John Sandford - Rules of Prey

"Sure. I'm in the basement of the old City Hall. You just leave your car-"

"I know where you are," she said. "I'll see you. And I'll call you this afternoon, about the shoes."

She walked off down the sidewalk and Lucas got in the car and started it. He watched her through the windshield for a moment and she looked back and smiled.

"Hmph," he grunted. He rolled down the street until he was beside her, pulled over, and rolled down the passenger-side window.

"Forget something?" she asked, leaning over the window.

"What kind of music do you listen to?"

"What?" She seemed confused.

"Do you like rock?"

"Sure."

"Want to go see Aerosmith tomorrow night? With me? Get you out of your apartment?"

"Oh. Well. Okay. What time?" She wasn't smiling but she was definitely interested.

"Pick you up at six. We'll get something to eat."

"Sure," she said. "See you." She waved and stepped back from the car. Lucas made an illegal U-turn and headed back toward the Interstate. As he pulled away, he glanced in his rearview mirror and saw her looking after him. It was silly, but he thought he felt their eyes touch.

Sister Mary Joseph had grown up as Elle Kruger on the near north side of Minneapolis, a block from the house where Lucas was born. They started grade school the same autumn, their mothers walking them down the cracked sidewalks together, past the tall green hedges and through the red brick arches of St. Agnes Elementary. Elle still ran through Lucas' dreams. She was a lovely slender blonde girl, the most popular kid in the class with both the pupils and the teachers, the fastest runner on the playground. At the blackboard, she regularly thrashed the class in multiplication races. Lucas usually finished second. In the spelldowns, it was Lucas who won, Elle who finished second.

Lucas left St. Agnes halfway through fifth grade, after the death of his father. He and his mother moved down to the south side and Lucas started at public school. Later, at a hockey tournament, he was warming up, swinging down the ice, and he stopped on the opponents' side of the rink to adjust his skates. She was there in the crowd, with a group of girls from Holy Spirit High. She had not seen him, or not recognized him in his hockey gear. He stood transfixed, appalled.

It had been six years. Other girls, gawky as she had been beautiful, had blossomed. Elle had not. Her face was pitted and scarred by acne. Her cheeks, her forehead, her chin were crossed with fiery red lines of infection. The small part of her face free of scarring was as coarse as sandpaper from attempts at treatment.

Lucas skated away, around the rink toward the home bench, Elle's face bobbing in his mind. A few minutes later, the players for the two teams were introduced and he skated out to center ice, his name booming from the public-address system, unable not to look, and found her grave eyes following him.

After the match he was clumping toward the tunnel to the locker rooms when he saw her standing on the other side of the barricade. When their eyes met her hand came up and fluttered at him and he stopped and reached across the barrier and took her hand and said, "Can you wait for me? Twenty minutes, outside?"

"Yes."

He drove her home after a tour of southern and western Minneapolis. They talked as they had when they were children, laughing in the dark car. At her house, she hopped out and ran up to the porch. The light came on, and her father stepped out.

"Dad, do you remember Lucas Davenport, he used to live down the street?"

"Sure, how are you, son?" her father said. There was a sad edge to his voice. He asked Lucas in and he sat for another half-hour, talking to Elle's parents, before he left.

As he walked out to the curb, she called him from her bedroom window on the second floor of the house, her head backlit against the flowered wallpaper.

"Lucas?"

"Yeah?"

"Please don't come back," she said, and shut the window.

He heard from her next a year and a half later, a week before graduation. She called to tell him that she was entering a convent.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. I have a vocation."

Years later, and two days after Lucas had killed his first man as a police officer, she called him. She was a shrink of sorts, she said. Could she help? No, not really, but he would like to see her. He took her to the ice-cream shop. Professor of psychology, she said. Fascinating. Watching minds work.

Did she have a vocation? Lucas wondered. Or was it her face, the cross that she bore? He couldn't ask, but when they left the shop she took his arm and smiled and said, "I have a vocation, Lucas."

A year later, he sold his first game and it was a hit. The Star-Tribune did a feature story about it and she called him again. She was a game player, she said. There was a games group at the college that regularly got together…

After that, he saw her virtually every week. Elle and another nun, a grocer and a bookie, both from St. Paul, a defense attorney from Minneapolis, and a student or two from St. Anne's or the University of Minnesota made up a regular war-gaming group. They met in the gym, played in an old unused room off what had been a girls' locker room. They furnished the room with a half-dozen chairs, a Ping-Pong table for the gaming maps, a used overhead light donated by a pool parlor, and a bad stereo that Lucas got on the street.

They met on Thursdays. They were currently working through Lucas' grandest creation, a replay of the Battle of Gettysburg that he would never be able to sell commercially. It was simply too complex. He'd had to program a portable computer to figure results.

Elle was General Lee.

Lucas parked the Porsche just down the hill from Albertus Magnus Hall and walked through the falling leaves up the hill toward the entrance. As he reached the bottom of the steps, she came out. The face was the same; so were the eyes, grave and gray, but always with a spark of humor.

"He can't stop," she told him as they strolled down the sidewalk. "The maddog falls into a category that cop shrinks call the sadistic killer. He's doing it for the pleasure of it. He's not hearing commands from God, he's not being ordered by voices. He's driven, all right, but he's not insane in the sense that he's out of control. He is very much in control, in the conventional sense of the word. He is aware of what he's doing and what the penalties are. He makes plans and provides for contingencies. He may be quite intelligent."

"How does he pick his victims?"

She shrugged. "Could be a completely adventitious encounter. Maybe he uses the phone book. But most likely he sees them personally, and whether he realizes it or not, he's probably picking a type. There may well have been an encounter of some kind when he was young, with his mother, with a female friend of his mother's… somebody whose sexual identity has become fixed in his mind."

"These women are small and dark-dark hair, dark eyes. One is a Mexican-American…"

"Exactly. So when he encounters one of these types, she somehow becomes fixed in his mind. Why it's that particular one, when there are so many possibilities, I just don't know. In any case, after he's chosen her, he can't escape her. His fantasies are built around her. He becomes obsessive. Eventually… he goes after her. Acts out the fantasies."

At the ice-cream parlor, she ordered her usual, a hot-fudge with a maraschino cherry. A few of the customers glanced curiously at them, the nun in her black habit, the tall, well-dressed male who was so obviously her friend. They ignored the passing attention.

"How long would it take him to fix on a particular woman? Would it be an instantaneous thing?"

"Could be. More likely, though, it would be some kind of encounter. An exposure, a conversation. He might make some kind of assessment of her vulnerability. Remember, this may be a very intelligent man. Eventually, though, it goes beyond his control. She becomes fixed in his mind, and he can no more escape her image than she can escape his attack."