Night Prey

fifteen cardboard cartons from U-Haul, still flat. A harried middle-aged woman sat on a piano bench, a handkerchief around her head; her face was wind- and sunburned, like a gardener’s, and was touched with grief. Charmagne Carter’s daughter, Emily.
    “. . . Soon as they said we could take it out. If we don’t, we have to keep paying rent,” she told Greave. She looked around. “I don’t know what to do with the books. I’d like to keep them, but there’re so many.”
    Lucas had been looking at the books: American literature, poetry, essays, history. Works on feminism, arranged in a way that suggested they were a conscious collection rather than a reading selection. “I could take some of them off your hands,” he said. “I mean, if you’d like to name a price. I’d take the poetry.”
    “Well, what do you think?” Carter asked, as Greave watched him curiously.
    “There are . . .” He counted quickly. “. . . thirty-seven volumes, mostly paper. I don’t think any of them are particularly rare. How about a hundred bucks?”
    “Let me look through them. I’ll give you a call.”
    “Sure.” He turned away from the books, more fully toward her. “Was your mother depressed or anything?”
    “If you’re asking if she committed suicide, she didn’t. She wouldn’t give the Joyces the pleasure, for one thing. But basically, she liked her life,” Carter said. She became more animated as she remembered. “We had dinner the night before and she was talking about this kid in her class, black kid, she thinks he’ll be a novelist but he needs encouragement . . . No way’d she kill herself. Besides, even if she wanted to, how’d she do it?”
    “Yeah. That’s a question,” Lucas said.
    “The only thing wrong with Mom was her thyroid. She had a little thyroid problem; it was overactive and she had trouble keeping her weight up,” Carter said. “And her insomnia. That might have been part of the thyroid problem.”
    “She was actually ill, then?” Lucas glanced sideways at Greave.
    “No. No, she really wasn’t. Not even bad enough to take pills. She was just way too thin. She weighed ninety-nine pounds and she was five-six. That’s below her ideal weight, but it’s not emaciated or anything.”
    “Okay.”
    “Now that kid isn’t gonna get help, the novelist,” Emily said, and a tear started down her cheek.
    Greave patted her on the shoulder—Officer Friendly—and Lucas turned away, hands in pockets, stepping toward the door. Nothing here.
    “You ought to talk to Bob, next apartment down the hall,” Emily said. She picked up a roll of packaging tape and a box, punched it into a cube. She stripped off a length of tape, and it sounded as if she were tearing a sheet. “He came in just before you got here.”
    “Bob was a friend of Charmagne’s,” Greave explained to Lucas. “He was here the night she died.”
    Lucas nodded. “All right. I’m sorry about your mother.”
    “Thanks. I hope you get those . . . those fuckers,” Emily said, her voice dropping into a hiss.
    “You think she was murdered?”
    “Something happened,” she said.
    BOB WOOD WAS another teacher, general science at Central in St. Paul. He was thin, balding, worried.
    “We’ll all go, now that Charmagne’s gone. The city’s going to give us some moving money, but I don’t know. Prices are terrible.”
    “Did you hear anything that night? Anything?”
    “Nope. I saw her about ten o’clock; we were taking our aluminum cans down for recycling and we came up in the elevator together. She was going off to bed right then.”
    “Wasn’t depressed. . . .”
    “No, no, she was pretty upbeat,” Wood said. “I’ll tell you something I told the other policemen: when she closed the door, I heard the lock snap shut. You could only throw the bolt from inside, and you had to do it with a key. I know, because when she got it, she was worried about being trapped inside by a fire. But then Cherry scared her one day—just looked at her, I guess, and scared her—and she started locking the door. I was here when they beat it down. They had to take a piece of the wall with it. They painted, but you can kind of see the outline there.”
    The wall showed the faint dishing of a plaster patch. Lucas touched it and shook his head.
    “If anything had happened in there, I would have heard it,” Wood said. “We share a bedroom wall, and the air-conditioning had been out for a couple of days. There was no noise. It