John Sandford - Rules of Prey

"Something's changed," Elle said to Lucas. They were standing near the exit, away from the others. Elle spoke in a low voice.

Lucas nodded, his voice dropping to match hers. "We think we know who he is. Maybe it was your prayers: a gift from God. An accident. Fate. Whatever."

"Why haven't you arrested him?"

Lucas shrugged. "We know who he is, but we can't prove it. Not quite. We're waiting for him to make a move."

"Is he a man of intelligence?"

"I really don't know." He glanced around the room, dropped his voice another notch. "A lawyer."

"Be careful," Elle said. "This is galloping to a conclusion. He's been playing a game, and if he's a real player, I'm sure he feels it too. He may go for a coup de maître. "

"I don't see that one's available to him. We'll just grind him down."

"Perhaps," she said, touching his coat sleeve. "But remember, his idea of a win may not be a matter of avoiding capture. He's a lawyer: perhaps he sees himself winning in court. Walking off the board with impunity after an acquittal. This is a very tricky position all the way around."

Lucas left St. Anne's at eight o'clock, drove restlessly home, punched up his word processor, sat in a pool of light, and tried to put the finishing touches on the Everwhen scenario. The opening prose must be lush, must hint of bare-breasted maidens with great asses, sword fights in dark tunnels, long trips, and hale-and-hearty good friends-everything a fifteen-year-old suburban computer freak doesn't have and yearns for. And it had to do all that while scrupulously avoiding pornography or anything else that would offend the kid's mother.

Lucas didn't have it in him. He sighed and shut down the computer, tossed the word-processing disk into his software file, and walked down to the library and sat in the dark to think.

The missing two hours worried him. It could have been an accident. And if the maddog had slipped away deliberately, why had he done it? Where had he gone? How and when did he spot the watchers? He hadn't gone out to kill-he wouldn't have his equipment, unless he carried it around in his briefcase, and he wasn't that stupid.

The trip to the antiques shop on the previous day was also worrisome. True, the maddog had stopped first at the computer store and picked up a case of paper. But Lucas remembered a half-case of paper sitting under the printer. He really didn't need any more. Not badly enough to make a special trip for it. Then he'd gone into the antiques shop, and one of the watchers, who had been passing on the opposite side of the street, saw the shop owner take the fishing lure out of the window. That had been confirmed after the maddog left, when Sloan had been sent in to pump the woman.

An antique fishing lure. Why? The maddog's apartment was virtually bare of ornament, so Lucas couldn't believe he'd bought it for himself.

A gift? But for whom? As far as they could tell, he had no friends. He made no phone calls, except on business, and got none at home. His mail consisted of bills and advertisements.

What was the lure for?

Sitting in the dark, his eyes closed, he turned the problem in his mind, manipulated it like a Rubik's Cube, and always came up with mismatched sides.

No point in sitting here, he thought. He looked at his watch. Nine o'clock. He got up, put on a jacket, and went out to the car. The nights were getting very cold now, and the wind on his face triggered a memory of skiing. Time to get his downhill skis tuned and the cross-country skis scraped and hot-waxed. He was always tired of winter by the time it ended, but he kind of liked the beginning.

The maddog's apartment was five miles from Lucas' house. Lucas stopped at a newsstand to buy copies of Powder and Skiing.

"Nothing," the surveillance cop said when he came up the stairs. "He's watching television."

Lucas peered out the window at the maddog's apartment. He could see nothing but the blue glow of a television through the living-room curtains. "Move, you motherfucker," he said.

The maddog forced himself to eat dinner, to clean up. Everything as usual. At seven o'clock he turned on the television. All drapes pulled. He glanced around. Now or never.

The maddog had never had a use for many tools, but this would not be a sophisticated job. He got a long-handled screwdriver, a clawhammer, a pair of pliers, and an electric lantern from the workroom and carried them upstairs. In his bedroom he put on two pairs of athletic socks to muffle his footsteps. When he was ready, he pulled down the attic stairs.

The attic was little better than a crawl space under the eaves of the apartment house, partitioned among the four apartments with quarter-inch plywood. Since the apartment's insulation was laid in the attic floor and the attic itself was unheated, it was cold, and suitable only for the storage of items that wouldn't be damaged by Minnesota 's winter cold. The maddog had been in it only twice before: once when he rented the apartment, and again on the day when he conceived the stroke, to examine the plywood partitions.

Padding silently across the attic floor, the maddog crossed to the partition for the apartment that was beside his, facing the street. The plywood paneling between his part of the attic and the opposite side had been nailed in place from his side. The work was sloppy and he was able to slip the end of the screwdriver under the edge of the panel and carefully pry it up. It took twenty minutes to loosen the panel enough that he could draw the nails out with the clawhammer and the pliers. Again, the work had been sloppy: no more than a dozen nails held the plywood panel in place.

When the panel was loose, he pulled it back enough that he could slip into the opposite side of the attic. The other side was almost as empty as his, with only a few jigsaw puzzles stacked near the folded stairs. Silence was now critical, and he took his time with the next job. He had plenty of time, he thought. He wouldn't move until the police spies thought he was in bed. Working quietly and doggedly in the light of the electric lantern, he loosened the plywood panels between his neighbor's attic and the attic of the woman who lived in the apartment diagonally opposite his.

That was his goal. The owner was a surgical nurse, recently divorced, who, ever since moving into the apartment, had worked the overnight shift in the trauma-care unit of St. Paul Ramsey Medical Center. He had called the hospital from his office, asked for her, and been told that she would be on at eleven o'clock.

It took a cold half-hour to get into her side of the attic. When the access was clear, he quietly propped the panels back in place so a casual inspection wouldn't reveal the missing nails. He stole back down the stairs to his bedroom, leaving the flashlight, tools, and nails at the top of the steps. When he got back, he would push the nails as best he could into their holes. Tomorrow morning, when the people opposite had gone to work, and before the maddog's last victim was found, he would go back and hammer them in place.

Downstairs again, he considered a quick trip to a neighborhood convenience store. A walking trip. It might be an undue provocation, but he thought not. He turned off the television, put on his jacket, checked his wallet, and went out the front door. He tried to goof along, two blocks, obviously not in a hurry. He crossed the blacktopped parking area of the convenience store, went inside, bought some bakery goods, some instant hot cereal, a jug of milk, and a copy of Penthouse. Back outside, he bit into a bismarck, savored the cherry filling that squirted into his mouth, and sauntered back home.

That should do it. That should prepare them psychologically for the idea that he would be in for the rest of the evening. He crossed his porch, pushed inside, locked the door behind him, put the cereal and milk away, and turned on the football game.