Night Prey

CHAPTER
24

Weather curled up on the couch. The television was tuned to CNN, and Lucas watched it without seeing it, brooding. "Nothing at all?" she asked.

"Not a thing," he said. He didn't look at her, just pulled at his lip and stared at the tube. He was tired, his face gray. "Three days. The media's killing us."

"I wouldn't worry so much about the media, if I were you."

Now he turned his head. "That's because you don't have to worry. You guys bury your mistakes," Lucas said. He grinned when he said it, but it wasn't a pleasant smile.

"I'm serious. I don't understand…"

"The media's like a fever," Lucas explained. "Heat starts to build up. The people out in the neighborhoods get scared, and they start calling their city councilmen. The councilmen panic-that's what politicians, do, basically, is panic-and they start calling the mayor. The mayor calls the chief. The chief is a politician who is appointed by the mayor, so she panics. And the shit flows downhill."

"I don't understand all the panic. You're doing everything you can."

"You have to look at Davenport's first rule of how the world really works," Lucas said.

"I don't think I've heard that one," Weather said.

"It's simple," he said. "A politician will never, ever, get a better job when he's out of office."

"That's it?"

"That's it. That explains everything. They're desperate to hang on to their jobs. That's why they panic. They lose the election, it's back to the car wash."

After a moment of silence, Weather asked, "How's Connell?"

"Not good," Lucas said.

Connell's facial skin was stretched, taut; dark smudges hung under her eyes, her hair was perpetually disarranged, as though she'd been sticking her fingers into an electric outlet.

"Something's wrong," she said. "Maybe the guy knows we're here. Maybe Jensen was imagining it."

"Maybe," Lucas said. They waited in Jensen's living room, stacks of newspapers and magazines by their feet. A Walkman sat on a coffee table. A television was set up in the second bedroom, but they couldn't listen to the stereo for fear that it would be heard in the hallway. "It sure felt good, though."

"I know… but you know what maybe it could be?" Connell had a foot-high stack of paper next to her hand, profiles and interviews with apartment employees, residents of Jensen's floor, and everyone else in the building with a criminal record. She had been pawing through it compulsively. "It could be, like, a relative of somebody who works here. And whoever works here goes home and lets it slip that we're in here."

Lucas said, "The keys are a big question. There are any number of ways that a cat burglar could get one key, but two keys-that's a problem."

"Gotta be an employee."

"Could be a valet service at a restaurant," he said. "I've known valets who worked with cat burglars. You see the car come in, you get the plate number, and from that, you can get an address and you've got the key."

"She said she hadn't used a valet since she got the new key," Connell said.

"Maybe she forgot. Maybe it's something so routine that she doesn't remember it."

"I bet it's somebody at her office-somebody with access to her purse. You know, like one of the messenger kids, somebody who can go in and out of her office without being noticed. Grab the key, copy it…"

"But that's another problem," Lucas said. "You've got to have some knowledge to copy it, and a source of blanks."

"So it's a guy working with a cat burglar. The burglar supplies the knowledge, the kid supplies the access."

"That's one way that it works," Lucas admitted. "But nobody in her office seems like a good bet."

"A boyfriend of somebody in the office; a secretary picks up the key, lays it off…"

Lucas stood up, yawned, wandered around the apartment, stopped to look at a framed black-and-white photograph. It wasn't much, a flower in a roundish pot, a stairway in the background. Lucas didn't know much about art, but this felt like it. A tiny penciled signature said Andre something, something with a K. He yawned again and rubbed the back of his neck and looked at Connell going through the paper.

"How'd you feel this morning?"

She looked up. "Hollow. Empty."

"I don't understand how it works, the whole chemotherapy thing," Lucas said.

She put down the paper. "Basically, the kind of chemo I get is poisonous. It knocks down the cancer, but it also knocks down my body," she said. Her voice was neutral, informed, like a medical commentator on public television. "They can only use it so long before the chemotherapy starts doing too much damage. Then they take me off it, and my body starts recovering from the chemo, but so does the cancer. The cancer gains a little every time. I've been on it for two years. I'm down to seven weeks between treatments. I've been five. I'm feeling it again."

"Lots of pain?"

She shook her head. "Not yet. I can't really describe it. It's a hollow feeling, and a weakness, and then a sickness, like the worst flu in the world. I understand, toward the end, it'll get painful, when it gets into my bone marrow… I expect to opt for other measures before then."

"Jesus," he said. Then: "What are the chances that the chemo will knock it down completely?"

"It happens," she said with a brief, ghostly smile. "But not for me."

"I don't think I could handle it," Lucas said.

The balcony door was closed, and Lucas moved over toward it, staying six feet back from the glass, and looked out at the park. Nice day. The rain had quit, and the light-blue sky was dappled with fair-weather clouds, cloud shadows skipping across the lake. A woman dying.

"But the other problem," Connell said, almost to herself, "besides the key, I mean, is why he hasn't come up here. Four days. Nothing."

Lucas was still thinking about cancer, had to wrench himself back. "You're talking to yourself," Lucas said.

"That's because I'm going crazy."

"You want a pizza?" Lucas asked.

"I don't eat pizza. It clogs up your arteries and makes you fat."

"What kind don't you eat?"

"Pepperoni and mushroom," Connell said.

"I'll get one delivered to the manager. I can run down and get it when it comes in," he said, yawning again. "This is driving me nuts."

"Why doesn't he come?" Connell asked rhetorically. "Because he knows we're here."

"Maybe we just haven't waited long enough," Lucas said.

Connell continued: "How does he know we're here? One: he sees us. Two: he hears about us. Okay, if he sees us, how does he know we're cops? He doesn't-unless he's a cop, and he recognizes people coming and going. If he hears about us, how does he hear about us? We've been over that."

"Pepperoni and mushroom?"

"No fuckin' anchovies."

"No way." Lucas picked up the phone, frowned, hung it up, and walked back to the glass door. "Did somebody check the roof on the other side of the street?"

Connell looked up. "Yeah, but Jensen was right. It's below the level of her window. She doesn't even bother to pull the drapes."

"It's not below the level of the air-conditioner housing," Lucas said. "C'mere. Look at this."

Connell stood up and looked. "There's no way to get up on it."

"He's a cat burglar," Lucas said. "And if he got up on it, he'd be looking right into the apartment. Who went over the roof?"

"Skoorag-but he just strolled around the roof. I saw him do it. Said there wasn't anything up there."

"We ought to take a look," Lucas said.

Connell looked at her watch. "Greave and O'Brien'll be here in an hour. We could go over then."

O'Brien carried a brown paper sack with a magazine inside, and tried to hide it from Connell. Greave said, "I've been thinking: how about if we picked up all three of them, the brothers and Cherry, separate them, tell them we've got a break, and tell them the first one who talks gets immunity."

Lucas grinned but shook his head. "You're thinking right, but you've got to have something. If you don't, they'll either tell you to go fuck yourself, or, which is worse, the guy who actually did the killing is the one who talks. He walks, and Roux hangs you out the window by your nuts. So, you gotta get something."

"I've gotten something," Greave said.

"What?"

"I've gotten desperate."

"O'Brien had a Penthouse," Connell said.

"It's a very boring job," Lucas said mildly.

"Think about this," Connell said. "What if women brought porno magazines to work, pictures of men with huge penises? And the women sat there and looked at the pictures, then looked at you, then looked at the picture. Wouldn't you find that just a little demeaning?"

"Not me, personally," Lucas said, face straight. "I'd just see it as another career opportunity."

"Goddamn you, Davenport, you always weasel away."

"Not always," Lucas said. "But I do have a well-developed sense of when to weasel." Then, as they crossed the street, "This is where the woman was killed and the guy fucked up."

They climbed the steps and buzzed the manager. A moment later, a door opened in the lobby and a middle-aged woman looked out. Her hair was not quite blue. Lucas held up his badge, and she let him in.

"I'll get somebody to let you up on the roof," the woman said when Lucas explained what they wanted. "That was awful, that poor guy stabbed."

"Were you here when those two people were attacked outside?"

"No, nobody was here. Except tenants, I mean," she said.

"I understand the guy was between the inner and outer doors when he was attacked."

The woman nodded. "One more second and he would have been inside. His key was in the lock."

"Sonofabitch," Lucas said. To Connell: "If somebody wanted to get a key and cover what they were doing… The whole attack didn't make sense, so they said gang kids did it. Trouble is, the gang unit hasn't heard a thing from the gangs. And they should have heard."

The janitor's name was Clark, and he opened the door to the roof and blocked it with an empty Liquid Plumber bottle. Lucas walked across the gravel-and-tar-paper roof. Greave and O'Brien were standing in Jensen's apartment, visible from the shoulders up.

"Can't see much from here," Lucas said. He turned to the air-conditioner housing.

"It looks high enough," Connell said. They walked around it: it was a gray cube, with three featureless metal faces. A locked steel service hatch, and a warranty sticker with a service number, were the only items on the fourth side. There was no access to the top of the cube.

"I can get a stepladder," Clark offered.

"Why don't you just give me a boost," Lucas said. He slipped out of his shoes and jacket, and Clark webbed his fingers together. Lucas put his foot in the other man's hands and stepped up. When his shoulders were over the edge of the housing, he pushed himself up with his hands.

The first thing he saw were the cigarette butts, forty or fifty of them, water-stained, filterless. "Oh, Christ." One butt was fresh, and he duckwalked over to it, peered at it.

"What?" Connell called.

"About a million cigarette butts."

"Are you serious? What kind?"

Lucas duckwalked back to the edge, peered down, and said, "Unfiltered Camels, each and every one."

Connell looked across the street. "Can you see in the apartment?"

"I can see O'Brien's shoes," Lucas said.

"The sonofabitch knew," Connell cried. "He was up here, he looked in, he saw us. We were this fuckin' close."

The crime-scene tech lifted the single fresh Camel with a pair of tweezers, put it in a bag, and passed it down. "We can try," he said to Lucas, "but I wouldn't count on much. Sometimes you get a little skin stuck to the butts, sometimes enough to do a DNA or at least get a blood type, but these have been out here a while." He shrugged. "We'll try, but I wouldn't hold my breath."

"What're the chances of DNA?" Connell demanded.

He shrugged. "Like I said, we'll try."

Connell looked at Lucas. "We've had cold matches on DNA."

"Yeah-two," Lucas said.

"We gotta make a run at it," she said.

"Sure." He looked across the street. Sloan waved. "We'll put a night-vision scope over there, in case he comes back. Goddamnit. I hope we haven't scared him completely."

"If we haven't, he's nuts," Connell said.

"We know he's nuts," Lucas answered. "But I'm afraid that if he has seen us, we're frustrating the hell out of him. I hope he doesn't go for another. I hope he comes in first…"