Buried Prey

on the edge of St. Paul’s Lowertown, one of those districts of old brick warehouses that the planners thought they could make artsy. He called her from the street, got lucky. She was home and buzzed him into the lobby. She was on the eighth floor, and he went up in an old freight elevator that groaned and stank of onions and took its own sweet time.
    Landry came to the door in a dressing gown, looked at him through half-drunk morning eyes, and said, “Yep, it’s you. You look tougher than you used to.”
    “You okay?” Lucas asked.
    “Yeah, I’m fine,” she said, pulling the gown tight around herself. “Come on in. I work late, I should be sleeping for another couple of hours.”
    She had one bedroom, a small living room with a kitchen to one side, a round wooden table to eat at, a corduroy-covered couch to sit on, and a TV peering across the couch. Lucas sat on one end of the couch and took out his pictures.
    She went through them, pulled out the same picture that Ryan had. “That’s the closest,” she said.
    “Just close, or do you think that’s him?”
    “If I were putting a face on him, with this computer or whatever it is, that’s what I’d draw. There’s something not quite right around the mouth, but it’s pretty good.” She stood up, absently scratched her crotch while looking around the living room, then tottered off to the kitchen area and came back with a pencil and a book. She put the paper on the book and then used the pencil to touch up the mouth. After one try and an erasure, she said, “There. That’s better.”
    She handed it back to Lucas: she’d made only a small change, but one of significance—she’d changed the line of his lips, from squared-off, to a descending curve. She asked, “Do you think he killed the Jones girls?”
    Lucas said, “I think maybe he did. I think this time I’m going to get a chance to ask him.”
    “I saw on a Channel Three promo that some woman was attacked by him and got away. She’s on at noon.”
    Kelly Barker had gotten her wish, Lucas thought. “She’s the one who gave us this picture,” he said.
    “So he was still trying to snatch girls like years later,” Landry said. “You think he got some that nobody knows about?”
    Lucas stood up, stuffed the pictures of Fell back in his briefcase. “I hate to think about that,” he said.
    He took the stairs down instead of the elevator and was slowed by two men, artists, he supposed, carrying a four-by-eight sheet of plywood down the stairs. When they turned it around the corner, he saw that it was painted with a picture of a dancing man, like Lucas had seen on tarot cards.
    Back at his car, he decided not to go after Mary Ann Ang/ Morgan. He might have screwed up a few lives through simple inexperience, way back when, but he didn’t need to screw up another, by showing up on her doorstep with questions about a massage parlor.
    He would locate and identify Fell—he probably had enough now, he thought—and doubted that Ang/Morgan would be able to speed that up much. Now, it was all research.
     
     
    WHILE LUCAS WAS TALKING to Landry, the killer was lying facedown on his couch. Just as he had gotten out of the shower, he’d suffered a series of muscle spasms in his back and legs, and he was afraid the ride might have done something to his spine. He found a bottle of oxycodone, left over from an oral surgery, popped three of them.
    After an hour on the couch, he felt good enough to eat. He turned on the TV and headed into the kitchen. He was putting together three fried-egg-and-onion sandwiches on Wonder bread when he heard a promo for a woman who might be able to identify the killer of the Jones girls.
    He went into the living room to watch, eating the sandwiches, swilling Diet Pepsi. He had to wait ten minutes, through the last part of a gardening show, before the noon news came up. Kelly Barker was the first story.
    He remembered the bitch with perfect clarity. He’d cut her up, but she got away—one of only two women to get away from him. The other had been in Kansas, under similar circumstances. But he’d made his move too soon then, and never got close enough to touch.
    With Barker, he’d gotten close enough, but she’d fought him and then she’d gotten a couple of steps on him, and she’d run like the wind. He’d made the executive decision to get the fuck out of there.
    Now she was on TV—and she had a picture that looked something like him.
    He unconsciously licked