Night Prey (8 page)

"Damnit," Lucas said. He picked up the phone and called Anderson back, gave him the name.

"What?" Connell wanted to know when he got off the phone.

"We'll check the bar," Lucas said. "There'll have to be some negotiations before we can get a mug of Erdrich."

Connell spun around and planted herself in front of him. "What the fuck is this?" she asked.

"It's called the Usual Bullshit," he said. "And calm down. We're talking about an hour or two, not forever."

But she was angry, heels pounding as they walked back to Lucas's Porsche. "Why do you drive this piece of crap? You ought to buy something decent," she snapped.

Lucas said, "Shut the fuck up."

"What?" She goggled at him.

"I said shut the fuck up. You don't shut the fuck up, you can take the bus back to Minneapolis."

Connell, still angry, trailed him into Harp's and muttered, "Oh, Lord" when she saw the bartender. The bartender was a dark-haired pixieish woman with large black eyes, too much makeup, and a bee-stung lower lip. She wore a slippery low-cut silk pullover without a bra, and a black string tie with a turquoise clasp at her throat. "Cops?" she asked, but she was smiling.

"Yeah." Lucas nodded, grinned, and tried to meet her eyes. "We need to talk to somebody who was here Friday night."

"I was," she said, dropping her elbows on the bar and leaning toward Lucas, glancing at Connell. The bartender smelled lightly of cinnamon, like a dream; she had a soft freckled cleavage. "What do you need?"

Lucas rolled out the photo of Wannemaker. "Was she here?"

The bartender watched his eyes, and, satisfied with her effect, picked up the photo and studied it. "She look like this?"

"Pretty much," Lucas said, steadfastly holding her eyes.

"What'd she do?" the bartender asked.

"Was she here?" Lucas asked again.

"Meanie," she said. "You don't want to tell me." The bartender frowned, pushed out her lower lip, studied the picture, and slowly shook her head. "No, I don't think she was. In fact, I'm sure she wasn't, if she dressed like this. Our crowd's into black. Black shirts, black pants, black dresses, black hats, black combat boots. I'd have noticed her."

"Big crowd?"

"In St. Paul?" She picked up her bar rag and scrubbed at a spot on the bar.

"Okay..."

As they started out, the bartender called after them, "What'd she do?"

"It was done to her," Connell said, speaking for the first time. She made it sound like a punishment.

"Yeah?"

"She was killed."

The bartender recoiled. "Like, murdered? How?"

"Let's go," said Lucas, touching Connell's coat sleeve.

"Stabbed," said Connell.

"Let's go," Lucas repeated.

" 'Do not wait for the last judgment. It takes place every day,' " the bartender said solemnly, in a quotation voice.

Now Lucas stopped. "Who was that?" he asked.

"Some dead French dude," the bartender said.

"That was disgusting," Connell fumed.

"What?"

"The way she was throwing it at you."

"What?"

"You know."

Lucas looked back at the bar, then at Connell, a look of utter astonishment on his face. "You think she was coming on to me?"

"Kiss my ass, Davenport," she said, and stalked off toward the car.

Lucas called Anderson again. "Roux's still talking to St. Paul," Anderson said. "She wants you back here, ASAP."

"What for?"

"I don't know. But she wants you back."

Connell complained most of the way back. They had something, she said. They should stay with it. Lucas, tired of it, offered to drop her at the St. Paul police headquarters. She declined. Roux was up to something, she said. When they walked into the chief's outer office, the bony secretary flipped a thumb toward the chief's door and they went through.

Roux was smoking furiously. She glanced at Connell, then nodded. "I guess you better stay and hear this."

"What's going on?" Lucas asked.

Roux shrugged. "We're outa here, is what's going on. No crime committed in Minneapolis. You just proved it. Wannemaker goes to that bookstore in St. Paul, gets dumped in Hudson. Let them fight about it."

"Wait a minute," said Connell.

Roux shook her head. "Meagan, I promised to help you and I did. But we've got lots of trouble right now, and this is St. Paul's killing. Your killing, up in Carlos Avery, is either Anoka County's or Duluth's. Not ours. We're putting out a press release that says our investigation concludes the murder was not committed here, that we'll cooperate with the investigating authorities, and so on."

"WAIT A FUCKING MINUTE!" Connell shouted. "Are you telling me we're done?"

"We're
done," Roux said, still friendly, but her voice sharpening. "You've still got some options. We'll get your research to St. Paul, and I'll ask that they let you assist their investigation. Or you could continue with the Smits case. I don't know what Duluth is doing with that anymore."

Connell turned to Lucas, her voice harsh. "What do you think?"

Lucas stepped back. "It's an interesting case, but she's right. It's St. Paul's."

Connell's face was like a stone. She stared at Lucas for a heartbeat, then at Roux, and then, without another word, spun and stalked out, slamming the office door behind her.

"You might have found a better way to handle that," Lucas said.

"Probably," Roux said, looking after Connell. "But I didn't know she was coming, and I was so damn happy to be out from under. Christ, Davenport, you saved my ass in four hours, finding that bookstore."

"So now what?"

Roux waved her hand expansively. "Do what you want." She took a drag on her cigarette, then took it out of her mouth and looked at it. "Jesus, sometimes I wish I was a man."

"Why?" Lucas was amused by her excitement.

"'Cause then I could take out a big fuckin' Cuban cigar and smoke its ass off."

"You could still do that."

"Yeah, but then people who don't already think I'm a bull dyke would start thinking I'm a bull dyke. Besides, I'd barf."

Lucas talked briefly to Anderson and Lester about wrapping up the paper on the case. "St. Paul will probably want to talk to you," Lester said.

"That's fine. Give them my home phone number if they call. I'll be around," Lucas said.

"Connell thinks it's a cheap shot, doesn't she? Dumping the case."

"It is cheap," Lucas said.

"Man, we're hurting," Lester said. "We've never hurt this bad. And if you're looking for something to do, we've still got bodies coming out of our ears. Did Greave tell you about his?"

"He mentioned something, but it didn't sound very interesting."

Sloan wandered in, hands in his pockets. He nodded to them, yawned, stretched, and to Lester said, "You got a Coke or something? I'm a little dry."

"Do I look like a fuckin' vending machine?" Lester asked.

"What happened, Sloan?" Lucas asked, picking up the signs.

Sloan yawned again, then said, "A little pissant student named Lanny Bryson threw Heather Tatten off the bridge."

"What?" A smile broke across Lester's face, like the sun coming up.

"Got him on tape," Sloan said, ostentatiously studying his fingernails. "She was hooking, part-time. She fucked him once, but wouldn't do it twice, not even for money. They were arguing, walking across the bridge, and he tried to smooch her but she hit him with her fist, in the nose. It hurt and he got mad and when she walked away, he hit her on the back of the head with an economics textbook-big fat motherfucker-and knocked her down. She was stunned and he just picked her up and pushed her over the railing. She tried to hang on at the last minute, scratched him all the way down his forearms."

"Did you use the cattle prods?" Lucas asked.

"Told us the whole fuckin' thing in one long sentence," Sloan said. "We Miranda-ed him twice on the tape. Got Polaroids of his arms; we'll get a DNA match later. He's over in the lockup now, waiting for the public defender."

Lucas, Anderson, and Lester looked at each other, then back at Sloan. Lester stepped close, took him by the arm, and said, "Can I kiss you on the lips?"

"Better not," Sloan said. "People might think you favor me at promotion time."

A pizza arrived, too much for somebody's lunch, so they cut it up, got Cokes from the machine in the basement, had a little party, giving Sloan a hard time.

Lucas left smiling. Sloan was a friend, maybe his best friend. But at the same time, he felt... He looked for a word. Disgruntled? Yes. Sloan had his victory. But somewhere out there, a monster was roaming around...

Chapter
5

Koop was slick with sweat, eyes shut, counting: eleven, twelve, thirteen. His triceps were burning, his toes reaching for the floor, his mind holding them off. Fourteen, fifteen... sixteen? No.

He was done. He dropped to the floor between the parallel bars and opened his eyes, the sweat running from his eyebrows. The burn in his arms began to even out, and he stumbled over to the toe-raise rack where he'd left the towel, mopped his face, picked up a pair of light dumbbells, and headed back to the posing room.

Two Guy's Body Shop, with a misplaced apostrophe, was the end unit of a dying shopping center on Highway 100, a shopping center marked by knee-high weeds growing out of cracked blacktop, and peeling hand-painted signs for failing tax services and obscure martial arts. Koop had parked the truck in a litter of crumbling blacktop, locked it, and gone inside.

To the right, one of the Two Guys sat behind the front desk, reading an old Heavy Metal magazine. To the left, a woman and two men were working around a variety of free-weight racks. The Guy looked up when Koop came in, grunted, and went back to the magazine. Koop walked past him, down a hallway where fifty musclemen stared down from curling Polaroids thumbtacked to the paneling, into the men's locker room. He changed into a jock, cutoff sweatpants, and a sleeveless T-shirt, strapped on a lifting belt, pulled on goatskin gloves stiff with dried sweat, and went back out into the main room.

Koop had a system: He divided his body into thirds, and worked a different third each day for three days. Then he took a day off, and the day after that, started over.

Shoulders and arms, first day; chest and back, second day; and then lower body. This was shoulders and arms: he worked the delts, triceps, biceps. Unlike a lot of people, he worked his forearms hard, squeezing rubber rings until the muscles screamed with acid.

And he worked his neck, both on the neck machine and with bridges. He'd never seen anyone else at Two Guy's doing bridges, but that didn't bother Koop. He'd once gone to a University of Minnesota...University of Iowa wrestling meet, and the Hawks were doing bridges. They'd kicked ass.

Koop liked bench presses. Hell, everybody liked bench presses. He did pyramids, ten reps at 350, two or three at 370, one or two at 390. He did seated behind-the-neck presses; he did curls, topping out at eighty pounds on the dumbbells, working his biceps.

At the very end, soaked with sweat, he got on a stair climber and ran up a hundred stories, then, breathing hard, he went back to the posing room.

A woman in a sweat-stained orange bikini was working in the mirrors on the west wall, moving from a frontal pose, arms over head, to a side pose, biceps flexed against her stomach. Koop dropped the dumbbells on a pad and stripped down to his jock. He picked up the dumbbells, did ten quick pumps, tossed them back on the pad, and began his routine. In the back of his mind, he could hear the woman grunting as she posed, could hear the exhaust fan overhead, but all he could see was himself... And sometimes, through the mist of sweat, the gossamer-wrapped body of Sara Jensen, spread-eagled on the bed, the dark pubic mound and...

Slam it, slam it, slam it, go, go...

The woman stopped, picked up her towel. He was vaguely aware that she was standing in a corner, watching.

When he finally quit, she tossed him his towel. "Gettin' the pecs," she said.

"Need more work," he mumbled, wiping himself down. "Need more work." He carried his workout clothes back to the locker room, soaked them under a shower, wrung them by hand, threw them into a dryer and turned the dryer on. Then he showered, toweled off, dressed, went out to the main room, bought a Coke, drank it, went back and took his clothes out of the dryer, hung them in his locker, and left.

He hadn't said a word to anyone, except, "Need more work..."

John Carlson was already in summer mode, black Raiders jacket over knee-length rapper shorts and black Nikes with red laces.

"What's happening, dude?" John was black and far too heavy. Koop handed him a small roll. John didn't check it, just stuffed it in his pocket.

"Gotta date," Koop said.

"Far out, man..." John rapped the car with his knuckles, as if for luck. "Get you some latex, man, you don't want to get no fuckin' AIDS."