John Sandford - Prey 06 - Night Prey Page 14

Koop hesitated. "Are you from Minnesota?"

  She really wasn't sure about talking to him. "I'm from Worthington."

  "Sure, I've been there," Koop said, trying a smile. "Stayed at a Holiday Inn on the way to Sioux Falls."

  go to Sioux all the time," she said. Something in common.

  She'd held her arms crossed over her stomach as they talked, now she dropped them to her sides. Opening up.

  Koop put the toolbox on the sidewalk. "Look, I'm a maintenance guy with Greyhound. You don't know me, but I'm an okay guy, really. I'm on my way to South Minneapolis, I could drop you in Uptown...."

  She looked at him closely now, afraid but tempted. He didn't look that bad: tall, strong. Older. Had to be thirty.

  was told that the bus..."

  "Sure." He grinned again. "Don't take rides from strangers. That's a good policy. If you stick close to the bus stop and the station, you should be okay," he said. "I wouldn't go down that way, you can see the porno stores. There're weirdos going in and out."

  "Porno stores?" She looked down the street. A black guy was looking in the window of a camera store.

  "Anyway, I gotta go," Koop said, picking up his toolbox. "Take it easy...."

  "Wait," she said, her face open, fearful but hoping. She picked up the duffel. "I'll take the ride, if it's okay."

  "Sure. I'm parked right behind the station," Koop said. "Let me get my tools stowed away... You'll be there in five minutes."

  "This is my first time in Minneapolis," the girl said, now chatty.

  "But I used to go up to Sioux every weekend, just about."

  "What's your name?" Koop asked.

  "Marcy Lane," she said. "What's yours?"

  "Ben," he said. "Ben Cooper."

  Ben was a nice name. Like Gentle Ben, the bear, on television.

  "Nice to meet you, Ben," she said, and tried a smile, a kind of bohemian, woman-of-the-road smile.

  She looked like a child.

  A pie-faced kid from the country.

  CHAPTER

  Heather heard the phone at the far end of the house, woke up, poked him.

  w w "Phone," she mumbled. "It much be for you."

  Lucas fumbled around in the dark, found the bedroom phone, picked it up. Dispatch patched him through to North Minneapolis. Another one.

  "... recovered her purse and a duffel bag with some clothes. We got a license, says she's Marcy Lane with an address in Worthington," Carrigan said. His voice sounded like a file being run over sheet metal.

  "We're trying to run her folks down now. You better get your ass over here."

  "Did you call Lester?" Lucas was sitting on the bed, hunched in the light from the bedside lamp, bare feet on the floor. Heather was still awake, unmoving, listening to the conversation over her shoulder.

  "Not yet. Should I?"

  "I'll call him," Lucas said. "Freeze every fuckin' thing. Freeze it.

  The shit's gonna hit the fan, and you don't want any mistakes. And don't talk to the uniforms, for Christ's sakes."

  "It's froze hard," Carrigan said.

  "Keep it that way." Lucas poked the phone's Cancel button, then redialed.

  "Who's dead?" Heather asked, rolling onto her back.

  "Some kid. Looks like our asshole did it," Lucas said. The dispatcher came on and he said, "This is Davenport. I need a number for a Meagan Connell. And I need to talk to Frank Lester. Now." l They found a number for Connell and he scribbled it down. As they put him through to Lester, he grinned at Heather, sleepy-eyed, looking up at him. "How often do they call you in the middle of the night?" she asked.

  "When you're working?"

  "Maybe twenty times in twenty years," he said.

  She rolled toward her nightstand, looked at the clock. "I get up in three hours."

  "Sorry," he said.

  She propped herself up on one elbow and said, "I never thought of it until now, but you've got very little hair on your ass."

  "Hair?" The phone was ringing at the other end, and he looked down at his ass, confused. A sleepy Lester grunted, "Hello?"

  "This is Davenport," Lucas said, going back to the phone, trying to get his mind off hair. "Carrigan just called. A young girl from Worthington got gutted and dumped in a vacant lot up on the north side.

  If it ain't the one that did Wannemaker, it's his twin brother."

  After a moment of silence, Lester said, "Shit."

  "Yeah. So now we got a new one. You better get with Roux and figure out what you're gonna do, publicity-wise."

  "I'll call her. Are you going up there? Wherever?"

  "I'm on my way," Lucas said.

  Lucas hung up, then dialed the number for Connell. She picked it up, her voice a weak croak: "Hello?"

  "This is Davenport," he said. "A girl from out in the country just got killed and dumped up on the north side. It looks like it's our guy."

  "Where?" Wide-awake now. Lucas gave her the address. "I'll see you there."

  Lucas hung up, hopped out of bed, and headed for the bathroom.

  "You were going to observe tomorrow," Heather said.

  Lucas stopped, turned back. "Oh, jeer, that's right. Listen. If I finish up out there, I'll come over to the hospital. You're starting at seven-thirty?"

  "Yes. That's when the kid's coming in."

  can make that," he said. "Where do I go?"

  "Ask at the front desk. Tell them the operating suite, and when you get up there, ask for me. They'll be expecting you."

  "I'll try," he said. "Seven-thirty." Carrigan's second claim to fame was that he had small, fine feet, with which he danced. He had once appeared on stage at the Guthrie, in a modern interpretation of Othello, wearing nothing but a gold lame jock and a headband.

  His third claim to fame was that when a rookie had referred to him as a fag dancer, he'd held the rookie's head in a locker-room toilet for so long that homicide submitted the kid's name to the Guinness Book of Records for the longest free dive. The claim was noted, but rejected.

  Carrigan's first claim to fame was that a decade earlier, he'd twice won the NCAA wrestling title at 198 pounds. Nobody fucked with him.

  "Couldn't have been too long ago," he told Lucas, looking back at the crowd gathering on the corner. Carrigan was black, as was most of the crosvd gathered across the street. "There was some people up here playing ball until dark, and there was no body then. Some kids cutting' across the park found her a little after one o'clock."

  "Anybody see any vehicles?"

  "We've got people going door to door across the park there, but I don't think we'll get much. There's an interstate entrance just down the block and it's easy to miss it: people come in here to turn around and go back, so there's cars in and out all the time. Nobody pays any attention. Come on, take a look."

  The body was still uncovered, lying on bare ground between a couple of large bushes. The bushes lined a bank that ran parallel to the third-base line on a softball field. Whoever had killed her didn't care if she was found, he must have realized that she'd be found almost immediately. Portable lights illuminated the area around the body, and a crime-scene crew was working it over. "Look for cigarettes," Lucas told Carrigan. "Unfiltered Camels."

  "Okay...."

  Lucas squatted next to the dead girl. She was lying on her side, twisted, her head and shoulders facing down, her hips half-turned toward the sky. Lucas could see enough of the wound to tell that it was identical to Wannemaker's: a stab and a disemboweling rip. He could smell the body cavity.... "Nasty," Lucas said.

  "Yeah," Carrigan said sourly.

  "Can I move her?"

  "What for?"

  want to roll her back and look at her chest," Lucas said.

  "If you want toþwe got photos and all," Carrigan said. "But there's blood all over her, you better use gloves. Hang on...." He came back a moment later with a pair of thin yellow plastic gloves and handed them to Lucas. Lucas pulled them on, took the woman by the arm, and rolled her back.

  "Look at this," Luc
as said. He pointed at two bloody squiggles on her breast. "What do they look like?"

  "Letters. An S and a J, " Carrigan said, shining a penlight on the girl's body. "Kiss my rosy red rectum. What is this shit, Davenport?"

  "Insanity," Lucas said as he studied the body.

  A moment later, Carrigan said, "Who's this?"

  Lucas looked over his shoulder and saw Connell striding toward them, wrapped in a raincoat. "My aide," he said.

  "Your fuckin' what?"

  "Is it him?" Connell asked, coming up. Lucas stood up and stripped off the gloves.

  "Yeah. Cut the SJ into her," Lucas said. He crooked his head back and looked up at the night sky, the faint stars behind the city lights.

  The guy had pissed him off. Somehow, Wannemaker didn't reach him so personally, this kid did. Maybe because he could still feel the life in her. She hadn't been dead long.

  "He's out of his pattern," Connell said.

  "Fuck pattern. We know he did Wannemaker," Lucas said. "The girl up north didn't have the letters cut into her."

  "But she was on schedule," Connell said. "Wannemaker and this one, these are two that are out of order. I hope we don't have two guys."

  "Nah." Lucas shook his head. "The knife in the stomach, man, it's a signature. More than the letters, even."

  better look at her," Connell said. She crept under the bushes for a better look, squatted next to the body, turned the light on it. She studied it for a minute, then two, then walked away to spit. Came back.

  "I'm getting used to it," she said.

  "God help you," said Carrigan.

  A patrolman and a tall black kid were walking fast up the block, the kid a half-step ahead of the patrolman. The kid wore knee shorts, an oversize shirt, Sox hat, and an expression of eye-rolling exaspera tlon.

  Carrigan took a step toward them. "What you got, Bill?"

  "Kid saw the guy," the patrolman said. "Sure enough."

  Lucas, Connell, and Carrigan gathered around the kid. "You see him?"

  "Man..." The kid looked up the block, where more people were wandering in, attracted by word of a murder.

  "What's your name?" Connell asked.

  "Dex?" The answer sounded like a question, and the kid's eyes Dlled up to the sky.

  "How long ago?" Lucas asked.

  The kid shrugged. "Do I look like a large fuckin' clock?"

  "You're gonna look like a large fuckin' scab if you don't watch your mouth," Carrigan said.

  Lucas held up a hand, got close to the kid. "This is a farm girl, ex.

  Just came up to the city, somebody let the air out of her."

  "Ain't got nothin' to do with me," Dex said, looking at the crowd again "Come over here," Lucas said, his voice friendly. He took the kid's arm. "Look at the body."

  "What?"

  "Come on...." He waved the kid over, then said to the patrolman, "Loan me your flashlight, will you, pal?"

  Lucas took Dex around the bush, then duckwalked with him toward the woman on the wound side. He went willingly enough, hell, he'd seen six thousand bodies on TV, and once had walked by a place where some ambulance guys were taking a body out of a house. This'd be cool.

  A foot from the body, Lucas turned the light on the stomach wound.

  "Fuck," said Dex. He stood up, straight through the bush, and started thrashing his way out.

  Lucas caught his web pocket, hauled him back down, rough. "Come on, man, you can tell people about this. How the cops let you check her out." He put the flashlight on the girl's face. "Look at her eyes, man, they're still open, they look like eggs. You can smell her guts if you get closer, kind of soapy smelling."

  Dex's eyes moved toward the corpse's, and he shuddered and stood and tried to run. Lucas let him go: Carrigan was waiting when the kid fought free of the bush.

  "Never saw nothin' like that before," Dex said. A line of saliva dribbled from one edge of his mouth, and he wiped it with his hand.

  "So who was it?" Carrigan asked.

  "White dude. Driving a pickup."

  "What kind of pickup?"

  "White with dark on it, maybe red, I don't know, I know the white part for sure," Dex said. He kept moving away from the body, around the bushes back toward the curb. Carrigan held one arm and Dex babbled on.

  "There was a camper on the back. People come up here to throw garbage sometimes. I thought that's what he was doin', throwing garbage."

  "How close were you?" Connell asked.

  "Down to the corner," Dex said, pointing. A hundred yards.

  "What'd he look like, far as you could tell?" Connell pressed.

  "Big guy? Small guy? Skinny?"

  "Pretty big. Big as me. And I think maybe he plays basketball, the way he got in the truck. He like hopped up there, you know. Just real quick, like he's got some speed. Quick."

  Connell fumbled in her purse and took out a folded square of paper.

  She started to unfold it when Lucas realized what it was, reached out and caught her hand, shook his head. "Don't do that," he said. He looked at Dex and asked, "How long ago?"

  "Hour? I don't know. Bout an hour." That meant nothing. For most witnesses, an hour was more than fifteen minutes and less than three hours.

  "What else?"

  "Man, I don't think there's anything else. I mean, let me think about it...." He looked past Lucas. "Here comes my mom."

  A woman rolled right through the police line, and when a cop reached out toward her, she turned around and snapped something that stopped him short, and she came on.

  "What're you doing here?" she demanded.

  "Talking to your son," Carrigan said, facing her. "He's a witness to a crime."

  "He's never been in no trouble," the woman said.

  "He's not in any trouble now," Connell said. "He might've seen a killerþa white man. He's just trying to remember what else he might've seen."

  "He's not in no trouble?" She was suspicious.

  Connell shook her head. "He's helping out."

  "Momma, you oughta see that girl," Dex said, swallowing. He looked back toward the bush. The girl's hip was just visible from where they were standing. He looked back at Carrigan. "The truck had those steps on the sides, you know, what do they call them?"

  "Running boards?" Lucas suggested.

  Dex nodded. "That's it. Silver runnung boards."

  "Chevy, Ford?"

  "Shoot, man, they all look the same to me. Wouldn't have one, myself...." "What color was the camper?"

  The kid had to think about it. "Dark," he said finally.

  "What else?"

  He scratched behind one ear, looked at his mother, then shook his head.

  "Just some white dude dumping garbage, is what I thought."

  "Were you alone when you saw him?" Lucas asked.

  He swallowed again and glanced at his mother. His mother saw it and slapped his back, hard. "You tell."

  saw a guy named Lawrence, was up here," he said.

  His mother put her hands on her hips. "You with Lawrence?"

  wasn't with Lawrence, Momma. I just saw him up here, is all. I wasn't with him."

  "You goddamn better not be with him or I throw your butt outa the house. You know what I told you," his mother said, angry. She looked at Carrigan and said, "Lawrence a pusher."

  "Lawrence his first name or his last name?" Carrigan asked.

  "Lawrence Wright."

  "Lawrence Wright? I know him," Carrigan said." Bout twenty-two or -three, tall skinny guy, used to wear a sailor hat all the time?"

  "That's him," the woman said. "Trash. He comes from a long line of trash. Got a trashy mother and all his brothers are trash," she said.

  She smacked the kid on the back again. "You hanging around with that trash?"

  "Where'd he go?" Lucas asked. "Lawrence?"

  "He was around here until they found the body," Dex said, looking around as if he might see the missing man. "Then he left."

  "Did he see the white guy?" Connell asked.
<
br />   Dex shrugged. "I wasn't with him. But he was closer than me. He was walking up this way when the white dude went out of the park. I saw the white dude lookin' at him."