John Sandford - The Night Crew

The messages were all routine, most of them were from the same woman. The last one, time-stamped at six o'clock that evening, was male: 'Molly said bring some Diet Pepsi, that's all the Lees ever drink.'

'Find a Molly?' Anna asked.

'There's an address book.' Harper walked to the kitchen counter, picked up a plastic address book with a bank advertisement on the cover. He found a Molly on the first page, with a phone number. He checked, and it was the same phone number as the one on the refrigerator magnet.

'Let's go look,' Anna said.

'What're we gonna do if we find him?' Harper asked. 'We've already lost the first guy we tried to follow.'

'Screw it: We don't have any time. Let's brace him. I'll know the voice.'

Louis turned the phone number into a name and address, and the address was a small apartment three blocks from the university.

'Upscale,' Harper said.

The apartment had inner and outer doors, the inner doors locked, but a row of mailboxes showed one 'M. O'Neill' on the second floor. Anna picked up the house phone and buzzed the apartment. A woman answered, and Anna said, 'Is this Molly?'

'Yes?'

'My name is Anna Batory. I'm looking for Charles McKinley, and I was hoping he might he here.'

'Just a minute.'

McKinley came down, surprised to see her. Pushed open the inner door so they could go inside. 'How'd you find me?'

His voice was a baritone, without the gravel of the voice on the phone. But the gravel, Anna thought, could be the product of sexual excitement, or aggression.

'We've got a really serious problem,' Anna said.

The kid didn't hear her; instead, he babbled on, his hands jumping around, awkwardly, nerdlike. 'God, you can't believe the TV shows I've been on,' he said. His fair skin was going pink with excitement. 'I had a couple of agents calling me.'

'Shut up, Charles,' Anna snapped.

He stopped. 'What?'

'No more bullshit. We know you set up the whole show with Jason and the animal rights people, that the whole thing was a fake.'

McKinley seemed to pull inside himself, and the nerd positively disappeared. 'Shoot,' he said. Then he shrugged and grinned at her, and said, 'Good run while it lasted.'

Harper was off to one side, and Anna glanced at him. He shook his head, a quick one-sided horizontal move, but she read in the shake what she was thinking: Not this guy.

'You know Jason's dead?'

'What?' He was startled, and again, it seemed real enough.

'What are you studying?' Anna asked suddenly. 'Are you in theater, or something like that?'

'Yeah,' he said. 'That's how I met Jason. What happened to him? Christ, I was supposed to call him but I couldn't ever get him.'

'Because he was already dead,' Anna said. 'Murdered. The same night as the raid. We thought you might know something about it.'

'What?' He looked quickly at Harper. 'You can't. are you the police?'

'The cops'll be coming around,' Harper said. 'But the guy who did the killing is stalking Anna, here. We're trying to get a name: and your name came up.'

'My name? How'd my name come up?'

'Because whoever is stalking Anna probably picked her out that nightand the only thing she did that night was the raid, and a. suicide.'

'And I didn't talk to anyone at the suicide,' Anna said.

'Well, I'm not doing itI mean, I've been in New York.'

'New York?'

'Yeah. I was on the "Today" show. I didn't get back until this morning. That's what we're doing tonight, we're celebrating.'

'Celebrating what?'

'Well, you know.' he gestured, meaning, I'm a hero. 'They've had all these animal rights people on, and all these other weirdos, and so now they decided to get me on. I've been on like six shows. He was murdered? How was he murdered.?'

'Listen, your friend Molly. Can you buzz her, ask her to come down? How many people are up there?'

'Six. No, seven.'

'Ask them to come down.'

McKinley went to the mailbox, pushed the call button, and Molly answered.

'Uh, Molly, could you and the guys come down here? Something's come up. Yeah, we'll tell you when you get down. Right now.'

Anna was thinking furiously: 'How'd you set us up? Whose idea was it?'

McKinley shrugged: 'Jason's, I guess. I'd seen him around, and mentioned I'd gotten a job feeding the animals up there at night. And he already knew Steve Judge with the animal rights group. I mentioned feeding the animals, and like, the next day, he was back with this idea.'

'So it was you and Steve and Jason,' Anna said.

'And Sarah.'

'Sarah?'

'Yeah. You know, the Bee. She was the brains of the group; Steve was basically the jock who carried shit around for them.'

McKinley had a few more details about the raid: 'If you think somebody was stalking you, you oughta look at that guard, everybody calls him Speedy. He's a goofy sucker.'

'The guard at the medical center?'

'Yeah, the one with the crew cut. He's some kind of Nazi.'

Anna shook her head: 'Didn't even see him.'

A stairway door popped open, and a woman with deep blue hair stepped into the lobby; six more people, three women, three men, all in their early twenties, trailed behind.

'What's going on?' the blue-haired woman asked.

'Charles can tell you,' Anna said. 'We have a very serious situation: a woman's been kidnapped, and all we need to know is if Charles has been here for a while. Since eight o'clock, say.'

They all looked from Charles to Anna, then back to Charles, and then all simultaneously nodded.

'Since seven,' blue-hair said. 'Since ten after seven, I remember, I was putting the roast in.'

'Let's go,' Anna said to Harper.

Outside, Anna said, 'We're running out of time. I don't know why he hasn't called back. He'll be calling. Let's find the Bee. Maybe she can tell us.'

She was frantic: wanted to scream, she wanted to run somewhere, do something.

'Anna, this is just like when I was chasing shadows on Jacob. We're finding people, but not the guy. We've got to stop running long enough to think. And when I think about it, I think Wyatt might be right.'

'He's in my neighborhood?'

'Something like that; that's a possibility. He keeps coming to your house, fuckin' with you.'

'Fucking with my house,' Anna said. She looked at her watch: He'd had Pam for at least a couple of hours now.

'The other thing is.'

'Clark.'

'Yeah, that's the other thing,' he said.

Clark's apartment was in Westwood, six blocks from the music building. Halfway there, Anna said, urgently, 'We've got no time for this, no time.'

'We should have made time,' Harper said. They were halfway to Clark's apartment complex. 'And what else can we do? I mean, we could still call Wyatt, and have the cops do it.'

'No.'

Anna fell back in her seat, looked out the window: If the cops got close to Clark, they'd tear him apart. Because Clark was oddhe was a composer of classical music, probably the least likely job in America. And he actually made money at it. And he had attitudes that had driven even his friends crazy: arrogant, conceited, charming, angry.

Not violent. Not that she'd ever seen. When he got angry, he got sullen, a cool, withdrawing anger, not a hot, plate-throwing tantrum. He'd never tear her house up.

On the other hand, her house wasn't really torn up. Just the broken window. And the guy had to break a window, if he wanted to get in the house. The destruction wasn't wanton.

Except for the pot. What had he done with that pot?

Anna shook her head, pushed her glasses back up her nose: she was losing it. She was five minutes from a confrontation she dreaded as much as anything she could think of, and she was worried about a flowerpot.

'Jake.' She grabbed his arm. 'Jake: we gotta go back to my place. Now.'