Rules of Prey

nine-o’clock newsbreak promoting it. The station’s top reporter, a tall blonde in a trench coat, rapped the harsh word “murder” into a microphone set up outside City Hall. An hour later, he taped TV3’s ten-o’clock news report, which replayed key parts of the press conference with the chief of police.
    The conference was chaotic. The chief was terse, straightforward. So were the first few questions. Then somebody raised his voice, cutting off a question from another reporter, and the whole conference reeled out of control. At the end, newspaper photographers were standing on chairs in front of the television, firing their strobes at the chief and the half-dozen other cops in the room.
    It took his breath away. He watched the tape a half-dozen times, considering every nuance. If only they’d run the whole press conference, he thought; that would be the responsiblething. After thinking about it for a moment or two, he called the station. The lines were busy and it took twenty minutes to get through. When he finally did, the operator put him on hold for a moment, then came back to tell him there were no plans “at the present time” to run the entire conference.
    “Might that change?” he asked.
    “I don’t know,” she said. She sounded harassed. “It might. About a million people are calling. You oughta check the Good-Morning Show tomorrow. If they decide to run it, they’ll say then.”
    When he got off the phone, the maddog got down on his knees with the VCR instructions and figured out how to program the time controls. He’d want to tape all the major newscasts from now on.
    Before he went to bed, he watched the tape one last time, the part with Lucas Davenport. Davenport had been shown in a brief cut, sitting cross-legged in a folding chair. He was wearing jeans and an expensive-looking sport coat. Called the smartest detective on the police force. Working independently.
    He got up early for the Good-Morning Show, but there was nothing but a rehash of the news from the night before. Later, when he was reading the morning papers, he found a short sidebar on Lucas Davenport in the St. Paul paper, with a small photograph. Killed five people? A games inventor? Wonderful. The maddog examined the photo closely. A cruel jawline, he decided. A hard man.
     
    The maddog could barely work during the day, impatiently rushing through the stack of routine real-estate and probate files on the desk before him. He spent a few more minutes with two minor criminal cases he was also handling, but finally pushed those aside as well. The criminal cases were his favorites, but he didn’t get many of them. The maddog was recognized in the firm as an expert researcher; but it was already being said that he would not work well before a jury. There was something . . . wrong about him. Nobody said it publicly, but it was understood.
    The maddog lived alone near the University of Minnesota, in one of four apartments in a turn-of-the-century house that had been modernized and converted to town houses. He rushed home after work, hurrying to catch the six-o’clock news. There was no more hard information, but TV3 had news crews out all over the city getting reaction from people in the street. The people in the street said they weren’t scared, that the police would get him.
    A cop in a squad car revealed that he signed himself “maddog,” and the newscasters picked it up. The maddog liked it.
    After the news, he spent an hour cleaning and squaring his meticulously neat apartment. He usually watched television at night or rental movies on his VCR. That night he couldn’t sit still. Eventually he went downtown, from bar to bar, cruising the crowds. He saw a James Dean-wannabe at a fashionable disco, a young man with long black hair and wide shoulders, a T-shirt under a black leather jacket, a cruel smile. He was talking to a girl in a short white dress that showed her legs all the way to her crotch and from the top down almost to her nipples.
    You think he’s dangerous, he thought of the woman, but it’s all a charade. I’m the dangerous one. You don’t even see me in my sport coat and necktie, but I’m the one. I’m the One.
    It was time to begin again. Time to begin looking. The need would begin to work on him. He knew the pattern now. In ten days or two weeks, it would be unbearable.
    So far he had taken a salesgirl, a housewife, a real-estate agent. How about one out of the pattern? One that would really