Broken Prey

Pope, thirty-four, a maniac, smelling like old banana peels and spoiled coffee grounds, standing on the street in Owatonna, passing eyes like icy raindrops, looking at a girl with a heart-shaped ass in raspberry slacks, and telling himself,
    “I gotta get me some of that. I just gotta . . .”

2
    THE MIST CAME IN WAVES, now almost a rain, now so light it was more like a fog. Across the Mississippi, the night lights of St. Paul shimmered with a brilliant, glassy intensity in the rain phases, and dimmed to ghosts in the fog.
    After two weeks of Missourilike heat, the mist was welcome, pattering down on the broad-leafed oaks and maples, gurgling down the gutters, washing out the narrow red-brick road, stirring up odors of cut grass, damp concrete, and sidewalk worms.
    A rich neighborhood, generous lawns, older houses well kept, a Mercedes here, a Land Rover there, window stickers from the universities of Minnesota and St. Thomas and even Princeton . . .
    And now the smell of car exhaust and the murmur of portable generators . . .
     
    SIX COP CARS , a couple of vans, and a truck jammed the street. Light bars turned on four of the vehicles, the piercing red-and-blue LED lights cutting down toward the river and up toward the houses perched on the high bank above it. Half of the cops from the cars were standing in the street, which had been blocked at both ends; the other half were down the riverbank, gathered in a spot of brilliant white light.
    People from the neighborhood clustered under an oak tree; they all wore raincoats, like shrouds in a Stephen King chorus, and a few had umbrellas overhead. A child asked a question in an excited, high-pitched voice, and was promptly hushed.
    Waiting for the body to come up.
     
    LUCAS DIDN’T WANT to get trapped, so he left his Porsche at the top of the street, pulled a rain shirt over his head, added a green baseball cap that said John Deere, Owner’s Edition, and headed down the sidewalk toward the cop cars.
    When he stepped into the street, a young uniformed cop, hands on her hips, maybe twenty-three or twenty-four, in a translucent plastic slicker said, “Hey! Back on the sidewalk.”
    “Sloan called me,” Lucas said.
    He was about to add “I’m with the BCA,” when she jumped in, sharp, officious, defensive about her own inexperience—part of the new-cop scripture that said you should never let a civilian get on top of you: “Get on the sidewalk. I’ll see if Detective Sloan wants to talk to you.”
    “Why don’t I just yell down there?” Lucas asked affably. Before she could answer, he bellowed, “HEY, SLOAN!”
    She started to poke a finger at his face, and then Sloan yelled, “Lucas: Down here!”
    Instead of shaking her finger at him, she twitched it across the road and turned away from him, hands still on her hips, shoulders square, dignity not quite preserved.
     
    A PORTABLE HONDA GENERATOR had been set up on the street, black power cables snaking down the riverbank where a line of Caterpillar-yellow work lights, on tripods, threw a couple of thousand watts of halogen light on the body. Nobody had covered anything yet.
    Lucas eased down the hillside, the grass slippery with churned-up mud. Twenty feet out, he saw the body behind a circle of legs, a red-and-white thing spread on the grass, arms outstretched to the sides, legs spread wide, faceup, naked as the day she was born.
    Lucas moved through the circle of cops, faces turning to glance at him, somebody said, “Hey, Chief,” and somebody else patted him on the back. Sloan stood on the slope below, leaning into the bank. Sloan was a narrow-faced, narrow-shouldered man wearing a long plastic raincoat, shoe rubbers, and a beaten-up snap-brim canvas hat that looked like it had just been taken out of the back closet. The hat kept the rain out of his eyes. He said to Lucas, “Look at this shit.”
    Lucas looked at the body and said, “Jesus Christ,” and somebody else said, “More’n you might think, brother. She was scourged .”
     
    SCOURGED. The word hung there, in the mist, in the lights. She’d been a young woman, a few pounds too heavy, dark hair. Her body, from her collarbone to her knees, was crisscrossed with cuts that had probably been made with some kind of flail, Lucas thought: a whip made out of wire, maybe. The cut lines were just lines: the rain had washed out any blood. There were dozens of the cuts, and the way they wrapped around her body, he expected her back to be in