Night Prey

lipstick a manifestation of Original Sin. She was waiting for him, dark circles under her eyes.
    “How’re you feeling?”
    “Better. Still a little morning sickness,” she said dismissively, brushing the illness away. “Did you read the histories?”
    “Yeah. Not much.”
    She looked angry: not at Lucas or Greave, but maybe at herself, or the world. “We’re not gonna get him this time, are we? He’s gonna have to kill somebody else before we get him.”
    “Unless we get a big fuckin’ break,” Lucas said. “And I don’t see a break coming.”
     
     
     
    JAN REED CAME by Lucas’s office after the press conference, and they ambled through the Skyways to a restaurant in the Pillsbury Building. Since she was new to Minnesota, they chatted about the weather, about the lakes, about the Guthrie Theater, and about the other places she’d worked: Detroit, Miami, Cleveland. They found a table not too close to anyone else, Reed with her back to the door—“I get pestered sometimes”—and ordered coffee and croissants.
    “How was the press conference?” Lucas asked, peeling open one of the croissants.
    Reed opened her notebook and looked at it. “Maybe not domestic,” she said. “The guy’s name is Evan Hart. His girlfriend’s been divorced for seven years. Her ex lives out on the West Coast and he was there this morning. Besides, she says he’s a nice guy. That they broke up because he was too mellow. No alimony or anything. No kids. Sort of a hippie mistake. And she hasn’t gone out with anybody else, seriously, for a couple of years.”
    “How about this Hart?” Lucas asked. “Has he got an ex? Is he bisexual? What does he do?”
    “He’s a widower,” Reed said. She put the yellow pencil in her mouth and turned pages. A little clump of hair fell over her eyes and she brushed it back; Weather did that. “His wife was killed in a traffic accident. He’s a lawyer for a stockbrokerage company, he has something to do with municipal bonds. He doesn’t sell anything, so it’s not that. He didn’t ruin anybody.”
    “Doesn’t sound like a fruitcake, though,” Lucas said. “It sounds like the guy was mad about something.”
    “That’s what it sounds like,” she said. “But Jensen’s really freaked out. That other attack happened right down below her apartment window.”
    “That’s what I heard. Jensen’s his girlfriend? She was actually there at the press conference?”
    “Yeah. She was. Sara Jensen. Sharp. Good-looking, runs her own mutual fund, probably makes two hundred thousand a year,” Reed said. “Dresses like it. She has just gorgeous clothes—she must go to New York. She was really angry. She wants the guy caught. Actually, it sounded like she wants the guy killed, like she was there to ask the cops to find him and kill him.”
    “Very strange,” Lucas said. “The guys in homicide are having a hard time right now. . . .”
    The conversation rambled along, through new subjects, Lucas enjoying it, laughing. Reed was nice-looking, amusing, and had spent a little time on the streets. They had that in common. Then she said something about gangs. Gangs was a code word for blacks, and as she talked, the code word pecked away at the back of Lucas’s mind. Reed, he thought after a bit, might have a fine ass and great eyes, but she was also a bit of a racist. Racism was becoming fashionable in the smart set, if done in a suitably subtle way. Was it immoral to jump a racist? How about if she didn’t have a good time, but you did?
    He was smiling and nodding and Reed was rambling on about something sexual but safe, the rumored affair between an anchorman and a cameraman, carried out in what she said was a TV van with bad springs.
    “. . . So there they were on Summit Avenue outside the governor’s mansion, and everybody’s going in for the ball and this giant van with TV3 on the side is practically jumping up and down, and her husband is out on the sidewalk, pacing back and forth, looking for her.” Reed was playing with her butter knife as she talked, and she twirled it in her fingers, a cheerleader’s baton twirl.
    Like Junky Doog, Lucas thought. What had Junky said when Greave had asked him why a man might start cutting on women? ’Cause a woman turns you on, that’s why. Maybe you see a woman and she turns you on. Gets you by the pecker . . .
    The Society of Jesus, SJ.
    Or . . .
    Lucas said, suddenly, sitting up, “What was the guy’s wound