Night Prey

bad. I’m out of chemo for the time being, I’m getting my strength back. But it won’t last. A couple weeks, three, and it’ll come creeping up on me again. I want to get him before I go.”
    “We can try.”
    “We gotta do better than that,” she said. “I owe some people.”
    “All right.”
    “I don’t mean to scare you,” she said.
    “You’re doing it.”
     
     
     
    THE OWNER OF The Saint recognized Wannemaker immediately. “Yes, she was here,” he said. His voice was cool, soft. He looked at Lucas over the top of his gold-rimmed John Lennon specs. “Killed? My God, she wasn’t the kind to get killed.”
    “What kind was she?” Lucas asked.
    “Well, you know.” He gestured. “Meek. A wallflower. She did ask a question when Margaret finished the reading, but I think it was because nobody was asking questions and she was embarrassed. That kind of person.”
    “Did she leave with anyone?”
    “Nope. She left alone. I remember, ’cause it was abrupt. Most readings, she’d hang around; she’d be the last to leave, like she had nothing else to do. But I remember, she headed out maybe fifteen minutes after we broke things up. There were still quite a few people in the store. I thought maybe she didn’t like Margaret.”
    “Was she in a hurry?”
    The store owner scratched his head, looked out his window at the street. “Yeah. Now that you mention it, she did sort of seem like she was going somewhere.”
    Lucas looked at Connell, who was showing just the faintest color.
    The store owner, frowning, said, “You know, when I think about it, the question she asked was made up, like maybe she was dragging things out. I was sort of rolling my eyes, mentally, anyway. Then she leaves in a hurry. . . .”
    “Like something happened while she was in the store?” Connell prompted.
    “I hate to say it, but yes.”
    “That’s interesting,” Lucas said. “We’ll need a list of everybody you know was here.”
    The store owner looked away, embarrassed. “Hmm. “I think, uh, a lot of my clients would see that as an invasion of privacy,” he said.
    “Would you like to see the pictures of Wannemaker?” Lucas asked gently. “The guy ripped her stomach open and all her intestines came out. And we think he might be hanging around bookstores.”
    The store owner looked at him for a moment, then nodded. “I’ll get a list going,” he said.
     
     
     
    LUCAS USED THE store phone to call Anderson, and told him about the identification. “She left here at nine o’clock.”
    “We got her car fifteen minutes ago,” Anderson said. “It was in the impound lot, towed out of downtown St. Paul. Hang on a minute. . . .” Anderson spoke to somebody else, then came back. “It was towed off a hill on Sixth. I’m told that’s next to Dayton’s.”
    “So she must have been headed somewhere.”
    “Unless she already was somewhere, and walked back to the store.”
    “I don’t think so. That’d be eight or ten blocks. There’s a lot of parking around here. She would have driven.”
    “Is there anything around Dayton’s at nine? Was the store open?”
    “There’s a bar up there—Harp’s. On the corner. Connell and I’ll stop in.”
    “Okay. St. Paul’ll process the car,” Anderson said. “I’ll pass on what you found out at this bookstore. You’re getting a list of names?”
    “Yeah. But it might not be much.”
    “Get me the names and I’ll run ’em.”
    Lucas hung up and turned around. Connell was marching toward him from the back of the store, where the owner had gone to talk with one of his clerks about people at the reading.
    “One of the men here was a cop,” she said fiercely. “A St. Paul patrolman named Carl Erdrich.”
    “Damnit,” Lucas said. He picked up the phone and called Anderson back, gave him the name.
    “What?” Connell wanted to know when he got off the phone.
    “We’ll check the bar,” Lucas said. “There’ll have to be some negotiations before we can get a mug of Erdrich.”
    Connell spun around and planted herself in front of him. “What the fuck is this?” she asked.
    “It’s called the Usual Bullshit,” he said. “And calm down. We’re talking about an hour or two, not forever.”
    But she was angry, heels pounding as they walked back to Lucas’s Porsche. “Why do you drive this piece of crap? You ought to buy something decent,” she snapped.
    Lucas said, “Shut the fuck up.”
    “What?” She goggled at him.
    “I said shut the