Night Prey

CHAPTER
17

The Hillerods called a Duluth lawyer named Aaron Capella. The lawyer arrived at midafternoon in a dusty Ford Escort, talked to the county attorney, then to his clients. Lucas went to the local emergency room, had four stitches taken in his scalp, then met Connell for a late lunch. Afterward, they hung out in Beneteau's office or wandered around the courthouse, waiting for Capella to finish with the Hillerods.

The crime-scene crew called from the junkyard to say they'd found three half-kilo bags of cocaine behind a false panel in the junkyard bathroom. Beneteau was more than pleased: he was on television with each of the Duluth-Superior stations.

"Gonna get my ass reelected, Davenport," he said to Lucas.

"I'll send you a bill," Lucas said.

They were talking in his office, and they saw Connell coming up the walk outside. She'd been down at a coffee shop, and carried a china cup with her.

"That's a fine-looking woman," Beneteau said, his eyes lingering on her. "I like the way she sticks her face into trouble. If you don't mind my asking, have you two… got something going?"

Lucas shook his head. "No."

"Huh. Is she with anybody else?"

"Not as far as I know," Lucas said. He started to say something about her being sick, hesitated.

"I mean, she's not a lesbian or anything," Beneteau said.

"No, she's not. Look, George…" He still couldn't think of exactly what he wanted to say. What he said was, "Look, do you want her phone number, or what?"

Beneteau's eyebrows went up. "Well, I get down to the Cities every now and then. You got it?"

Aaron Capella was a pro. Beneteau knew him, and they shook hands when Capella walked into the sheriff's office. Beneteau introduced Lucas and Connell.

"I've spoken to my clients. Another unconscionable violation of their civil rights," Capella said mildly to Beneteau.

"I know, it's a shame," Beneteau said, tongue in cheek. "The right of felons to bear stolen assault weapons while distributing cocaine and speed."

"That's what I keep telling people, and you're the only guy who understands," Capella said. "C'mon, Bich is waiting."

They walked through the courthouse, Beneteau and Capella talking about Capella's sailboat, which he kept on Lake Superior. "… guy from Maryland was telling me, 'A lake just isn't the ocean.' So I say, 'Where do you sail?' and he says, 'The Chesapeake.' And I say, 'You could put six Chesapeakes in Superior, and still have a Long Island Sound around the edges.' "

Bich was the county attorney, a serious, red-faced man in a charcoal suit. "They're bringing your client up now, Aaron," he said to Capella. They all followed the prosecutor into his office, settling into chairs, Bich joining the sailing talk until a deputy brought Joe Hillerod down from the lockup.

Hillerod's lip lifted in an uncontrollable sneer when he saw Beneteau. He dropped into a chair next to Capella and said, "How're we doing?"

Bich spoke to Capella as if Hillerod weren't there, but everything he said was aimed at Hillerod: Capella and Bich had already been over the ground.

"Tell you what, Aaron, your client's in bad shape," Bich said professorially. "He's got two years left on his parole. Possession of a gun'll put him back inside. There won't be any trial, none of that bullshit. All it takes is a hearing."

"We'd contest."

Bich rolled past him. "We found him with a house full of stolen guns. We could try him for possessing firearms as a felon and possession of stolen firearms. Then we could send him to Minnesota, to be tried for burglary. He'd go back to Waupun, serve out the rest of his parole, start his new Wisconsin time after that, and then go to Minnesota to serve out his time over there. That's a lot of time."

The lawyer spread his hands. "Joe had nothing to do with the guns. He thought they were legit. A friend left them there, the same guy you grabbed up in the bathroom."

"Right." Bich rolled his eyes.

"But we're not discussing the guns; that's another issue," Capella said. "We can talk, right? That's why Lucas and Ms. Connell are here, right? A little friendly extortion?"

"If he'll ride along with us," Bich said, poking a finger at Hillerod's chest, "we might be inclined to forget the parole violation, the possession of a gun. That we got him on already."

"So what are we talking about?" Capella asked.

Bich looked at Lucas. "Do you want to explain to Mr. Hillerod?"

Lucas looked at him and said, "I won't bullshit you. There are some good reasons to think that you've been slicing up women. Ripping their guts out. Six or more times now. We need to ask you some questions and get some answers."

Hillerod had known what was coming, having spoken to Capella. He started shaking his head before Lucas was finished talking. "Nah, nah, never did it, that's bullshit, man."

"We're running your knife through the crime lab," Connell said. "It looks like it might have some blood gummed up in the hinges."

"Well, shit," Hillerod said, and he looked uncomfortable for a moment as he thought about what she'd said. "If there's blood, it's animal blood. That's a hunting knife."

"This ain't exactly deer season," Lucas said.

"If there's any goddamned blood on that knife, it's deer blood-or you put it there just to get me," Hillerod said heatedly. "You fuckin' cops think you can get away with anything."

Capella's voice rode over his client's. "My client remembers the bookstore in Madison."

"That's a long time to remember," Bich marveled. "Several years, if I've got it right."

"I remember 'cause it's the only bookstore I ever been in," Hillerod snarled.

Capella kept talking. "… and he's got a witness of good reputation who spent that whole night with him down in Madison, and he's sure she'll remember it independently of anything we talk about here. Without any prompting from me or Joe. I will state that we have not been in touch with her, and that Joe's confident that she'll remember."

"You've got a name?" Lucas asked.

"You can have the name and the circumstances in which they met," the lawyer said. "The fact is, he picked her up at the bookstore."

"I didn't have nothing to do with the guns," Hillerod said sullenly.

"We're not talking about that," his lawyer said quickly. He patted Hillerod on the knee. "That's not part of the deal."

"We know the killer smokes Marlboros," Lucas said, leaning toward Hillerod. "You smoke Marlboros, right?"

"No, no, I usually smoke Merits, I'm trying to quit," Hillerod said. "I just got the Marlboros that once."

"Your man is lying to us," Lucas said to Capella. "We know he's smoked Marlboros for years."

Capella said, "He says Merits… I gotta believe him."

"Merits taste like shit," Bich said. "Why'd you smoke Merits? Is that all you smoke?"

"Well, I'm trying to quit," Hillerod said, not meeting their eyes. "I smoke some Marlboros, but I didn't kill anybody. I smoke some Ventures, too."

The Marlboro bluff hadn't worked. "We want to know about the bookstore," Connell said.

"In Madison?" Hillerod's eyes defocused for a moment, and then he said, "How'd you know about that, anyway?"

"We've got a witness," Connell said. "You left with a woman."

"That's right," Hillerod said. Then he said, "She's gotta be the one who told you."

"She's not," Lucas said. "Our witness… well, it's a woman, but it's not your friend. If you've got a friend. But we want to know about the other woman. The one who turned up dead the next day."

"Wasn't me," Hillerod said. "The woman I left with, she's still alive. And she must've told you that I couldn't have done it, 'cause I was with her."

"What's her name?" asked Connell.

Hillerod scratched his face, glaring at her, but Connell looked levelly back, as though she were an entomologist examining a not-particularly-interesting beetle. "Abby Weed," he said finally.

"Where does she live?"

Hillerod shrugged. "I don't know the address, just how to get there. But you can get her at the university."

"She works at the university?" Lucas asked.

"She's a professor," he said. "In fine art. She's a painter."

Lucas looked at Connell, who rolled her eyes. "Who were you there with? At the bookstore?"

"Wasn't there with nobody," Hillerod said. "I went in to get a book on my bike, if they had one, which they didn't."

"How long were you in there?"

Hillerod shrugged. "Hour."

"That's a long time to look for a book that they didn't have," Lucas said.

"I only spent five minutes looking for the book. Then I saw Abby giving me the eye, and I hung around to bullshit her a little bit. She had the big…" He glanced at Connell. "Headlights."

"She went home with you?" Connell said.

"We went to her place."

"You spent the night?"

"Shit, I spent about four nights," Hillerod said with a small smile, talking to Connell. "Every time I tried to get out of bed, I'd find her hanging on to my dick…" The smile went flat, and he looked at Lucas. "The fuckin' cop," he said. "That fuckin' cop picked me out, didn't he?"

"What cop?"

"The cop at the store."

Lucas looked at him for a long beat, then said, "You have a 666 on your hand."

Hillerod looked at the tattoo, shook his head. "Goddamnit, I knew that was stupid, the fuckin' 666. Everybody was getting them. I told people, the cops'll use them against us."

"Did you see anybody in the store that looked like this?" Connell asked. She handed him the composite.

Hillerod looked it over, then looked curiously from Connell to Lucas to Bich to Capella. "Well. Not anyone else. Not that I remember."

"What? What'd you mean, anyone else?" Lucas asked.

He shrugged. "You should know. It looks like your cop."

"The cop?" Connell looked at Lucas again. "How did you know he was a cop?"

"The way he looked at me. He was a cop, all right. He looked at my hand, then at me, and then my hand. He knew what it was."

"Could have been a con," Lucas said.

Hillerod thought about it, then said, "Yeah. Could have been, I guess. But I felt like he was a cop."

"And he looked like this picture," Connell said.

"Yeah. It's not quite right, I don't think. I can't remember that well, but his beard's wrong," he said, studying the drawing. "And there's something wrong about the mouth. And the guy's hair was flatter… But that's who it mostly looks like."

"The cop," Lucas said.

"Yeah. The cop."

"Sonofagun," Connell said bitterly. They stood next to a water fountain, the office lawyers and secretaries flowing around them. "The cop shows up again. Davenport-I believe him." She gestured down the hall at Bich's office, where Hillerod waited. "I can't believe he just pulled that out of his ass. He's not smart enough."

"Don't panic yet," Lucas said. "We've still got some lab work to do. We've got the knife."

"You know as well as I do… Are we sure the St. Paul cop is out of it?"

"St. Paul says he is."

"There's no way they'd cover for a guy on something like this," she said, not quite making it a question.

"No way," Lucas agreed. "I talked to one of their guys, and they worked him over pretty good."

"Goddamnit," Connell said. She shook her head. "We're going back to the beginning."

Connell drove: she wanted to handle the Porsche. On the way out to the interstate, the sun dropping toward the horizon, windshield greased by a million bugs from the roadside ditches, she said, "George Beneteau was surprisingly professional. I mean, for a county sheriff."

Lucas rode along for a minute, then said, "He asked about you. Marital status, that kind of thing."

"What?"

Lucas grinned at her and she flushed. "He said…" Lucas dropped into a cornball accent, which Beneteau didn't have, " 'that's a fine-lookin' woman.' "

"You are lying to me, Davenport."

"Honest to God," Lucas said. After a minute, he said, "He wanted your phone number."

"Did you give it to him?"

Lucas said, "I didn't know what to do, Meagan. I didn't know whether to tell him you were sick, or what. So I… yeah, I gave it to him."

"You didn't tell him I was sick?"

"No. I didn't."

They drove on for another minute, in silence, and then Connell began to weep. Eyes open, head up, big hands square on the wheel, she began sobbing, breath tearing from her chest, tears streaming down her face. Lucas started to say something, looking for words, but she just shook her head and drove on.