Night Prey

Connell said.
    “Fuck pattern. We know he did Wannemaker,” Lucas said. “The girl up north didn’t have the letters cut into her.”
    “But she was on schedule,” Connell said. “Wannemaker and this one, these are two that are out of order. I hope we don’t have two guys.”
    “Nah.” Lucas shook his head. “The knife in the stomach, man, it’s a signature. More than the letters, even.”
    “I better look at her,” Connell said. She crept under the bushes for a better look, squatted next to the body, turned the light on it. She studied it for a minute, then two, then walked away to spit. Came back. “I’m getting used to it,” she said.
    “God help you,” said Carrigan.
    A patrolman and a tall black kid were walking fast up the block, the kid a half-step ahead of the patrolman. The kid wore knee shorts, an oversize shirt, Sox hat, and an expression of eye-rolling exasperation.
    Carrigan took a step toward them. “What you got, Bill?”
    “Kid saw the guy,” the patrolman said. “Sure enough.”
    Lucas, Connell, and Carrigan gathered around the kid. “You see him?”
    “Man . . .” The kid looked up the block, where more people were wandering in, attracted by word of a murder.
    “What’s your name?” Connell asked.
    “Dex?” The answer sounded like a question, and the kid’s eyes rolled up to the sky.
    “How long ago?” Lucas asked.
    The kid shrugged. “Do I look like a large fuckin’ clock?”
    “You’re gonna look like a large fuckin’ scab if you don’t watch your mouth,” Carrigan said.
    Lucas held up a hand, got close to the kid. “This is a farm girl, Dex. Just came up to the city, somebody let the air out of her.”
    “Ain’t got nothin’ to do with me,” Dex said, looking at the crowd again.
    “Come over here,” Lucas said, his voice friendly. He took the kid’s arm. “Look at the body.”
    “What?”
    “Come on. . . .” He waved the kid over, then said to the patrolman, “Loan me your flashlight, will you, pal?”
    Lucas took Dex around the bush, then duckwalked with him toward the woman on the wound side. He went willingly enough; hell, he’d seen six thousand bodies on TV, and once had walked by a place where some ambulance guys were taking a body out of a house. This’d be cool.
    A foot from the body, Lucas turned the light on the stomach wound.
    “Fuck,” said Dex. He stood up, straight through the bush, and started thrashing his way out.
    Lucas caught his web pocket, hauled him back down, rough. “Come on, man, you can tell people about this. How the cops let you check her out.” He put the flashlight on the girl’s face. “Look at her eyes, man, they’re still open, they look like eggs. You can smell her guts if you get closer, kind of soapy smelling.”
    Dex’s eyes moved toward the corpse’s, and he shuddered and stood and tried to run. Lucas let him go: Carrigan was waiting when the kid fought free of the bush.
    “Never saw nothin’ like that before,” Dex said. A line of saliva dribbled from one edge of his mouth, and he wiped it with his hand.
    “So who was it?” Carrigan asked.
    “White dude. Driving a pickup.”
    “What kind of pickup?”
    “White with dark on it, maybe red, I don’t know; I know the white part for sure,” Dex said. He kept moving away from the body, around the bushes back toward the curb. Carrigan held one arm and Dex babbled on. “There was a camper on the back. People come up here to throw garbage sometimes. I thought that’s what he was doin’, throwing garbage.”
    “How close were you?” Connell asked.
    “Down to the corner,” Dex said, pointing. A hundred yards.
    “What’d he look like, far as you could tell?” Connell pressed. “Big guy? Small guy? Skinny?”
    “Pretty big. Big as me. And I think maybe he plays basketball, the way he got in the truck. He like hopped up there, you know. Just real quick, like he’s got some speed. Quick.”
    Connell fumbled in her purse and took out a folded square of paper. She started to unfold it when Lucas realized what it was, reached out and caught her hand, shook his head. “Don’t do that,” he said. He looked at Dex and asked, “How long ago?”
    “Hour? I don’t know. ’Bout an hour.” That meant nothing. For most witnesses, an hour was more than fifteen minutes and less than three hours.
    “What else?”
    “Man, I don’t think there’s anything else. I mean, let me think about it. . . .” He looked past Lucas. “Here comes my