Night Prey

“C’mere and look at the windows.”
    The windows were blacked out with sheets of quarter-inch plywood. “I went outside and looked,” Connell said. “He’s painted the outside of them black, so unless you get down on your knees and look into the window wells, it just looks like the basement is dark. He went to a lot of trouble with it: the edges are caulked.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yeah.” She looked down the sheet. “I think this is where he killed Wannemaker. On a piece of plastic. There’re a couple of three-packs of drop cloths in the utility room. One of them is unopened. The other one only had one cloth in it. I was walking around down here, and it looked to me like the rug was matted in a rectangle. Then I noticed the furniture: it’s set up to look at something in the middle of the rug. When I saw the drop cloths . . .” She shrugged. “I laid it out, and it fit perfectly.”
    “Jesus . . .” Lucas looked at the tech. “Anything?”
    The tech nodded and said, “A ton of shit: I don’t think the rug’s ever been cleaned, and it must’ve been installed fifteen years ago. It’s gonna be a goddamned nightmare, sorting everything out.”
    “Well, it’s something, anyway,” Lucas said.
    “There’s one other thing,” Connell said. “Up in the bedroom.”
    Lucas followed her back up the stairs. Koop’s bedroom was spare, almost military, though the bed was unmade and smelled of sweat. Lucas saw it right away: on the chest of drawers, a bottle of Opium.
    Lucas: “You didn’t touch it?”
    “Not yet. But it wouldn’t make any difference.”
    “Jensen said he took it from her place. If her fingerprints are on it . . .”
    “I called her. Her bottle was a half-ounce. She always gets herself a half-ounce at Christmas because it lasts almost exactly a year.”
    Lucas peered at the perfume bottle: a quarter-ounce. “She’s sure?”
    “She’s sure. Damnit, I thought we had him.”
    “We should check it anyway,” Lucas said. “Maybe she’s wrong.”
    “Yeah, we’ll check—but she was sure. Which brings up the question, why Opium? Does he obsess on the perfume? Does the perfume attract him somehow? Or did he go out and buy some of his own, to remind him of Jensen?”
    “Huh,” Lucas said.
    “Well? Is it the perfume or the woman?” She looked at him, expecting to pull a rabbit out of a hat. Maybe he could. Lucas closed his eyes. After a moment, he said, “It’s because Jensen uses it. He’s creeping into her apartment in the dark, goes into her bedroom, and something sets him off. The perfume. Or maybe seeing her there. But the perfume really brings it back to him. It’s possible, if he’s really freaked out, that he used everything in the bottle he stole from her.”
    “Do you think it’s enough? The beard being shaved, and the perfume bottle?”
    He shook his head. “No. We’ve got to find something. One thing.”
    Connell moved around until she was looking straight into Lucas’s eyes from no more than two feet. Her face was waxy, pale, like a dinner candle. “I was sick again this morning. In two weeks, I won’t be able to walk. I’ll be back in chemo, I’ll start shedding hair. I won’t be able to think straight.”
    “Jesus, Meagan. . . .”
    “I want the sonofabitch, Lucas,” she said. “I don’t want to be dead in a hole and have him walking around laughing. You know he’s the one, I know he’s the one.”
    “So?”
    “So we gotta talk. We gotta figure something out.”

31
    KOOP GOT OUT of jail a few minutes after noon, blinking in the bright sunshine, his lawyer walking behind, a sport coat over his shoulder, talking.
    Koop was very close to the edge. He felt as though he had a large crack in his head, that it was about to split in half, that a wet gray worm would spill out, a worm the size of a vacuum-cleaner hose.
    He didn’t like jail. He didn’t like it at all.
    “Remember, not a thing to anybody, okay?” the lawyer said, shaking his finger into the air. He’d learned not to shake it at his clients: one had almost pulled it off. He was repeating the warning for at least the twentieth time, and Koop nodded for the twentieth time, not hearing him. He was looking around at the outdoors, feeling the tension falling away, as though he were coming unwrapped, like a mummy getting its sheet pulled.
    Jesus. His head was really out of control. “Okay.”
    “There’s nothing you can say to the cops that would help you. Nothing. If you want to talk