John Sandford - Rules of Prey

Daylight was leaking in the office windows when the meeting convened. Daniel's face look stretched, almost gaunt. He had not shaved, was not wearing a tie. Lucas had never seen him in the office without a tie. The two deputy chiefs looked stunned and fidgeted nervously in their chairs.

"… don't understand why we didn't have automatic stop on all Thunderbirds the instant something started happening," Daniel was saying.

"We should have, but nobody decided who was going to call. When it went down and the fight started and Blaney started hollering for backup and then for the ambulances, we just lost it," said the surveillance crew's supervisor. "Lucas was on the air pretty quick, six minutes-"

"Six minutes, Jesus," said Daniel, leaning back in his chair, his eyes closed. He was talking calmly, but his voice was shaky. "If one of the surveillance crews had called the instant it started going down, it would have been rebroadcast and we'd have had cars on the way before Blaney got on the air. That would have eliminated the foul-up by the dispatcher. We'd have been eight minutes or nine minutes faster. If Lucas is right and he was parked up near the entrance to the Interstate, he was downtown having a drink by the time we started looking for his car."

There was a long silence.

"What about this Werschel guy?" asked one of the deputy chiefs.

Daniel opened an eye and looked at an assistant city attorney who sat at the back of the room, a briefcase between his feet.

"We haven't figured it out yet," the attorney said. "There's going to be some kind of lawsuit, but we were clearly within our rights to go into his yard in pursuit of the killer. Technically, his dogs should have been restrained, no matter how high the fence was. And when he came out and opened fire, Sickles was clearly within his rights to defend himself and his partner. He did right."

"So we got no problem there," said one of the deputy chiefs.

"A jury might give the wife a few bucks, but I wouldn't worry about it," the attorney said.

"Our problem," Daniel said in his remote voice, "is that this killer is still running around loose, and we look like a bunch of clowns running around killing civilians and each other. To say nothing of beating each other up afterward."

There was another silence. "Let's get back to work," Daniel said finally. "Lucas? I want to talk to you."

"What else you got?" he asked when they were alone.

"Not a thing. I had… a feeling about the McGowan thing-"

"Bullshit, Lucas, you set her up and you know it and I know it, and God help me, if we could do it again I'd say go ahead. It should have worked. Motherfucker. Motherfucker." Daniel pounded the top of his desk. "We had him in the palm of our hand. We had the fucker."

"I blew it," Lucas said moodily. "That gunfight went up and I came across the fence and saw Werschel lying there and I knew he wasn't the maddog because the maddog was all dressed in black. And Sally was down and still pumping some blood and Sickles was there to help her, and the other guys, and I should have kept going. I should have gone over the back fence after the maddog and left Sally to the other guys. I thought that. I had this impulse to keep going, but Sally was pumping blood and nobody else was moving…"

"You did all right," Daniel said, stopping the litany. "Hey, a cop got blown up right in front of you. It's only human to stop."

"I fucked up," Lucas said. "And now I don't have a thing to go on."

"Nails," Daniel said.

"What?"

"I can hear the media getting out the nails. We're going to be crucified."

"It's pretty hard to give a shit anymore," Lucas said.

"Wait for a couple days. You'll start giving a shit." He hesitated. "You say Channel Eight got some film of you and Cochrane?"

"Yeah. God damn, I'm sorry about that. He's a rookie. I just lost it."

"From what I hear, it's going to be pretty hard to take back what you said. Most of the cops out there think you're right. And Sally had some years in. If Cochrane had just taken it easy, he'd have been right down that alley before the maddog knew you were coming. You'd have squeezed him between you and nobody would ever have gone into the yard with those fuckin' dogs."

"Doesn't make it better to know how close we came," Lucas said.

"Get some sleep and get back here in the afternoon," Daniel said. "This thing should start shaking out by then. We'll know what to expect from the media. And we can start figuring out what to do next."

"I can't tell you what to do," Lucas said. "I'm running on empty."

They didn't come for him.

Somewhere, in the back of his head, he couldn't believe it, that they didn't come for him.

He staggered through the connecting door from the garage into his apartment, took a step into the front room, realized that he was tracking sticky yellow clay onto the carpet, and stopped. He stood for a minute, breathing, reorganizing, then carefully stepped back onto the kitchen's tile floor and stripped. He took off everything, including his underwear, and left it in a pile on the floor.

His leg was bleeding and he sat on the edge of the bathtub and looked at it. The bites were not too deep, but they were ragged. In other circumstances, he would go to an emergency room and get stitches. He couldn't now. He washed the wounds carefully, with soap and hot water, ignoring the pain. When he had cleaned them as well as he could, he pulled the shower curtain around the tub and did the rest of his body. He washed carefully, his hands, his hair, his face. He paid special attention to his fingernails, where some of the clay might have lodged.

Halfway through the shower, he broke down and began to gag. He leaned against the wall, choking with adrenaline and fear. But he couldn't let himself go. He didn't have the luxury of it. Nor did he have the luxury of contemplating his situation. He must act.

The maddog fought to control himself. He finished washing, dried with a rough towel, and bandaged the leg wounds with gauze and adhesive tape. Then he went into the bedroom, dressed in clean clothes, and returned to the kitchen.

All of the clothing he'd worn that night was commonly available: Levi's, an ordinary turtleneck shirt, a black ski jacket purchased from an outdoor store. Jockey underwear. An unmarked synthetic watch cap. Running shoes. He emptied the pockets of the jacket. The Kotex pad, the gloves, the tape, the sock and potato, the pack of rubbers, all went into a pile on the floor. He'd lost the pry bar when he was running, but it should be clean; the cops wouldn't get anything from it. He carried the pile of clothing and shoes to the laundry room and dumped it in the washing machine.

With the clothes washing, he got a small vacuum cleaner, went out to the garage, and cleaned the car. Some of the clay was still damp and stuck tenaciously to the carpet. He went back in the house, got a bottle of dishwashing liquid and a pan, went back out, and carefully shampooed each area that showed a sign of the clay. If the cops sent the car to a crime laboratory, they might still find some particles of the stuff. He would have to think about it. And he would, for sure, vacuum it again after the damp carpet had dried.

When he was finished with the car, the maddog went back inside and checked the washing machine-the wash cycle was done-and transferred the clothing and shoes to the dryer. Then he found the box of surgeon's gloves he used in his attacks and pulled on a pair. From under the kitchen sink he got a roll of black plastic garbage bags, opened one, took the dust bag out of the vacuum, and threw it inside. Next he threw in the equipment he'd taken from his clothing, along with the box of remaining Kotex pads that he'd kept in a back closet.