John Sandford - Rules of Prey

"We'll fix you up. You live about a hundred yards from the St. Paul police indoor range. I shoot over there in competition. I could probably fix it to give you a few lessons."

"Let me sleep on it," she said. "But I think so."

When he was leaving, she closed the door except for a tiny crack and said as he started down the hall, "Hey, Davenport?"

He stopped. "Yes?"

"Are you ever going to ask me out again?"

"Sure. If you're willing to put up with me."

"I'm willing," she said, and eased the door closed. Lucas whistled on his way to the elevator, and she leaned against the door, listening to the sound of him and smiling to herself.

Late that night, Lucas lay in the spare bedroom and looked at the charts pinned to the wall. After a while he stood and wrote at the bottom of the killer's chart, "Hangs around courthouse."

He was delighted by the newspapers.

He knew he shouldn't save them. If a cop saw them… But then, if a cop saw them, here in his apartment, it would be too late. They would know. And how could he not save them? The inch-high letters were a joy to the soul.

The Star-Tribune had SERIAL KILLER SLAYS 3 CITIES WOMEN. The Pioneer Press was bigger and better: SERIAL KILLER STALKS TWIN CITIES WOMEN. He liked the word "stalks." It reflected a sense of a continuing process, rather than a historical one; and work that was planned, instead of random.

Purely by chance, on the night the story broke, he saw a 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 responsible thing. 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 mess with the cops' minds? A hooker, like in Dallas? No need to hurry, but it was a thought.

He was drifting along, deep in thought, when a voice called his name.

"Hey, Louie. Louie. Over here."

He turned. Bethany Jankalo, God help him. One of the associates. Tall, blonde, slightly buck-toothed. Loud. And, he'd been told, eminently available. She was on the arm of a professorial type, who stood tall, sucked a pipe, and looked at the maddog with disdain.

"We're going to the Melange opening," Jankalo brayed. She had a wide mouth and was wearing fluorescent pink lipstick. "Come on. It's a lot of laughs."

Jesus, he thought, and she's an attorney.

But he fell in with them, Jankalo running her mouth, her escort sucking his pipe, which appeared to be empty and made slurping sounds as he worked it. Together they walked down a block, to a gallery in a gray brick building. There was a small crowd on the walk outside. Jankalo led the way through, using her shoulders like a linebacker. Inside, middle-aged professionals carried plastic glasses of white wine through the gallery while staring blankly at the canvases that lined the eggshell-white walls.

"Who dropped the pizza?" Jankalo laughed as she looked at the first piece. Her escort winced. "What a bunch of shit."

Some of it was not.

The maddog did not know about art; wasn't interested in it. On the walls of his office, he had two duck prints, taken from the annual federal waterfowl stamps. He'd been told they were good investments.

But now his eyes were opened. Most of the work was, indeed, very bad. But Larson Deiree did riveting nudes posed against bizarre Situational backdrops. Their contorted bodies caught in explicitly sexual offerings, the recipients of the offers, men in overcoats and broadbrimmed hats and wing-tip shoes, their faces averted, shown as alienated strangers. Power transactions; the women as unequivocal prizes. The maddog was fascinated.