Certain Prey

Between the two of you, maybe we can figure out a time that this . . . happened.” T HE WOMAN’S NAME was Jan Davis. She was a small, slender woman with dishwater-blond hair and high cheekbones. Her apartment was pleasantly cluttered with books, scientific reprints and a few music CDs, all classical. She was scurrying around, picking up magazines, straightening chairs, making lemonade when Lucas went over. Heather bounced in a worn, oversized easy chair, watching Lucas, smiling when he looked at her. Outside, in the hallway, cops were setting up crime-scene lines.
    “I have a daughter about your age,” Lucas told Heather. “Have you started school yet?”
    “Yes,” she said. “I was promoted. I’m in first now. When school comes back.”
    “So you won’t be the littlest kids anymore . . . there’ll be kindergartners who are smaller than you.”
    “Yup.” But she hadn’t thought of that before, and she slipped off the chair and ran into the kitchen: “Hey, Mom, Mr. Davenport says there’ll be kids littler than me at school . . .”
    A minute later, Davis came out of the kitchen with two glasses of lemonade: “There’s plenty more if the other gentleman wants some.”
    Lucas nodded, and took the glass. “I noticed on your mailbox on the way in, your husband, Howard . . .”
    “Howard’s not living here now,” she said firmly.
    “Not for a while?” Lucas asked.
    “About seven weeks. I just haven’t taken his name off the mailbox.”
    “So . . . what? You’re going to get divorced?”
    “Yes. I’m just finishing my thesis at the U,” she said. “I’ve got a postdoc offer from Johns Hopkins, and Heather and I’ll be moving to Baltimore in December. Howard won’t be coming.”
    “Well, I’m sorry,” Lucas said. And he was. After a moment’s silence, he turned to look at Heather and asked, “What were you doing last night when you heard the party at Marta’s? Were you in the hall?”
    Heather looked guiltily at her mother and then said, “Just for a minute. I left my truck out there.”
    “She’s not supposed to go out in the hall at night, after it gets dark,” Davis said. “But sometimes she does.”
    “Do you know what time it was?”
    “We were talking about that, before you came over,” Davis said. “She was out there with her blocks and her bulldozer when I told her to come in. But she left her truck, and a few minutes later I heard her messing around out there, and I went out and got her. It was between eight and nine.”
    “Eight and nine. You wouldn’t have been watching television or anything, so you’d know what show was on?”
    Davis was shaking her head. “No, I’m rewriting my thesis, the final edit, and I’d just shut down . . .” She cocked her head to the side, then said, “Hey: I think the word processor has a time thing on it, that shows when the file was closed.” She hopped off the couch and headed for a back room. Lucas and Heather followed.
    Davis’s study was a converted bedroom, with a single bed still in it. “Howard slept here the last few weeks he lived with us,” she said offhandedly. She was bringing the computer up, cycling through the Windows 98 display, then bringing up the word processor.
    “Yup.” She tapped the screen, and bounced in her seat a little, the way her daughter had. “The file was stored at eight twenty-two. I stored it and got up and heard Heather in the hall, and told her to come back inside.”
    “All right, that’s something,” Lucas said. “Eight twentytwo.” He looked at Heather. “Did you see anybody when you were in the hallway?”
    She shook her head. “No.” Then she added, “I peeked when Mom was gone, and I saw two ladies.”
    “Two ladies? This was after you heard the party balloons?”
    She nodded, solemn in the face of Lucas’s interest.
    “How did you see them?” Lucas asked.
    “When I heard them, I opened the door just to peek,” she said. “I thought it was Marta.”
    “But it wasn’t Marta?”
    She shook her head again.
    “Did you know the ladies?”
    “No.”
    “Never saw them before?”
    She shook her head.
    “Do you remember what they looked like?” Lucas asked.
    She cocked her head in a perfect rendition of her mother’s thinking mannerism, and after two or three seconds said, “Maybe I do.”

NINE

    Carmel Loan learned that the bodies had been found from TV3. She and Rinker were walking through the skyway toward Carmel’s office, eating frozen yogurt, when