Broken Prey

filled a pink golf shirt as though he’d been poured into it; squinted at, he resembled a strawberry milk shake.
    “Are you the owner?” Lucas asked.
    “Mmm-hmmm.” He nodded, friendly.
    Lucas glanced at the second man, who was the physical opposite of the owner—reed thin with dark-plastic-rimmed glasses perched on a knife-edge nose, and under the nose, a mustache that looked like it had been sketched in with a pencil. He wore a seedy gray suit and yellow-brown shoes. A tie hung around his neck like a cleaning rag.
    Lucas held up his ID: “I’m an investigator with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Do you have a security camera in here?”
    The owner’s eyebrows arched, and he shook his head: “No. Not much to steal. Never had a break-in. What’s going on?”
    Out of the corner of his eye, Lucas saw the thin man casually lay his arm on top of the book that he and the owner had been looking at, then slip it off the counter and out of sight. “Just doing a check,” Lucas said. “What time do you close?”
    “Five, usually?”
    “Yesterday?”
    “Yeah, five o’clock. Nothing down here after five.”
    “Okay . . .” Lucas stepped back toward the door, then paused. Never hurt to ask the question. “What was the book you were looking at when I came in . . . if I might ask?”
    The thin man was nervous. “Just a thriller.” He flashed it up and down.
    “Could I look at it?” Lucas asked. He put a little thug into his voice. “I like thrillers.”
    “Uhhh . . .” The thin man glanced at the store owner, who shrugged. The thin man said, reluctantly, “I guess.”
    He handed over the book: Lawrence Block, The Burglar Who Met O. “I read this guy,” Lucas said, flicking a finger at Block’s name. “Who’s O?” He flipped through the book: Was there something hidden inside?
    As he did it, there was a quick intake of breath by the thin man, who said, “Please . . . you’ll break the binding. That’ll cut the value in half.”
    “What’s special about it?” Lucas asked, frowning at the book. “It’s just a commercial—”
    “Please.” The thin man took the book back, closed it carefully. His glasses had slipped down his thin nose, and he pushed them back up with a forefinger. He nearly whispered it: “Printed in France. An edition of five hundred in English, five hundred in French. A hundred dollars a copy at the press, they go for a thousand dollars now.”
    “Well, maybe,” the store owner said. He was skeptical. “If you can find somebody to pay the thousand.”
    “In a big metropolitan area . . .”
    “There’s one right up north of us,” the owner said. “If you want to go try.”
    Lucas: “What? It’s dirty or something?”
    “No,” the thin man said, offended. “It’s sophisticated.”
    “Huh. Who’s O?”
    The thin man shook his head: “There was a famous book, The Story of O. If you haven’t read it . . . well, I can’t explain. You’d have to get into the literature.”
    The owner changed the subject: “So what’s going on with the security camera?”
    Lucas shrugged and let the book go. “We’re trying to find somebody who might have taken a picture of that phone across the street. Guy we’re looking for might have used it.”
    The owner snapped his fingers, then pointed a finger-pistol at Lucas: “I’ve seen you. You were on TV. You’re looking for the killer, right? The crazy guy from Owatonna?”
    Lucas nodded: “Yes.”
    The owner looked out the window, as though Pope might suddenly pop up in the window, like a Punch puppet. “You think he made a call from across the street?”
    “We think he might have. Last night, about eleven.”
    The owner’s eyes narrowed. “I wasn’t here at eleven. Long gone. But have you talked to Mrs. Bird upstairs?”
    “Mrs. Bird?”
    “She sits up there and looks out the window all day and night,” the store owner said. “Says she’s waiting to die. If she didn’t die last night, she might’ve seen something.”
    Lucas nodded: “Thanks. I’ll go ask.” As he went out the door, he looked back at the thin man with his Burglar book: “Sophisticated?”
    The thin man nodded. “European.”
     
    MRS. BIRD WAS TOO OLD to look thin—she looked wasted; she looked like she was going away for good. Lucas thought she might be ninety-five. She peeked at him over the chain on her door, pale blue curious eyes over lightly rouged cheeks. When Lucas showed her his ID, she opened the