Rules of Prey by John Sandford Read Free Book Online

said it was an accident? Thought somebody was breaking into the house?”
    “That’s him. He fell on a manslaughter, though it was probably a straight-out murder. He got six years, he’ll serve four. But there’s still an appeal floating around. Because of the appeal, the evidence was supposedly up in the property room. We went up and looked. The gun is gone. Or it was gone, until the killer dropped it.”
    “Shit.” Things had disappeared from the property room before. Five grams of cocaine became four. Twenty bondage magazines became fifteen. As far as Lucas knew, this was the first time a gun had gone missing.
    “You had access to the evidence room a couple of times. During the Ryerson case and during that hassle over the Chicago burglary gang. We cross-referenced everything we had from the killings and the witness. Times, places, the artist’s description. We could eliminate as suspects all the women who had access to the room. We could eliminate cops who were confirmed on-duty when the killings took place. People have been killed or attacked in all three shifts . . . Anyway, we got it down to your name, basically. You’re the right size. Nobody ever knows where you’re at. You’re a games freak and this guy is apparently playing some kind of game. Andthe gun came out of the property room. I never really thought you were the one, but . . . you see how it went down.”
    “Yeah, I see,” Lucas said sourly. “Thanks a lot.”
    “Hey, what would you have done?” Daniel asked defensively.
    “Okay.”
    “Now we know you’re clean,” the chief said. He leaned back in his chair, stretched, and crossed his legs. “ ’Cause our man did another one. Four to six hours ago. We figure it was just about the time you were sitting out on the lawn eating that apple.”
    Lucas nodded. “Where’s this one?”
    “Down by Lake Nokomis. Just west of the lake, up in those hills.”
    “Can you contain it?”
    “No.” Daniel shook his head. “This is three. If we tried to contain it, we’d be leaking like a rusty faucet by tomorrow afternoon. That’d cause more trouble than if we go out front with it. I’ve already called a press conference for nine o’clock tonight. That’ll give the TV stations time to make the ten-o’clock news. I want you to be here. I’ll outline the killings, appeal for help, all that. And I’m assigning you to the case, full-time.”
    “I don’t want it,” said Lucas. “Homicide bores me. You walk around all day talking to civilians who don’t know anything. There are other guys do it better. And I got a lot of stuff going on this crack business. I got a half-dozen guys picked out—”
    “Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s absolutely fuckin’ wonderful, but the media is going to hang us all by our balls if we don’t get this freak,” Daniel said, cutting Lucas off in mid-sentence. “You remember back a few years when those two women got killed in the parking ramps? Like two, three weeks apart, different guys? Pure coincidence? You remember how the media went out of their minds? You remember how the TV stations were having seminars on self-defense? How they had reports every night on progress? You remember all that?”
    “Yeah.” It had been a nightmare.
    “This is going to be worse. Those guys in the parking ramps, we grabbed one the same day, we got the other one a couple days after he did it. We still got hysteria. This guy, he’s killed three, attacked another one, raped them and stabbed them, and he’s still on the loose.”
    Lucas nodded and rubbed his jaw with his fingertips. “You’re right. They’ll go berserk,” he admitted.
    “Guaranteed. This doesn’t happen in the Twin Cities. So fuck the crack. I want you on this thing. You’ll work by yourself, homicide will work parallel. The media’ll like that. They think you’re some kind of fuckin’ genius.”
    “What does homicide think about me working on it?” Lucas asked.
    “A couple of guys will be