Night Prey

“I don’t know,” she said after a minute. “Maybe, if I saw an actual picture. I can remember the beard and the shoulders. His beard looked sort of funny. Short, but really dense, like fur . . . Kind of unpleasant, I thought. Maybe fake. I can’t remember much about his face. Knobby, I think.”
    “Dark beard? Light?”
    “Mmm . . . dark. Kind of medium, really. Pretty average hair, I think . . . brown.”
    “All right,” Lucas said. “Let’s nail this down. And let’s get you with an artist. Do you have time to come to Minneapolis?”
    “Sure. Right now? Let me tell my boss.”
    As the woman went to talk to her boss about leaving, Connell caught Lucas’s sleeve. “Gotta be him. Smokes, arrives after the talk, then leaves right away. Wannemaker is lingering after the talk, but suddenly leaves, like somebody showed up.”
    “Wouldn’t count on it,” Lucas said. But he was counting on it. He felt it, just a sniff of the killer, just a whiff of the track. “We got to put her through the sex files.”
    The woman came back, animated. “Let’s go. I’ll follow you over.”
     
     
     
    GREAVE WANTED TO stop at the apartment complex so Lucas could look at the locked-room mystery. “C’mon, man, it’s twenty fuckin’ minutes. We’ll be back before she’s done with the artist,” he said. A pleading note entered his voice. “C’mon, man, this is killing me.”
    Lucas glanced at him, hands clutched, the too-hip suit. He sighed and said, “All right. Twenty minutes.”
    They took I-94 back to Minneapolis, but turned south instead of north toward City Hall. Greave directed him through a web of streets to a fifties-era mid-rise concrete building with a hand-carved natural-wood sign on the narrow front lawn that had a loon on top and the name “Eisenhower Docks” beneath the bird. A fat man pushed a mower down the lawn away from them, leaving behind the smell of gas and cheap cigar.
    “Eisenhower Docks?” Lucas said as they got out.
    “If you stand on the roof you can see the river,” Greave said. “And they figured ‘Eisenhower’ makes old people feel good.”
    The man pushing the lawn mower made a turn at the end of the lawn and started back; Lucas recognized Ray Cherry, forty pounds heavier than he’d been when he’d fought in Golden Gloves tournaments in the sixties. Most of the weight had gone to his gut, which hung over beltless Oshkosh jeans. His face had gone from square to blocky, and a half-dozen folds of fat rolled down the back of his neck to his shoulders. His T-shirt was soaked with sweat. He saw Davenport and Greave, pushed the lawn mower up to their feet, and killed the engine.
    “What’re you doing, Davenport?”
    “Lookin’ around, Ray,” Lucas said, smiling. “How’ve you been? You got fat.”
    “Y’ain’t a cop no more, so get the fuck off my property.”
    “I’m back on the force, Ray,” Lucas said, still smiling. Seeing Ray made him happy. “You oughta read the papers. Deputy chief in charge of finding out how you killed this old lady.”
    A look crossed Cherry’s face, a quick shadow, and Lucas recognized it, had seen it six or seven hundred or a thousand times: Cherry had done it. Cherry wiped the expression away, tried a look of confusion, took a soiled rag out of his pocket, and blew his nose. “Bullshit,” he said finally.
    “Gonna get you, Ray,” Lucas said; the smile stayed but his voice had gone cold. “Gonna get the Joyces, too. Gonna put you in Stillwater Prison. You must be close to fifty, Ray. First-degree murder’ll get you . . . shit, they just changed the law. Tough luck. You’ll be better’n eighty before you get out.”
    “Fuck you, Davenport,” Cherry said. He fired up the mower.
    “Come and talk to me, Ray,” Lucas said over the engine noise. “The Joyces’ll sell you out the minute they think it’ll get them a break. You know that. Come and talk, and maybe we can do a deal.”
    “Fuck you,” Cherry said, and he mowed on down the yard.
    “Lovely fellow,” Greave said in a fake English accent.
    “He did it,” Lucas said. He turned to Greave and Greave took a step back: Lucas’s face was like a block of stone.
    “Huh?”
    “He killed her. Let’s see her apartment.”
    Lucas started for the apartment door, and Greave trotted after him. “Hey, wait a minute, wait a minute. . . .”
     
     
     
    THERE WERE A thousand books in the apartment, along with a rolled-up Oriental carpet tied with brown twine, and