Night Prey

there,” Koop said, trying a smile. “Stayed at a Holiday Inn on the way to Sioux Falls.”
    “I go to Sioux all the time,” she said. Something in common. She’d held her arms crossed over her stomach as they talked; now she dropped them to her sides. Opening up.
    Koop put the toolbox on the sidewalk. “Look, I’m a maintenance guy with Greyhound. You don’t know me, but I’m an okay guy, really. I’m on my way to South Minneapolis, I could drop you in Uptown. . . .”
    She looked at him closely now, afraid but tempted. He didn’t look that bad: tall, strong. Older. Had to be thirty.
    “I was told that the bus . . .”
    “Sure.” He grinned again. “Don’t take rides from strangers. That’s a good policy. If you stick close to the bus stop and the station, you should be okay,” he said. “I wouldn’t go down that way, you can see the porno stores. There’re weirdos going in and out.”
    “Porno stores?” She looked down the street. A black guy was looking in the window of a camera store.
    “Anyway, I gotta go,” Koop said, picking up his toolbox. “Take it easy. . . .”
    “Wait,” she said, her face open, fearful but hoping. She picked up the duffel. “I’ll take the ride, if it’s okay.”
    “Sure. I’m parked right behind the station,” Koop said. “Let me get my tools stowed away . . . You’ll be there in five minutes.”
    “This is my first time in Minneapolis,” the girl said, now chatty. “But I used to go up to Sioux every weekend, just about.”
    “What’s your name?” Koop asked.
    “Marcy Lane,” she said. “What’s yours?”
    “Ben,” he said. “Ben Cooper.”
    Ben was a nice name. Like Gentle Ben, the bear, on television. “Nice to meet you, Ben,” she said, and tried a smile, a kind of bohemian, woman-of-the-road smile.
    She looked like a child.
    A pie-faced kid from the country.

10
    WEATHER HEARD THE phone at the far end of the house, woke up, poked him.
    “Phone,” she mumbled. “It must be for you.”
    Lucas fumbled around in the dark, found the bedroom phone, picked it up. Dispatch patched him through to North Minneapolis. Another one.
    “. . . recovered her purse and a duffel bag with some clothes. We got a license, says she’s Marcy Lane with an address in Worthington,” Carrigan said. His voice sounded like a file being run over sheet metal. “We’re trying to run her folks down now. You better get your ass over here.”
    “Did you call Lester?” Lucas was sitting on the bed, hunched in the light from the bedside lamp, bare feet on the floor. Weather was still awake, unmoving, listening to the conversation over her shoulder.
    “Not yet. Should I?”
    “I’ll call him,” Lucas said. “Freeze every fuckin’ thing. Freeze it. The shit’s gonna hit the fan, and you don’t want any mistakes. And don’t talk to the uniforms, for Christ’s sakes.”
    “It’s froze hard,” Carrigan said.
    “Keep it that way.” Lucas poked the phone’s Cancel button, then redialed.
    “Who’s dead?” Weather asked, rolling onto her back.
    “Some kid. Looks like our asshole did it,” Lucas said. The dispatcher came on and he said, “This is Davenport. I need a number for a Meagan Connell. And I need to talk to Frank Lester. Now.”
    They found a number for Connell and he scribbled it down. As they put him through to Lester, he grinned at Weather, sleepy-eyed, looking up at him. “How often do they call you in the middle of the night?” she asked. “When you’re working?”
    “Maybe twenty times in twenty years,” he said.
    She rolled toward her nightstand, looked at the clock. “I get up in three hours.”
    “Sorry,” he said.
    She propped herself up on one elbow and said, “I never thought of it until now, but you’ve got very little hair on your ass.”
    “Hair?” The phone was ringing at the other end, and he looked down at his ass, confused. A sleepy Lester grunted, “Hello?”
    “This is Davenport,” Lucas said, going back to the phone, trying to get his mind off hair. “Carrigan just called. A young girl from Worthington got gutted and dumped in a vacant lot up on the north side. If it ain’t the one that did Wannemaker, it’s his twin brother.”
    After a moment of silence, Lester said, “Shit.”
    “Yeah. So now we got a new one. You better get with Roux and figure out what you’re gonna do, publicity-wise.”
    “I’ll call her. Are you going up there? Wherever?”
    “I’m on my way,” Lucas