Eyes of Prey

Cassie. She was supposed to be off, but there was no answer at her apartment. He tried the theater, but no one answered the phone.
    “God damn it.” He needed her. He went back outside and found Shearson and Barber standing at the mall entrance. Shearson had a sack under his arm that might have contained a necktie. Rain swept across the lot beyond them, and the floodlights around the death car had been turned off.
    “Find everything you needed?” Lucas asked Shearson, tapping the sack with a finger.
    “Hey, I’m out here on my own time,” Shearson said. He was wearing a dark cashmere knee-length coat over a pearl-gray suit, with a white shirt, a blue tie with tiny crowns on it, and black loafers. His breath smelled of Juicy Fruit.
    “You talk to the kid?” Barber asked.
    “Yeah. I’d like to get a stenographer over to his place tomorrow, take a statement,” Lucas said. “He told me the guy was juggling his keys, and doing a little dance step when he caught them. I’d like to get him on record for that.”
    “Give us a call with questions . . .” said Barber.
    “You get something?” Shearson asked, eyebrows up.
    “I don’t know,” Lucas said. He trusted Shearson about as far as he could spit a rat. “What’s happening with this shrink you’ve been looking at?”
    “He’s the Loverboy, all right,” Shearson said. “He’s hiding something. There aren’t a lot of loose ends to pull on. I think we oughta just sit back for a couple days. Until something new comes up. But Daniel’s got me covering him like whip on cream.”
    “Okay . . . Well, I gotta get one last look at this car,” Lucas said.
    Barber went with him, the two of them hurrying through the rain with a kind of broken-field lope, shoulders hunched, as though they could dodge the raindrops.
    “Your buddy’s got a great wardrobe,” Barber said, tongue in cheek.
    “And he’d lose an IQ contest to a fuckin’ stump,” Lucas said.
    The body was being moved out of the car, wrapped in sheets. Another Maplewood cop came over and said, “Nothing in the car that looks like a weapon. Nothing but paper—ice cream bar wrappers, candy wrappers, Ding Dong wrappers. The woman lived on junk.”
    “All right,” said Lucas. To Barber, he said, “Can you keep me up-to-date?”
    “I’ll fax you everything we got in the morning, first thing. We don’t need this clown killing people out here.”
     
    Lucas hadn’t expected much from the scene itself. If a killer had no relationship with the victim, no apparent motive, no rational method of operation, the only things left to find were witnesses or traceable physical evidence. Because a serial killer could pick the time and place, he could pick a situation that minimized his exposure to witnesses. And evidence left behind—semen, in sex-related cases, or blood or skin samples—didn’t help until after the killer was caught.
    This attack had been almost perfect. Almost . . .
    The storm was dying as Lucas headed west. There was another thunderstorm cell far down to the south, but from I-35W he could see distant jetliner landing lights, going into Minneapolis-St. Paul International from the south, so he knew the storm must be well out downstate.
    By the time he got to Cassie’s apartment, the rain had diminished to a barely perceptible drizzle. He went into the entry and rang the bell for her apartment, but there was no answer. He continued up the street to the theater, but the windows there were dark.
    Damn. He needed her.
    And he found her. She was sitting on his porch steps, a gym bag between her feet.
    “How long have you been here?” he asked from the car, as she strolled out to the driveway. “How’d you get here?”
    “About twenty minutes—I came on the bus. I would have broken in, but the woman next door keeps watching me out her window,” Cassie said, grinning. She tipped her head toward a lighted window in the next house. An elderly woman peeked out a lighted window in a side door, and Lucas waved at her. She waved back and disappeared.
    “She keeps an eye out,” Lucas said. “Besides, you’d need a sledge to get through the doors . . . . Let me get the car inside.”
    Cassie waited behind the car as he put it in the garage next to his battered Ford four-by-four.
    “Sweatsuit and shoes,” she said, holding up the gym bag as he dropped the garage door. “I thought we could run along the river.”
    “In the rain?”
    “You could see it going over on