The Night Crew

The futon was on a frame: she picked up the head end of it, looked underneath. A shoebox. She pulled the shoebox out, opened the lid, and found a half-dozen videotapes, all commercial, all pornographic.

'What?' Harper asked, sticking his head in the door.

'Porno,' A

'Yeah, well, probably a hundred thousand guys have bondage tapes. And not all the tapes are bondage.'

'All right. But something to keep in mind.' She put the box back.

Harper said, 'I hate going through a guy's stuff like this. I'd hate to have somebody do it to me.'

'You have a box of porno tapes?'

'No. But I've got letters and pictures of old friends. Nothing that I wouldn't show anyone, but I wouldn't want somebody just trashing through it.'

'Interesting, though,' A

'Probably why you're good at your job,' Harper said. He headed back to the kitchen and a moment later, said, 'He's got an answering machine.'

A

The messages were all routine, most of them were from the same woman. The last one, time-stamped at six o'clock that evening, was male: 'Molly said bring some Diet Pepsi, that's all the Lees ever drink.'

'Find a Molly?' A

'There's an address book.' Harper walked to the kitchen counter, picked up a plastic address book with a bank advertisement on the cover. He found a Molly on the first page, with a phone number. He checked, and it was the same phone number as the one on the refrigerator magnet.

'Let's go look,' A

'What're we go

'Screw it: We don't have any time. Let's brace him. I'll know the voice.'

Louis turned the phone number into a name and address, and the address was a small apartment three blocks from the university.

'Upscale,' Harper said.

The apartment had i

'Yes?'

'My name is A

'Just a minute.'

McKinley came down, surprised to see her. Pushed open the i

His voice was a baritone, without the gravel of the voice on the phone. But the gravel, A

'We've got a really serious problem,' A

The kid didn't hear her; instead, he babbled on, his hands jumping around, awkwardly, nerdlike. 'God, you can't believe the TV shows I've been on,' he said. His fair skin was going pink with excitement. 'I had a couple of agents calling me.'

'Shut up, Charles,' A

He stopped. 'What?'

'No more bullshit. We know you set up the whole show with Jason and the animal rights people, that the whole thing was a fake.'

McKinley seemed to pull inside himself, and the nerd positively disappeared. 'Shoot,' he said. Then he shrugged and gri

Harper was off to one side, and A

'You know Jason's dead?'

'What?' He was startled, and again, it seemed real enough.

'What are you studying?' A

'Yeah,' he said. 'That's how I met Jason. What happened to him? Christ, I was supposed to call him but I couldn't ever get him.'

'Because he was already dead,' A

'What?' He looked quickly at Harper. 'You can't. are you the police?'

'The cops'll be coming around,' Harper said. 'But the guy who did the killing is stalking A

'My name? How'd my name come up?'

'Because whoever is stalking A

'And I didn't talk to anyone at the suicide,' A

'Well, I'm not doing itI mean, I've been in New York.'

'New York?'

'Yeah. I was on the "Today" show. I didn't get back until this morning. That's what we're doing tonight, we're celebrating.'

'Celebrating what?'

'Well, you know.' he gestured, meaning, I'm a hero. 'They've had all these animal rights people on, and all these other weirdos, and so now they decided to get me on. I've been on like six shows. He was murdered? How was he murdered.?'

'Listen, your friend Molly. Can you buzz her, ask her to come down? How many people are up there?'

'Six. No, seven.'

'Ask them to come down.'

McKinley went to the mailbox, pushed the call button, and Molly answered.

'Uh, Molly, could you and the guys come down here? Something's come up. Yeah, we'll tell you when you get down. Right now.'

A

McKinley shrugged: 'Jason's, I guess. I'd seen him around, and mentioned I'd gotten a job feeding the animals up there at night. And he already knew Steve Judge with the animal rights group. I mentioned feeding the animals, and like, the next day, he was back with this idea.'

'So it was you and Steve and Jason,' A

'And Sarah.'

'Sarah?'

'Yeah. You know, the Bee. She was the brains of the group; Steve was basically the jock who carried shit around for them.'

McKinley had a few more details about the raid: 'If you think somebody was stalking you, you oughta look at that guard, everybody calls him Speedy. He's a goofy sucker.'

'The guard at the medical center?'

'Yeah, the one with the crew cut. He's some kind of Nazi.'

A

A stairway door popped open, and a woman with deep blue hair stepped into the lobby; six more people, three women, three men, all in their early twenties, trailed behind.

'What's going on?' the blue-haired woman asked.

'Charles can tell you,' A

They all looked from Charles to A

'Since seven,' blue-hair said. 'Since ten after seven, I remember, I was putting the roast in.'

'Let's go,' A

Outside, A

She was frantic: wanted to scream, she wanted to run somewhere, do something.

'A

'He's in my neighborhood?'

'Something like that; that's a possibility. He keeps coming to your house, fuckin' with you.'

'Fucking with my house,' A

'The other thing is.'

'Clark.'

'Yeah, that's the other thing,' he said.