Buried Prey

talking about taking down the LaChaise gang, and Sherrill said, “It was all pretty good, wasn’t it? I gotta tell you, by the way—just between you and me—the Democrats want me to run for the state senate. Rose Marie’s old seat, it’s coming up empty.”
    “You gonna do it?” Lucas asked.
    “Thinking about it,” she said. “I feel like where I am now—I mean, I kicked this job’s ass—I feel like I’m on a launchpad. I’m good on TV, I’ve got a rep. I could go someplace with politics.”
    “You’d have to hang around with politicians,” Lucas pointed out.
    “You say things like that, but you hang around with politicians yourself,” Sherrill said.
    “So go for it,” Lucas said. “You want me to whisper in the governor’s ear? He’s always had an eye for hot-chick politicians.”
    “Well, if you find your mouth pressed to his ear, someday, instead of that other area, and can’t think of what to say . . . you could mention my name.”
    Before he left, she patted the envelope with the tapes and asked how long it would take to confirm that the caller was the same man on both.
    “Maybe tomorrow, or the day after,” Lucas said.
    “So call me tomorrow and tell me what you got,” she said.
    “Yes, dear,” Lucas said.

    ON THE WAY HOME, he thought, Good old days . Not always so good: Marcy had been shot twice over the years, both times seriously. She was lucky she was still alive . . . but so was Lucas, for that matter.
    With that thought, he went home and had a vegetarian dinner and talked to his kids and spent some time in the bathroom with Sam, who was having a little trouble with toilet training—“He knows what to do, he’s just being stubborn,” Weather said. “He needs some encouragement from his father.”
    Then he sat alone in the den and thought more about the Jones case. They had a number of entries into the case, and any one of them might produce Fell. The most promising, he thought, was the probability that one of the massage-parlor women would identify Fell as Kelly Barker’s attacker, through the Identi-Kit picture.
    If that didn’t work, he’d give the picture to the media; that might well produce an ID, especially if Fell had stayed in the area.
    And, he thought, if Barker talked Channel Three into putting her in front of a camera, and if Fell saw it, and believed that she was the only witness against him, and if he were genuinely mad . . . might he not be tempted to get permanently rid of the only witness who could identify him?
    Something more to think about.
    A trap?
    But probably not: too much like TV.

12
    The Jones girls’ killer sat in his living room staring blankly at the TV, a rerun of a Seinfeld show, which he’d seen twenty times, the one about the Soup Nazi. He was dead tired, sat drinking a Budweiser, eating corn chips with cream cheese, trying to blink away the weariness as he waited for the old man to show up.
    The killer was a large man, dressed in oversized jeans and a gray T-shirt; rolls of fat folded over his belt, and trembled like Jell-O down his triceps. He had thick black hair, heavy eyebrows, dark eyes, a small, angular nose, and a petulant, turned-down mouth. A mouth that said that nothing had worked for him: nothing. Ever.
    His living room was small and cluttered. Off to one side, in a den not much larger than a closet, a half-dozen rack-mounted servers pushed the temperature in the room up into the eighties. He could take eighty-three or eighty-four, but any higher than that, he couldn’t sleep. He was right at that level, he thought, and sure enough, the air conditioner kicked on.
    And started eating his money.

    NOT THAT he could sleep anyway.
    He’d never slept more than five or six hours a night, except when he was popping Xanax, and that might get him seven hours for a week or so. He suspected he needed eight or nine hours, long term, to stay alive. He wasn’t getting it. He’d get up tired, be tired all day, go to bed tired, and then lie there, staring at the dark.
    He suffered from anxiety, and felt that he had a right to. He had high blood pressure, high cholesterol, was grossly overweight, and had a set of vicious, burning hemorrhoids that might someday put him on an operating table.
    And now the Jones girls had come back to haunt him.
    Then there was the old man.
     
     
    THE KILLER, back in the day, had been an almost-college-graduate; and then, after college, he’d worked at a half-dozen jobs in electronics.