Broken Prey

“Show us, take us up . . . Is the guy still here?”
    As they jogged across an atrium, she said over her shoulder, “Yes. He’s hurt, really bad, there’s blood all over the place.”
    They were in the stairwell, her ass bouncing in Lucas’s face as they went up. “He’s hurt?” Sloan asked. Shrake was coming up behind them now. “The crazy man?”
    “No, not the crazy man. He ran. The other man . . .”
    Lucas said, “Shit . . .”
    Then they were out of the stairs and running down a hallway toward another cluster of the curious, and Lucas called, “Police, coming through.”
    The cluster broke, and Lucas went in, found a young woman in underpants and a T-shirt crouched over a man who wore nothing but jeans. The man was awake and talking. Lucas went to his knees and looked at the woman and said, “What happened? How bad?”
    The man answered for her, good English, but accented: “A crazy man. We have not seen him before. He cut me with a straight razor, an old kind, and then he went out. He cut a small artery in my shoulder. I’ll be okay if they get me soon to the hospital. We must cauterize the artery. For now, we put pressure on it.”
    “He’s a doctor,” the young woman said, and Lucas nodded.
    “Ambulance is coming,” Shrake said. He was on his phone, talking to the 911 dispatcher. “One minute out. The locals are looking for the car.”
    Lucas asked the injured man and the woman, and then the people jammed into the doorway, “Was the guy’s name Grant? Does anybody know if the guy’s name was Leopold Grant?”
    One woman in the doorway, an older woman with harsh red lipstick, said, “I didn’t see the attack, but I know Leo. He lives on the other side of the building.”
    The man on the floor said, “I have never seen him before this.” The woman with him said, “Me, either. He just kept kicking the door. I thought it was an earthquake. He knew my name. He called me Millie . . .”
    Lucas said to the lipstick woman who knew Grant, “Show me where Grant’s room is.”
     
    GOING BACK DOWN the hallway, they ran into Jenkins, with the Mankato cops in tow. Lucas said to a sergeant, “Get the ambulance guys up here quick, we got an arterial. Keep these people isolated, the witnesses. Jenkins, you come with us.”
    “Where’re we going?”
    “We’re following her.” He pointed at the woman who was taking them to Grant’s apartment, and they fell in behind her. To get to Grant’s, they had to go back down the hallway, through the second-floor lobby, and out the opposite side into another hallway. They’d walked fifty or sixty feet down the hallway, and the woman said, “It’s right up ahead. The next door.”
    “Just about back-to-back with that chick’s apartment,” Shrake said.
    Lucas came up slowly, pulled his gun, pushed the woman back, and pressed a finger to his lips. He could see that the door to Grant’s apartment was open an inch or two. He stopped at the door, and Jenkins, gun in hand, went on past. With Jenkins lined up on the other side, Lucas pushed the door open. They could hear a radio—and then Lucas realized that it was coming from somewhere else. From the apartment, he could hear nothing at all.
    Jenkins said, “I can’t see anything.”
    “Gonna go,” Lucas said. He got his .45 out in front and stepped through, one step, two, three, ready to fire, Sloan right behind him, Sloan’s gun tracking to the right while Lucas’s gun tracked left. Two bedrooms, two baths. Open-plan kitchen, nobody in that. Cleared a bedroom used as an office, cluttered but not torn up, cleared the master bedroom, the bathrooms, the closets.
    “He’s a freak,” Jenkins said. He’d come in behind them, and he nodded at the bed. Lucas stepped over to look, saw the stethoscope trailing out of the wall.
    “Listening to the chick,” Shrake said. “They looked like they’d been fucking, the guy must’ve been over here, must’ve cracked.”
    Lucas put his gun away. “All right. I’ll call the co-op center, put out a call on the car. It’s a snake hunt now.”
     
    THEY BACKED OUT of the apartment, not wanting to hack up any evidence: best to let the crime-scene crew deal with it. As they went, Jenkins said, “He didn’t take much, looks like his clothes are still here.”
    They closed the door, got a city cop to come down to watch it until they could get it sealed. As Lucas talked to the co-op center, Jenkins, Shrake, and Sloan went down to Millie