Night Prey

shrugged. “I’m not going to sweat them; I’m just gonna ask. Come on.”
    They walked down toward the corner, and Connell asked, “Why can’t I show him the picture? He could give us a confirmation.”
    “I don’t want to contaminate his memory. If we get a sketch out of him, I’d rather have it be what he remembers, not what he saw when you showed him a picture.”
    “Oh.” She thought about it for a minute, then nodded.
    As they reached the corner, the crowd went quiet, and Carrigan pushed right up to it. “Some white dude just cut open a little girl and dumped her body in the bushes back there,” Carrigan said conversationally, without preamble. “A guy named Lawrence Wright saw him. We don’t want to hassle Lawrence, we just want a statement: if anybody’s seen him, or if he’s here?”
    “That girl, black or white?” a woman asked.
    “White,” Lucas said.
    “Why you need to talk to Lawrence? Maybe he didn’t see nothin’.”
    “He saw something,” Carrigan said. “He was right next to this white dude.”
    “The guy is nuts,” Lucas said. “He’s like that guy over in Milwaukee, killed all those boys. This has got nothing to do with nothing, he’s just killing people.”
    A ripple of talk ran through the crowd, and then a woman’s voice said, “Lawrence went to Porter’s.” Somebody else said, “Shush,” and the woman’s voice said, “Shush, your ass, he’s killing little girls, somebody is.”
    “White girls . . . that don’t make no difference . . . still white . . . What’d Lawrence do . . . ?”
    “We better get going,” Carrigan said quietly. “Before somebody runs down to Porter’s and tells Lawrence we’re coming.”
     
     
     
    LUCAS AND CONNELL rode with Carrigan. “Porter’s is an after-hours place down on Twenty-ninth,” Carrigan said. “We oughta get a squad to do some blocking for us.”
    “Wouldn’t hurt,” Lucas said. “The place’d still be open?”
    “Another fifteen minutes or so. He usually closes about five in the summertime.”
    They met the squad four minutes later at a Perkins restaurant parking lot. One patrolman was black, the other white, and Lucas talked to them through the car windows, told them who they were looking for. “Just hold anybody coming out . . . You guys know where it is?”
    “Yeah. We’ll slide right down the alley. As soon as you see us going in, though, you better get in the front.”
    “Let’s do it,” Carrigan said.
    “How bad might this get?” Connell asked.
    Carrigan glanced at her. “Shouldn’t be bad at all. Porter’s is an okay place; Porter goes along. But you know . . .”
    “Yeah. Lucas and I are white.”
    “Better let me go first. Don’t yell at anybody.”
     
     
     
    THEY HESITATED AT the corner, just long enough for the squad to cut behind them, go halfway down the block, then duck into the mouth of the alley. Carrigan rolled up to the front of a 1920s-style four-square house with a wide porch. The porch was empty, but when they climbed out of the car, Lucas could hear a Charles Brown tune floating out through an open window.
    Carrigan led the way up the walk, across the porch. When he went through the door, Lucas and Connell paused a moment, making just a little space, then followed him through.
    The living room of the old house had been turned into a bar; the old parlor had a half-dozen chairs in it, three of them filled. Two men and two women sat around a table in the living room to the left. Everything stopped when Lucas and Connell walked in. The air was layered with tobacco smoke and the smell of whiskey.
    “Mr. Porter,” Carrigan was saying to a bald man behind the bar.
    “What can I do for you gentlemen?” Porter asked, both hands poised on the bar. Porter didn’t have a license, but it wasn’t usually a problem. One of the men at the table moved his chair back an inch, and Lucas looked at him. He stopped moving.
    “One of your patrons saw a suspect in a murder—a white man who killed a white girl and dumped her body up in the park,” Carrigan said, his voice formal, polite. “Guy’s a maniac, and we need to talk to Lawrence Wright about it. Have you seen Lawrence?”
    “I really can’t recall. The name’s not familiar,” Porter said, but his eyes drifted deliberately toward the hall. A door had a hand-lettered sign that said Men.
    “Well, we’ll get out of your way, then,” Carrigan said. “I’ll just take a leak, if you don’t mind.”
    Lucas had