Night Prey

for a ride.”
    “Where to?”
    “Wisconsin.” He rocked on the toes of the too-yellow shoes. “Hudson. Look at a body.”
    “Anybody I know?” Lucas asked.
    Sloan shrugged. “You know a chick named Harriet Wannemaker?”
    “I don’t think so,” Lucas said.
    “That’s who it probably is.”
    “Why would I go look at her?”
    “Because I say so and you trust my judgment?” Sloan made it a question.
    Lucas grinned. “All right.”
    Sloan looked down the block at Lucas’s Porsche. “Can I drive?”
     
     
     
    “PRETTY BAD IN there?” Sloan asked. He threw his hat in the back and downshifted as they rolled up to a stop sign at Highway 280.
    “They executed him. Shot him in the teeth,” Lucas said. “Think it might be the Seeds.”
    “Miserable assholes,” Sloan said without too much heat. He accelerated onto 280.
    “What happened to what’s-her-name?” Lucas asked. “Wannabe.”
    “Wannemaker. She dropped out of sight three days ago. Her friends say she was going out to some bookstore on Friday night, they don’t know which one, and she didn’t show up to get her hair done Saturday. We put out a missing persons note, and that’s the last we know until this morning, when Hudson called. We shot a Polaroid over there; it wasn’t too good, but they think it’s her.”
    “Shot?”
    “Stabbed. The basic technique is a rip—a stick in the lower belly, then an upward pull. Lots of power. That’s why I’m looking into it.”
    “Does this have something to do with what’s-her-name, the chick from the state?”
    “Meagan Connell,” Sloan said. “Yeah.”
    “I hear she’s trouble.”
    “Yeah. She could use a personality transplant,” Sloan said. He blew the doors off a Lexus SC, allowing himself a small smile. The guy in the Lexus wore shades and driving gloves. “But when you actually read her files, the stuff she’s put together—she’s got something, Lucas. But Jesus, I hope this isn’t one of his. It sounds like it, but it’s too soon. If it’s his, he’s speeding up.”
    “Most of them do,” Lucas said. “They get addicted to it.”
    Sloan paused at a stoplight, then ran the red and roared up the ramp onto Highway 36. Shifting up, he pushed the Porsche to seventy-five and kept it there, cutting through traffic like a shark. “This guy was real regular,” he said. “I mean, if he exists. He did one killing every year or so. Now we’re talking about four months. He did the last one just about the time you were gettin’ shot. Picked her up in Duluth, dumped the body up at the Carlos Avery game reserve.”
    “Any leads?” Lucas touched the pink scar on his throat.
    “Damn few. Meagan’s got a file.”
     
     
     
    THEY TOOK TWENTY minutes getting to Wisconsin, out the web of interstates through the countryside east of St. Paul, the landscape green and heavy after a wet spring. “It’s better out here in the country,” Sloan said. “Christ, the media’s gonna get crazy with this cop killed.”
    “Lotta shit coming down,” Lucas said. “At least the cop’s not ours.”
    “Four killed in five days,” Sloan said. “Wannemaker will make five in a week. Actually, we might have six. We’re looking into an old lady who croaked in her bed. A couple of the guys think she might’ve been helped along. They’re calling it natural, for now.”
    “You cleared the domestic on Dupont,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah, with the hammer and chisel.”
    “Hurts to think about it.” Lucas grinned.
    “Got it right between the eyes,” Sloan said, impressed. He’d never had a hammer-and-chisel job before, and novelty wasn’t that common in murder. Most of it was a half-drunk guy scratching his ass and saying, Jesus, she got me really pissed, you know? Sloan went on: “She waited until he was asleep, and whack. Actually, whack, whack, whack. The chisel went all the way through to the mattress. She pulled it out, put it in the dishwasher, turned the dishwasher on, and called 911. Makes me think twice about going to sleep at night. You catch your old lady staring at you . . .”
    “Any defense? Long-term abuse?”
    “Not so far. So far, she says it was hot inside, and she got tired of him laying there snoring and farting. You know Donovan up in the prosecutor’s office?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Says he’d of taken a plea to second if it’d been only one whack,” Sloan said. “With whack-whack-whack, he’s gotta go for first degree.”
    A truck moved in front of them