Night Prey

was hot and spooky-quiet. I didn’t hear a thing.”
    “So you think she just died?”

    Wood swallowed twice, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Jeez. I don’t know. If you know Cherry, you gotta think . . . Jeez.”
     
     
     
    IN THE STREET, Lucas and Greave watched a small girl ride down the sidewalk on a tiny bicycle, fall down, pick it up, start over, and fall down again. “She needs somebody to run behind her,” Greave said.
    Lucas grunted. “Doesn’t everybody?”
    “Big philosopher, huh?”
    Lucas said, “Wood and Carter shared a wall.”
    “Yes.”
    “Have you looked at Wood?”
    “Yeah. He thinks newspaper comics are too violent.”
    “But there might be something there. What can you do with a shared wall? Stick a needle through it, pump in some gas or something?”
    “Hey. Davenport. There’s no toxicology,” Greave said with asperity. “ There’s no fuckin’ toxicology. You look up toxicology in the dictionary, and there’s a picture of the old lady and it says, ‘Not Her.’ ”
    “Yeah, yeah. . . .”
    “She wasn’t poisoned, gassed, stabbed, shot, strangled, beaten to death . . . what else is there?”
    “How about electrocuted?” Lucas suggested.
    “Hmph. How’d they do it?”
    “I don’t know. Hook some wires up to her bed, lead them out under a door, and when she gets in bed, zap, and then they pull the wires out.”
    “Pardon me while I snicker,” Greave said.
    Lucas looked back at the apartment building. “Let me think about it some more.”
    “But Cherry did it?”
    “Yup.” They looked down the lawn. Cherry was at the other end, kneeling over a quiet lawn mower, fiddling, watching them. “You can take it to the bank.”
     
     
     
    LUCAS GLANCED AT his watch as they got back to the car: they’d been at the apartments for almost an hour. “Connell’s gonna tear me up,” he said.
    “Ah, she’s a bite in the ass,” Greave said.
    They bumped into Mae Heinz in the parking ramp, getting into her car. Lucas beeped the horn, called out, “How’d it go?”
    Heinz came over. “That woman, Officer Connell . . . she’s pretty intense.”
    “Yes. She is.”
    “We got one of those drawings, but . . .”
    “What?”
    Heinz shook her head. “I don’t know whether it’s my drawing or hers. The thing is, it’s too specific. I can mostly remember the guy with the beard, but now we’ve got this whole picture, and I don’t know if it’s right or not. I mean, it seems right, but I’m not sure I’m really remembering it, or if it’s just because we tried out so many different pictures.”
    “Did you look at our picture files, the mugs . . . ?”
    “No, not yet. I’ve got to get my kid at day care. But I’m coming back tonight. Officer Connell is going to meet me.”
     
     
     
    CONNELL WAS WAITING in Lucas’s office. “God, where’ve you been?”
    “Detour,” Lucas said. “Different case.”
    Connell’s eyes narrowed. “Greave, huh? Told you.” She gave Lucas a sheet of paper. “This is him. This is the guy.”
    Lucas unfolded the paper and looked at it. The face that looked back was generally square, with a dark, tight beard, small eyes, and hard, triangular nose. The hair was medium length and dark.
    “We gotta feed it to the TV. We don’t have to say we’re looking for a serial killer, just that we’re looking for this guy on the Wannemaker case,” Connell said.
    “Let’s hold off on that for a bit,” Lucas said. “Why don’t we take this around to the other people who were in the store and get it confirmed. Maybe ship it out to Madison, and anywhere else the guy might have been seen.”
    “We gotta get it out,” Connell objected. “People gotta be warned.”
    “Take it easy,” Lucas said. “Make the checks first.”
    “Give me one good reason.”
    “Because we haven’t gotten anything unique to this guy,” Lucas said. “If we wind up in court with a long circumstantial case, I don’t want the defense to pull out this picture, hold it up by our guy, and say, ‘See—he doesn’t look anything like this.’ That’s why.”
    Connell pulled at her lip, then nodded. “I’ll check with people tonight. I’ll get every one of them.”

9
    KOOP WAS AT Two Guy’s, working his quads. The only other patron was a woman who’d worked herself to exhaustion, and now sat, legs apart, on a bent-up folding chair by the Coke machine, drinking Gatorade, head down, her sweat-soaked hair dangling almost to the floor.
    Muscle chicks