Night Prey

fifteen-hundred-dollar gun, I bet,” he said, aiming it out the window at a Folger’s coffee can in the side yard.
    “What’s the story on the woman up there?” Connell asked.
    “Ellie Rae? She and her husband run the best diner in town. Rather, she runs it and he cooks. Great cook, but when he gets depressed, he drinks. If they break up, he’ll get steady drunk, and she’ll quit, and that’ll be the end of the diner.”
    “Oh,” Connell said. She looked at him to see if he was joking.
    “Hey, that’s a big deal,” Beneteau said defensively. “There are only two of them, and the other one’s a grease pit.”
    Joe Hillerod looked a lot like his brother, with the same blunt, tough German features. “I got fifteen hundred bucks in my wallet, cash, and I want witnesses to that. I don’t want the money going away,” he said sullenly.
    Ellie Rae said, “I’m a witness.”
    “You shut up, Ellie Rae,” Beneteau said. “What the hell are you doing here, anyway?”
    “I love him,” she said. “I can’t help myself.”
    A deputy helped the fat man into the room. He was bleeding all over his head, shoulders, and arms from the window, and was dragging one leg.
    “Dumb bunny jumped off the roof,” the deputy said. “After he crashed through the window.”
    “He was flushing shit upstairs,” Lucas said. Dumb bunny? The guy looks like a mastodon. “He got some of it on the toilet seat, though.”
    “Check that,” Beneteau said to one of the deputies.
    Connell had put away her gun, and now she stepped up behind Hillerod and pulled at his hand, immobilized by the cuffs.
    “What the fuck?” Hillerod said, trying to turn to see what she was doing.
    “See?”
    Lucas looked. Hillerod had the 666 on the web between his thumb and forefinger. “Yeah.”
    The woman who’d been on the fold-out couch had been watching Connell, taking in Connell’s inch-long hair. “I was sexually abused,” she said finally. “By the cops.”
    Connell said, “Yeah?”
    Lucas was climbing the stairs, and Connell hurried after him. In the bedroom, a decrepit water bed was pushed against one wall, with a bedstand and light to one side and a chest of drawers against the wall at the foot of the bed. Magazines and newspapers were scattered around the room. An ironing board sat in a corner, buried in wrinkled clothing, the iron lying on its side at the pointed end of the board.
    A long stag-handled folding knife sat in a jumble of junk on the chest of drawers. Connell bent over next to it, carefully not touching it, looked at it, and said, “Goddamn, Davenport. The autopsies say it’s a knife like this. The blade’s just right.”
    She picked up a matchbook and used it to rotate the knife. The excitement rose in her voice. “There’s some gunky stuff in the hinge or whatever you call it, where it folds; it could be blood.”
    “But look at the cigarettes,” Lucas said.
    A pack of Marlboros sat on the nightstand. There wasn’t a Camel in the house.

17
    THE HILLERODS CALLED a Duluth lawyer named Aaron Capella. The lawyer arrived at midafternoon in a dusty Ford Escort, talked to the county attorney, then to his clients. Lucas went to the local emergency room, had four stitches taken in his scalp, then met Connell for a late lunch. Afterward, they hung out in Beneteau’s office or wandered around the courthouse, waiting for Capella to finish with the Hillerods.
    The crime-scene crew called from the junkyard to say they’d found three half-kilo bags of cocaine behind a false panel in the junkyard bathroom. Beneteau was more than pleased: he was on television with each of the Duluth-Superior stations.
    “Gonna get my ass reelected, Davenport,” he said to Lucas.
    “I’ll send you a bill,” Lucas said.
    They were talking in his office, and they saw Connell coming up the walk outside. She’d been down at a coffee shop, and carried a china cup with her.
    “That’s a fine-looking woman,” Beneteau said, his eyes lingering on her. “I like the way she sticks her face into trouble. If you don’t mind my asking, have you two . . . got something going?”
    Lucas shook his head. “No.”
    “Huh. Is she with anybody else?”
    “Not as far as I know,” Lucas said. He started to say something about her being sick, hesitated.
    “I mean, she’s not a lesbian or anything,” Beneteau said.
    “No, she’s not. Look, George . . .” He still couldn’t think of exactly what he wanted to say. What he said was, “Look,