Eyes of Prey

building, zoning and health violations you can find in a place like that. I doubt an old theater could survive, if somebody really wanted to tote them all up.”
    “Blackmail,” she said.
    “Law enforcement.”
    “Sure,” she said, with distaste. “I don’t think I could live with that.”
    She got out of the car and led the way across the street. The theater was dark, but as she opened the door with her key, she called, “Hello? Anybody here?”
    No answer. “This way,” she said in a hushed voice. They crossed the lobby in the weak light from the street and started down a hallway. Cassie patted the left wall, found a light switch and turned on a single hall light. Lucas followed her to a red wooden door. She tried the doorknob and found it locked. “Damn it. I was hoping it’d be open,” she said.
    “Let me look,” Lucas said. He took a small metal flashlight from his jacket pocket, knelt at the lock, shined the light into the crack between the door and the jamb, turned the knob as far as he could, then turned it back.
    “Can you open it?”
    “Yeah.” He took the wallet, a trifold, from his pocket. He opened it, laid it flat on the floor and slipped out a thin metal blade.
    “What’re you doing?”
    “Magic,” he said. He put the blade in the crack between the door and the jamb, and rotated the blade downward; the bolt slipped back. “Shazam.”
    The office was small, untidy, with lime-green walls, a metal desk with a phone, four chairs, a bulletin board and file cabinets. A faint smell of mildew and old cigarette smoke hung in the air. As Lucas put his lock set back into his pocket, Cassie stepped to one of the file cabinets and pulled open a drawer. Hundreds of eight-by-ten photos were jammed into manila folders. She took out two, a bulging pair, and laid them on the desk.
    “He’ll be in these,” she said. She started going through them, tapping Druze’s face wherever she found it. “Here . . . here . . . here he is again.”
    “He’s good at avoiding the camera,” Lucas said. He tookseveral of the photos and held them under the light. Druze was always in stage paint or makeup. Sometimes his face was obscured by a hat; at other times by a hand gesture.
    “Here’s the best one so far,” Cassie said, flipping a photo out to Lucas.
    Troll, he thought. Druze had a round head, too large for his body. And although he was wearing makeup, there were obvious changes in his skin texture, as if his face had been quilted together. His nose was shortened, ruined.
    “That’s the best,” Cassie said, finishing with the pictures. “But, ah . . .” She glanced at another file cabinet.
    “What?”
    “If we can get this other cabinet open, we could look through the personnel files. There may be a straight head-shot . . . . The cabinet’s always locked.”
    “Let’s look,” Lucas said. He glanced at the lock on the cabinet, took a pick out of the wallet and had the lock open in less than a second.
    “That’s fast,” Cassie said, impressed.
    “For office file cabinets, you get more of a master key than a pick,” Lucas said. “I’m not that good with the picks.”
    “Where do you get them?” she asked.
    “I know a guy,” Lucas said. He pulled open the top drawer and found a file labeled “Druze.” Inside was a block of what once had been eight wallet-sized photos, headshots, straight on, no makeup. Two of them had been cut away with scissors. “Passport shots. And he does look like the cyclops, kind of,” Lucas said. He went to the office desk, found a pair of scissors in the top drawer, cut out one of the photos and showed it to Cassie.
    “Uh-huh.” She glanced at it, then went back to the file she was holding.
    “What’s that?”
    She looked up, a piece of notebook paper in her hand, a sad smile on her face. “It’s my file. There’s a note from Elizabeth.It says my work has to be evaluated in case financial circumstances worsen.”
    “What does that . . . ?”
    “She was going to fire me,” Cassie said. A tear trickled down her cheek. “Fuckin’ theater people, man . . .”
    Lucas used the pick to lock the cabinet. The office door locked from the inside, then simply pulled shut. On the way out, they turned off the lights.
    Cassie had taken Armistead’s note, and when they were back in the car again, she reread it under the dome light. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “I can’t believe she’d do this.”
    “Well, she’s