner of his mouth, watching her from the dark. She shrank away… and the alarm went off again. Sara touched her forehead, frowned, sat up, looked around the room, threw back the blankets with the sense that something was wrong.

  “Hello?” she called out, but she knew she was alone. She went to use the bathroom, but paused in the doorway. Something… what?

  The dream? She’d been sweating in the dream; she remembered wiping her forehead with the back of her hand. But that didn’t seem right…

  She flushed the toilet and headed for the front room with the image still in her mind: sweating, wiping her forehead…

  Her jewelry box sat on the floor in the middle of the front room, the drawers dumped. She said aloud, “How’d that get there?”

  For just a moment, she was confused. Had she taken it out last night, had she been sleepwalking? She took another step, saw a small mound of jewelry set to one side, all the cheap stuff.

  And then she knew.

  She stepped back, the shock climbing up through her chest, the adrenaline pouring into her bloodstream. Without thinking, she brought the back of her hand to her face, to her nose, and smelled the nicotine and the other…

  The what?

  Saliva.

  “No.” She screamed it, her mouth open, her eyes wide.

  She convulsively wiped her hand on the robe, wiped it again, wiped her sleeve across her forehead, which felt as if it were crawling with ants. Then she stopped, looked up, expecting to see him-to see him materializing from the kitchen, from a closet, or even, like a golem, from the carpet or the wooden floors. She twisted this way, then that, and backed frantically toward the kitchen, groping for the telephone.

  Screaming as she went.

  Screaming.

  CHAPTER

  2

  Lucas Davenport held the badge case out the driver’s-side window. The pimply-faced suburban cop lifted the yellow plastic crime-scene tape and waved him through the line. He rolled the Porsche past the fire trucks, bumped over a flattened canvas hose, and stopped on a charred patch of dirt that a few hours earlier had been a lawn. A couple of firemen, drinking coffee, turned to check out the car.

  The phone beeped as he climbed out, and he bent down to pull it off the visor. When he stood up, the stink from the fire hit him: the burned plaster, insulation, paint, and old rotting wood.

  “Yeah? Davenport.”

  Lucas was a tall man with heavy shoulders, dark-complected, square-faced, with the beginnings of crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes. His dark hair was just touched with gray; his eyes were a startling blue. A thin white scar crossed his forehead and right eye socket, and trailed down to the corner of his mouth. He looked like a veteran athlete, a catcher or a hockey defenseman, recently retired.

  A newer pink scar showed just above the knot of his necktie.

  “This is Sloan. Dispatch said you were at the fire.” Sloan sounded hoarse, as though he had a cold.

  “Just got here,” Lucas said, looking at the burned-out Quonset.

  “Wait for me. I’m coming ove
r.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “We’ve got another problem,” Sloan said. “I’ll talk to you when I get there.”

  Lucas hung the phone back on the visor, slammed the door, and turned to the burned-out building. The warehouse had been a big light-green World War II Quonset hut, mostly galvanized steel. The fire had been so hot that the steel sheets had twisted, buckled, and folded back on themselves, like giant metallic tacos.

  With pork.

  Lucas touched his throat, the pink scar where the child had shot him just before she had been chopped to pieces by the M-16. That case had started with a fire, with the same stink, with the same charred-pork smell that he now caught drifting from the torched-out hulk. Pork-not-pork.

  He touched the scar again and started toward the blackened tangle of fallen struts. A cop was dead inside the tangle, the first call had said, his hands trussed behind his back. Then Del had called in, said the cop was one of his contacts. Lucas had better come out, although the scene was outside the Minneapolis jurisdiction. The suburban cops were walking around with grim one-of-us looks on their face. Enough cops had died around Lucas that he no longer made much distinction between them and civilians, as long as they weren’t friends of his.

  Del was stepping gingerly through the charred interior. He was unshaven, as usual, and wore a charcoal-gray sweatshirt over jeans and cowboy boots. He saw Lucas and waved him inside. “He was already dead,” Del said. “Before the fire got to him.”

  Lucas nodded. “How?”

  “They wired his wrists and shot him in the teeth, looks like three, four shots in the fuckin’ teeth from all we can tell in that goddamned nightmare,” Del said, unconsciously dry-washing his hands. “He saw it coming.”

  “Yeah, Jesus, man, I’m sorry,” Lucas said. The dead cop was a Hennepin County deputy. Earlier in the year, he’d spent a month with Del, trying to learn the streets. He and Del had almost become friends.

  “I warned him about the teeth: no goddamned street people got those great big white HMO teeth,” Del said, sticking a cigarette into his face. Del’s teeth were yellowed pegs. “I told him to pick some other front. Anything would have been better. He coulda been a car-parts salesman or a bartender, or anything. He had to be a fuckin’ street guy.”

  “Yeah… so what’d you want?”

  “Got a match?” Del asked.

  “You wanted a match?”

  Del grinned past the unlit cigarette and said, “C’mon inside. Look at something.”

  Lucas followed him through the warehouse, down a narrow pathway through holes in half-burned partitions, past stacks of charred wooden pallets. Toward the back, he could see the black plastic sheet where the body was, and the stench of burned pork grew sharper. Del took him to a fallen plasterboard interior wall, where the remnants of a narrow wooden box held three small-diameter pipes, each about five feet long.

  “Are these what I think they are?” Del asked.

  Lucas squatted next to the box, picked up one of the pipes, looked at the screw-threading at one end, tipped up the other end, and looked inside at the rifling. “Yeah, they are-if you think they’re fifty-cal replacement barrels.” He dropped the barrel back on the others, duckwalked a couple of feet to another flattened box, picked up a piece of machinery. “This is a lock,” he said. “Bolt-action single-shot fifty-cal. Broken. Looks like a stress-line crack, bad piece of steel… What was in this place?”

  “A machine shop, supposedly.”

  “Yeah, a machine shop,” Lucas said. “They were turning out these locks, I bet. Gettin’ the barrels from somewhere else-you wouldn’t normally see them on single-shots, they’re too heavy. We ought to have the identification guys look at them, see if we can figure out where they came from, and who got them at this end.” He dropped the broken lock on the floor, stood up, and tipped his head toward the body. “What was this guy into?”

  “The Seeds, is what his friends say.”

  Lucas, exasperated, shook his head. “All we need is those assholes hanging around.”

  “They’re getting into politics,” Del said. “Want to kill themselves some black folks.”

  “Yeah. You want to look into this?”

  “That’s why I got you out here,” Del said, nodding. “You see the guns, you smell the pork, how can you say no?”

  “All right. But you check with me every fuckin’ fifteen minutes,” Lucas said, tapping him on the chest. “I want to know everything you’re doing. Every name you find, every face you see. Any sign of trouble, you back away and talk to me. They’re dumb motherfuckers, but they’ll kill you.”

  Del nodded, said, “You’re sure you don’t have a match?”

  “I’m serious, Del,” Lucas said. “You fuck me around, I’ll put your ass back in a uniform. You’ll be directing traffic outside a parking ramp. Your old lady’s knocked up and I don’t wanna be raising your kid.”

  “I really need a fuckin’ match,” Del said.

  The Seeds: the Hayseed Mafia, the Bad Seed M.C. Fifty or sixty stickup men, car thieves, smugglers, truck hijackers, Harley freaks, mostly out of northwest Wisconsin, related by blood or marriage or simply shared jail cells. Straw-haired baby-faced country assholes: have guns, will travel. And they were lately infected by a virulent germ of apocalyptic anti-black weirdness, and were suspected of killing a minor black hood outside a pool hall in Minneapolis.

  “Why would they have the fifty-cals?” Del asked.

  “Maybe they’re building a Waco up in the woods.”

  “The thought crossed my mind,” Del said.

  When they got back outside, a Minneapolis squad was shifting through the lines of fire trucks, local cop cars, and sheriff’s vehicles. The squad stopped almost on their feet, and Sloan climbed out, bent over to the driver, a uniformed sergeant, and said, “Keep the change.”

  “Blow me,” the driver said genially, and eased away.

  Sloan was a narrow man with a slatlike face. He wore a hundred-fifty-dollar tan summer suit, brown shoes a shade too yellow, and a fedora the color of beef gravy. “How do, Lucas,” he said. His eyes shifted to Del. “Del, you look like shit, my man.”

  “Where’d you get the hat?” Lucas asked. “Is it too late to take it back?”

  “My wife bought it for me,” Sloan said, sliding his fingertips along the brim. “She says it complements my ebullient personality.”

  Del said, “Still got her head up her ass, huh?”

  “Careful,” Sloan said, offended. “You’re talking about my hat.” He looked at Lucas. “We gotta go for a ride.”

  “Where to?”

  “Wisconsin.” He rocked on the toes of the too-yellow shoes. “Hudson. Look at a body.”

  “Anybody I know?” Lucas asked.

  Sloan shrugged. “You know a chick named Harriet Wannemaker?”

  “I don’t think so,” Lucas said.

  “That’s who it probably is.”

  “Why would I go look at her?”

  “Because I say so and you trust my judgment?” Sloan made it a question.

  Lucas grinned. “All right.”

  Sloan looked down the block at Lucas’s Porsche. “Can I drive?”

  “Pretty bad in there?” Sloan asked. He threw his hat in the back and downshifted as they rolled up to a stop sign at Highway 280.

  “They executed him. Shot him in the teeth,” Lucas said. “Think it might be the Seeds.”

  “Miserable assholes,” Sloan said without too much heat. He accelerated onto 280.

  “What happened to what’s-her-name?” Lucas asked. “Wannabe.”

  “Wannemaker. She dropped out of sight three days ago. Her friends say she was going out to some bookstore on Friday night, they don’t know which one, and she didn’t show up to get her hair done Saturday. We put out a missing persons note, and that’s the last we know until this morning, when Hudson called. We shot a Polaroid over there; it wasn’t too good, but they think it’s her.”

  “Sho
t?”

  “Stabbed. The basic technique is a rip-a stick in the lower belly, then an upward pull. Lots of power. That’s why I’m looking into it.”

  “Does this have something to do with what’s-her-name, the chick from the state?”

  “Meagan Connell,” Sloan said. “Yeah.”

  “I hear she’s trouble.”

  “Yeah. She could use a personality transplant,” Sloan said. He blew the doors off a Lexus SC, allowing himself a small smile. The guy in the Lexus wore shades and driving gloves. “But when you actually read her files, the stuff she’s put together-she’s got something, Lucas. But Jesus, I hope this isn’t one of his. It sounds like it, but it’s too soon. If it’s his, he’s speeding up.”

  “Most of them do,” Lucas said. “They get addicted to it.”

  Sloan paused at a stoplight, then ran the red and roared up the ramp onto Highway 36. Shifting up, he pushed the Porsche to seventy-five and kept it there, cutting through traffic like a shark. “This guy was real regular,” he said. “I mean, if he exists. He did one killing every year or so. Now we’re talking about four months. He did the last one just about the time you were gettin’ shot. Picked her up in Duluth, dumped the body up at the Carlos Avery game reserve.”

  “Any leads?” Lucas touched the pink scar on his throat.

  “Damn few. Meagan’s got a file.”

  They took twenty minutes getting to Wisconsin, out the web of interstates through the countryside east of St. Paul, the landscape green and heavy after a wet spring. “It’s better out here in the country,” Sloan said. “Christ, the media’s gonna get crazy with this cop killed.”

  “Lotta shit coming down,” Lucas said. “At least the cop’s not ours.”

  “Four killed in five days,” Sloan said. “Wannemaker will make five in a week. Actually, we might have six. We’re looking into an old lady who croaked in her bed. A couple of the guys think she might’ve been helped along. They’re calling it natural, for now.”

  “You cleared the domestic on Dupont,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah, with the hammer and chisel.”

  “Hurts to think about it.” Lucas grinned.