Night Prey

“How’d that get there?”
    For just a moment, she was confused. Had she taken it out last night, had she been sleepwalking? She took another step, saw a small mound of jewelry set to one side, all the cheap stuff.
    And then she knew.
    She stepped back, the shock climbing up through her chest, the adrenaline pouring into her bloodstream. Without thinking, she brought the back of her hand to her face, to her nose, and smelled the nicotine and the other . . .
    The what?
    Saliva.
    “No.” She screamed it, her mouth open, her eyes wide.
    She convulsively wiped her hand on the robe, wiped it again, wiped her sleeve across her forehead, which felt as if it were crawling with ants. Then she stopped, looked up, expecting to see him—to see him materializing from the kitchen, from a closet, or even, like a golem, from the carpet or the wooden floors. She twisted this way, then that, and backed frantically toward the kitchen, groping for the telephone.
    Screaming as she went.
    Screaming.

2
    LUCAS DAVENPORT HELD the badge case out the driver’s-side window. The pimply-faced suburban cop lifted the yellow plastic crime-scene tape and waved him through the line. He rolled the Porsche past the fire trucks, bumped over a flattened canvas hose, and stopped on a charred patch of dirt that a few hours earlier had been a lawn. A couple of firemen, drinking coffee, turned to check out the car.
    The phone beeped as he climbed out, and he bent down to pull it off the visor. When he stood up, the stink from the fire hit him: the burned plaster, insulation, paint, and old rotting wood.
    “Yeah? Davenport.”
    Lucas was a tall man with heavy shoulders, dark-complected, square-faced, with the beginnings of crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes. His dark hair was just touched with gray; his eyes were a startling blue. A thin white scar crossed his forehead and right eye socket, and trailed down to the corner of his mouth. He looked like a veteran athlete, a catcher or a hockey defenseman, recently retired.
    A newer pink scar showed just above the knot of his necktie.
    “This is Sloan. Dispatch said you were at the fire.” Sloan sounded hoarse, as though he had a cold.
    “Just got here,” Lucas said, looking at the burned-out Quonset.
    “Wait for me. I’m coming over.”
    “What’s going on?”
    “We’ve got another problem,” Sloan said. “I’ll talk to you when I get there.”
    Lucas hung the phone back on the visor, slammed the door, and turned to the burned-out building. The warehouse had been a big light-green World War II Quonset hut, mostly galvanized steel. The fire had been so hot that the steel sheets had twisted, buckled, and folded back on themselves, like giant metallic tacos.
    With pork.
    Lucas touched his throat, the pink scar where the child had shot him just before she had been chopped to pieces by the M-16. That case had started with a fire, with the same stink, with the same charred-pork smell that he now caught drifting from the torched-out hulk. Pork-not-pork.
    He touched the scar again and started toward the blackened tangle of fallen struts. A cop was dead inside the tangle, the first call had said, his hands trussed behind his back. Then Del had called in, said the cop was one of his contacts. Lucas had better come out, although the scene was outside the Minneapolis jurisdiction. The suburban cops were walking around with grim one-of-us looks on their faces. Enough cops had died around Lucas that he no longer made much distinction between them and civilians, as long as they weren’t friends of his.
    Del was stepping gingerly through the charred interior. He was unshaven, as usual, and wore a charcoal-gray sweatshirt over jeans and cowboy boots. He saw Lucas and waved him inside. “He was already dead,” Del said. “Before the fire got to him.”
    Lucas nodded. “How?”
    “They wired his wrists and shot him in the teeth, looks like three, four shots in the fuckin’ teeth from all we can tell in that goddamned nightmare,” Del said, unconsciously dry-washing his hands. “He saw it coming.”
    “Yeah, Jesus, man, I’m sorry,” Lucas said. The dead cop was a Hennepin County deputy. Earlier in the year, he’d spent a month with Del, trying to learn the streets. He and Del had almost become friends.
    “I warned him about the teeth: no goddamned street people got those great big white HMO teeth,” Del said, sticking a cigarette into his face. Del’s teeth were yellowed pegs. “I told