Rules of Prey

different pieces of equipment and clothing in separate trashcans.
    He’d paid a hundred and sixty dollars for the ski jacket and hated to see it go. But it must go. It could have microscopic particles of the yellow clay inextricably impressed in the fabric. He couldn’t throw it in a trashcan. It was too expensive. Somebody might wonder why it had been discarded, and publicity about the attempt on McGowan by a black-clad maddog would be intense. He finally left the jacket hanging on a hook in a rest room at an all-night truck stop, as though it had been forgotten. With any luck, it would wind up in Boise.
    He had the same problem with the shoes. They were new Reeboks, a fashionable mat black. He liked them. He pitched them separately out the car window into the roadside ditch, a mile or so apart. He would have to buy a new pair, toreplace his aging Nike Airs. He’d better stick with the Airs, he thought, just in case the cops found prints in that muddy ditch and matched them to Reeboks.
    At Eau Claire the maddog checked into an out-of-the-way motel and paid with his Visa card. The receipt had no time stamp. Should the police someday come after him, the sleepy clerk almost certainly wouldn’t remember him, much less what time he had arrived. And he would have a receipt to prove that he was in Eau Claire the night of the McGowan attack.
    In his room, he stripped, showered again, and put a new dressing on the dog bites. By three in the morning it was all done and he was in bed, the lights out, the blankets pulled up under his chin.
    Time to think. He lay awake in the dark and mentally retraced his steps from the car to McGowan’s house. Down the dark side streets. The car starting. Where was he? The maddog had not yet turned into the alley. Then the second car starting.
    They’d had McGowan’s house under surveillance, he realized. They had ambushed him, and the ambush should have worked. Davenport? Almost certainly. He had been manipulated into an attack, probably with the woman’s cooperation.
    The maddog knew that he might someday be caught. He had no illusions about that. But he had supposed that if he were caught, it would be through a combination of uncontrollable and unforeseeable circumstances. He had imagined, in waking nightmares, the struggle with a woman, perhaps like the struggle with Carla Ruiz. And the intervention of another man, or maybe even a crowd; a lynch mob. Somehow, in these visions, the mob seemed to pursue him through a department store, with women’s clothing racks flying helter-skelter and shoppers screaming and glass cases breaking. It was ludicrous, but felt real, the endless aisles of clothing through which he fled, with the crowd only a rack or two behind and closing on the flanks.
    He had not imagined being manipulated, being tricked,being suckered. He had not imagined losing the game through inferior play.
    But he nearly had.
    In the back of his head he still couldn’t believe that they hadn’t come for him. That they didn’t now know who he was.
    He reviewed in his mind the destruction of the evidence at his apartment. He had done a good job, he concluded, but was there a telling trace of mud somewhere? Was it possible that somebody had seen his car license?
    The videotape. Damn. He had forgotten the videotape with the news broadcasts on it. But wait: he had never known when the news broadcasts would carry stories about the maddog, so he’d carefully taped whole broadcasts. Some carried nothing at all about the maddog . . . not that there had been many of those these last few weeks. So the tape should be okay. It wasn’t as specific to the maddog as individual newspaper clips.
    He felt a twinge of regret about the destruction of the clips. Maybe he could have kept them, maybe he should have carried them out to the car, and in Eau Claire tomorrow he could have rented a safe-deposit box. Too late. And probably foolish. When he was done with the women, when he was leaving the Twin Cities—maybe it was time—he could get copies from the library.
    With the evening’s events rattling through his mind like a pachinko ball, the maddog pulled the blankets a little higher, his calf now burning like fire, and waited for dawn.

CHAPTER
24
    Before he went home, Lucas returned to McGowan’s. There were a half-dozen squad cars, three city cars, and a technician’s van at the Werschel house. Two more squads were parked in the street at McGowan’s. A Channel Eight truck with a