Night Prey Read Online Free PDF

down toward the river, and began vomiting.
    "Be my fuckin' guest," Helstrom muttered.
    "What'd she do?" Lucas asked.
    "Came over like her ass was on fire and started screaming at everyone. Like we forgot to scrape the horseshit off our shoes," Helstrom said.
    Sloan, concerned, started after Connell, then stopped, scratched his head, walked down to the Dumpster, and looked inside. "Whoa." He turned away, and said, "Goddamnit," and then to Lucas, "Hold your breath."
    Lucas was breathing through his mouth when he looked in. The body was nude and had been in a green garbage bag tied at the top. The bag had split open on impact when it hit the bottom of the Dumpster, or someone had split it open.
    The woman had been disemboweled, her intestines boiling out like an obscene corn smut. And Sloan's earlier description was right: she hadn't been stabbed, she'd been opened like a sardine can, a long slit running from her pelvic area to her sternum. He thought at first that maggots were already working on her, but then realized that the sprinkles of white on the body were grains of rice, apparently somebody's garbage.
    The woman's head was in profile against the green garbage sack. The garbage sack had a red plastic tie, and it snuggled just above the woman's ear like a bow on a Christmas package. Flies crawled all over her, like tiny black MiGs... Above her breasts, two inches above the top of the slash, were two smaller cuts in what might be letters. Lucas looked at them for five seconds, then backed away, and waited until he was a half-dozen strides from the Dumpster before he started breathing through his nose again.
    "The guy who dumped her must be fairly strong," Lucas said to Helstrom. "He had to either throw her in there or carry her up pretty high, without spilling guts all over the place."
    Connell, white-faced, tottered back up the ramp.
    "What'd you just say?"
    Lucas repeated it, and Helstrom nodded. "Yeah. And from the description we got, she wasn't a complete lightweight. She must've run around 135. If that's Wannemaker."
    "It is," Sloan said. Sloan had walked around to the other side of the Dumpster, and was peering into it again. From Lucas's perspective, eyes, nose, and ears over the edge of the Dumpster, he looked like Kilroy. "And I'll tell you what: I've seen a videotape of the body they found up in Carlos Avery. If the same guy didn't do this one, then they both took cuttin' lessons at the same place."
    "Exactly the same?" Lucas asked.
    "Identical," Connell said.
    "Not quite," Sloan said, backing away from the Dumpster. "The Carlos Avery didn't have the squiggles above her ti... breasts."
    "The squiggles?" Connell asked.
    "Yeah. Take a look."
    She looked in again. After a moment, she said, "They look like a capital S and a capital J. "
    "That's what I thought," Lucas said.
    "What does that mean?" Connell demanded.
    "I'm not a mind reader," Lucas said, "Especially with the dead." He turned his head to Helstrom. "No way to get anything off the edge of this thing, is there? Off the Dumpster?"
    "I doubt it. It's rained a couple times since Friday, people been throwing stuff in there all weekend... Why?"
    "Better not take a chance." Lucas went back to the Porsche, popped the trunk, took out a small emergency raincoat, a piece of plastic packed in a bag not much bigger than his hand. He stripped the coat out, carried it back to the Dumpster, and said, "Hang on to my legs so I don't tip inside, will you, D.T.?"
    "Sure..."
    Lucas draped the raincoat carefully over the edge of the Dumpster and boosted himself up until he could lay his stomach over the top. His upper body hung down inside, his face not more than a foot from the dead woman's.
    "She's got, uh..."
    "What?"
    "She's got something in her hand... Can't see it. Like maybe a cigarette."
    "Don't touch."
    "I'm not." He hung closer. "She's got something on her chest. I think it's tobacco... stuck on."
    "Garbage got tossed on her."
    Lucas dropped back onto the blacktop and