John Sandford: Night Prey

"What?" Lucas asked. The blonde was waving her arms.

"Trouble," Sloan said. He popped the door. "That's Connell."

A bony deputy sheriff with a dark, weathered face had been talking to a city cop at the Dumpster, and when the Porsche pulled into the lot, the deputy grinned briefly, called something out to the cop who was arguing with the blond woman, and started over.

"Helstrom," said Lucas, digging for the name. "D. T. Helstrom. Remember that professor that Carlo Druze killed?"

"Yeah?"

"Helstrom found him," Lucas said. "He's a good guy."

They got out of the car as Helstrom came up to Lucas and stuck out his hand. "Davenport. Heard you were back. Deputy chief, huh? Congratulations."

"D. T. How are you?" Lucas said. "Haven't seen you since you dug up the professor."

"Yeah, well, this is sorta worse," Helstrom said, looking back at the Dumpster. He rubbed his nose.

The blond woman called past the cop, "Hey. Sloan."

Sloan muttered something under his breath, and then, louder, "Hey, Meagan."

"This lady working with you?" Helstrom asked Sloan, jerking a thumb at the blonde.

Sloan nodded, said, "More or less," and Lucas tipped his head toward his friend. "This is Sloan," he said to Helstrom. "Minneapolis homicide."

"Sloan," the woman called. "Hey, Sloan. C'mere."

"Your friend's a pain in the ass," Helstrom said to Sloan.

"You'd be a hundred percent right, except she's not my friend," Sloan said, and started toward her. "I'll be right back."

They were standing on a blacktopped boat ramp, with striped spaces for car and trailer parking, a lockbox for fees, and a Dumpster for garbage. "What you got?" Lucas asked Helstrom as they started toward the Dumpster.

"A freak… He did the killing on your side of the bridge, I think. There's no blood over here, except what's on her. She'd stopped bleeding before she went in the Dumpster, no sign of anything on the ground. And there must've been a lot of blood… Jesus, look at that."

Up on the westbound span of the bridge, a van with yellow flashing roof lights had stopped next to the rail, and a man with a television camera was shooting down at them.

"That legal?" Lucas asked.

"Damned if I know," Helstrom said.

Sloan and the woman came up. The woman was young, large, in her late twenties or early thirties. Despite her anger, her face was as pale as a dinner candle; her blond hair was cropped so short that Lucas could see the white of her scalp. "I don't like the way I'm being treated," the woman said.

"You've got no jurisdiction here. You can either shut up or take yourself back across the bridge," Helstrom snapped. "I've had about enough of you."

Lucas looked at her curiously. "You're Meagan O'Connell?"

"Connell. No O. I'm an investigator with the BCA. Who are you?"

"Lucas Davenport."

"Huh," she grunted. "I've heard about you."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Some kind of macho asshole."

Lucas half-laughed, not sure she was serious, looked at Sloan, who shrugged. She was. Connell looked at Helstrom, who had allowed himself a small grin when Connell went after Lucas. "So can I see her, or what?"

"If you're working with Minneapolis homicide…" He looked at Sloan, and Sloan nodded. "Be my guest. Just don't touch anything."

"Christ," she muttered, and stalked down to the Dumpster. The Dumpster came to her collarbone, and she had to stand on her tiptoes to look in. She stood for a moment, looking down, then walked away, down toward the river, and began vomiting.

"Be my fuckin' guest," Helstrom muttered.

"What'd she do?" Lucas asked.

"Came over like her ass was on fire and started screaming at everyone. Like we forgot to scrape the horseshit off our shoes," Helstrom said.

Sloan, concerned, started after Connell, then stopped, scratched his head, walked down to the Dumpster, and looked inside. "Whoa." He turned away, and said, "Goddamnit," and then to Lucas, "Hold your breath."

Lucas was breathing through his mouth when he looked in. The body was nude and had been in a green garbage bag tied at the top. The bag had split open on impact when it hit the bottom of the Dumpster, or someone had split it open.

The woman had been disemboweled, her intestines boiling out like an obscene corn smut. And Sloan's earlier description was right: she hadn't been stabbed, she'd been opened like a sardine can, a long slit running from her pelvic area to her sternum. He thought at first that maggots were already working on her, but then realized that the sprinkles of white on the body were grains of rice, apparently somebody's garbage.

The woman's head was in profile against the green garbage sack. The garbage sack had a red plastic tie, and it snuggled just above the woman's ear like a bow on a Christmas package. Flies crawled all over her, like tiny black MiGs… Above her breasts, two inches above the top of the slash, were two smaller cuts in what might be letters. Lucas looked at them for five seconds, then backed away, and waited until he was a half-dozen strides from the Dumpster before he started breathing through his nose again.

"The guy who dumped her must be fairly strong," Lucas said to Helstrom. "He had to either throw her in there or carry her up pretty high, without spilling guts all over the place."

Connell, white-faced, tottered back up the ramp.

"What'd you just say?"

Lucas repeated it, and Helstrom nodded. "Yeah. And from the description we got, she wasn't a complete lightweight. She must've run around 135. If that's Wannemaker."

"It is," Sloan said. Sloan had walked around to the other side of the Dumpster, and was peering into it again. From Lucas's perspective, eyes, nose, and ears over the edge of the Dumpster, he looked like Kilroy. "And I'll tell you what: I've seen a videotape of the body they found up in Carlos Avery. If the same guy didn't do this one, then they both took cuttin' lessons at the same place."

"Exactly the same?" Lucas asked.

"Identical," Connell said.

"Not quite," Sloan said, backing away from the Dumpster. "The Carlos Avery didn't have the squiggles above her ti… breasts."

"The squiggles?" Connell asked.

"Yeah. Take a look."

She looked in again. After a moment, she said, "They look like a capital S and a capital J. "

"That's what I thought," Lucas said.

"What does that mean?" Connell demanded.

"I'm not a mind reader," Lucas said, "Especially with the dead." He turned his head to Helstrom. "No way to get anything off the edge of this thing, is there? Off the Dumpster?"

"I doubt it. It's rained a couple times since Friday, people been throwing stuff in there all weekend… Why?"

"Better not take a chance." Lucas went back to the Porsche, popped the trunk, took out a small emergency raincoat, a piece of plastic packed in a bag not much bigger than his hand. He stripped the coat out, carried it back to the Dumpster, and said, "Hang on to my legs so I don't tip inside, will you, D.T.?"

"Sure…"

Lucas draped the raincoat carefully over the edge of the Dumpster and boosted himself up until he could lay his stomach over the top. His upper body hung down inside, his face not more than a foot from the dead woman's.

"She's got, uh…"

"What?"

"She's got something in her hand… Can't see it. Like maybe a cigarette."

"Don't touch."

"I'm not." He hung closer. "She's got something on her chest. I think it's tobacco… stuck on."

"Garbage got tossed on her."

Lucas dropped back onto the blacktop and started breathing again. "Some of it's covered with blood. It's like she crumbled a cigarette on herself."

"What're you thinking?" Helstrom asked.

"That the guy was smoking when he killed her," Lucas said. "That she snatched it out of his mouth. I mean, she wouldn't have been smoking, not if she was being attacked."