Night Prey

CHAPTER
30

Lucas and Connell watched the arrest from a Super America station across the street, leaning on Connell's car, eating ice cream sandwiches. Koop came out, Kershaw a step behind, with one hand on Koop's right elbow. "I wanted to take him," Connell said between bites.

"Not for burglary," Lucas said.

"No." She looked at her watch. "The search warrants should be ready."

Carrigan and Kershaw were pushing Koop into the car. Koop's arms were flexed, and his muscles stood out like ropes. Lucas balled up the ice cream sandwich wrapper and fired it at a trash can; it bounced off onto the pavement.

"I want to get down to the house," Connell said. "See you there?"

"Yeah. I'll wait until they open the truck-I'll let you know if there's anything good."

Lucas wanted crime-scene people to open the truck. "We might be talking about a couple of hairs," he told the patrolman with the keys. "Let's wait."

"Okay. Who was that guy?" the patrolman asked.

"Cat burglar," Lucas said. "He sure went nice and easy."

"He scared the shit out of me," the patrolman confessed, his eyes drifting back toward the store. "I was in the door and he looked over toward me, like he was gonna run. He had crazy eyes, man. He was right on the edge of flipping out. Did you see his arms? I wouldn't have wanted to fight the sonofabitch."

Crime scene arrived five minutes later. A half-carton of unfiltered Camels sat on the front seat. A bag of mixed salt and sand, jumper cables, a toolbox, and other junk occupied the back.

Lucas poked carefully through it but found nothing. He pulled the keys Koop had produced. There were two truck keys, what looked like two house keys, and a fifth one. Jensen's maybe. But it didn't look new enough. They'd have to check.

"Got a nice set of burglary tools back here," one of the crime-scene guys said. Lucas walked around to the back of the truck, where they'd carefully opened the toolbox. Unfortunately, burglary tools were nothing more than a slightly unusual selection of ordinary tools. You had to prove the burglary first. The crime-scene guy picked up a small metal-file and looked at it with a magnifying glass, just like Sherlock Holmes.

"Got some brass," he said.

"That'll help," Lucas said. Koop was cutting his own keys, by hand. "Anything like a knife? Any rope?"

"No."

"Goddamnit. Well, close it up and take it down," Lucas said, disappointed. "We want everything-prints, hair, skin, fluid. Everything."

Lucas dropped the Porsche at the curb and started up the driveway to Koop's house. The front and side doors were open, and two unmarked vans sat in the driveway, along with Connell's anonymous gray Chevy. Lucas was almost to the front steps when he saw two neighborhood women walking down the street, one of them pushing a baby buggy. Lucas walked back toward them.

"Hello," he said.

The woman pushing the buggy had her hair in curlers, covered with a rayon scarf. The other one had dishwater-blond hair with streaks of copper through it. They stopped. "Are you police?" Neighbors always knew.

"Yes. Have you seen Mr. Koop recently?"

"What'd he do?" asked the copper-streaked one. The kid in the buggy was sucking on a blue pacifier, looking fixedly at Lucas with pale-blue eyes.

"He's been arrested in connection with a burglary," Lucas said.

"Told you," Copper Streak said to Hair Curler. To Lucas, she said, "We always knew he was a criminal."

"Why? What'd he do?"

"Never got up in the morning," she said. "You'd hardly ever see him at all. Sometimes, when he put his garbage out. That was it. He was never in his yard. His garage door would go up, always in the afternoon, and he'd drive away. Then he'd come back in the middle of the night, like three o'clock in the morning, and the garage door would go up, and he'd be inside. You never saw him. The only time I ever saw him, except for garbage, was that Halloween snowstorm a couple of years ago. He came out and shoveled his driveway. After that, he always had a service do it."

"Did he have a beard?"

Copper Streak looked at Hair Curler, and they both looked back at Lucas. "Sure. He's always had one."

One more thing, Lucas thought. They talked for another minute, then Lucas broke away and went inside.

Connell was in the kitchen, scribbling notes on a yellow pad.

"Anything?" Lucas asked.

"Not much. How about the truck?"

"Nothing so far. No weapon?"

"Kitchen knives. But this guy isn't using a kitchen knife. I'd be willing to bet on it."

"I just talked to a couple of neighbors," Lucas said. "They say he's always had a beard."

"Huh." Connell pursed her lips. "That's interesting… C'mere, down the basement." Lucas followed her down a short flight of stairs off the kitchen. The basement was finished. To the left, through an open door, Lucas could see a washer, dryer, laundry sink, and a water heater, sitting on a tiled floor. The furnace would be back here too, out of sight. The larger end of the basement was carpeted with a seventies-era two-tone shag. A couch, a chair, and a coffee table with a lamp pressed against the walls. The center of the rug was dominated by a plastic painter's drop cloth, ten feet by about thirteen or fourteen, laid flat on the rug. A technician was vacuuming around the edges of the drop cloth.

"Was that plastic sheet like that?" Lucas asked.

"No. I put it there," Connell said. "C'mere and look at the windows."

The windows were blacked out with sheets of quarter-inch plywood. "I went outside and looked," Connell said. "He's painted the outside of them black, so unless you get down on your knees and look into the window wells, it just looks like the basement is dark. He went to a lot of trouble with it: the edges are caulked."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." She looked down the sheet. "I think this is where he killed Wannemaker. On a piece of plastic. There're a couple of three-packs of drop cloths in the utility room. One of them is unopened. The other one only had one cloth in it. I was walking around down here, and it looked to me like the rug was matted in a rectangle. Then I noticed the furniture: it's set up to look at something in the middle of the rug. When I saw the drop cloths…" She shrugged. "I laid it out, and it fit perfectly."

"Jesus…" Lucas looked at the tech. "Anything?"

The tech nodded and said, "A ton of shit: I don't think the rug's ever been cleaned, and it must've been installed fifteen years ago. It's gonna be a goddamned nightmare, sorting everything out."

"Well, it's something, anyway," Lucas said.

"There's one other thing," Connell said. "Up in the bedroom."

Lucas followed her back up the stairs. Koop's bedroom was spare, almost military, though the bed was unmade and smelled of sweat. Lucas saw it right away: on the chest of drawers, a bottle of Opium.

Lucas: "You didn't touch it?"

"Not yet. But it wouldn't make any difference."

"Jensen said he took it from her place. If her fingerprints are on it…"

"I called her. Her bottle was a half-ounce. She always gets herself a half-ounce at Christmas because it lasts almost exactly a year."

Lucas peered at the perfume bottle: a quarter-ounce. "She's sure?"

"She's sure. Damnit, I thought we had him."

"We should check it anyway," Lucas said. "Maybe she's wrong."

"Yeah, we'll check-but she was sure. Which brings up the question, why Opium? Does he obsess on the perfume? Does the perfume attract him somehow? Or did he go out and buy some of his own, to remind him of Jensen?"

"Huh," Lucas said.

"Well? Is it the perfume or the woman?" She looked at him, expecting to pull a rabbit out of a hat. Maybe he could. Lucas closed his eyes. After a moment, he said, "It's because Jensen uses it. He's creeping into her apartment in the dark, goes into her bedroom, and something sets him off. The perfume. Or maybe seeing her there. But the perfume really brings it back to him. It's possible, if he's really freaked out, that he used everything in the bottle he stole from her."

"Do you think it's enough? The beard being shaved, and the perfume bottle?"

He shook his head. "No. We've got to find something. One thing."

Connell moved around until she was looking straight into Lucas's eyes from no more than two feet. Her face was waxy, pale, like a dinner candle. "I was sick again this morning. In two weeks, I won't be able to walk. I'll be back in chemo, I'll start shedding hair. I won't be able to think straight."

"Jesus, Meagan…"

"I want the sonofabitch, Lucas," she said. "I don't want to be dead in a hole and have him walking around laughing. You know he's the one, I know he's the one."

"So?"

"So we gotta talk. We gotta figure something out."