Chosen Prey

nodded. “If they get him to Regions alive, he’ll make it—as long as he doesn’t have too much shit in his bloodstream.”
    “I told the paramedics about the crack,” Del said. “They’ll watch out for it.”
    “I want to know what the heck happened,” Marshall said. “Why’d he open up? Because we took the door down?”
    Lucas rubbed his head, looking up at the apartment, and said, “I don’t know. He’s always been a crazy sonofabitch, and he never worried about getting hurt. Not brave, just nuts. I never really thought about him being suicidal.”
    “It’s that blood,” Del said. He looked up, where Lucas was looking, and continued, “Something happened up there.”
    “He couldn’t be our guy,” Marshall said. “You didn’t have any goddamn twelve- or thirteen-year-old traveling around the countryside picking up women in their twenties. I mean, I don’t know what it means.”
    “He was probably just a connection,” Lucas said. “But he knows our guy.”
    “We could get a name tonight, then,” Marshall said. “They sew him up—”
    “If he’ll talk,” Del said. “He’s a little asshole, and he’ll be pissed.”
    “More pissed than you might think,” Lucas said. “His legs weren’t moving when he was on the ground. The slug that took him in the stomach might have clipped his spine.”
    Marshall winced, and Del said, “Ah, shit.”
    The crime-scene people were taping the apartment when the three of them climbed back up the stairs and tentatively stepped inside. Allport spotted them, shook his head: “Quite a bit of day-old blood. We don’t think it was his.”
    “Is someone dead? That much blood?” Lucas asked.
    Allport relayed the question to somebody out of sight. A second later, a cop in a tweed jacket and golf slacks stepped into the hallway and looked down at Lucas and said, “Not that much. I’d say it’s gotta be maybe a pint, give or take. Of course, we don’t know how much he cleaned up.”
    “Doesn’t look like he’d done much cleaning,” Del said. “There was still some blood on the wallpaper.”
    “You find any jewelry?” Lucas asked. “Good stuff?”
    “Haven’t looked yet,” the cop said. “Would that be a priority?”
    “Yeah, it would be,” Lucas said. “Get the sequence of events on the entry nailed down first, though. We don’t want that to get confused.”
    The cop nodded and dropped back out of sight. Allport said, “Give us half an hour. Then I’d appreciate if you could slow-walk through the place, see if anything catches your eye.”
    Lucas nodded. “We’ll be back.” To Del and Marshall, as they stepped back out onto the deck: “The day started so pretty that I drove the Porsche.”
    “Still not a bad day,” Marshall said, looking up at the sky. “Still pretty. Even smells good, once you get away from the blood.”
     
    T HEY WASTED THE half hour and a little more at a bagel shop on Grand Avenue, drinking coffee and trying to figure out the next step. They were still shaky from the shooting: talking too fast, digressing into stories, arguing the Aronson case.
    “The woman over at the Catholic school, the museum lady—we gotta talk to her some more,” Marshall said. “She comes up four times on our lists, and she takes you right over to that wall in Laura’s pictures. That place has gotta be involved, and it’s gotta be somebody close to her. Maybe somebody who works at the museum. People come to see her, and he picks them up there.”
    “Black’s running down all the names in the museum and the art department—everybody over twenty-five,” Lucas said.
    “I’m supposed to go to this task force meeting tomorrow with Marcy,” Marshall said. “I’d rather hang with you guys, but if you want, I could go over there and tell them about St. Patrick’s and what we’ve seen so far, and maybe . . . I don’t know, maybe we could get them to do research on everybody in the whole school. Everybody. Maybe there’d be some way to hook up the records from the school computer with the FBI, and run them all off in an hour or something.”
    “That’s a thought,” Lucas said. “I just can’t figure out what a guy at St. Pat’s is doing with a pimp like Randy.”
    “Just a fence,” Del said. “The guy’s a sex freak, so maybe they got hooked up that way, and then he started fencing stuff through Randy.”
    “You know what we should have done?” Marshall said. “When we had that woman over at DDT’s