Night Prey

CHAPTER
21

The curb outside City Hall was lined with TV vans. Something had happened.

Lucas dumped the Porsche in a ramp and hurried back. A Star-Tribune reporter, a young guy with a buzz cut, carrying a notebook, was coming up from the opposite direction. He nodded at Lucas and held the door. "Anything happening with your case?" he asked.

"Nothing serious," Lucas said. "What's going on?"

"You haven't heard?" Buzz Cut did a mock double take.

"I'm just coming in," Lucas said.

"You remember that couple that was jumped up by the lakes, the woman was killed?"

"Yeah?"

"Somebody else got hit, right across the street. Four hours ago. Thirty feet away from the first scene," Buzz Cut said. "I ain't bullshitting you, Lucas: I been out there. Thirty feet. This guy came out of nowhere like a maniac, broad daylight. Big fucking switchblade. He sounded like somebody from a horror movie, had a hat over his face, he was screaming. But it wasn't any gang. It was white-on-white. The guy who got stabbed is a lawyer."

"Dead?" Lucas asked. He'd relaxed a notch: not his case.

"Not yet. He's cut to shit. Got a knife in the guts. He's still in the operating room. He spent the night with his girlfriend, and the next morning, he walks out the door and this asshole jumps him."

"Has she got a husband or ex-husband?"

"I don't know," the reporter said.

"If I were you, I'd ask," Lucas said.

The reporter held up his notebook, which was turned over to a page with a list of indecipherable scrawls. "First question on the list," he said. Then he said, "Whoa."

Jan Reed was lounging in the hall, apparently waiting for the press conference to start. She saw Lucas and lifted her chin and smiled and started toward them, and the reporter, without moving his lips, said, "You dog."

"Not me," Lucas muttered.

"Lucas," she said, walking up. Big eyes. Pools. She touched him on the back of his hand and said, "Are you in on this?"

Lucas despised himself for it, but he could feel the pleasure of her company unwinding in his chest. "Hi. No, but it sounds like a good one." He bounced on his toes, like a basketball player about to be sent into a game.

She looked back toward the briefing room. "Pretty spectacular right now. It could wind up as a domestic."

"It's right across the street from that other one."

She nodded. "That's the angle. That's what makes it good. Besides which, the people are white."

"Is that a requirement now?" Buzz Cut asked.

"Of course not," she said, laughing. Then her voice dropped to the confidential level, including him in the conspiracy. "But you know how it goes."

The reporter's scalp flushed pink and he said, "I better get inside."

"What's wrong with him?" she asked, watching him go. Lucas shrugged, and she said, "So, do you have time for a cup of coffee? After the press conference?"

"Uhhmm," Lucas said, peering down at her. She definitely wound his clock. "Why don't you stop by my office," he said.

"Okay… but, your tie, your collar's messed up. Here…"

She fixed his collar and tie, and though he was fairly certain that there'd been nothing wrong with them, he liked it, and carried her touch down the hall.

Connell was the perfect contrast to Jan Reed: a big solid blonde who carried a gun the size of a toaster and considered lipstick a manifestation of Original Sin. She was waiting for him, dark circles under her eyes.

"How're you feeling?"

"Better. Still a little morning sickness," she said dismissively, brushing the illness away. "Did you read the histories?"

"Yeah. Not much."

She looked angry: not at Lucas or Greave, but maybe at herself, or the world. "We're not gonna get him this time, are we? He's gonna have to kill somebody else before we get him."

"Unless we get a big fuckin' break," Lucas said. "And I don't see a break coming."

Jan Reed came by Lucas's office after the press conference, and they ambled through the Skyways to a restaurant in the Pillsbury Building. Since she was new to Minnesota, they chatted about the weather, about the lakes, about the Guthrie Theater, and about the other places she'd worked: Detroit, Miami, Cleveland. They found a table not too close to anyone else, Reed with her back to the door-"I get pestered sometimes"-and ordered coffee and croissants.

"How was the press conference?" Lucas asked, peeling open one of the croissants.

Reed opened her notebook and looked at it. "Maybe not domestic," she said. "The guy's name is Evan Hart. His girlfriend's been divorced for seven years. Her ex lives out on the West Coast and he was there this morning. Besides, she says he's a nice guy. That they broke up because he was too mellow. No alimony or anything. No kids. Sort of a hippie mistake. And she hasn't gone out with anybody else, seriously, for a couple of years."

"How about this Hart?" Lucas asked. "Has he got an ex? Is he bisexual? What does he do?"

"He's a widower," Reed said. She put the yellow pencil in her mouth and turned pages. A little clump of hair fell over her eyes and she brushed it back; Weather did that. "His wife was killed in a traffic accident. He's a lawyer for a stockbrokerage company, he has something to do with municipal bonds. He doesn't sell anything, so it's not that. He didn't ruin anybody."

"Doesn't sound like a fruitcake, though," Lucas said. "It sounds like the guy was mad about something."

"That's what it sounds like," she said. "But Jensen's really freaked out. That other attack happened right down below her apartment window."

"That's what I heard. Jensen's his girlfriend? She was actually there at the press conference?"

"Yeah. She was. Sara Jensen. Sharp. Good-looking, runs her own mutual fund, probably makes two hundred thousand a year," Reed said. "Dresses like it. She has just gorgeous clothes-she must go to New York. She was really angry. She wants the guy caught. Actually, it sounded like she wants the guy killed, like she was there to ask the cops to find him and kill him."

"Very strange," Lucas said. "The guys in homicide are having a hard time right now…"

The conversation rambled along, through new subjects, Lucas enjoying it, laughing. Reed was nice-looking, amusing, and had spent a little time on the streets. They had that in common. Then she said something about gangs. Gangs was a code word for blacks, and as she talked, the code word pecked away at the back of Lucas's mind. Reed, he thought after a bit, might have a fine ass and great eyes, but she was also a bit of a racist. Racism was becoming fashionable in the smart set, if done in a suitably subtle way. Was it immoral to jump a racist? How about if she didn't have a good time, but you did?

He was smiling and nodding and Reed was rambling on about something sexual but safe, the rumored affair between an anchorman and a cameraman, carried out in what she said was a TV van with bad springs.

"… So there they were on Summit Avenue outside the governor's mansion, and everybody's going in for the ball and this giant van with TV3 on the side is practically jumping up and down, and her husband is out on the sidewalk, pacing back and forth, looking for her." Reed was playing with her butter knife as she talked, and she twirled it in her fingers, a cheerleader's baton twirl.

Like Junky Doog, Lucas thought. What had Junky said when Greave had asked him why a man might start cutting on women? 'Cause a woman turns you on, that's why. Maybe you see a woman and she turns you on. Gets you by the pecker…

The Society of Jesus, SJ.

Or…

Lucas said, suddenly, sitting up, "What was the guy's wound like?"

"What?" She'd been in midsentence.

"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, nobody 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 switchbladelike 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."