Night Prey

really . . . bizarre. It’s more like magic, or palm reading, than science. I do science. Everybody I work with does science. That’s routine. What you do . . . it’s fascinating.”
    Lucas giggled, a startling sound, high-pitched, unlike anything she’d ever heard from him. Not a chuckle. A giggle. She peered down at him.
    “Goddamn, I’m glad you moved in with me, Karkinnen,” he said. “Conversations like this could keep me awake for weeks at time. You’re better than speed.”
    “I’m sorry. . . .”
    “No, no.” He pushed up on his elbow to face her. “I need this. Nobody ever looked into me before. I think a guy could get old and rusty if nobody ever looked into him.”
     
     
     
    WHEN WEATHER WENT into the bathroom, Lucas got up and wandered around, naked, hunting from room to room, not knowing exactly what for. A picture of the dead Eloise Miller hung in his mind’s eye: a woman on the way to feed a friend’s dog while the friend was out of town. She’d made that walk, late at night, just once in her life. Once too often.
    Lucas could hear Weather running water in the bathroom, and thought guiltily about the attractions of Jan Reed. He sighed, and pushed the reporter out of his mind. That’s not what he was supposed to be thinking about.
    They knew so much about the killer, he thought. Generally what he looked like, his size, his strength, what he did, the kinds of vehicles he drove, if indeed he drove that Taurus sedan in addition to the truck. Anderson was now cross-indexing joint ownerships, green Taurus sedans against pickups.
    But so much of what they knew was conflicting, and conflicts were devastating in a trial.
    Depending on who you believed, the killer was a white, short or tall police officer (or maybe a convict), a cocaine user who drove either a blue-and-white or red-and-white pickup truck, or a green Taurus sedan, and he either wore glasses or he didn’t, and while he probably wore a beard at one time, he might have shaved it off by now. Or maybe not.
    Terrific.
    And even if that could be sorted out, they had not a single convicting fact. Maybe the lab would come through, he thought. Maybe they’d pull some DNA out of a cigarette, and maybe they’d find the matching DNA signature in the state’s DNA bank. It had been done.
    And maybe pigs would fly.
    Lucas wandered into the dining room, tinkled a few keys on the piano. Weather had offered to teach him how to play—she’d taught piano in college, as an undergraduate—but he said he was too old.
    “You’re never too old,” she’d said. “Here, have some more wine.”
    “I am too old. I can’t learn that kind of stuff anymore. My brain doesn’t absorb it,” Lucas said, taking the wine. “But I can sing.”
    “You can sing?” She was amazed. “Like what?”
    “I sang ‘I Love Paris’ in the senior concert in high school,” he said, somewhat defensively.
    “Do I believe you?” she asked.
    “Well, I did.” He sipped.
    And she sipped, then put the glass on a side table and rummaged, somewhat tipsily, through the piano bench and finally said, “Ah-ha, she calls his bluff. I have here the music to ‘I Love Paris.’ ”
    She played and he sang; remarkably well, she said. “You have a really nice baritone.”
    “I know. My music teacher said I had a large, vibrant instrument.”
    “Ah. Was she attractive?”
    “It was a he,” Lucas said. “Here. Have some more wine.”
     
     
     
    LUCAS STRUCK A few more notes, then wandered back toward the bedroom, thinking again about his eyewitnesses. They had more than a dozen of them now. Several had been too far away to see much; a couple of them had been so scared that they were more confusing than helpful; two men had seen the killer’s face during the attack on Evan Hart. One said he was white, the other said he was a light-skinned black.
    And some had seen the killer too long ago, and remembered nothing about him at all. . . .
     
     
     
    WEATHER WAS NAKED, bent over the sink, her hair full of shampoo. “If you touch my butt, I’ll wait until you’re asleep and I’ll disfigure you,” she said.
    “Cut off your nose to spite your face, huh?”
    “We’re not talking noses,” Weather said, scrubbing.
    He leaned in the doorway. “There’s something women don’t understand about good asses,” he said. “A really good ass is an object of such sublime beauty, that it’s almost impossible to keep your hands off.”
    “Try to think of a way,” she