Prey: Night Prey Part 24

"Well, s.h.i.+t," 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 G.o.dd.a.m.ned blood on that knife, it's deer blood-or you put it there just to get me," Hillerod said heatedly. "You f.u.c.kin' 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," b.i.+.c.h 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 circ.u.mstances 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 s.h.i.+t," b.i.+.c.h 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 n.o.body," 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 bulls.h.i.+t 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?"

"s.h.i.+t, 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 d.i.c.k. . . ." The smile went flat, and he looked at Lucas. "The f.u.c.kin' cop," he said. "That f.u.c.kin' 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. "G.o.dd.a.m.nit, I knew that was stupid, the f.u.c.kin' 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 b.i.+.c.h 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."

"SONOf.a.gUN," 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 b.i.+.c.h's office, where Hillerod waited. "I can't believe he just pulled that out of his a.s.s. 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."

"G.o.dd.a.m.nit," 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, winds.h.i.+eld 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 G.o.d," 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.

18.

EVANHART STOOD with one hand in his pocket, his voice low, concerned. His back was to the balcony, so he was framed in the dark square; he wore a blue suit with a conservative striped s.h.i.+rt, and carried a square Scotch gla.s.s in his left hand. He'd taken his necktie off and thrust it in his pocket. Sara could see just the point of it sticking out from under the flap of his coat pocket. "Have you talked to the police?"

She shook her head. "I don't know what I'd tell them." She crossed her arms over her chest, rubbed her triceps with her hands, as though she were cold. "It's like having a ghost," she said. "I feel somebody, but I've never seen anything. I had the burglary, and since then . . . nothing. They'd say it's paranoia-paranoia brought on by the burglary. And I hate being patronized."

"They'd be right about the paranoia. You can't be a good trader if you're not paranoid," Hart said. He sipped the Johnnie Walker Black.

" 'Cause somebody is out to get you," she said, finis.h.i.+ng the old Wall Street joke. She drifted across the front room toward him. She also had a gla.s.s, vodka martini, three olives. She looked out across the balcony, over the building across the street, toward the park. "To tell the truth, I am a little scared. A woman was killed just across the street, and the guy with her is still in a coma. This was just a few days ago, a couple of days after my burglary. They haven't caught anybody yet-they say it was gang kids. I've never seen any gang kids here. It was supposed to be safe. I used to walk around the lake in the evenings, but I've stopped."

Hart's face was serious again. He reached out and brushed her arm with two fingertips, just a light touch. "Maybe you should think about moving out of here."

"I've got a lease," Sara said, away from the balcony, toward him. "And the apartment is really handy to work. And it should be safe. It is safe. I've changed the locks, I've got a steel door. I don't know. . . ."

Hart stepped over to the balcony, looked out, his back toward her. She wondered if she made him nervous. "It's a pretty neighborhood. And I guess no place is really perfectly safe. Not anymore."

There was a moment of silence, and then she asked, "Do I make you nervous?"

He turned, a weak, slowly dying smile on his face. "Yeah, a little."

"Why?"

He shrugged. "I like you too much. You're very attractive . . . I don't know, I'm just not very good at this."

"It is awkward," she said. "Look, why don't you come over and sit down, and I'll put my head on your shoulder, and we'll go from there."

He shrugged again. "All right." He put down his gla.s.s, crossed the room, sat quickly, put his arm around her shoulder, and she let her head sink onto his chest.

"Now, is this bad?" she asked, and suddenly broke into a giggle.

"No, this isn't bad at all," Evan said. He sounded nervous, but he felt committed, and when she lifted her head to smile at him, he kissed her.

She felt good. She made a hundred and thirty thousand dollars a year, took vacations in Paris and Mexico and Monaco; she was the toughest woman she knew.

But a chest felt . . . excellent. She snuggled into it.

KOOP GRABBED THE edge of the air-conditioner housing, pulled himself up, and saw Jensen on the couch with a man, saw her turn her face up and the man kiss her.

"Oh, f.u.c.k me," he said aloud. "Oh, f.u.c.k me," and he felt his world shake.

The guy across the street put his hand on Jensen's waist, then moved it up a few inches, under her breast. Koop thought he recognized the guy, then realized he'd seen somebody like him on television, an old movie. Henry Fonda, that was it; Henry Fonda, when he was young. "Motherf.u.c.ker. . . ."

Koop stood up without thinking, hand holding the scope, the living room couch jumping toward him. Their faces were locked together and the guy was definitely copping a feel. Remembering himself, Koop dropped to a crouch, felt the heat climbing into his face. He looked down and hammered his fist into the steel housing; and for the first time since-when? never?-felt something that might have been emotional pain. How could she do this? This wasn't right, she was his. . . .

He looked back toward Sara's apartment. They were talking now, backed off a little. Then she tipped her head onto his shoulder, and that was almost worse than the kiss. Koop put the scope on them, and watched so hard that his head began to hurt. Christ, he hoped they didn't f.u.c.k. Please, don't do it. Please.

They kissed again, and this time the guy's hand cupped Jensen's breast, held it. Koop, in agony, rolled over on his shoulder and looked away, decided not to look back until he counted to a hundred. Maybe it would go away. He counted one, two, three, four, five and got to thirty-eight before he couldn't stand it, and flipped over.

The guy was standing.