Eyes of Prey

standing on a chair, shouting at Lester. When she stood on the chair, thecops around her sat down; she wore a very short black leather skirt.
     
    “I guess you gotta get what you can get,” Sloan said, laughing. Lester had fled, and Sloan, Lucas and Harmon Anderson walked together down the hall toward Homicide.
    “Department full of fuckin’ perverts,” Anderson said, adding, “You could see the crack of her ass, if you sat just right.”
    “Jesus Christ, Harmon, I think that’s sexual abuse in the third degree,” Lucas said, laughing with Sloan.
    “You know why they’ve got such great voices, the TV people?” Anderson asked, going off in a new direction. “Because they reverberate in the space where most people have brains . . .”
    Swanson came slouching down the hall toward them, heavyset, glittering gold-rimmed glasses. “Did I miss it?”
    “You missed it,” Sloan confirmed. “Anderson got his first look at a woman’s ass in twenty years.”
    “How about Bekker?” Lucas asked.
    “Not a thing. We got his ass in here first thing, asked him if he wanted a lawyer, he said no. He said he’d ask if he needed one. So we said, What’d you do? He said he spent the late afternoon working at home, and the evening watching television. We asked what he was watching, and he told us. He was, like, watching CNBC in the afternoon, some kind of stock market shows, and then the news . . . . He went out around nine o’clock to get a bite to eat. We got that confirmed . . . .”
    “How about phone calls?”
    “He talked to one guy on the phone, a guy from the hospital, but that was late, way after the killing.”
    “Who called who?” Lucas asked. The four detectives circled around each other as Swanson talked.
    “The other guy called in . . .” Swanson said.
    “Could have a VCR, tape the shows,” Anderson suggested.
    “He does have a VCR,” Swanson said. “I don’t know about taping the shows. Anyway, we got his statement, and shit, there was nothing to say. He didn’t know Armistead, doesn’t even know if he’d ever seen her on the stage . . . . He was just . . . There wasn’t anything there. We sent him home.”
    “You believe him?” Lucas asked.
    Swanson’s forehead furrowed. “I don’t know. When you’re leaning on a guy, like we been leaning on Bekker, scouting around his neighborhood, calling his neighbors, all that . . . and something happened that could clear him, you’d think he’d be peeing all over himself in a rush to prove he didn’t do it. He wasn’t like that. He was cool. Answered all the questions like he was reading off of file cards.”
    “Keep up the pressure,” Anderson said.
    Swanson shook his head. “That ain’t gonna work with this guy. I’m starting to think—he’s an asshole, but he could be innocent.”
    They were still talking about it when Jennifer Carey turned the corner.
    “Lucas . . .” Her voice was feminine, clear, professional.
    Lucas turned in instant recognition. Sloan, Anderson and Swanson turned with him, then moved away down the corridor, furtively watching, as Lucas walked toward her.
    “Daniel said you’d be talking afterwards,” Jennifer said. She was slender and blonde, with a few thirties wrinkles on a well-kept face. She wore a pink silk blouse with a gray suit, and almost stopped his heart. She and Lucas had a two-year-old daughter but had never married. They’d been estranged ever since their daughter had been wounded.
    “Yeah. Didn’t see you at the conference.”
    “I just got here. Where will you be talking? Down at the conference room?” She was all business, brisk, impersonal. There would be more to it than that, Lucas knew.
    “Nah. I’ll just be around . . . . How are you?”
    “I’m working with a new unit,” she said, ignoring the question. “Could we get you outside, on the steps?”
    “Sure. How’ve you been?” he persisted.
    She shrugged and turned away, heading for the steps. “About the same. Are you coming over Saturday afternoon?”
    “I . . . don’t think so,” he said, tagging along, hands in his pockets.
    “Fine.”
    “When are we going to talk?”
    “I don’t know,” she said over her shoulder.
    “Soon?”
    “I don’t think so,” she threw back. “Not soon.”
    “Hey, wait a minute,” he said. He reached forward, hooked her arm and spun her around.
    “Let the fuck go of me,” she said, jerking her arm away, angry.
    Lucas had always worried