Night Prey

they’d throw in some new drywall and a bunch of spackling compound and paint, cut down the cupboards, stick in some new low-rider stoves and refrigerators, and sell the place to the city as public housing for the handicapped. They had somebody juiced: the city council was hot to go. The Joyces figured to turn a million and a half on the deal. But there was a fly in the ointment.”
    The teacher, Charmagne Carter, and a dozen other older tenants had been given long-term leases on their apartments by the last manager of the building before the Joyces bought it, Greave said. The manager knew he’d lose his job in the sale, and apparently made the leases as a quirky kind of revenge. The city wouldn’t take the building with the long-term leases in effect. The Joyces bought out a few of the leases, and sued the people who wouldn’t sell. The district court upheld the leases.
    “The leases are $500 a month for fifteen years plus a two-percent rent increase per year, and that’s that. They’re great apartments for the price, and the price doesn’t even keep up with inflation,” Greave said. “That’s why these people didn’t want to leave. But they might’ve anyway, because the Joyces gave them a lot of shit. But this old lady wasn’t intimidated, and she held them all together. Then she turned up dead.”
    “Ah.”
    “Last week, she doesn’t make it to school,” Greave continued. “The principal calls, no answer. A cop goes by for a look, can’t get the door open—it’s locked from the inside and there’s no answer on the phone. They finally take the door down, the alarms go off, and there she is, dead in her bed. George Joyce is dabbing the tears out of his eyes and looking like the cat that ate the canary. We figured they killed her.”
    “Autopsy?”
    “Yup. Not a mark on her. The toxicology reports showed just enough sedative for a couple of sleeping pills, which she had a prescription for. There was a beer bottle and a glass on her nightstand, but she’d apparently metabolized the alcohol because there wasn’t any in her blood. Her daughter said she had long-term insomnia, and she’d wash down a couple of sleeping pills with a beer, read until she got sleepy, and then take a leak and go to bed. And that’s exactly what it looks like she did. The docs say her heart stopped. Period. End of story.”
    Lucas shrugged. “It happens.”
    “No history of heart problems in her family. Cleared a physical in February, no problems except the insomnia and she’s too thin—but being underweight goes against the heart thing.”
    “Still, it happens,” Lucas said. “People drop dead.”
    Greave shook his head. “When the Joyces were running the flops, they had a guy whose job it was to keep things orderly. They brought him over to run the apartments. Old friend of yours; you busted him three or four times, according to the NCIC. Remember Ray Cherry?”
    “Cherry? Jesus. He is an asshole. Used to box Golden Gloves when he was a kid. . . .” Lucas scratched the side of his jaw, thinking. “That’s a nasty bunch you got there. Jeez.”
    “So what do I do? I got nothing.”
    “Get a cattle prod and a dark basement. Cherry’d talk after a while.” Lucas grinned through his teeth, and Greave almost visibly shrank from him.
    “You’re not serious.”
    “Mmm. I guess not,” Lucas said. Then, brightening: “Maybe she was stabbed with an icicle.”
    “What?”
    “Let me think about it,” Lucas said.
     
     
     
    THERE WERE TWO landfills in Dakota County. Adhering to Murphy’s Law, they went to the wrong one first, then shifted down a series of blacktopped back roads to the correct one. For the last half-mile, they were pinched between two lumbering garbage trucks, gone overripe in the freshening summer.
    “Office,” Greave said, pointing off to the left. He dabbed at the front of his lavender suit, as though he were trying to whisk away the smell of rotten fruit.
    The dump office was a tiny brick building with a large plate-glass window, overlooking a set of truck scales and the lines of garbage haulers rumbling out to the edge of the raw yellow earth of the landfill. Lucas swung that way, dumped the Porsche in a corner of the lot.
    Inside the building, a Formica-topped counter separated the front of the office from the back. A fat guy in a green T-shirt sat at metal desk behind the counter, an unlit cigar in his mouth. He was complaining into a telephone and picking penny-sized flakes