Night Prey

me,” the patrolman confessed, his eyes drifting back toward the store. “I was in the door and he looked over toward me, like he was gonna run. He had crazy eyes, man. He was right on the edge of flipping out. Did you see his arms? I wouldn’t have wanted to fight the sonofabitch.”
    Crime scene arrived five minutes later. A half-carton of unfiltered Camels sat on the front seat. A bag of mixed salt and sand, jumper cables, a toolbox, and other junk occupied the back.
    Lucas poked carefully through it but found nothing. He pulled the keys Koop had produced. There were two truck keys, what looked like two house keys, and a fifth one. Jensen’s maybe. But it didn’t look new enough. They’d have to check.
    “Got a nice set of burglary tools back here,” one of the crime-scene guys said. Lucas walked around to the back of the truck, where they’d carefully opened the toolbox. Unfortunately, burglary tools were nothing more than a slightly unusual selection of ordinary tools. You had to prove the burglary first. The crime-scene guy picked up a small metal file and looked at it with a magnifying glass, just like Sherlock Holmes.
    “Got some brass,” he said.
    “That’ll help,” Lucas said. Koop was cutting his own keys, by hand. “Anything like a knife? Any rope?”
    “No.”
    “Goddamnit. Well, close it up and take it down,” Lucas said, disappointed. “We want everything—prints, hair, skin, fluid. Everything.”
     
     
     
    LUCAS DROPPED THE Porsche at the curb and started up the driveway to Koop’s house. The front and side doors were open, and two unmarked vans sat in the driveway, along with Connell’s anonymous gray Chevy. Lucas was almost to the front steps when he saw two neighborhood women walking down the street, one of them pushing a baby buggy. Lucas walked back toward them.
    “Hello,” he said.
    The woman pushing the buggy had her hair in curlers, covered with a rayon scarf. The other one had dishwater blond hair with streaks of copper through it. They stopped. “Are you police?” Neighbors always knew.
    “Yes. Have you seen Mr. Koop recently?”
    “What’d he do?” asked the copper-streaked one. The kid in the buggy was sucking on a blue pacifier, looking fixedly at Lucas with pale-blue eyes.
    “He’s been arrested in connection with a burglary,” Lucas said.
    “Told you,” Copper Streak said to Hair Curler. To Lucas, she said, “We always knew he was a criminal.”
    “Why? What’d he do?”
    “Never got up in the morning,” she said. “You’d hardly ever see him at all. Sometimes, when he put his garbage out. That was it. He was never in his yard. His garage door would go up, always in the afternoon, and he’d drive away. Then he’d come back in the middle of the night, like three o’clock in the morning, and the garage door would go up, and he’d be inside. You never saw him. The only time I ever saw him, except for garbage, was that Halloween snowstorm a couple of years ago. He came out and shoveled his driveway. After that, he always had a service do it.”
    “Did he have a beard?”
    Copper Streak looked at Hair Curler, and they both looked back at Lucas. “Sure. He’s always had one.”
    One more thing, Lucas thought. They talked for another minute, then Lucas broke away and went inside.
    Connell was in the kitchen, scribbling notes on a yellow pad.
    “Anything?” Lucas asked.
    “Not much. How about the truck?”
    “Nothing so far. No weapon?”
    “Kitchen knives. But this guy isn’t using a kitchen knife. I’d be willing to bet on it.”
    “I just talked to a couple of neighbors,” Lucas said. “They say he’s always had a beard.”
    “Huh.” Connell pursed her lips. “That’s interesting . . . C’mere, down the basement.” Lucas followed her down a short flight of stairs off the kitchen. The basement was finished. To the left, through an open door, Lucas could see a washer, dryer, laundry sink, and a water heater, sitting on a tiled floor. The furnace would be back here too, out of sight. The larger end of the basement was carpeted with a seventies-era two-tone shag. A couch, a chair, and a coffee table with a lamp pressed against the walls. The center of the rug was dominated by a plastic painter’s drop cloth, ten feet by about thirteen or fourteen, laid flat on the rug. A technician was vacuuming around the edges of the drop cloth.
    “Was that plastic sheet like that?” Lucas asked.
    “No. I put it there,” Connell said.