Night Prey

But it’s small. And if we don’t get him, he might outwait our ability to escort you and then come after you. We had a case a few years ago where a guy in his middle twenties went after a woman who’d been his ninth-grade teacher. He’d brooded about her all that time.”
    “Oh, Jesus . . .” Then, suddenly: “All right. Let’s do it. Let’s get him.”
    The uniformed cop who’d been in the waiting room rapped on the door, stuck his head inside, and said to Jensen, “Dr. Ramihat is looking for you.”
    Jensen took Lucas’s forearm, her fingers digging in, as they went back down the hall to the waiting area. They found the surgeon greedily sucking on a cigarette and eating a Twinkie. “There’s an awful lot of damage,” he said, in light Indian accents. “There aren’t any guarantees, but we’ve got him more or less stable and we’ve stopped the bleeding. Unless we get something unexpected, his chances are good. There’ll be an infection problem, but he’s in good physical shape and we should be able to handle it.”
    Jensen collapsed in a chair, face in her hands, began to blubber. Ramihat patted her on the shoulder with one hand, ate the second Twinkie with his cigarette hand, and winked at Lucas. Connell pulled Lucas aside and said quietly, “If we can keep her in line, we got him.”
     
     
     
    THEY SPENT THE rest of the morning setting it up: Sloan came in to work with Lucas, Connell, and Greave in checking people with access to Jensen’s keys. Five women from intelligence, narcotics, and homicide would rotate as close escorts.
    After some discussion, Jensen decided that she could stay in the apartment as long as an escort was always with her. That way, she wouldn’t have to move anything out, and open the possibility that if the killer was in the building, she’d be seen doing it.
    Hart came out of surgery at three o’clock in the afternoon, hanging on.

23
    KOOP WAS STILL in a rage as he fled the lakes. He couldn’t think of the guy in bed with Jensen without hyperventilating, without choking the truck’s steering wheel, gripping it, screaming at the windshield. . . .
    In calmer moments, he could still close his eyes and see her as she was that first night, lying on the sheets, her body pressing up through the nightgown. . . .
    Then he’d see her on Hart again, and he’d begin screaming, strangling the steering wheel. Crazy. But not entirely gone. He was sane enough to know that the cops might be coming for him. Somebody might have seen him getting in the truck, might have his license number.
    Koop had done his research in his years at Stillwater: he knew how men were caught and convicted. Most of them talked to the cops when they shouldn’t. Many of them kept scraps and pieces of past crimes around them—television sets, stereos, watches, guns, things with serial numbers.
    Some of them kept clothing with blood on it. Some of them left blood behind, or semen.
    Koop had thought about it. If he was taken, he swore to himself that he would say nothing at all. Nothing. And he would get rid of everything he wore or used in any crime: he would not give the cops a scrap to hang on to. He would try to build an alibi—anything that a defense attorney could use.
     
     
     
    HE WAS STILL in psychological flight from the attack on Hart when he dumped the coat and hat. The coat was smeared with Hart’s blood, a great liverish-black stain. He wrapped it, with the hat, in a garbage bag and dumped it with a pile of garbage bags on a residential street in Edina. The garbage truck was three blocks away. The bag would be at the landfill before noon. He threw the plain-pane glasses out the car window into the high grass of a roadside ditch.
    Turned on the radio, found an all-news station. Bullshit, bullshit, and more bullshit. Nothing about him.
    In his T-shirt, he stopped at a convenience store, bought a six-pack of springwater, a bar of soap, a laundry bucket, and a pack of Bic razors. He continued south to Braemar Park, climbed into the back of the truck, and shaved in the bucket. His face felt raw afterward; when he looked in the truck mirror, he barely recognized himself. He’d picked up a few wrinkles since he’d last been bare-faced, and his upper lip seemed to have disappeared into a thin, stern line.
    He couldn’t bring himself to throw away the knife or the apartment keys. He washed the knife as well as he could, using the last of the springwater, sprayed both the knife and the