Night Prey

drive over to Waupun tomorrow and talk to him?”
    “Okay. What about Greave?”
    “I’ll tell him to work his own case for the day. That’s all he wants to do anyway.”
    “Good. How far is Waupun?”
    “Five or six hours.”
    “Why don’t we fly?”
    “Ah . . .”
    “I can get a state patrol plane, I think.”
     
     
     
    WEATHER’S HEAD WAS snuggled in under Lucas’s jaw, and she said, “You should have driven. You don’t need the stress.”
    “Yeah, but I sound like such a chicken.”
    “Lots of people don’t like to fly.”
    “But they do,” he said.
    She patted his stomach. “You’ll be okay. I could get you something that’d mellow you out a little, if you want.”
    “That’d mess up my head. I’ll fly.” He sighed and said, “My main problem is, I’m not running this investigation. Connell’s done everything, and I can’t see beyond what she’s done. I’m not thinking: the gears aren’t moving like they used to.”
    “What’s wrong?”
    “I don’t know, exactly—I can’t get anything to start with. If I could get the smallest bite of personal information on the guy, I’d have something—we just can’t get it. All I have to work with is paper.”
    “You said he might do cocaine. . . .”
    “Maybe fifty thousand people in the Twin Cities do cocaine on a more or less regular basis,” Lucas said. “I could jump a few dealers, but the chances of getting anywhere are nil.”
    “It’s something.”
    “I need something else, and soon. He’s gone crazy—less than a week between kills. He’ll be doing another one. He’ll be thinking about it already.”

13
    LUCAS HATED AIRPLANES, feared them. Helicopters, for reasons he didn’t understand, were not so bad. They flew to Waupun in a small four-seater fixed-wing plane, Lucas in the back.
    “I’ve never seen anything like that,” Connell said, an undercurrent of satisfaction in her voice.
    “You’re exaggerating it,” Lucas said, his face grim. The airport was open, windy, a patch on the countryside. A brown state car waited by the Waupun sign, and they walked that way.
    “I thought you were going to throw the pilot out the window when we hit those bumps. I thought you were gonna explode. It was like your head was blowing up, like one of those Zodiac boats where the pressure builds up.”
    “Yeah, yeah.”
    “I hope you and the pilot can kiss and make up before we fly back,” Connell said. “I don’t want him flying scared.”
    Lucas turned to her and she stepped away, half smiling, half frightened. With the fish-white stone face behind the black glasses, he looked like a maniac; Lucas did not like airplanes.
    A Waupun guard tossed a newspaper in the backseat of the state car and got out as they came up. “Ms. Connell?”
    “Yes.”
    “Tom Davis.” He was a mild-looking, fleshy man with rosy cheeks and vague blue eyes under a smooth, baby-clear forehead. He had a small graying mustache, just a bit wider than Hitler’s. He smiled and shook her hand, then to Lucas, “And you’re her assistant?”
    “That was a joke,” Connell said hastily. “This is, uh, Deputy Chief Lucas Davenport from Minneapolis.”
    “Whoops, sorry, Chief,” Davis said. He winked at Connell. “Well, hop in. We got a little ride.”
     
     
     
    DAVIS KNEW D . Wayne Price. “He’s not a bad fella,” he said. He drove with one foot on the gas and the other on the brake. The constant surging and slowing reminded Lucas of the airplane’s motion.
    “He was convicted of murdering a woman by slicing her open with a knife,” Connell said. “They had to remove her intestines from the street with a bucket.” Her voice was conversational.
    “That wouldn’t put him in the top ten percent of his class,” the guard said, just as conversationally. “We got guys in here who raped and killed little boys before they ate them.”
    “ That’s bad,” Lucas said.
    “That is bad,” said Davis.
    “Is there any talk about Price?” Lucas asked. “He says he’s innocent.”
    “So do fifty percent of the others, though most of them don’t actually claim to be innocent. They say the law wasn’t followed, or the trial wasn’t fair. I mean, they did it, whatever it was, but they say the state didn’t dot every single i and cross every single t before puttin’ them away—and they say that’s just not fair. There’s nobody finickier about the law than a con,” Davis said.
    “How about Price?”
    “I don’t know D. Wayne