Prey: Night Prey Part 27

"This guy who was attacked this morning," Lucas said impatiently.

"Uh . . . well, he was stabbed in the stomach," Reed said, startled by the sudden roughness in his voice. "Two or three times. He was really messed up. I guess they're still trying to put him together in the operating room."

"With a switchblade. The kid from the Strib said it was a switchblade."

"A witness said that," Reed said. "Why?"

"I gotta go," Lucas said, looking at his watch. He threw a handful of dollars on the table. "I'm sorry, but I really got to run. I'm sorry. . . ."

Now she looked distinctly startled, but he did run, once he was out of sight. His office was locked, n.o.body around. He went down the hall to homicide and found Anderson eating an egg-salad sandwich at his desk. "Have you seen Connell?"

"Uh, yeah, she just went into the women's can." He had a fleck of egg white on his lip.

Lucas went down to the women's can and pushed the door open. "Connell?" he shouted. "Meagan?"

After a moment, a reluctant, hollow, tile-walled "Yeah?"

"Come out here."

"Christ . . ." She took two minutes, Lucas walking up and down the hall, cooling off. Very unlikely, he thought. But the wound sounded right. . . .

Connell came out, tucking her shirt into her skirt. "What?"

"The guy that was attacked this morning," Lucas said. "He was ripped in the stomach by a guy with a switch- bladelike knife."

"Lucas, it was a guy, it was daylight, he doesn't fit anything . . ." She was puzzled.

"He'd spent the night with his girlfriend, Sara Jensen."

Still she looked puzzled.

Lucas said, "SJ."

22.

THEY FOUND SARA Jensen at Hennepin General, distraught, pacing the surgical waiting room. A uniformed cop sat in a plastic chair reading Road & Track. They took Jensen to an examination room, shut the door, and sat her down.

"It's about G.o.dd.a.m.n time somebody started taking this seriously," Jensen said. "You had to wait until Evan got stabbed. . . ." Her voice was contained, but with a thread of fear that suggested she was at the edge of her self-control. "It's the G.o.dd.a.m.n burglar. If you'd find him . . ."

"What burglar?" Lucas asked. The place smelled like medical alcohol and skin and adhesive tape.

"What burglar?" Her voice rose in anger, until she was nearly shouting. "What burglar? What burglar? The burglar at my place."

"We don't know anything about that," Connell said quickly. "We work homicide. We're looking for a man who has been killing women for years. The last two he's marked with the initials SJ-your initials. We're not sure it's you, but it might be. The attack on Mr. Hart resembles the technique he has used to kill the women. The weapon appears to be similar. He fits the descriptions we've had. . . ."

"Oh, G.o.d," Jensen said, her hand going to her mouth. "I saw it on TV3, the man with the beard. The man who attacked Evan had a beard."

Lucas nodded. "That's him. Do you know anybody who looks like that? Somebody you've dated, somebody you have a relationship with? Maybe with some frustration? Or maybe somebody who just watches you, somebody you can feel in your office?"

"No." She thought about it again. "No. I know a couple of guys with beards, but I haven't dated them. And they seem to be ordinary enough . . . Besides, it's not them. It's the G.o.dd.a.m.n burglar. I think he's been coming back to my apartment."

"Tell us about the burglar," Lucas said.

She told them: the initial burglary, the loss of her jewelry and belt, the smell of saliva on her forehead. And she told them about the sense she had, that somebody had been in and out of her apartment since the burglary-and the feeling that it was the same man. "But I'm not sure," she said. "I thought I was going crazy. My friends thought it was stress from the burglary, that I was imagining it. But I don't think so: the place just didn't feel right, like there was something in the air. I think he sleeps in my bed." Then she laughed, a short, barely amused bark. "I sound like the Three Bears. Somebody's been eating my porridge. Somebody's been sleeping in my bed."

"So you say that when he came in the first time, he must've touched you-kissed you on the forehead."

"More like a lick," she said, shuddering. "I can remember it, like a dream."

"What about the actual entry?" Lucas asked. "Did he break the door?"

There hadn't been a sound, she said, and the door had been untouched, so he must have had a key. But she was the only one with a key-and the building manager, of course.

"What's he like? The manager?"

"Older man. . . ."

They went through the list: who had the key, who could get it, who could copy it. More people than she'd realized. Building employees, a cleaning woman. How about valet-parking places? A few valets-"But I changed the locks again after the burglary. He'd have to get my key twice."

"Gotta be somebody in the building," Connell said to Lucas. She'd grabbed his wrist to get his attention. She was sick, but she was a strong woman, and her grip had the strength of desperation.

"If somebody's actually coming back," Lucas said. "But whoever it was is a pro. He knew what he wanted and where it was. He didn't rip the place apart. A cat burglar."

"A cat burglar?" Jensen said doubtfully.

"I'll tell you something: movies romanticize cat burglars, but real cat burglars are cracked," Lucas said. "They get off on creeping in apartments while the residents are home. Most burglars, the last thing they want is to run into a home owner. Cat burglars get off on the thrill. Every one of them does dope, cocaine, speed, PCP. Quite a few of them have rape records. A lot of them eventually kill somebody. I'm not trying to scare you, but that's the truth."

"Oh, G.o.d. . . ."

"The way the attack happened would suggest that the guy knows about you and Mr. Hart," Connell said. "Do you talk to anybody in your building about him?"

"No, I really don't have any close friends in the building, other than just to say h.e.l.lo to," Jensen said. Then, "Last night was the first time Evan stayed over. It was actually the first time we'd slept together. Ever. It's like whoever it is, knew about us."

"Did you tell anybody at work that he was coming over?"

"I have a couple of friends who knew we were getting close. . . ."

"We'll need their names," Lucas said. And to Connell: "Somebody at the office might have occasional access to her purse; they could get the keys that way. We should check all the apartments that adjoin hers, too. People in her hallway." To Jensen: "Do you feel any attention from anybody in your apartment? Just a little creepy feeling? Somebody who seems sort of anxious to meet you, or talk to you, or just looks you over?"

"No, no, I don't. The manager is a heck of a nice guy. Really straight. I don't mean, you know, repressed, or weird, or a Boy Scout leader or anything. He's like my dad. G.o.d, it gives me the shakes, thinking about somebody watching me," she said.

"How about an outsider?" Lucas asked. "Is there a building across the street where you could be watched from? A Peeping Tom?"

She shook her head. "No. There's a building across the street-that's the building where that woman was killed last week-but I'm on the top floor, which is higher even than their roof," Jensen said. "I look right across their roof into the park, and the other side of the park is residential. There's nothing as high as me on the other side of the park. Besides, that's a mile away."

"Okay . . ." Lucas studied her for a moment. She was very different than the other victims. Watching her, Lucas felt a small chord of doubt. She was fashionable, she was smart, she was tough. There was no hint of deference, no air of wistfulness, no feeling of time and years slipping away.

"I've got to get out of the apartment," Jensen said.

"Could a policeman come with me while I get some things?"

"You can have a cop with you until we get the guy," Lucas said. He reached forward to touch her arm. "But I hope you won't leave. We could move you to another apartment inside the building, and give you escorts: armed policewomen in plain clothes. We'd like to trap the guy, not scare him off."

Connell joined in: "We don't really have any leads, Ms. Jensen. We're almost reduced to waiting until he kills somebody else, and hoping we find something then. This is the first break we've had."

Jensen stood up and turned away, shivered, looked down at Lucas, and said, "How much chance is there that he'd . . . get to me?"

Lucas said, "I won't lie to you: there's always a chance. But it's small. And if we don't get him, he might outwait our ability to escort you and then come after you. We had a case a few years ago where a guy in his middle twenties went after a woman who'd been his ninth-grade teacher. He'd brooded about her all that time."

"Oh, Jesus . . ." Then, suddenly: "All right. Let's do it. Let's get him."

The uniformed cop who'd been in the waiting room rapped on the door, stuck his head inside, and said to Jensen, "Dr. Ramihat is looking for you."

Jensen took Lucas's forearm, her fingers digging in, as they went back down the hall to the waiting area. They found the surgeon greedily sucking on a cigarette and eating a Twinkie. "There's an awful lot of damage," he said, in light Indian accents. "There aren't any guarantees, but we've got him more or less stable and we've stopped the bleeding. Unless we get something unexpected, his chances are good. There'll be an infection problem, but he's in good physical shape and we should be able to handle it."

Jensen collapsed in a chair, face in her hands, began to blubber. Ramihat patted her on the shoulder with one hand, ate the second Twinkie with his cigarette hand, and winked at Lucas. Connell pulled Lucas aside and said quietly, "If we can keep her in line, we got him."

THEY SPENT THE rest of the morning setting it up: Sloan came in to work with Lucas, Connell, and Greave in checking people with access to Jensen's keys. Five women from intelligence, narcotics, and homicide would rotate as close escorts.

After some discussion, Jensen decided that she could stay in the apartment as long as an escort was always with her. That way, she wouldn't have to move anything out, and open the possibility that if the killer was in the building, she'd be seen doing it.

Hart came out of surgery at three o'clock in the afternoon, hanging on.

23.

KOOP WAS STILL in a rage as he fled the lakes. He couldn't think of the guy in bed with Jensen without hyperventilating, without choking the truck's steering wheel, gripping it, screaming at the windshield. . . .

In calmer moments, he could still close his eyes and see her as she was that first night, lying on the sheets, her body pressing up through the nightgown. . . .

Then he'd see her on Hart again, and he'd begin screaming, strangling the steering wheel. Crazy. But not entirely gone. He was sane enough to know that the cops might be coming for him. Somebody might have seen him getting in the truck, might have his license number.

Koop had done his research in his years at Stillwater: he knew how men were caught and convicted. Most of them talked to the cops when they shouldn't. Many of them kept sc.r.a.ps and pieces of past crimes around them-television sets, stereos, watches, guns, things with serial numbers.

Some of them kept clothing with blood on it. Some of them left blood behind, or s.e.m.e.n.

Koop had thought about it. If he was taken, he swore to himself that he would say nothing at all. Nothing. And he would get rid of everything he wore or used in any crime: he would not give the cops a sc.r.a.p to hang on to. He would try to build an alibi-anything that a defense attorney could use.

HE WAS STILL in psychological flight from the attack on Hart when he dumped the coat and hat. The coat was smeared with Hart's blood, a great liverish-black stain. He wrapped it, with the hat, in a garbage bag and dumped it with a pile of garbage bags on a residential street in Edina. The garbage truck was three blocks away. The bag would be at the landfill before noon. He threw the plain-pane gla.s.ses out the car window into the high gra.s.s of a roadside ditch.

Turned on the radio, found an all-news station. Bulls.h.i.t, bulls.h.i.t, and more bulls.h.i.t. Nothing about him.

In his T-shirt, he stopped at a convenience store, bought a six-pack of springwater, a bar of soap, a laundry bucket, and a pack of Bic razors. He continued south to Braemar Park, climbed into the back of the truck, and shaved in the bucket. His face felt raw afterward; when he looked in the truck mirror, he barely recognized himself. He'd picked up a few wrinkles since he'd last been bare-faced, and his upper lip seemed to have disappeared into a thin, stern line.

He couldn't bring himself to throw away the knife or the apartment keys. He washed the knife as well as he could, using the last of the springwater, sprayed both the knife and the keys with WD-40, wrapped them in another garbage bag, knotted the mouth of the bag, walked up a hill near the park entrance, and buried the bag near a prominent oak. He felt almost lonely when he walked away from it. He'd recover it in a week or so . . . if he was still free.

Cleansed of the immediate evidence of the crime, Koop headed east out of St. Paul.

As he pa.s.sed White Bear Avenue: Police are on the scene of a brutal murder attempt in south Minneapolis that took place about an hour and fifteen minutes ago. The site is less than a block from the building where a woman was murdered and a man was badly beaten last week; the man is still in a coma from that attack, and may not recover. In this latest attack, witnesses say a tall, bearded man wearing steel-rimmed gla.s.ses and a brown snap-brimmed hat attacked attorney Evan Hart as he left a friend's apartment this morning. Hart is currently in surgery at Hennepin General, where his condition is listed as critical. The attacker fled and may be driving a mint-green late-model Taurus sedan. Witnesses say that the attacker repeatedly slashed Hart with a knife. . . .

Green Taurus sedan? What was that? Tall? He was five-eight.

Was either white or a light-skinned black man . . .

What? They thought he was black. Koop stared at the radio in amazement. Maybe he didn't have to run at all.

Still: He drove for an hour and a half, losing the Twin Cities radio stations sixty miles out. He stopped at a big sporting goods outlet off I-94, bought a shirt, a sleeping bag, a cheap spinning rod with a reel, a tackle box, and some lures. He stripped them of bags and receipts, threw the paper in a trash can, and turned north, plotting the roads in his head. At Cornell, he bought some bread, lunch meat, and a six-pack of Miller's, and carefully kept the receipt with its hour-and-day stamp, crumbled in the grocery sack, thrust under the seat. Before he left the store parking lot, he looked carefully around the lot for any discarded receipts, but didn't see any.

North of Cornell, he turned into the Brunet Island State Park and parked at a vacant campsite away from the boat launching ramp. Two boat trailers were parked at the ramp, hooked onto pickups. When he had the ramp to himself, he dug around in a trash can for a moment. There were two grocery bags crumpled inside; he opened the first, found it empty, but in the second, he found another grocery receipt. There was no time on it, but the date and the store name were, and the date was from the day before.

He carried it back to the truck and threw it in the back.

He could see only one boat on the water, so far away that he could barely make out the occupants. Koop was not much of a fisherman, but he got the rod and reel, tied on a spinner bait, and walked back toward the ramp. n.o.body around. Ducking through the brush, he moved up to one of the trailers, unscrewed a tire cap, and pushed the valve stem with his fingernails. When the tire was flat, he carefully backed away and tossed the cap into weeds.

After that, he waited; wandered down the sh.o.r.eline, casting. Thinking about Jensen's treachery. How could a woman do that? It wasn't right. . . .

Deep in thought, he was annoyed, five minutes later, when he got a hit. He ripped a small northern off the hook and tossed the fish back up in the weeds. f.u.c.k it.

An hour after he'd let the air out of the trailer tire, an aluminum fishing boat cut in toward the ramp. Two men in farm coveralls climbed out of the boat and walked back to the trailer with the flat. The older of the two backed the trailer into the water while the other stood on the side opposite the flat and helped the boat up to the ramp. After the boat was loaded and pulled out, the man on the ramp yelled something, and after some talk back and forth, the man in the car got out to look at the trailer tire. Koop drifted toward them, casting.

"Got a problem?" he called.

"Flat tire."

"Huh." Koop reeled in his last cast and walked over toward them. The driver was talking to his friend about taking the boat off, pulling the wheel, and driving it into town to get it fixed.

"I got a pump up in my truck," Koop said. "Maybe it'd hold long enough to get you into town."

"Well." The farmers looked at each other, and the driver said, "Where's your truck?"

"Right over there, you can see it. . . ."

"We could give 'er a try," the driver said.

Koop retrieved the pump. "h.e.l.l of a nice boat," he said as they pumped up the tire. "Always wanted a Lund. Had it long?"

"Two years," the driver said. "Saved for that sucker for ten years; got it set up perfect." When the tire was up, they watched it for a moment, then the driver said, "Seems to hold."