Night Prey

them again, several times. There were too many details for a single reading, or even two or three. But he’d learned when he looked back from other murders that the files often pointed at the killer way before he was brought down. Truth was in the details. . . .
    His rummaging was interrupted by a knock. “Yeah. Come in.”
    Connell stepped through, flustered, but still pale as a ghost. “I was in town. I thought I’d come by, instead of calling.”
    “Come in. Sit down,” Lucas said.
    Connell’s close-cropped hair was disconcerting; it lent a punkish air to a woman who was anything but a punk. She had a serious, square face, with a short, Irish nose and a square chin. She was still wearing the blue suit she’d worn that morning, with a darker stripe of what might have been garbage juice on the front of it. An incongruous black leather hip pack was buckled around her hips, the bag itself perched just below her navel: a rip-down holster for a large gun. She could take a big gun: she had large hands, and she stuck one of them out and Lucas half-rose to shake it.
    She’d opted for peace, Lucas thought; but her hand was cold. “I read your file,” he said. “That’s nice work.”
    “The possession of a vagina doesn’t necessarily indicate stupidity,” Connell said. She was still standing.
    “Take it easy,” Lucas said, his forehead wrinkling as he sat down again. “That was a compliment.”
    “Just want things clear,” Connell said crisply. She looked at the vacant chair, still didn’t sit. “And you think there is something?”
    Lucas stared at her for another moment, but she neither flinched nor sat down. Holding her eyes, he said, “I think so. They’re all too . . . not alike, but they have the feeling of a single man.”
    “There’s something else,” Connell said. “It’s hard to see it in the files, but you see it when you talk to the friends of these women.”
    “Which is?”
    “They’re all the same woman.”
    “Ah. Tell me. And sit down, for Christ’s sakes.”
    She sat, reluctantly, as if she were giving up the high ground. “One here in the Cities, one in Duluth, now this one, if this latest one is his. One in Madison, one in Thunder Bay, one in Des Moines, one in Sioux Falls. They were all single, late twenties to early forties. They were all somewhat shy, somewhat lonely, somewhat intellectual, somewhat religious or at least involved in some kind of spirituality. They’d go out to bookstores or galleries or plays or concerts at night, like other people’d go out to bars. Anyway, they were all like that. And then these shy, quiet women turn up ripped. . . .”
    “Nasty word,” Lucas said casually. “Ripped.”
    Connell shuddered, and her naturally pale complexion went paper-white. “I dream about the woman up at Carlos Avery. I was worse up there than I was today. I went out, took a look, started puking. I got puke all over my radio.”
    “Well, first time,” Lucas said.
    “No. I’ve seen a lot of dead people,” Connell said. She was pitched forward in her chair, hands clasped. “This is way different. Joan Smits wants vengeance. Or justice. I can hear her calling from the other side—I know that sounds like schizophrenia, but I can hear her, and I can feel the other ones. All of them. I’ve been to every one of those places, where the murders happened, on my own time. Talked to witnesses, talked to cops. It’s one guy, and he’s the devil.”
    There was a hard, crystalline conviction in her voice and eyes, the taste and bite of psychosis, that made Lucas turn his head away. “What about the sequence you’ve got here?” Lucas asked, trying to escape her intensity. “He was putting a year between most of them. But then he skipped a couple—once, twenty-one months, another time, twenty-three. You think you’re missing a couple?”
    “Only if he completely changed his MO,” Connell said. “If he shot them. My data search concentrated on stabbings. Or maybe he took the time to bury them and they were never found. That wouldn’t be typical of him, though. But there are so many missing people out there, it’s impossible to tell for sure.”
    “Maybe he went someplace else—L.A. or Miami, or the bodies were just never found.”
    She shrugged. “I don’t think so. He tends to stay close to home. I think he drives to the killing scene. He picks his ground ahead of time, and goes by car. I plotted all the places where these women were taken from, and