Rules of Prey

CHAPTER 3

He had first talked to her a month before, in the records department of the county clerk's office. She had raven-black hair, worn short, and brown eyes. Gold hoop earrings dangled from her delicate earlobes. She wore just a touch of scent and a warm red dress.

"I'd like to see the file on Burhalter-Mentor," she told a clerk. "I don't have the number. It should have been in the last month."

The maddog watched her from the corner of his eye. She was fifteen or twenty years older than he was. Attractive.

The maddog had not yet gone for the artist. His days were colored with thoughts of her, his nights consumed with images of her face and body. He knew he would take her; the love song had already begun.

But this one was interesting. More than interesting. He felt his awareness expanding, reveled in the play of light through the peach fuzz of her slender forearm… And after the artist, there had to be another.

"Is that a civil filing?" the clerk asked the woman.

"It's a bunch of liens on an apartment complex down by Nokomis. I want to make sure they've been resolved."

"Okay. That's Burkhalter…"

"Burkhalter-Mentor." She spelled it for him and the clerk went back into the file room. She's a real-estate agent, the maddog thought. She felt his attention and glanced at him.

"Are you a real-estate agent?" he asked.

"Yes, I am." Serious, pleasant, professional. Pink lipstick, just a touch.

"I'm new here in Minneapolis," the maddog said, stepping a bit closer. "I'm an attorney with Felsen-Gore. Would you have a couple of seconds to answer a real-estate question?"

"Sure." She was friendly now, interested.

"I've been looking around the lakes, down south of here, Lake of the Isles, Lake Nokomis, like that."

"Oh, it's a very nice neighborhood," she said enthusiastically. She had what plastic surgeons called a full mouth, showing a span of brilliantly white teeth when she smiled. "There are lots of houses on the market right now. It's my specialty area."

"Well, I 'm not sure whether I want a condo or a house…"

"A house holds its value better."

"Yeah, but you know, I'm single. I don't really want to hassle with a big yard…"

"What you really need is a bungalow on a small lot, not much yard. You'd have more space than you would in an apartment, and you could sign up for a lawn service for thirty dollars a month. That'd be cheaper than the maintenance fee on most condos, and you'd maintain resale value."

The maddog got his file and waited until she got a photocopy of the liens. They drifted together along the hall to the elevators and rode down to the first floor.

"Well, hmm, look, in Dallas we had this thing, it was called the multiple list, or something like that?" said the maddog.

"Yes, multiple listing service," she said.

"So if I were to drive around and find a place, I could call you and you could show it to me?"

"Sure, I do it all the time. Let me give you my card."

Jeannie Lewis. He tucked her card into his wallet. As soon as he turned away and stepped out of her physical presence, he saw the artist again, her face and body as she walked through the streets of St. Paul. He hungered for her, and the real-estate agent was almost forgotten. But not quite.

For the next week, he saw the card each time he took his wallet out of his pocket. Jeannie Lewis of the raven hair. A definite candidate.

And then the fiasco.

He woke the next morning, bruised and creaking. He took a half-dozen extra-strength aspirin tablets and carefully twisted to look at his back in the bathroom mirror. The bruises were coming and they would be bad, long black streaks across his back and shoulders.

The obsession with the artist was broken. When he got out of the shower, he saw a strange face in the mirror, floating behind the steamed surface. It had happened before. He reached out and wiped the mirror with a corner of his towel. It was Lewis, smiling at him, engaged in his nudity.

Her office was in the south lake district, in an old storefront with a big window. He drove the neighborhood, looking for a vantage point. He found it on the parking boulevard kitty-corner from Lewis' office. He could sit in his car and watch her through the storefront window as she sat in her cubicle, talking on the telephone. He watched her for a week. Every afternoon but Wednesday she arrived between twelve-thirty and one o'clock, carrying a bag lunch. She ate at her desk as she did paperwork. She rarely went back out before two-thirty. She was stunning. He best liked the way she walked, using her hips in long fluid strides. He dreamt of her at night, of Jeannie Lewis walking nude toward him across the desert grass…

He decided to collect her on a Thursday. He found a nice-looking home on a narrow street in a redeveloping neighborhood six blocks from her office. There were no houses directly across the street from it. The driveway was sunken a few feet into the lawn, and stairs led behind a screen of evergreens to the front door. If he rode with Lewis to the house and she pulled into the driveway, and he got out the passenger side, he would be virtually invisible from the street.

The house itself felt empty. He checked the cross-reference books used by investigators at his office, found the names of the neighbors. He called the first one in the book and got a nosy old man. He explained that he would like to make a direct offer for the house, cutting out the real-estate dealers. Did the neighbor know where the owners were? Why, yes. Arizona. And here's the number; they're not due back until Christmas, and then only for two weeks.

Scouting the neighborhood, the maddog found a small supermarket across from a Standard station a few blocks from the house.

On Thursday, he packed his equipment into the trunk of his car and wore a loose-fitting tweed sport coat with voluminous pockets. He checked to make sure Lewis was in, then drove to the supermarket, parked his car in the busy lot, and called her from a pay phone.

"Jeannie Lewis," she said. Her voice was pleasantly cool.

"Yes, Ms. Lewis?" said the maddog, pronouncing it "miz." His heart was thumping against his ribs. "I ran into you in the clerk of court's office a month ago. We were talking about houses in the lakes area?"

There was a moment's hesitation at the other end of the line and the maddog was afraid she had forgotten him. Then she said, "Oh… yes, I think I remember. We went down in the elevator together?"

"Yes, that's me. Listen, to make a long story short, I was cruising the neighborhood down here, looking, and I had car trouble. So I pulled into a gas station and they said it would be a couple hours, they've got to put in a water pump. Anyway, I went out to walk around and I found a very interesting house."

He glanced at the paper in his hand, with the address, and gave it to her. "I wonder if we might set up a time to look at it?"

"Are you still at that Standard station?"

"I'm at a phone booth across the street."

"I'm not doing anything right now and I'm only five minutes away. I could stop at the other realtor's, they're only two minutes from here, pick up the key, and come and get you."

"Well, I don't want to inconvenience you…"

"No, no problem. I know that house. It's very well-kept. I'm surprised it hasn't gone yet."

"Well…"

"I'll be there in ten minutes."

It took fifteen. He went into the supermarket, bought an ice-cream bar, sat on a bus bench next to the phone booth, and licked the ice cream. When Lewis arrived, driving a brown station wagon, she recognized him at once. He could see her teeth as she smiled at him through the tinted windshield.

"How are you?" she asked as she popped open the passenger-side door. "You're the attorney. I remembered as soon as I saw your face."

"Yes. I really appreciate this. Have I introduced myself? I'm Louis Vullion." The maddog killer pronounced it "Loo-ee Vul-yoan," though his parents had called him "Loo-is Vul-yun," to rhyme with "onion."

"Glad to meet you." And she seemed to be.

The drive to the house took three minutes, the woman pointing out the advantages of the neighborhood. The lakes close enough that he could jog down at night. Far enough away that he wouldn't be bothered by traffic. Schools close enough to enhance the resale value of the house, should he ever wish to sell it. Not so close that kids would be a problem. Enough stability in the housing that neighbors knew each other and strangers in the neighborhood would be noticed.

"The crime rate around here is quite low compared to other neighborhoods in the city," she said. Just then a jet roared low overhead, going in for a landing at Minneapolis-St. Paul International. She didn't mention it.

Vullion didn't mention it either. He listened just enough to nod at the right places. Deeper inside, he was going through his visualization routine. This time, he couldn't mess it up, as he had with the artist.

Oh, yes, he'd assumed the blame for that one; there was no shirking it. He'd erred and he had been lucky to escape. A one-hundred-thirty-pound woman in good shape could be a formidable opponent. He would not forget that again.

As for Lewis, he couldn't foul it up. Once he attacked, she had to die, because she'd seen his face, she knew who he was. So he'd practiced, as best he could, in his apartment, hitting a basketball hung from a hook in the bathroom door. Like it was a head.

And now he was ready. He'd tucked a gym sock filled with a large Idaho baking potato into his right jacket pocket. The bulge showed, but not much. It could be anything, an appointment book, a bagel. A Kotex pad, the tape, and a pair of latex surgeon's gloves were in his left pocket. He would touch nothing that would take a fingerprint until he had the gloves on. He thought about it, rehearsed it in his mind, and said, "Oh, yes?" at the right spots in Lewis' sales talk.

And as they drove, he felt his awareness expanding; realized, with a tiny touch of distaste, that she probably smoked. There was the slightest odor of nicotine about her.

When they pulled into the driveway, his stomach began to clutch just as it had with the artist and the others. "Nice place from the outside, anyway," he said.

"Wait'll you see inside. They've done a beautiful treatment of the bathrooms."

She led the way to the front door, which was screened from the street by evergreens. The key opened the door, and they pushed in. The house was fully furnished, but the front room had the too-orderly feeling of long-prepared-for absence. The air was still and slightly musty.

"You want to wander around a minute?" Lewis looked up at him.

"Sure." He glanced at the kitchen, strolled through the front room, walked up three stairs to the bedroom level, looked in each room. When he came back down, she was clutching her purse strap in front of her, examining with some interest a crystal lamp on the fireplace mantel.

"How much are they asking?"

"A hundred and five."

He nodded and glanced toward the basement door at the edge of the kitchen.

"Is that the basement?"

"Yes, I believe so."

When she turned toward the door, he took the sock out of his pocket. She took another step toward the basement door. Swinging the sock like a mace, he slammed the Idaho baker into the back of her head, just above her left ear.

The blow knocked her off her feet and Vullion dropped on her back and slammed her again. This one was not like the bitch artist. She was an office worker with no strength in her arms. She moaned once, dazed, and he grabbed the hair on the crown of her head and wrenched her head straight back and shoved in the Kotex. He pulled on his gloves, took the tape from his side pocket, and quickly wrapped her head. As she finally began to struggle against him, he rolled her over, crossed her wrists, and taped them. She was beginning to recover, her eyes half-open now, and he dragged her up the stairs into the first bedroom and threw her on the bed. He taped her arms first, to the headboard, then her legs, apart, to the corner posts of the bed.

He was breathing hard but he could feel the erection pounding at his groin, the excitement building in his throat.

He stepped back and looked down at her. The knife, he thought. Hope there's a good one. He went down to look in the kitchen.

On the bed behind him, Jeannie Lewis moaned.