Certain Prey

morning—Heather usually has the door open so she can play in the hall, and Marta usually stops to talk to her.” She looked at Black and then back to Lucas and asked, “Do you have some kind of ID?”
    “Yes, I do.” Lucas smiled, tried to look pleasant, took out his ID case, handed it over.
    She looked at it, then back up at Lucas: “I’ve heard of you. You only do murders.”
    “What’s that, Mom?” Heather asked.
    “Talk to you later,” the mother said to the girl, handing Lucas’s ID case back. “This is a policeman. He catches bad men.”
    “I didn’t see any men at Marta’s,” the girl said.
    “Okay,” Lucas said.
    Black, at the end of the hall, said, “Nobody home.”
    “They were having a party last night,” Heather said. Her mother frowned: “I didn’t hear a party—I didn’t see anybody coming or going.”
    “I heard them popping the balloons. Like at a birthday party,” the girl said. L UCAS LOOKED down the hall at Black, whose face had gone tight. Black said, “That’s enough for an entry.”
    “Right,” Lucas said. To the mother: “You better take Heather back inside.”
    “What? Why?” She turned her eyes down to the other door. Black had slipped his pistol out of his holster and was holding it by his side, where the little girl couldn’t see it. The woman looked back at Lucas, suddenly understanding, and said, “Oh, no, no . . . Heather, c’mon. C’mon inside with Mom.”
    When they’d gone inside, Lucas nodded at Black, who lined up on the Paris-green door, then kicked it below the knob. The old door punched open, and Lucas, .45 in his hand, stepped past Black. One step and he saw the Latino man on the floor. Another step, and he saw the woman just beyond. They were both facedown.
    “Okay,” Black said from behind. “Watch me, man . . .” The two of them edged through the apartment, looking for anyone else; but the place was empty except for the bodies. Lucas walked back to the living room. No signs of a struggle, nor had the little girl apparently heard any—but she had heard the balloons popping. These were executions, then, with silencers. He’d seen enough bodies in his career that two more shouldn’t have affected him, but these did. The cool efficiency of the killer, swatting human beings as though they were so many gnats.
    He shook his head and asked Black, “Got your phone?” “Yeah, I’ll call,” Black said. He was standing over the man: “Goddamn, look at this guy’s head. Same deal: half-dozen rounds.”
    Lucas, slipping his gun away, squatted next to the woman’s body. Her face was older than its years, he thought: careworn, but with smile lines, too. The rims of her nostrils were slightly rough, reddened. Cocaine, he thought. “Same here,” he said. And he added: “This takes it away from Hale Allen. He might’ve been willing to kill his old lady for her money, but this isn’t that. This is something else.”
    “Yeah,” Black said. “He was too fuckin’ dumb, anyway.”
    He was holding the cell phone to his ear and said, “Marcy? This is me . . . Yeah, yeah, shut up for a minute, will you? Lucas and I are looking at a couple of more dead ones in an apartment in Dinkytown . . . No, I’m not. No, I’m not. I need you to get all the shit rolling over here, huh? Yeah . . .”
    While he was telling her about it, Lucas moved quickly through the apartment. He was going through a scatter of paper on the kitchen counter when he heard a quiet, single knock on the door. He looked up just in time to see the mommy take two steps through the door. She said, “Did you . . .” and then saw the bodies. “Oh, God.”
    Lucas stepped toward her: “Please don’t come in.” She stepped back into the doorway, her right hand at her mouth, the other hand feeling for the doorjamb. “Don’t touch anything, please, don’t touch the door,” Lucas said urgently. “Don’t touch.”
    She backed into the hallway. Lucas followed and said, “We haven’t processed the room yet, we need to bring in crime-scene specialists.” She nodded, dumbly, and Lucas added, “I’d like to talk to you. I’ve got to wait here for a few minutes, until we get this going, but I’d like to see you and your daughter.”
    “Heather?” Now she looked frightened.
    “Just for a couple of minutes,” Lucas said. “Maybe your place would be better.”
    “Why do you want to talk to Heather?”
    “She said she heard balloons popping. Those were probably guns.