Prey: Night Prey Part 7

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 d.a.m.n happy to be out from under. Christ, Davenport, you saved my a.s.s 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 f.u.c.kin' Cuban cigar and smoke its a.s.s off."

"You could still do that."

"Yeah, but then people who don't already think I'm a bull d.y.k.e would start thinking I'm a bull d.y.k.e. 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 c.o.ke or something? I'm a little dry."

"Do I look like a f.u.c.kin' vending machine?" Lester asked.

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

Sloan yawned again, then said, "A little p.i.s.sant 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 f.u.c.ked 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 motherf.u.c.ker-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 f.u.c.kin' 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 c.o.kes from the machine in the bas.e.m.e.nt, 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. . . .

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 thumb-tacked 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 a.s.s.

Koop liked bench presses. h.e.l.l, 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 c.o.ke, 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 f.u.c.kin' AIDS."

"Do that," Koop said.

John backed away, took off his cap, and scratched his head. Koop started down the block, turned the corner. Another black kid was walking down the sidewalk. He swerved across the dirt parking strip to the curb, and when Koop slowed next to him, tossed a plastic twist through the pa.s.senger window and turned away. Koop kept going. Three blocks later, with nothing in his rearview, Koop stopped for a taste. Just a taste to wake him up.

KOOP DIDN'T UNDERSTAND his fascination with Jensen. Didn't understand why he was compelled to watch her, to get close to her. To hurry his daily rounds to meet her after work . . .

He finished liquidating the jewelry he'd taken from Jensen's apartment in a bar on the I-494 strip in Bloomington, selling the engagement ring and the wedding band to a guy who dressed and talked like an actor playing a pro athlete: a tan, a golf shirt, capped teeth, and a gold chain around his thick neck. But he knew stones, and the smile was gone from his eyes when he looked at them. He gave Koop $1,300. The total take from the apartment pushed $6,000, not counting the belt. It never occurred to Koop to feel a connection between the jewelry and the woman who'd caught his heart. The jewelry was his, not hers.

He left the Bloomington strip and idled back into Minneapolis, killing time behind the wheel, eventually turning east, to an Arby's on St. Paul's east side. He'd called the moving man who'd given him the map of Jensen's apartment, and arranged to meet. Koop was both early and late for the meetings, arriving a half hour early, watching the meeting spot from a distance. When his man arrived, alone, on time, he'd watch for another ten minutes before going in. He'd never had a contact turn on him. He didn't want it to happen, either.

The moving man arrived a few minutes early, hurried straight into the Arby's. The way he moved gave Koop some confidence that everything was okay: there was no tentativeness, no looking around. He carried a notebook in his hand. Koop waited five more minutes, watching, then went in. The guy was sitting in a booth with a cup of coffee, a young guy, looked like a college kid. Koop nodded at him, stopped for a cup of coffee himself, paid the girl behind the counter, and slid into the booth. "How're you doing?"

"It's been a while," the guy said.

"Yeah, well . . ." Koop handed him a Holiday Inn brochure. The guy took it and looked inside.

"Thanks," he said. "You must've done okay."

Koop shrugged. He wasn't much for chitchat. "Got anything else?"

"Yeah. A good one." The guy pushed the notebook at him. "I was p.i.s.sing my pants waiting for you to call. We was moving some stuff into this house on Upper St. Dennis in St. Paul, you know where that is?"

"Up the hill off West Seventh," Koop said, pulling in the notebook. "Some nice houses up there. A little riffraff, too."

"This a nice house, man." The guy's head was bobbing. "Nice. There was a guy from a safe company there. They'd just set a big f.u.c.kin' safe in concrete, down in the bas.e.m.e.nt, in a corner of a closet. I seen it myself."

"I don't do safes. . . ." The notebook was too thick. Koop opened it and found a key impression in dried putty. He'd shown the guy how to do it. The impression was crisp, clean.

"Wait a minute, for Christ's sakes," the guy said, holding up his hands. "So when he was talking to the safe guy, he was walking around with this piece of paper in his hand. When they finished, he came up and asked how long we were gonna be, 'cause he wanted to take a shower and shave, 'cause he was going out. We said we'd be a while yet, and he went up and took a shower in the bathroom. The bathroom off his bedroom. We were working right down the hall, my buddy was settin' up a guest bed. So I stepped down the hall and looked into his bedroom. I could hear the shower going, and I saw this paper laying on the dresser with his billfold and watch, and I just took the chance, man. I zipped over and looked at it, and it was the f.u.c.kin' combination. How about that, huh? I wrote it down. And listen, you know what this guy does? This guy runs half the automatic car washes in the Twin Cities. And he was braggin' to us about going out to Vegas all the time. I bet that f.u.c.kin' safe is stuffed."

"How about his family?" This sounded better; Koop would rather steal money than anything.

"He's divorced. Kids live with his old lady."

"The key's good?"

"Yeah, but, uh . . . There's a security system on the door. I don't know nothing about that."

Koop looked at the man for a minute, then nodded. "I'll think about it."

"I could use some cash, get out of this f.u.c.kin' place," the guy said. "My parole's up in September. Maybe go to Vegas myself."

"I'll get back," Koop said.

He finished his drink, picked up the notebook, nodded to the guy, and walked out. As he pulled out of the parking lot, he glanced at his watch. Sara should be getting off. . . .

KOOP HAD KILLED his mother.

He'd killed her with a long, slender switchblade he'd found in a p.a.w.nshop in Seoul, Korea, where he'd been with the Army. When he'd gotten back to the States, he'd spent a long weekend hitchhiking from Fort Polk to Hannibal, Missouri, for the sole purpose of ripping her.

And he'd done that. He'd banged on the door and she'd opened it, a Camel glued to her lip. She'd asked, "What the f.u.c.k do you want?" and he'd said, "This." Then he'd stepped up into the trailer and she'd stepped back, and he'd stuck the knife in just about her belly b.u.t.ton, and ripped up, right up through her breastbone. She'd opened her mouth to scream. Nothing came out but blood.

Koop had touched nothing, seen n.o.body. He'd grown up in Hannibal, just like Huck Finn, but he hadn't been any kind of Huck. He'd just been a dumb-s.h.i.t kid who never knew his father, and whose mother gave b.l.o.w. .j.o.bs for money after she got off work at the bar. On a busy night she might have four or five drunks stop by, banging on the aluminum door, sucking them, spitting in the sink next to his bedroom, spitting and gargling salt-and-soda, half the night gone. She'd drag him downtown, respectable eyes tearing at them, women in thigh-length skirts and tweedy jackets, pitying, disdaining. "b.i.t.c.hes; b.i.t.c.hes ain't no better'n me, you better believe it," his mother said. But she was lying, and Koop knew that for sure. They were better than his mother, these women in their suits and hats and clack-clack high heels. . . .

He'd been back at Fort Polk, sitting on his bunk reading Black Belt magazine, when the battalion sergeant-major came by. He'd said, "Koop, I got some bad news. Your mother was found dead."

And Koop had said, "Yeah?" and turned the page.

WHEN KOOP HAD been in Korea, he'd learned from the hookers outside the base that he had a problem with s.e.x. Nothing worked right. He'd get turned on thinking about it, but then the time would come . . . and nothing would happen.

Until, in his anger, he smacked one of the women. Hit her in the forehead with a fist, knocked her flat. Things started to work.

He'd killed a woman in New Orleans. He thought of the murder as an accident: he was pounding on her, getting worked up, and suddenly she wasn't fighting back, and her head was flopping a little too loosely. That'd scared him. They had the death penalty in Louisiana, and no qualms about using it. He'd run back to Fort Polk, and was astonished when nothing happened. Nothing. Not even a story in the newspaper, not that he could find.

That's when he'd gotten the idea about killing his mother. Nothing complicated. Just do it.

AFTER THE ARMY, he'd spent a year working on the Mississippi, a barge hand. He'd eventually gotten off in St. Paul, drifted through a series of c.r.a.ppy jobs, finally got smart and used his veteran's preference for something a little better. A year after that, he'd picked up a woman at a Minneapolis bookstore. He'd gone for a lifter's calendar and the woman had come to him. He'd recognized her immediately: she had the wool suit and the clack-clack high heels. She'd asked him something about exercise; he couldn't remember what, it'd obviously been a pickup. . . .

He hadn't thought to take her off, but he had, and that had been better than pounding on hookers. There had been a quality to the woman, the nylons and the careful makeup, the well-rounded sentences. She was one of those women so distinctly better than his mother.

And they were everywhere. Some were too smart and tough to be taken. He stayed away from that kind. But there were also the tentative ones, awkward, afraid: not of death or pain or anything else so dramatic, but of simple loneliness. He found them in a Des Moines art gallery and in a Madison bookstore and a Thunder Bay record shop, a little older, drinking white wine, dressed carefully in cheerful colors, their hair done to hide the gray, their smiles constant, flitting, as though they were sparrows looking for a place to perch.

Koop gave them a place to perch. They were never so much wary as anxious to do the right thing. . . .

KOOP PICKED UP Jensen when she left her office, escorted her to a Cub supermarket. Followed her inside, watching her move, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s shifting under her blouse, her legs, so well-muscled; the way she brushed the hair out of her eyes.

Her progress through the produce section was a sensual lesson in itself. Jensen prowled through it like a hunting cat, squeezing this, sniffing at those, poking at the others. She bought bing cherries and oranges and lemons, fat white mushrooms and celery, apples and English walnuts, grapes both green and red, and garlic. She made a brilliant salad.

Koop was in the cereals. He kept poking his head around the corner, looking at her. She never saw him, but he was so intent that he didn't see the stock kid until the kid was right on top of him.

"Can I help you?" The kid used a tone he might have used on a ten-year-old shoplifter.

Koop jumped. "What?" He was fl.u.s.tered. He had a cart with a package of beef jerky and a jar of dill pickles.

"What're you looking for?" The kid had a junior-cop att.i.tude; and he was burly, too-white, with pimples, crew cut, and small pig-eyes.

"I'm not looking. I'm thinking," Koop said.

"Okay. Just asking," the kid said. But when he moved away, he went only ten feet and began rearranging boxes of cornflakes, ostentatiously watching Koop.

Sara, at the very moment that the kid asked his first question, decided she'd gotten enough produce. A moment later, as the kid went to work in the cornflakes, she came around the corner. Koop turned away from her, but she glanced up at his face. Did he see the smallest of wrinkles? He turned his back and pushed his cart out of the aisle. The fact is, she might have seen him twenty times, if she'd ever scanned the third layer of people around her, if she'd noticed the guy on the bench on the next sidewalk over as she jogged. Had she remembered him? Was that why her forehead had wrinkled? The kid had seen him watching her. Would he say anything?

Koop thought about abandoning his cart, but decided that would be worse than hanging on. He pushed it to the express lane, bought a newspaper, paid, and went on to the parking lot. While he was waiting to pay, he saw the kid step out of an aisle, his fists on his hips, watching. A wave of hate washed over him. He'd get the little f.u.c.ker, get him in the parking lot, rip his f.u.c.king face off . . . Koop closed his eyes, controlling it, controlling himself. When he fantasized, the adrenaline started rolling through his blood, and he almost had to break something.

But the kid just wasn't worth it. a.s.shole. . . .