Night Prey

"What about…?"

"There was a guy who was a cop," Heinz said.

"Got him," Lucas said.

"Then there were two guys there together, and I thought they might be gay. They stood too close to each other."

"Know their names?"

"No idea," she said. "But they were very well-dressed. I think they were in architecture or landscaping or something like that, because they were talking to the author about sustainable land use."

"And the guy with the beard," Co

"Yeah. He came in during the talk. And he must've left right away, because I didn't see him later. I sorta looked. Jesus-I could of been dead. I mean, if I'd found him."

"Was he tall, short, fat, ski

"Big guy. Not tall, but thick. Big shoulders. Beard. I don't like beards, but I liked the shoulders." She winked at Co

Lucas looked at Co

"Would you know him if we showed you a picture of him?" Lucas asked.

She cocked her head and looked to one side, as though she were ru

"Dark beard? Light?"

"Mmm… dark. Kind of medium, really. Pretty average hair, I think… brown."

"All right," Lucas said. "Let's nail this down. And let's get you with an artist. Do you have time to come to Mi

"Sure. Right now? Let me tell my boss."

As the woman went to talk to her boss about leaving, Co

"Wouldn't count on it," Lucas said. But he was counting on it. He felt it, just a sniff of the killer, just a whiff of the track. "We got to put her through the sex files."

The woman came back, animated. "Let's go. I'll follow you over."

Greave wanted to stop at the apartment complex so Lucas could look at the locked-room mystery. "C'mon, man, it's twenty fuckin' minutes. We'll be back before she's done with the artist," he said. A pleading note entered his voice. "C'mon, man, this is killing me."

Lucas glanced at him, hands clutched, the too-hip suit. He sighed and said, "All right. Twenty minutes."

They took I-94 back to Mi

"Eisenhower Docks?" Lucas said as they got out.

"If you stand on the roof you can see the river," Greave said. "And they figured 'Eisenhower' makes old people feel good."

The man pushing the lawn mower made a turn at the end of the lawn and started back; Lucas recognized Ray Cherry, forty pounds heavier than he'd been when he'd fought in Golden Gloves tournaments in the sixties. Most of the weight had gone to his gut, which hung over beltless Oshkosh jeans. His face had gone from square to blocky, and a half-dozen folds of fat rolled down the back of his neck to his shoulders. His T-shirt was soaked with sweat. He saw Davenport and Greave, pushed the lawn mower up to their feet, and killed the engine.

"What're you doing, Davenport?"

"Lookin' around, Ray," Lucas said, smiling. "How've you been? You got fat."

"Y'ain't a cop no more, so get the fuck off my property."

"I'm back on the force, Ray," Lucas said, still smiling. Seeing Ray made him happy. "You oughta read the papers. Deputy chief in charge of finding out how you killed this old lady."

A look crossed Cherry's face, a quick shadow, and Lucas recognized it, had seen it six or seven hundred or a thousand times: Cherry had done it. Cherry wiped the expression away, tried a look of confusion, took a soiled rag out of his pocket, and blew his nose. "Bullshit," he said finally.

"Go

"Fuck you, Davenport," Cherry said. He fired up the mower.

"Come and talk to me, Ray," Lucas said over the engine noise. "The Joyces'll sell you out the minute they think it'll get them a break. You know that. Come and talk, and maybe we can do a deal."

"Fuck you," Cherry said, and he mowed on down the yard.

"Lovely fellow," Greave said in a fake English accent.

"He did it," Lucas said. He turned to Greave and Greave took a step back: Lucas's face was like a block of stone.

"Huh?"

"He killed her. Let's see her apartment."

Lucas started for the apartment door, and Greave trotted after him. "Hey, wait a minute, wait a minute…" There were a thousand books in the apartment, along with a rolled-up Oriental carpet tied with brown twine, and fifteen cardboard cartons from U-Haul, still flat. A harried middle-aged woman sat on a piano bench, a handkerchief around her head; her face was wind- and sunburned, like a gardener's, and was touched with grief. Charmagne Carter's daughter, Emily.

"… Soon as they said we could take it out. If we don't, we have to keep paying rent," she told Greave. She looked around. "I don't know what to do with the books. I'd like to keep them, but there're so many."

Lucas had been looking at the books: American literature, poetry, essays, history. Works on feminism, arranged in a way that suggested they were a conscious collection rather than a reading selection. "I could take some of them off your hands," he said. "I mean, if you'd like to name a price. I'd take the poetry."

"Well, what do you think?" Carter asked, as Greave watched him curiously.

"There are…" He counted quickly. "… thirty-seven volumes, mostly paper. I don't think any of them are particularly rare. How about a hundred bucks?"

"Let me look through them. I'll give you a call."

"Sure." He turned away from the books, more fully toward her. "Was your mother depressed or anything?"

"If you're asking if she committed suicide, she didn't. She wouldn't give the Joyces the pleasure, for one thing. But basically, she liked her life," Carter said. She became more animated as she remembered. "We had di

"Yeah. That's a question," Lucas said.

"The only thing wrong with Mom was her thyroid. She had a little thyroid problem; it was overactive and she had trouble keeping her weight up," Carter said. "And her insomnia. That might have been part of the thyroid problem."

"She was actually ill, then?" Lucas glanced sideways at Greave.

"No. No, she really wasn't. Not even bad enough to take pills. She was just way too thin. She weighed ninety-nine pounds and she was five-six. That's below her ideal weight, but it's not emaciated or anything."

"Okay."

"Now that kid isn't go