Prey: Night Prey Part 19

"Lots of people don't like to fly."

"But they do," he said.

She patted his stomach. "You'll be okay. I could get you something that'd mellow you out a little, if you want."

"That'd mess up my head. I'll fly." He sighed and said, "My main problem is, I'm not running this investigation. Connell's done everything, and I can't see beyond what she's done. I'm not thinking: the gears aren't moving like they used to."

"What's wrong?"

"I don't know, exactly-I can't get anything to start with. If I could get the smallest bite of personal information on the guy, I'd have something-we just can't get it. All I have to work with is paper."

"You said he might do cocaine. . . ."

"Maybe fifty thousand people in the Twin Cities do cocaine on a more or less regular basis," Lucas said. "I could jump a few dealers, but the chances of getting anywhere are nil."

"It's something."

"I need something else, and soon. He's gone crazy-less than a week between kills. He'll be doing another one. He'll be thinking about it already."

13.

LUCAS HATED AIRPLANES, feared them. Helicopters, for reasons he didn't understand, were not so bad. They flew to Waupun in a small four-seater fixed-wing plane, Lucas in the back.

"I've never seen anything like that," Connell said, an undercurrent of satisfaction in her voice.

"You're exaggerating it," Lucas said, his face grim. The airport was open, windy, a patch on the countryside. A brown state car waited by the Waupun sign, and they walked that way.

"I thought you were going to throw the pilot out the window when we hit those b.u.mps. I thought you were gonna explode. It was like your head was blowing up, like one of those Zodiac boats where the pressure builds up."

"Yeah, yeah."

"I hope you and the pilot can kiss and make up before we fly back," Connell said. "I don't want him flying scared."

Lucas turned to her and she stepped away, half smiling, half frightened. With the fish-white stone face behind the black gla.s.ses, he looked like a maniac; Lucas did not like airplanes.

A Waupun guard tossed a newspaper in the backseat of the state car and got out as they came up. "Ms. Connell?"

"Yes."

"Tom Davis." He was a mild-looking, fleshy man with rosy cheeks and vague blue eyes under a smooth, baby-clear forehead. He had a small graying mustache, just a bit wider than Hitler's. He smiled and shook her hand, then to Lucas, "And you're her a.s.sistant?"

"That was a joke," Connell said hastily. "This is, uh, Deputy Chief Lucas Davenport from Minneapolis."

"Whoops, sorry, Chief," Davis said. He winked at Connell. "Well, hop in. We got a little ride."

DAVIS KNEW D . Wayne Price. "He's not a bad fella," he said. He drove with one foot on the gas and the other on the brake. The constant surging and slowing reminded Lucas of the airplane's motion.

"He was convicted of murdering a woman by slicing her open with a knife," Connell said. "They had to remove her intestines from the street with a bucket." Her voice was conversational.

"That wouldn't put him in the top ten percent of his cla.s.s," the guard said, just as conversationally. "We got guys in here who raped and killed little boys before they ate them."

"That's bad," Lucas said.

"That is bad," said Davis.

"Is there any talk about Price?" Lucas asked. "He says he's innocent."

"So do fifty percent of the others, though most of them don't actually claim to be innocent. They say the law wasn't followed, or the trial wasn't fair. I mean, they did it, whatever it was, but they say the state didn't dot every single i and cross every single t before puttin' them away-and they say that's just not fair. There's n.o.body finickier about the law than a con," Davis said.

"How about Price?"

"I don't know D. Wayne that good, but some of the guys believe him," Davis said. "He's been pretty noisy about it, filing all kinds of appeals. He's never stopped; he's still doing it."

"DON'T LIKE PRISONS," Connell said. The interview room had the feel of a dungeon.

"Like the doors might not open again after you're inside," Lucas said.

"That's exactly it. I could stand it for about a week, and then they'd come to put me back in the cell, and I'd freak. I don't think I'd make a full month. I'd kill myself," Connell said.

"People do," Lucas said. "The saddest ones are the people they put on a suicide watch. They can't get out, and they can't get it over with. They just sit and suffer."

"Some of them deserve it."

Lucas disagreed. "I don't know if anybody deserves that."

D . WAYNE PRICE was a large man in his early forties; his face looked as if it had been slowly and incompe tently formed with a ball-peen hammer. His forehead was shiny and pitted, with scars running up into his hairline. He had rough poreless skin under his eyes, scar tissue from being punched. His small round ears seemed to be fitted into slots in his head. When the escort brought him to the interview room, he smiled a convict's obsequious smile, and his teeth were small and chipped. He was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt with "Harley-Davidson" on the front.

Lucas and Connell were sitting on a couple of slightly damaged green office chairs, facing a couch whose only notable quality was its brownness. The escort was a horse-faced older man with a buzz cut; he was carrying a yellow-backed book, said, "Sit," to Price, as though he were a Labrador retriever, said, "How do" to Lucas and Connell, then dropped onto the other end of the couch with his book.

"You smoke?" Connell asked Price.

"Sure." She fished in a pocket, handed him an open pack of Marlboros and a butane lighter. Price knocked a cigarette out of the pack, lit it, and Connell said, voice soft, "So, this woman in Madison. You kill her?"

"Never touched the b.i.t.c.h," Price said, testing, his eyes lingering on her.

"But you knew her," Connell said.

"I knew who she was," Price said.

"Sleep with her?" Lucas asked.

"Nope. Never got that close," Price said, looking at Lucas. "Had a nice a.s.s on her, though."

"Where were you when she was killed?" asked Connell.

"Drunk. My buddies dropped me off at my house, but I knew if I went inside I'd start barfin', so I walked down to this convenience store for coffee. That's what got me."

"Tell me," said Connell.

Price looked up at the ceiling, stuck the cigarette in his mouth, looked down at it long enough to light it, blew some smoke and closed his eyes, remembering. "I was out drinking with some buddies. s.h.i.t, we were drinking all afternoon and shootin' pool. And so about eight o'clock my buddies brought me home 'cause I was too f.u.c.kin' drunk to drink."

"That's pretty drunk," Lucas said.

"Yeah, pretty," Price said. "Anyway, they dumped me off on my porch, and I sat there for a while, and when I could get going, I decided to go up to the corner and get some coffee. There was a 7-Eleven in one of them side-street shopping centers. There was like a drugstore and a cleaners and this bookstore. I was in the 7-Eleven, and she came down from the bookstore to get something. I was drunker'n s.h.i.t, but I remembered her from some welding I done for her."

"Welding?"

"Yeah." Price laughed, the laugh trailing off into a cough. "She had this piece-of-s.h.i.t '79 Cadillac, cream over key-lime green, and the b.u.mper fell off. Just f.u.c.kin' fell off one day. The Cadillac place wanted like four hundred bucks to fix it, so she brought it over to my place and asked me what I could do. I welded the sonofab.i.t.c.h back on for twenty-two dollars. If that b.u.mper hadn't fell off, I'd be a free man today."

"So you remembered her," Connell prompted. "In the store."

"Yeah. I said h.e.l.lo and come on to her a little bit, but she wasn't having it, and she left. I sort of followed along." Price's voice was slow and dreamy, pulling details out of his memory. "She went down to this bookstore. I was so f.u.c.kin' drunk, I kept thinking, h.e.l.l, I'm gonna get lucky with this chick. There was no chance. Even if she'd said, 'h.e.l.l, yes,' I was in no shape to . . . you know. Anyway, I went into the bookstore."

"How long did you stay?"

"About five minutes. There was a crowd in there, and I didn't fit so good. For one thing, I smelled like a Budweiser truck had peed on me."

"So?" Connell prompted.

"So I left." His voice hardened, and he sat up. "There was this pimply-faced a.s.shole kid in there, a clerk. He said I stayed, and that later, when this book thing was over, I followed her out of the store. That's what he said. The lawyer asked him on the witness stand, he said, 'Can you point to the man who followed her out?' And this kid said, 'Yessir. That's the man right there.' He pointed to me. I was a gone motherf.u.c.ker."

"But it wasn't you."

"h.e.l.l no. The kid remembered me because I b.u.mped into him. Sorta pushed him."

"What's this tattoo business?" Lucas asked.

Price's eyes slid toward the escort, back to Lucas, back to the escort, back to Lucas, and his chin moved quickly right and left, no more than a quarter inch. "Tattoo? Kid didn't have no tattoo."

Connell, jotting down notes, missed it. She looked up. "According to my notes," she said, but Lucas rode over her.

"We gotta talk," he said to her. "I'd rather Mr. Price didn't hear this. . . . C'mon."

The escort had been browsing The Encyclopedia of Pop, Rock and Soul. He looked up and said, "I could take him. . . ."

"The corner is fine," Lucas said, pulling Connell along.

"What?" she asked, low-voiced.

Lucas got his back to Price and the escort. "D. Wayne doesn't want to talk about tattoos in front of the guard," Lucas said. "Talk to him for another five minutes, then ask the guard where the ladies' room is. Get him to take you-it's back through one set of doors."

"I can do that," she said.

The escort was back in his book when they sat down again. "So where'd you go when you left the store?" Lucas asked.

"Home."

"You didn't stay with her? You didn't try again?"

"f.u.c.k, no. I was too drunk to follow her anywhere. I went back to the convenience store and got a couple more beers-never even got my coffee. I barely made it back home. I sat on my steps for a while, drank the beers, then I went inside and pa.s.sed out. I didn't wake up until the cops came to get me."

"Must've been more to it than that," Lucas said.

Price shrugged. "There wasn't. The guy across the street even saw me sittin' on the steps, and said so. They found the f.u.c.kin' beer cans next to the step. Said it didn't prove nothing."

"Must've had a horses.h.i.t attorney," Lucas said.

"Public defender. He was all right. But you know . . ."

"Yeah?"

Price leaned back and looked at the ceiling again, as though weary of the story. "The cops wanted me. I was stealing stuff. I admit that. Tools. I specialized in tools. Most people steal, like, stereos. s.h.i.t, you can't get nothing for a stereo compared to what you can get for a good set of mechanic's tools, you know? Anyway, the cops were trying to get me forever, but they never could. I'd steal something, and before anybody knew it was gone, there was three n.i.g.g.e.rs down in Chicago with a new welding rig, or something. I go into a shop, take out the tools, drive two hours and a half down to Chicago, unload them, drive back, and be drunk on my b.u.t.t with the money in my pocket before anybody knows anything happened. I thought I was pretty smart. The cops knew, and I knew that they knew, but I never thought they'd just get me. But that's what they did."

"I read a file that said you might have done a couple of liquor stores, that some people got hurt. Old man got beat with a pistol," Connell said.

"Not me," Price said, but his eyes slid away.

"Took some booze with the cash," Connell said. "You are a booze hound."

"Look, I admitted the stealing," Price said. He licked his lips. "But I didn't kill the b.i.t.c.h."

"When you were in the store, did you see anybody else that might have been with her?"

"Man, I was drunk," Price said. "When the cops come for me, I couldn't even remember seeing this gal, until they reminded me a lot."

"So you don't know s.h.i.t about s.h.i.t," Lucas said.

A little coal sparked in Price's eye that said he'd like to be alone with Lucas. "That's about it," Price said. Lucas held his eyes, and the coal died. "There were people down in the bookstore that night that n.o.body ever found. They were reading poems down there, and there was a whole bunch of people. It could have been any of them, more'n me."

Connell sighed, then looked at the escort. "Excuse me-is there a ladies' room back there?"

"Noooo . . ." He had to think about it. "Closest one is out."

"I wonder, do you mind? Could you?"

"Sure." The escort looked at Price. "You sit still, okay?"

Price spread his hands. "Hey, these guys are trying to help me out."

"Sure," the guard said. And to Connell: "Come along, girl."

Lucas winced, but Connell went. As soon as the door closed, Price leaned forward, voice low. "You think they're listening in?"