Night Prey ld-6

by John Sandford

  Gotta take him. Gotta take him now.

  The impulse was like a hammer. He’d gut the cocksucker right in the driveway. He was messing with Koop’s woman…

  But Koop lingered, unwilling to leave until the guy was out the door. They finally broke apart, and Koop, in a half-crouch, waited for him to go. Jensen was holding his hand. Didn’t want him to go. Tugged at him.

  “Cocksucker…” he thought, and realized he’d spoken aloud. Said it again: “Cocksucker, cut your fuckin’ heart out, man, cut your fuckin’…”

  And the roof access door opened. A shaft of light, shocking, blinding, snapped across the roof and climbed the airconditioner housing. Koop went flat, tense, ready to fight, ready to run.

  Voices crossed each other, ten feet away. There was a sharp rattle and a bang as the door was pushed open, then closed of its own weight.

  Cops.

  “Gotta be quick.” Not cops. A woman’s voice.

  Man’s voice. “It’s gonna be quick, I can promise that, you got me so hot I can’t hold it.”

  Woman’s voice: “What if Kari looks for the pad?”

  “She won’t, she’s got no interest in camping… c’mon, let’s go behind the airconditioner thing. C’mon.”

  The woman giggled and Koop heard them rattling across the graveled roof, and the sound of a plastic mat being unrolled on the gravel. Koop looked sideways, past the duct toward Jensen’s building. She was kissing the guy good-bye again, standing on her tiptoes in the open door, his hand below her waist, almost on her ass.

  Below him, eight feet away, the man was saying, “Let me get these, let me get these… Oh, Jesus, these look great…”

  And the woman: “Boy, what if Kari and Bob could see us now… Oh, God…”

  Across the street, Jensen was pushing the door shut. She leaned back against it, her head cocked back, an odd, loose look on her face, not quite a smile.

  The woman: “Don’t rip it, don’t rip it…”

  The man: “God, you’re wet, you’re a hot little bitch…”

  Koop, blind with fury, his heart pounding like a triphammer, lay quiet as a mouse, but getting angrier and angrier. He thought about jumping down, of taking the two of them.

  He rejected the idea as quickly as it had come. A woman had already died at this building, and a man was in a coma. If another two died, the cops would know something was happening here. He’d never get back up.

  Besides, all he had was his knife. He might not get them both-and he couldn’t see the guy. If the guy was big, tough, it might take a while, make a lot of noise.

  Koop bit his lip, listening to the lovemaking. The woman tended to screech, but the screeching sounded fake. The guy said, “Don’t scratch,” and she said, “I can’t help myself,” and Koop thought, Jesus…

  And Sara Jensen’s lover was getting away. Better to let him go… goddamnit.

  He turned his head back to Jensen’s apartment. Jensen went into the bathroom and shut the door. He knew from watching her that when she did that, she’d be inside for a while. Koop eased himself over onto his back and looked up at the stars, listened to the couple on the roof below him. Goddamnit.

  Man’s voice: “Let me do it this way, c’mon…”

  The woman: “God, if Bob knew what I was doing…”

  CHAPTER

  19

  Greave had his feet up on his desk, talking on the phone, when Lucas arrived in the morning. Anderson drifted over and said, “A homicide guy in Madison interviewed somebody named Abby Weed. He says she confirmed that she met Joe Hillerod in a bookstore. She doesn’t remember the date, but she remembered the discussion, and it was the right one. She said she spent the night with him, and she was unhappy about being questioned.”

  “Damnit,” Lucas said. He said it without heat. Hillerod hadn’t felt right, and he hadn’t expected much. “Have you seen Meagan Connell?”

  Anderson shook his head, but Greave, still on the phone, held up a finger, said a few more words, then covered the mouthpiece with his palm. “She called in, said she was sick. She’ll be in later,” he said. He went back to the phone.

  Sick. Connell had been plummeting into depression when Lucas left her the night before. He hadn’t wanted to leave-he’d suggested that she come home with him, spend the night in a guest room, but she’d said she was fine.

  “I shouldn’t have mentioned Beneteau asking about you,” Lucas said.

  She caught his arm. “Lucas, you did right. It’s one of the nicer things that’s happened to me in the last year.” But her eyes had been ineffably sad, and he’d had to turn away.

  Greave dropped the receiver on the hook and sighed. “How far did you get on the sex histories?” Lucas asked.

  “Not very far.” Greave looked away. “To tell you the truth, I hardly got started. I thought I might have something on my apartment.”

  “Goddamnit, Bob, forget the fuckin’ apartment,” Lucas said, his voice harsh. “We need these histories-and we need as many people thinking about the case as we can get.”

  Greave stood up, shook himself like a dog. He was a little shorter than Lucas, his features a little finer. “Lucas, I can’t. I try, but I just can’t. It’s like a nightmare. I swear to God, I was eating an ice cream cone last night and I started wondering if they poisoned her ice cream.” Lucas just looked at him, and Greave shook his head after a minute and said, “They didn’t, of course.”

  And they both said, simultaneously, “No toxicology.”

  Jan Reed found Lucas in his office. She had great eyes, he thought. Italian eyes. You could fall into them, no problem. He had a quick male mini-vision: Reed on the bed, pillow under her shoulders, head back, a half inch from orgasm. She looks up at the final instant, eyes opening, her awareness of him the sexiest thing in the universe…

  “Nothing,” he said, flustered. “Not a thing.”

  “But what about the people you grabbed in that raid over in Wisconsin?” There was a pinprick of amusement in her eyes. She knew the effect she had on him.

  And she knew about the raid. “An unrelated case, but a good story,” Lucas lied. He babbled: “It’s a group of people called the Seeds-there used to be a motorcycle gang called the Bad Seeds, from up in northwest Wisconsin, and they evolved into a criminal organization. Cops call it the Hayseed Mafia. Anyway, these are the guys who were hitting the suburban gun stores. We got a lot of the guns back.”

  “That is interesting,” she said. She made a note in her notebook, then put the eraser end of her pencil against her teeth, pensively, erotically. He was starting to fixate on the idea of television anchorwomen and oral sex, Lucas thought. “The gun issue’s so hot… right now.” She would pause every so often, leaving a gap in the conversation, almost as though she were inviting him to fill it in.

  She paused now, and Lucas said, “Reed’s an English name, right?”

  “Yes. I’d be English on my father’s side,” she said. “Why?”

  “I was thinking,” Lucas said. “You’ve got great Italian eyes, you know?”

  She smiled and caught her bottom lip with an upper tooth, and said, “Well, thank you…”

  When she left, Lucas went to the door with her. She moved along a little more slowly than he did, and he found himself almost on top of her, ushering her out. She smelled fine, he thought. He watched her down the hall. She wouldn’t be an athlete. She was soft, smooth. She turned at the corner to see if he was watching, and just at that moment, when she turned, and though they resembled each other not at all, she reminded him of Weather.

  The rest of the day was a wasteland of paper, old reports, and conjectures. Connell wandered in after two, even paler than usual, said she’d been working on the computers. Lucas told her about the interview with Abby Weed. Connell nodded: “I’d already written them off. Hitting the Hillerods was just our good deed for the day.”

  “How’re you feeling?”

  “Sick,” she said. Then quickly: “Not from last night. From… the bi
g thing. It’s coming back.”

  “Jesus, Meagan…”

  “I knew it would,” she said. “Listen, I’m going to talk to Anderson, and start helping Greave on those histories. I can’t think of anything else.”

  She left, but came back ten seconds later. “We’ve got to get him, Lucas. This week or next.”

  “I don’t know…”

  “That’s all the time I’ve got this round… and the next round will be even shorter.”

  Lucas got home early, found Weather on the couch reading The Robber Bride, her legs curled beneath her.

  “A dead end?”

  “Looks like it,” Lucas said. “The woman in Madison confirmed Joe Hillerod’s story. We’re back to looking at paper.”

  “Too bad. He sounds like a major jerk.”

  “We’ve got him on the guns, anyway,” Lucas said. “He handled most of the rifles, and their ID guys got good prints. And they found bolt cutters and a crowbar in his truck, and the tool-marks guy matched them to the marks on a gunshop door out in Wayzata.”

  “So what’s left? On the murder case?”

  “God, I don’t know. But I feel like things are moving.”

  Lucas spent the late evening in the study, going through Anderson’s book on the case-all the paper that anybody had brought in, with the histories that Greave had completed. Weather came to the door in her cotton nightgown and said, “Be extra quiet when you come to bed. I’ve got a heavy one tomorrow.”

  “Yeah.” He looked up from the paper, his hair in disarray, discouraged. “Christ, you know, there’s so much stuff in here, and so much of it’s bullshit. The stuff in this file, you could spend four years investigating and never learn a fuckin’ thing.”

  She smiled and came over and patted his hair back into place, and he wrapped an arm around her back and pulled her close, so he could lean his head between her breasts. There was something animal about this: it felt so good, and so natural. Like momma. “You’ll get him,” she said.

  An hour later, he was puzzling over Anderson’s note on the deaf people. Everything sounded right: a guy with a beard, going to the bookstore, in a truck. How in the hell did they screw up the license so bad? He glanced at his watch: one o’clock, too late to call anybody at St. Paul. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. Maybe something would bubble to the surface of his mind…

  CHAPTER

  20

  Koop brought a sack of Taco Bell soft tacos to the rooftop, tossed the sack on top of the airconditioner housing, and pulled himself up after it. There was still enough light that Sara Jensen might see him if she looked out her window, so he duckwalked across the housing until he was behind the exhaust vent.

  Putting the tacos aside, he shook the Kowa scope out of its canvas case and surveyed the apartment. Where was the blond guy? Had he come back? His heart was chilly with the fear…

  The drapes from both rooms were open, as usual. Sara Jensen was nowhere in sight. The bathroom door was closed.

  Satisfied for the moment, Koop settled in behind the vent, opening the tacos, gulping them down. He dripped sour cream on his jacket: Shit. He brushed the sour cream with a napkin, but there would be a grease stain. He tossed the napkin off the edge off the housing, then thought, I shouldn’t do that, and made a mental note to pick it up before he left.

  Ten minutes after he arrived, Sara Jensen walked-hurried-out of the bathroom. She was nude, and the thrill of her body ran through him like an electric current, like a hit of speed. He put the scope on her as she sat at her dressing table and began to work on her makeup. He enjoyed seeing this, the careful work under the eyes, the touch-up of the lashes, the sensuous painting of her full lips. He dreamed about her lips…

  And he loved to watch her naked back. She had smoothly molded shoulders, the ripple of her spine from the top of her round ass straight to the nape of her neck. Her skin was fine, clear-one small dark mole on her left shoulder blade, the long, pale neck…

  She stood, turned toward him, face intent, her breasts bobbing, the gorgeous pubic patch… She dug through her dresser, looking at what? Underwear? She pulled on a pair of underpants, took them off, threw them back, pulled on a much briefer pair, looked at herself in the mirror. Looked again, backed away, pulled the bottom elastic of her pants away from her thighs, let it snap back, turned to look at her butt.

  And Koop began to worry.

  She found a bra to go with the pants, an underwired bra, perhaps: it seemed to push her up. She didn’t really need it, he thought, but it did look good. She turned again, looking at her self, snapped the elastic on her pants leg again.

  Posed.

  She was pleased with herself.

  “What are you doing, Sara?” Koop asked. He tracked her with the scope. “What the fuck are you doing?”

  She disappeared into a closet and came back out with a simple dark dress, either very dark blue or black. She held it to her breasts, looked into the mirror, shook her head at herself, and went back into the closet. She came back out with blue jeans and a white blouse, held them up, put them on, tucked in the shirt. Looked at herself, made a face in the mirror, shook her head, went back into the closet, emerged with the dress. She took off the jeans, stripping for him again, exciting him. She picked up the dress, pulled it over her head, smoothed it down.

  “Are you going out, Sara?”

  She looked in the mirror again, one hand on her ass, then took the dress off, tossed it on the bed, and looked thoughtfully at her chest of drawers. Walked to the chest, opened the bottom drawer, and took out a pale-blue cotton sweat suit. She pulled it on, pushed up the sleeves on the sweatshirt, went back to the mirror. Pulled off the sweatshirt, took off the bra, pulled the sweatshirt back on.

  Koop frowned. Sweat suit?

  The dress had been simple but elegant. The jeans casual but passable at most places in the Cities. But the sweat suit? Maybe she’d just been trying on stuff. But if so, why all the time in the bathroom? Why the sense of urgency?

  Koop turned away, dropped behind the duct, lit a Camel, then rolled onto his knees and looked back through her window. She was standing in front of her mirror, flipping her hair with her hands. Brushing it back: breaking down its daytime structure.

  Huh.

  She stopped suddenly, then ducked back at the mirror, gave her hair a last flip, then hurried-skipped once-going out of the bedroom, into the front room, to the door. Said something, a smile on her face, then opened the door.

  Goddamn it.

  The blond guy was there. He had a chin on him, a butt-chin, with a dimple in it. He was wearing jeans and a canvas shirt, looking as tousled as she did. She stepped back from him, pulled a piece of her sweat suit out from her leg, almost as if she were about to curtsy.

  Butt-chin laughed and stepped inside and leaned forward as if he were about to peck her on the cheek, and then the peck ignited and they stood there in each other’s arms, the hallway door still open behind them. Koop rose to a half-stoop, looking across the fifty feet of air at his true love in another man’s arms. He groaned aloud and hurled his cigarette toward them, at the window. They never saw it. They were too busy.

  “Motherfuckers…”

  They didn’t go out. Koop watched in pain as they moved to the couch. He realized, suddenly, why she had rejected the jeans and vacillated between the dress and the sweat suit: access.

  A guy can’t get his hands in a tight pair of jeans, boyo. Not without a lot of preliminaries. With a sweatsuit, there were no barriers. No problems getting your hands in. And that’s where Blondy’s were-in Sara’s loose sweatpants, under her loose sweatshirt, Sara writhing beneath his touch-before they went to the bedroom.

  Blondy stayed the night.

  So did Koop, huddled behind the vent on the airconditioner housing, fading from consciousness to unconsciousness-not exactly sleep, but something else, something like a coma. Toward dawn, with just the light jacket, he got very cold. When he moved, he hurt. About four-thirty, the star
s began to fade. The sun rose into a flawless blue sky and shone down on Koop, whose heart had turned to stone.

  He felt it: a rock in his chest. And no mercy at all.

  He had to wait more than an hour in the light before there was any movement in Sara Jensen’s apartment. She woke first, rolled over, said something to the lump on the other side. Then he said something-Koop thought he did, anyway-and she moved up behind him, both of them on their sides, talking.

  Two or three minutes later, Blondy got up, yawning, stretching. He sat naked on the bed, his back to Koop, then suddenly snatched the blankets down. Sara was there, as naked as he was, and he flopped on top of her, his head between her breasts. Koop turned away, squeezed his eyes shut. He just couldn’t watch.

  And he just couldn’t not watch. He turned back. Blondy was nibbling on one of Sara Jensen’s nipples, and Sara, back arched, her hands in his hair, was enjoying every second of it. The stone in Koop’s heart began to fragment, to be replaced by a cold, unquenchable anger. The fucking whore was taking on another man. The fucking whore…

  But he loved her anyway.

  He couldn’t help himself.

  And couldn’t help watching when she pushed him flat on the bed, and trailed her tongue from his chest down across his navel…

  The blond guy finally left at seven o’clock.

  Koop had stopped thinking long before that. For an hour, he’d simply been waiting, his knife in his hand. He occasionally ran it down his face, over his beard, as if he were shaving. He was actually getting in tune with it, the steel in the blade…

  When the door closed behind Blondy, Koop barely gave Sara Jensen a thought. There’d be time for her later. She turned away, hurrying back to the bedroom to get ready for work.

  Koop, wearing his glasses and snap-brimmed hat, flew off the airconditioner housing. He had just enough control to check the apartment hallway before bursting into it from the roof access; a man stood in it, facing the elevator. Koop cursed, but the man suddenly stepped forward and was gone. Koop ran the length of the hall and took the stairs.