Certain Prey

here?” Lucas asked.
    “Oh, yeah,” the manager said, looking around in disgust. “She skipped. I know what that feels like. She’s skipped.”
    “Then this is her,” Lucas said. “Let’s get the crime-scene guys in here.”
    “Four hundred bucks,” the manager said.
    “Yeah, well, don’t touch anything,” Franklin growled. Franklin and Swanson went to the last room on the list, while Lucas looked around the empty room, and a moment later, Franklin came back: “Better have a look at this chick.”
    This one fit, too: a cheerleader, with the blond hair, blue eyes, good shape, a little busty. And again, Lucas had the sense of déj‡ vu: “Do I know you?” he asked.
    “No,” the woman said, a little angry and a little more scared. “Who are you?”
    “I’m a deputy chief of police,” Lucas said. “Where are you from?”
    “From Seattle.”
    Lucas spotted a wedding ring. “And you’re married?”
    “Yes, and I’d like to know . . .”
    “What are you doing here? Are you in town on business?”
    “What’s going on?” she demanded, the fear fading, and the anger growing.
    “Just tell me,” Lucas said patiently. “Are you here on business?”
    “Yes, I’m here for the perio convention at the Radisson.”
    “What’s a perio?” Franklin asked. He was a very large black man in a yellow plaid sport coat, and he loomed in the doorway like a dark moon.
    “A periodontist. I’m a dentist,” she said.
    “Thanks,” Lucas said. He glanced at Franklin and shook his head and said to the woman, “We’ve got a situation here, which Detective Franklin will explain to you . . .”
    Outside in the hall, Swanson said to Lucas, “A gum gardener.”
    “A what?”
    “A gum gardener. That’s what periodontists are called by other dentists.”
    “Yeah? I’ll treasure that piece of information.” L UCAS WENT BACK to the empty room to wait for the crimescene crew. He wanted only one piece of information: that the china handles on the bathroom fixtures had been wiped. If they’d been wiped, this was the room, and they were too late.
    Franklin went off to check on the last room again. Then the two crime-scene guys arrived, and Lucas told them what he wanted to know. One of them stepped into the bathroom, looked at the china handles on the sink, took what looked like a perfume bottle out of his briefcase and sprayed a steel-colored dust on the handles. Then he stuck his head in the sink so he could get a closer look. When he emerged, he said, “Wiped. Slick as a whistle.”
    “Goddamnit, I knew it,” Lucas said.
    Franklin returned. “Last lady came in, from that room that was all torn up. She’s fifty, and she’d got a dog. A small one. I offered to flush it for her, but she said no.”
    “Okay,” Lucas said. To the crime-scene guys: “She probably wiped the place down, but I want you to dust everything. Anything we get . . .”
    “Look at this,” the second crime-scene guy said. He was emerging from the shower, and he was holding a small hotel-sized bar of soap.
    “What?” Lucas asked.
    “I think she forgot to wipe the soap.”

    “S HE FORGOT to wipe the what?” Mallard asked.
    “The soap,” Lucas said. “A bar of soap.”
    “You can’t leave prints on a bar of soap. Wet soap?”
    “Well, you can one way,” Lucas said. “If the soap squirts out of your hand and you leave it on the floor, and then get out and dry yourself and remember the soap, and pick it up and put it back in the soap dish, then you can leave prints. At least, that’s what we think—one corner of the soap was squared off and cracked, like it’d been dropped. The hard part was getting the soap back to the office without screwing up the prints. That was a goddamned nightmare.”
    “How’re you processing it?”
    “We put it in a refrigerator down in Identification.”
    “You put it in what?”
    Lucas was irritated: “Do we have a bad connection or something? I can hear you perfectly.”
    “Why’d you put it in the goddamn refrigerator?” Mallard asked. He was getting loud, for a guy who looked like an accountant, even with the thick neck.
    “We figure if we can harden it up enough, we can dust it and pick up the prints,” Lucas said. “I mean, we can see them, we’re just scared to death of doing anything to them. If you blow on them, they could fade.”
    “Ah, Jesus. I’m gonna call the fingerprint guys here and get them in touch with your guys,” Mallard said. “Maybe we can