Night Prey

this is sorta worse,” Helstrom said, looking back at the Dumpster. He rubbed his nose.
    The blond woman called past the cop, “Hey. Sloan.”
    Sloan muttered something under his breath, and then, louder, “Hey, Meagan.”
    “This lady working with you?” Helstrom asked Sloan, jerking a thumb at the blonde.
    Sloan nodded, said, “More or less,” and Lucas tipped his head toward his friend. “This is Sloan,” he said to Helstrom. “Minneapolis homicide.”
    “Sloan,” the woman called. “Hey, Sloan. C’mere.”
    “Your friend’s a pain in the ass,” Helstrom said to Sloan.
    “You’d be a hundred percent right, except she’s not my friend,” Sloan said, and started toward her. “I’ll be right back.”

    THEY WERE STANDING on a blacktopped boat ramp, with striped spaces for car and trailer parking, a lockbox for fees, and a Dumpster for garbage. “What you got?” Lucas asked Helstrom as they started toward the Dumpster.
    “A freak . . . He did the killing on your side of the bridge, I think. There’s no blood over here, except what’s on her. She’d stopped bleeding before she went in the Dumpster, no sign of anything on the ground. And there must’ve been a lot of blood . . . Jesus, look at that.”
    Up on the westbound span of the bridge, a van with yellow flashing roof lights had stopped next to the rail, and a man with a television camera was shooting down at them.
    “That legal?” Lucas asked.
    “Damned if I know,” Helstrom said.
    Sloan and the woman came up. The woman was young, large, in her late twenties or early thirties. Despite her anger, her face was as pale as a dinner candle; her blond hair was cropped so short that Lucas could see the white of her scalp. “I don’t like the way I’m being treated,” the woman said.
    “You’ve got no jurisdiction here. You can either shut up or take yourself back across the bridge,” Helstrom snapped. “I’ve had about enough of you.”
    Lucas looked at her curiously. “You’re Meagan O’Connell?”
    “Connell. No O. I’m an investigator with the BCA. Who are you?”
    “Lucas Davenport.”
    “Huh,” she grunted. “I’ve heard about you.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yeah. Some kind of macho asshole.”
    Lucas half-laughed, not sure she was serious, looked at Sloan, who shrugged. She was. Connell looked at Helstrom, who had allowed himself a small grin when Connell went after Lucas. “So can I see her, or what?”
    “If you’re working with Minneapolis homicide . . .” He looked at Sloan, and Sloan nodded. “Be my guest. Just don’t touch anything.”
    “Christ,” she muttered, and stalked down to the Dumpster. The Dumpster came to her collarbone, and she had to stand on her tiptoes to look in. She stood for a moment, looking down, then walked away, down toward the river, and began vomiting.
    “Be my fuckin’ guest,” Helstrom muttered.
    “What’d she do?” Lucas asked.
    “Came over like her ass was on fire and started screaming at everyone. Like we forgot to scrape the horseshit off our shoes,” Helstrom said.
    Sloan, concerned, started after Connell, then stopped, scratched his head, walked down to the Dumpster, and looked inside. “Whoa.” He turned away, and said, “Goddamnit,” and then to Lucas, “Hold your breath.”
    Lucas was breathing through his mouth when he looked in. The body was nude and had been in a green garbage bag tied at the top. The bag had split open on impact when it hit the bottom of the Dumpster, or someone had split it open.
    The woman had been disemboweled, her intestines boiling out like an obscene corn smut. And Sloan’s earlier description was right: she hadn’t been stabbed, she’d been opened like a sardine can, a long slit running from her pelvic area to her sternum. He thought at first that maggots were already working on her, but then realized that the sprinkles of white on the body were grains of rice, apparently somebody’s garbage.
    The woman’s head was in profile against the green garbage sack. The garbage sack had a red plastic tie, and it snuggled just above the woman’s ear like a bow on a Christmas package. Flies crawled all over her, like tiny black MiGs . . . Above her breasts, two inches above the top of the slash, were two smaller cuts in what might be letters. Lucas looked at them for five seconds, then backed away, and waited until he was a half-dozen strides from the Dumpster before he started breathing through his nose again.
    “The guy who dumped