Night Prey

phone. To Greave he said, grinning, “He’s got to call up a listing on his computer, but he doesn’t remember it.”
    “What?” Greave was as perplexed as Weather. He looked at the air conditioner, then at the kid. The kid shrugged.
    Lucas said into the phone, “You didn’t? Isn’t it under warranty? Un-huh. And that would cover all repairs, right? Okay. Listen, a detective named Greave will be coming over to take a statement from you later today. We’ll try to make it before five o’clock.”
    Lucas rang off, folded the phone, handed it back to Greave, and looked at the kid. “When I talked to you, you said you were helping Ray with the air-conditioning.”
    “Yeah. It was broke.”
    “But nobody came from the air-conditioner company?”
    “Not that I saw.” The kid swallowed.
    “What’d you do to it?” Lucas asked.
    “Well, I don’t know. I just handed him screwdrivers and helped him take shit apart. Sir.”
    “The ducts.”
    “Those big tubes,” the kid said. Ducts wasn’t solid in his vocabulary.
    “You didn’t mess with the motor or anything.”
    “No, sir, not me. Not anybody. Just the tubes.”
    “What?” asked Greave. “What? What?”
    “They froze her,” Lucas said.
     
     
     
    GREAVE HALF SMILED. “You’re fuckin’ joking.”
    “Well. Not exactly froze. They killed her with hypothermia,” Lucas said. “She was an older woman, underweight because of her thyroid condition. She took sleeping pills every night with a beer, or maybe two. Cherry knew about the pills and the booze. She apparently joked about her medicine. So he watched her window until her lights went out, waited a half hour, and turned on the air-conditioning. They pumped cold air meant for the entire building into that one apartment. I bet it was colder in her apartment than the inside of a refrigerator.”
    “Jesus,” Greave said, scratching his chin. “Would that do it?”
    Lucas nodded. “Everybody says it was hot inside, because the air-conditioning was broken. The pictures of the body showed her curled up on a sheet, no blanket, because it was hot when she lay down. By age and body weight, she was the kind of person most susceptible to hypothermia,” Lucas said. “The only thing that would make somebody even more susceptible is booze.”
    Greave said, “Huh.”
    “The thing that cinches it,” Lucas said, “is that the cheapest goddamn real estate hustlers in town never called for warranty service. The air conditioner is covered. The service guy just told me that they’ll fix anything that goes wrong for five years. He said if a screw falls out of the housing, they’d come out and put it back in.”
    “I don’t see . . .” Greave said, still not believing.
    “Think about the body shots again, the photographs,” Lucas said. “She was on her side, curled, fetal position, as if she might have been cold, and unconsciously trying to protect herself. But the drugs knocked her down and out. She couldn’t get back up. And it worked: they killed her. Not only did it work, there was no sign of what they did. No toxicology. The doors were bolted, the windows were locked, the motion sensors were armed. They killed her with cold.”
    Greave looked at the kid. The kid said, “Jeez. I helped Ray disconnect all them tubes and put them back together, but I didn’t know what he was doing.”
    “They ran the air conditioner after he pulled the tubes, I bet,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah. They said they was testing it,” the kid said.
    “Kiss my ass,” said Greave, a sudden light in his eye. “They froze the old bat. A batsicle.”
    “I think so,” Lucas said.
    “Can I bust them?” Greave asked. “Let me bust ’em, huh?”
    “It’s your case,” Lucas said. “But if I were you, I’d think about playing them off against each other. Offer one of them a plea. They’re all assholes, every one of them. Now that you know how they did it, one of them’ll turn on the others.”
    “Froze her,” Greave said, marveling.
    “Yeah,” Lucas said, looking around off the roof at the city. He could see just a sliver of the Mississippi in the distance. “It makes your blood run cold, doesn’t it?”
     
     
     
    LUCAS STOPPED TO talk to Roux, and told her about the batsicle. “Is your butt saved?”
    “For the time being,” she said. She sounded unhappy. “But you know . . .”
    “What?”
    She had a half-inch-thick sheaf of paper in her hands. “We’ve had seven bank robberies in the last two