Eyes of Prey

school . . . .
    The car with the woman didn’t move. When the other car, the Darkman car, was out of sight, the kid considered for a moment, then ambled across the sidewalk, down the long rows of cars. What was she? Was she, like, a hooker, giving blow jobs in the backseat? That’d be something.
    He got close, he peeked . . . .
    “Aw, Jesus . . . Aw, Jesus . . .” The kid ran toward the mall, his arms milling. Halfway there, he began screaming, “Help . . .”
     
    Lucas, still hot from Bekker’s visit, was working on Druid’s Pursuit when the watch commander called.

CHAPTER
23
    A thunderstorm was rolling across Minneapolis when Lucas left his house, lightning crackling through the clouds, storm-front winds lashing the elm branches overhead. He went north, up Highway 280, the lights of downtown Minneapolis to the west, barely visible through the advancing rain. The storm caught him just before he turned east, a few drops splatting off the windshield, and then a torrent, a waterfall, hailstones pecking on the roof, small white beads of ice bouncing off the road in his headlights. He turned east on I-694 and the rain slackened, then quit altogether as he outran the storm front.
    From the highway, the mall was screened by an intervening block of buildings, but he could see red emergency lights flashing off window glass. The White Bear Avenue exit was jammed. He put the Porsche on the shoulder and worked his way to the front. A Minnesota highway patrolman ran toward him, and Lucas hung his badge case out the window.
    “Davenport,” the patrolman said, leaning in the window. “Stay behind me and I’ll make a hole in this line.”
    The patrolman jogged along the shoulder, leading the Porsche to a roadblock. The street was a nightmare tangle ofshoppers trying to get out of the mall, gawkers trying to drive past the murder scene, and the normal traffic on and off the interstate. The patrolmen had given up trying to control the crush and had settled for getting as many people out of the mall as possible. At the roadblock, the patrolman leading Lucas said something to the others, and they stopped traffic, directed a car out of the way and let Lucas slip through to the parking lot.
    “Thanks,” Lucas yelled as he went through. “I came through that storm—it’s a bad one, with hail. If you got rain gear . . .”
    The patrolman nodded and waved him on.
     
    Television vans and reporters’ cars were lined up on the perimeter of the lot, a hundred yards from a battered brown Chevy. All four doors on the car were open and emergency lights bathed it in a brilliant showroom illumination. Lucas left his Porsche in a pod of squad cars and walked toward the Chevy.
    “Davenport, over here.” A cop in a short blue jacket, who’d been talking to another cop in a sweater, called to him, and Lucas walked over.
    “John Barber, Maplewood,” said the cop in the jacket. He had pale blue eyes and a long lantern jaw. “And this is Howie Berkson . . . . Howie, go on over and tell that TV bunch it’ll be another twenty minutes, okay?”
    As Berkson walked away, Barber said, “C’mon.”
    “Any question whether it’s the same guy?” Lucas asked.
    Barber shrugged. “I guess not. One of your people is running around out here . . . Shearson? He says the technique is the same. Wait’ll you see her face.”
    Lucas went and looked, and turned away, and they started a circle around the car. “Looks like him,” he said sourly. “A copycat couldn’t get up that much enthusiasm for it . . . .”
    “That’s what Shearson said . . . .”
    “Where is he, by the way?” Lucas asked, looking around the lot.
    Barber grinned. “He said it looked like we had it under control. I heard he’s looking at shirts over in the mall.”
    “Asshole,” Lucas said.
    “That’s the feeling we got. By the way, we found a kid who saw the guy.”
    “What?” Lucas stopped short. “Saw him?”
    “Don’t get your hopes up,” Barber said. “He was a hundred yards away and wasn’t paying too much attention. Saw the guy’s car, too, but doesn’t have any idea about make or model or even color . . . Didn’t get anything. Says the killer looked like a guy from some comic-book movie.”
    “Then how do you know he saw . . .”
    “Because he saw the woman walking out toward her car. He wasn’t paying any attention to her, just hanging out, but a minute later, he saw a man by her car, it looked