Night Prey

reputation who spent that whole night with him down in Madison, and he’s sure she’ll remember it independently of anything we talk about here. Without any prompting from me or Joe. I will state that we have not been in touch with her, and that Joe’s confident that she’ll remember.”
    “You’ve got a name?” Lucas asked.
    “You can have the name and the circumstances in which they met,” the lawyer said. “The fact is, he picked her up at the bookstore.”
    “I didn’t have nothing to do with the guns,” Hillerod said sullenly.
    “We’re not talking about that,” his lawyer said quickly. He patted Hillerod on the knee. “That’s not part of the deal.”
    “We know the killer smokes Marlboros,” Lucas said, leaning toward Hillerod. “You smoke Marlboros, right?”
    “No, no, I usually smoke Merits, I’m trying to quit,” Hillerod said. “I just got the Marlboros that once.”
    “Your man is lying to us,” Lucas said to Capella. “We know he’s smoked Marlboros for years.”
    Capella said, “He says Merits . . . I gotta believe him.” “Merits taste like shit,” Bich said. “Why’d you smoke Merits? Is that all you smoke?”
    “Well, I’m trying to quit,” Hillerod said, not meeting their eyes. “I smoke some Marlboros, but I didn’t kill anybody. I smoke some Ventures, too.”
    The Marlboro bluff hadn’t worked. “We want to know about the bookstore,” Connell said.
    “In Madison?” Hillerod’s eyes defocused for a moment, and then he said, “How’d you know about that, anyway?”
    “We’ve got a witness,” Connell said. “You left with a woman.”
    “That’s right,” Hillerod said. Then he said, “She’s gotta be the one who told you.”
    “She’s not,” Lucas said. “Our witness . . . well, it’s a woman, but it’s not your friend. If you’ve got a friend. But we want to know about the other woman. The one who turned up dead the next day.”
    “Wasn’t me,” Hillerod said. “The woman I left with, she’s still alive. And she must’ve told you that I couldn’t have done it, ’cause I was with her.”
    “What’s her name?” asked Connell.
    Hillerod scratched his face, glaring at her, but Connell looked levelly back, as though she were an entomologist examining a not-particularly-interesting beetle. “Abby Weed,” he said finally.
    “Where does she live?”
    Hillerod shrugged. “I don’t know the address, just how to get there. But you can get her at the university.”
    “She works at the university?” Lucas asked.
    “She’s a professor,” he said. “In fine art. She’s a painter.”
    Lucas looked at Connell, who rolled her eyes. “Who were you there with? At the bookstore?”
    “Wasn’t there with nobody,” Hillerod said. “I went in to get a book on my bike, if they had one, which they didn’t.”
    “How long were you in there?”
    Hillerod shrugged. “Hour.”
    “That’s a long time to look for a book that they didn’t have,” Lucas said.
    “I only spent five minutes looking for the book. Then I saw Abby giving me the eye, and I hung around to bullshit her a little bit. She had the big . . .” He glanced at Connell. “Headlights.”
    “She went home with you?” Connell said.
    “We went to her place.”
    “You spent the night?”
    “Shit, I spent about four nights,” Hillerod said with a small smile, talking to Connell. “Every time I tried to get out of bed, I’d find her hanging on to my dick. . . .” The smile went flat, and he looked at Lucas. “The fuckin’ cop,” he said. “That fuckin’ cop picked me out, didn’t he?”
    “What cop?”
    “The cop at the store.”
    Lucas looked at him for a long beat, then said, “You have a 666 on your hand.”
    Hillerod looked at the tattoo, shook his head. “Goddamnit, I knew that was stupid, the fuckin’ 666. Everybody was getting them. I told people, the cops’ll use them against us.”
    “Did you see anybody in the store that looked like this?” Connell asked. She handed him the composite.
    Hillerod looked it over, then looked curiously from Connell to Lucas to Bich to Capella. “Well. Not anyone else. Not that I remember.”
    “What? What’d you mean, anyone else?” Lucas asked.
    He shrugged. “You should know. It looks like your cop.”
    “The cop?” Connell looked at Lucas again. “How did you know he was a cop?”
    “The way he looked at me. He was a cop, all right. He looked at my hand, then at me, and then my hand. He knew what it