Night Prey

CHAPTER
19

Greave had his feet up on his desk, talking on the phone, when Lucas arrived in the morning. Anderson drifted over and said, "A homicide guy in Madison interviewed somebody named Abby Weed. He says she confirmed that she met Joe Hillerod in a bookstore. She doesn't remember the date, but she remembered the discussion, and it was the right one. She said she spent the night with him, and she was unhappy about being questioned."

"Damnit," Lucas said. He said it without heat. Hillerod hadn't felt right, and he hadn't expected much. "Have you seen Meagan Connell?"

Anderson shook his head, but Greave, still on the phone, held up a finger, said a few more words, then covered the mouthpiece with his palm. "She called in, said she was sick. She'll be in later," he said. He went back to the phone.

Sick. Connell had been plummeting into depression when Lucas left her the night before. He hadn't wanted to leave-he'd suggested that she come home with him, spend the night in a guest room, but she'd said she was fine.

"I shouldn't have mentioned Beneteau asking about you," Lucas said.

She caught his arm. "Lucas, you did right. It's one of the nicer things that's happened to me in the last year." But her eyes had been ineffably sad, and he'd had to turn away.

Greave dropped the receiver on the hook and sighed. "How far did you get on the sex histories?" Lucas asked.

"Not very far." Greave looked away. "To tell you the truth, I hardly got started. I thought I might have something on my apartment."

"Goddamnit, Bob, forget the fuckin' apartment," Lucas said, his voice harsh. "We need these histories-and we need as many people thinking about the case as we can get."

Greave stood up, shook himself like a dog. He was a little shorter than Lucas, his features a little finer. "Lucas, I can't. I try, but I just can't. It's like a nightmare. I swear to God, I was eating an ice cream cone last night and I started wondering if they poisoned her ice cream." Lucas just looked at him, and Greave shook his head after a minute and said, "They didn't, of course."

And they both said, simultaneously, "No toxicology."

Jan Reed found Lucas in his office. She had great eyes, he thought. Italian eyes. You could fall into them, no problem. He had a quick male mini-vision: Reed on the bed, pillow under her shoulders, head back, a half inch from orgasm. She looks up at the final instant, eyes opening, her awareness of him the sexiest thing in the universe…

"Nothing," he said, flustered. "Not a thing."

"But what about the people you grabbed in that raid over in Wisconsin?" There was a pinprick of amusement in her eyes. She knew the effect she had on him.

And she knew about the raid. "An unrelated case, but a good story," Lucas lied. He babbled: "It's a group of people called the Seeds-there used to be a motorcycle gang called the Bad Seeds, from up in northwest Wisconsin, and they evolved into a criminal organization. Cops call it the Hayseed Mafia. Anyway, these are the guys who were hitting the suburban gun stores. We got a lot of the guns back."

"That is interesting," she said. She made a note in her notebook, then put the eraser end of her pencil against her teeth, pensively, erotically. He was starting to fixate on the idea of television anchorwomen and oral sex, Lucas thought. "The gun issue's so hot… right now." She would pause every so often, leaving a gap in the conversation, almost as though she were inviting him to fill it in.

She paused now, and Lucas said, "Reed's an English name, right?"

"Yes. I'd be English on my father's side," she said. "Why?"

"I was thinking," Lucas said. "You've got great Italian eyes, you know?"

She smiled and caught her bottom lip with an upper tooth, and said, "Well, thank you…"

When she left, Lucas went to the door with her. She moved along a little more slowly than he did, and he found himself almost on top of her, ushering her out. She smelled fine, he thought. He watched her down the hall. She wouldn't be an athlete. She was soft, smooth. She turned at the corner to see if he was watching, and just at that moment, when she turned, and though they resembled each other not at all, she reminded him of Weather.

The rest of the day was a wasteland of paper, old reports, and conjectures. Connell wandered in after two, even paler than usual, said she'd been working on the computers. Lucas told her about the interview with Abby Weed. Connell nodded: "I'd already written them off. Hitting the Hillerods was just our good deed for the day."

"How're you feeling?"

"Sick," she said. Then quickly: "Not from last night. From… the big thing. It's coming back."

"Jesus, Meagan…"

"I knew it would," she said. "Listen, I'm going to talk to Anderson, and start helping Greave on those histories. I can't think of anything else."

She left, but came back ten seconds later. "We've got to get him, Lucas. This week or next."

"I don't know…"

"That's all the time I've got this round… and the next round will be even shorter."

Lucas got home early, found Weather on the couch reading The Robber Bride, her legs curled beneath her.

"A dead end?"

"Looks like it," Lucas said. "The woman in Madison confirmed Joe Hillerod's story. We're back to looking at paper."

"Too bad. He sounds like a major jerk."

"We've got him on the guns, anyway," Lucas said. "He handled most of the rifles, and their ID guys got good prints. And they found bolt cutters and a crowbar in his truck, and the tool-marks guy matched them to the marks on a gunshop door out in Wayzata."

"So what's left? On the murder case?"

"God, I don't know. But I feel like things are moving."

Lucas spent the late evening in the study, going through Anderson's book on the case-all the paper that anybody had brought in, with the histories that Greave had completed. Weather came to the door in her cotton nightgown and said, "Be extra quiet when you come to bed. I've got a heavy one tomorrow."

"Yeah." He looked up from the paper, his hair in disarray, discouraged. "Christ, you know, there's so much stuff in here, and so much of it's bullshit. The stuff in this file, you could spend four years investigating and never learn a fuckin' thing."

She smiled and came over and patted his hair back into place, and he wrapped an arm around her back and pulled her close, so he could lean his head between her breasts. There was something animal about this: it felt so good, and so natural. Like momma. "You'll get him," she said.

An hour later, he was puzzling over Anderson's note on the deaf people. Everything sounded right: a guy with a beard, going to the bookstore, in a truck. How in the hell did they screw up the license so bad? He glanced at his watch: one o'clock, too late to call anybody at St. Paul. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. Maybe something would bubble to the surface of his mind…