Storm Prey

and convivial. The nurse liked him for all of that. He patted her hand as he left: “Thanks for the info. Maybe I’ll see you up there.”
    Nice guy, she thought. Definitely husband material.
     
     
    LUCAS LEFT MACY’S with a bag of short-sleeved golf shirts—January in Minnesota, how far away could summer really be?—and the information that the menswear department hadn’t sold any coats at all that morning. By January, everybody in Minnesota already had one.

9
    LUCAS WAS LEANING against Joe Mack’s refrigerator with a Diet Coke in his hand, watching with little interest the two men from the BCA crime-scene crew. Joe Mack lived in a nice-enough but bland apartment with all-eggshell walls, in a singles’ complex in Woodbury, a suburban town six miles from Cherries.
    Joe had decorated the place with framed posters of Harley-Davidsons and Playboy Playmates. He had a stereo/TV system that occupied an entire wall in the front room, and a swinging-singles wet bar with every kind of North American alcohol known to man. No scotch. One of the crime-scene technicians had a Janis Joplin album playing on the stereo, a nice quiet background to nothing much. They’d found two ounces of marijuana in a baggie in the refrigerator. They’d tag it, and if needed, it could be used to hold Joe Mack, but with an outstanding charge of kidnapping, the dope wasn’t lighting anybody’s fire.
    A DNA specialist had already come and gone. It seemed likely that Joe had been sleeping alone, since there was only one pillow on his bed. The pillow provided a harvest of curly, auburn hair, and the sheets a couple of semen stains that should, altogether, provide excellent DNA.
    They also found two pistols, a 9mm Beretta and a Colt .45 with full clips, and several boxes of ammo, a twelve-gauge shotgun and three boxes of shells, a scoped .22 rifle, a scoped .30-06 rifle, a broken taser, and a paintball gun with a bag of balls. They took them away, but except for the taser, they were really nothing more than any Wisconsin boy might have in his closet. That included the dope.
    “Now here’s something really interesting,” one of the techs said. He was in the bedroom, across the hall from the kitchen, kneeling next to Mack’s bed. The other tech came down the hall from the front room and Lucas asked, “What is it?”
    The tech turned and sat down with a magazine in his hands. “The February 1990 Playboy with Pamela Anderson. The gatefold is worn, but intact.”
    “Whoa.” The second tech drifted into the bedroom to look over the first tech’s shoulder.
    “Think it could be a clue?” Lucas asked.
    “It’s a clue to something, but I’m so old I can’t remember what it is,” the first guy said. “Look at this: thirty-six, twenty-two, thirty-four. This woman was in exceptionally good shape.”
    “I’m not so big on blondes,” the second tech said.
    The first tech looked at him with pity and said, “Loser.”
    After a bit, Lucas said, “We’re not going to find anything here, are we?”
     
     
    HE WAS GETTING READY to leave when his cell phone rang, and he looked at the screen: Marcy.
    “Yeah?”
    “The airport police looked at their tag file, and they found out that Jill MacBride’s van came into the Blue Ramp about forty minutes after Mack ran. They went looking for it and found it up on top. Door was unlocked. MacBride was inside. Looks like she was strangled.”
    Janis was singing that “freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” and Lucas said, “I, uh ... Ah, crap.”
    “I’m going down there. We’ll get crime scene on the way. Are you still at Mack’s?”
    “Yeah. Not much here. Got the DNA going. I’ll see you over there.”
     
     
    THE SADNESS CAME ON like a wave. He’d never met the woman, but he’d seen the kid, and there was another kid still at school. Weather was talking about having another kid, looking for a daughter, and he wouldn’t mind, Lucas thought. Tough to have too many daughters.
    What about the girls, Joe? And in a way, he couldn’t believe that Mack had killed the woman—he’d seemed like a screwup, but didn’t have the hard edge of somebody who could throttle a woman in cold blood. On the other hand, the questioning might have triggered a psychotic state. If that were the case, then he could have strangled MacBride without really understanding what he was doing; from a terrible need just to remove her. That would also explain the irrationality of it. He