Mind Prey

could only see the side of his face, but suddenly thought: I know him. But he looks different. From where? Where? Andi sank back to the floor of the van and the man in front turned back to the wheel and then pulled away from the curb, muttering, “Break my fuckin’ window? Break my fuckin’ window?”
    “Who are you?” Andi asked.
    That seemed to make him even angrier. Who was he? “John,” he said harshly.
    “John who? What do you want?”
    John Who? John the Fuck Who? “You know John the Fuck Who.”
    Grace was bleeding from her nose, her eyes wild; Genevieve was huddled in the corner, and Andi said again, helplessly, “John who?”
    He looked over his shoulder, a spark of hate in his eyes, reached up and pulled a blond wig off his head.
    Andi, a half-second later, said, “Oh, no. No. Not John Mail.”

2
    T HE RAIN WAS cold, but more of an irritant than a hazard. If it had come two months later, it would’ve been a killer blizzard, and they’d be wading shin-deep in snow and ice. Marcy Sherrill had done that often enough and didn’t like it: you got weird, ugly phenomena like blood-bergs, or worse. Rain, no matter how cold, tended to clean things up. Sherrill looked up at the night sky and thought, small blessings.
    Sherrill stood in the headlights of the crime-scene truck, her hands in her raincoat pockets, looking at the feet of the man on the ground. The feet were sticking out from under the rear door of a creme-colored Lexus with real leather seats. Every few seconds, the feet gave a convulsive jerk.
    “What’re you doing, Hendrix?” she asked.
    The man under the car said something unintelligible.
    Sherrill’s partner bent over so the man under the car could hear him. “I think he said, ‘Chokin’ the chicken.’” The rain dribbled off his hat, just past the tip of a perfectly dry cigarette. He waited for a reaction from the guy on the ground—a born-again Christian—but got none. “Fuckin’ dweeb,” he muttered, straightening up.
    “I wish this shit’d stop,” Sherrill said. She looked up at the sky again. The National Enquirer would like it, she thought. This was a sky that might produce an image of Satan. The ragged storm clouds churned through the lights from the loop, picking up the ugly scarlet flicker from the cop cars.
    Down the street, past the line of cop cars, TV trucks squatted patiently in the rain, and reporters stood in the street around them, looking down at Sherrill and the cops by the Lexus. Those would be the cameramen and the pencil press. The talent would be sitting in the trucks, keeping their makeup straight.
    Sherrill shivered and turned her head down and wiped the water from her eyebrows. She’d had a rain cap, once, but she’d lost it at some other crime scene with drizzle or sleet or snow or hail or…Everything dripped on her sooner or later.
    “Shoulda brought a hat,” her partner said. His name was Tom Black, and he was not quite openly gay. “Or an umbrella.”
    They’d once had an umbrella, too, but they’d lost it. Or, more likely, it had been stolen by another cop who knew a nice umbrella when he saw it. So now Sherrill had the icy rain dripping down her neck, and she was pissed because it was six-thirty and she was still working while her goddamn husband was down at Applebee’s entertaining the barmaid with his rapierlike wit.
    And more pissed because Black was dry and snug, and she was wet, and he hadn’t offered her the hat, even though she was a woman.
    And even more pissed knowing that if he had offered, she’d have had to turn it down, because she was one of only two women in the Homicide Unit and she still felt like she had to prove that she could handle herself, even though she’d been handling herself for a dozen years now, in uniform and plainclothes, doing decoy work, undercover drugs, sex, and now Homicide.
    “Hendrix,” she said, “I wanna get out of this fuckin’ rain, man…”
    From the street, a car decelerated with a deepening groan, and Sherrill looked over Black’s shoulder and said, “Uh-oh.” A black Porsche 911 paused at the curb, where the uniforms had set up their line. Two of the TV cameras lit up to film the car, and one of the cops pointed at the crime van. The Porsche snapped down the drive toward the parking lot, quick, like a weasel or a rubber band.
    “Davenport,” Black said, turning to look. Black was short, slightly round, and carried a bulbous nose over a brush mustache. He was exceedingly