Certain Prey

phone bills for the last four months and used the camera again. But the last phone bill was almost exactly a month old . . .
    He went into the kitchen, where he’d seen a neat stack of envelopes, flipped through them, found the US West bill. With another little jangle of nerves, he picked up a teakettle on the stove, tipped it to make sure there was enough water and turned it on.
    He looked in the bedroom while he waited for the teakettle-to heat. Nothing obvious. He very carefully went through her drawers, afraid that he would disturb them in a way she could detect. He found nothing. He checked the closets quickly, and was closing the door when a brassy sparkle on the floor caught his eye. The sparkle had a certain quality that he unconsciously recognized. He stooped, scraped his hand along the rug, felt it, picked it up: an unfired .22 shell. He took a penlight out of his pocket, searched the closet floor, but found only the one cartridge.
    He thought about it for a second, then put it in his pocket. He was closing the closet door when the teakettle began to hum. He hurried back to the kitchen, let the raw steam play down the back of the envelope, pried up the seal, took out the bill, shot a quick photo of the long-distance calls and resealed the envelope before the adhesive could dry. He put the kettle back and sniffed: the smell of the adhesive hung in the air, only faintly, but it was there, he thought. He hoped Carmel would take her time.
    In the office, the computer was sitting quietly; he paged quickly through a few other folders, dragged a couple of them to the Zip icon, waited a few seconds until the files had been dumped, then shut the computer down.
    All right. What else? He was ready to leave; before he went, he took a last look around.
    The apartment was fabulous. But aside from the stuff in the filing cabinets, and stuck away in drawers, it hardly seemed to have been lived in: obsessively neat, everything in its place, like a stage set.
    The phone in his pocket rang: Sloan.
    “They’re leaving,” he said. “I just got my shrimp cocktail. I hope I’m not supposed to follow them.”
    “Nah, let them go. But what do you think?”
    “They’re tight, all right. It was kissy-smoochy all night. But I think the guy was expecting somebody else to show. He kept cruising the place, looking around.”
    “Huh. Wonder what that’s about?” Lucas asked, feeling just slightly guilty. Then, “How come you’re eating a shrimp cocktail and they’re already leaving? You having it for dessert?”
    “Well . . . yeah,” Sloan said. His voice went a little hoarse: “I love these things.” W HEN C ARMEL GOT HOME, a little after eleven—she had to work the next day—she stopped at the threshold of the apartment and wrinkled her nose. Something, she thought, was not quite right. She couldn’t put her finger on it: the air was wrong, or something. The apartment’s chemicals had been disturbed. She walked through, leaving the hallway door open so she’d have a place to run if she needed it, but found nothing at all.
    “Huh,” she said as she closed the hallway door.
    By the next morning, she’d forgotten it.

ELEVEN

    When Lucas got home, he took the CompactFlash card out of his pocket, dropped another one out of the Nikon, and read them into his home computer. After transferring the files to Photoshop, he sharpened the photos as much as he could and dumped them to his photo printer. That done, he called Davenport Simulations and let the phone ring until a man answered, his voice grumpy at the interruption.
    “Steve? Lucas Davenport.”
    “Hey, Lucas! Where’ve you been, man?” Steve smoked a little weed from time to time; dropped a little acid on weekends, and let his beard grow. When the acid was on him, he could program in three dimensions. “You don’t come around anymore.”
    “I’d be like the ghost of bad news, the former owner hanging around,” Lucas said. “But I needed somebody who could help me out with a computer problem. I thought about you . . . from your phreaking days.”
    “I don’t do that shit anymore, hardly ever,” Steve said. “Uh, what do you need?”
    “Is there anyone on the Net who could track down anonymous telephone numbers?” Lucas asked. “If there is, do you know how you could get in touch with him?”
    Steve dropped his voice, though he probably was alone: “Depends on what the numbers are and how much trouble you want to go to. And whether you want to