Night Prey

they can get messed up?” Lucas asked.
    The operator, a bony college kid in a Stone Temple Pilots T-shirt, shrugged. “One in a thousand—maybe less than that. The best odds you’re going to get.”
    Lucas handed him the cassette. “Do it.”
     
     
     
    SEVENTEEN MINUTES LATER, the kid said, “The problem is, she was trying to take a picture from a hundred and fifty or two hundred feet away, at night, with this little teeny flash. The flash is supposed to light up somebody’s face at ten feet.”
    “There’s nothing fuckin’ there,” Connell shouted at him, spit flying.
    “Yeah, there is—you can see it,” the kid said, indignant, peering at one of the almost-black prints. That particular print had a yellow smudge in the middle of it, what might have been a streetlight, above what might have been the roof of a truck. “That’s exactly what you get when you take pictures in the dark with one of those little fuckin’ cameras.”
    There was something going on in the prints, but they couldn’t tell what. Just a lot of smudges that might have been a woman being stabbed to death.
     
     
     
    “I DON’T BELIEVE it,” Connell said. She slumped in the car seat, sick.
    “I don’t believe in eyewitnesses or cameras,” Lucas said.
    Another three blocks and Connell said suddenly, urgently, “Pull over, will you? Right there, at the corner.”
    “What?” Lucas pulled over.
    Connell got out and vomited. Lucas climbed out, walked around to her. She looked up weakly, tried to smile. “Getting worse,” she said. “We gotta hurry, Lucas.”
     
     
     
    “W E ’ R E TALKING FIRESTORM,” Roux said. She had two cigarettes lit at the same time, the one on the window ledge burning futilely by itself.
    “We’ll get him,” Lucas said. “We’ve still got the surveillance at Sara Jensen’s. There’s a good chance he’ll come in.”
    “This week,” Roux said. “Gotta be this week.”
    “Very soon,” Lucas said.
    “Promise?”
    “No.”>
     
     
     
    LUCAS SPENT THE day following the Eloise Miller routine, reading histories, calling cops. Connell did the same, and so did Greave. Results from the street investigation began coming in. The guy was big and powerful, batted the woman like a rag doll.
    There were three eyewitnesses: one said the killer had a beard, the other two said he did not. Two said he wore a hat, the other said he had black hair. All three said he drove a truck, but they didn’t know what color. Something and white. There wasn’t much dirt in the street to pick up tire tracks, even if two cop cars and an ambulance hadn’t driven over them.
    The autopsy came in. Nothing good. No DNA source. No prints. Still checking for hair.
     
     
     
    AT FOUR O’CLOCK, he gave up. He went home, took a nap. Weather got home at six.
    At seven, they lay on top of the bedsheet, sweat cooling on their skin. Outside the window, which was cracked just an inch or two, they could hear the cars passing in the street a hundred feet away, and sometimes, quietly, the muttering of voices.
    Weather rolled up on her elbow. “I’m amazed at the way you can separate yourself from what you’re doing,” she said. She traced a circle on his chest. “If I was as stuck on a problem as you are, I couldn’t think of anything else. I couldn’t do this.”
    “Waiting is part of the deal,” Lucas said. “It has always been that way. You can’t eat until the cake is baked.”
    “People get killed while you’re waiting,” she said.
    “People die for bad reasons all the time,” Lucas said. “When we were running around in the woods last winter, I begged you to stay away. You refused to stay away, so I’m alive. If you hadn’t been out there . . .” He touched the scar on his throat.
    “Not the same thing,” she objected. She touched the scar. Most of it, she’d made herself. “People die all the time because of happenstance. Two cars run into each other, and somebody dies. If the driver of one of them had hesitated five seconds at the last stoplight, they wouldn’t have collided, and nobody would die. That’s just life. Chance. But what you do . . . somebody might die because you can’t solve a problem that’s solvable. Or like last winter, you seemed to reach out and solve a problem that was unsolvable, and so people who probably would have died, lived.”
    He opened his mouth to reply, but she patted him on the chest to stop him. “This isn’t criticism. Just observation. What you do is