Night Prey

roust them.”
    “Be a little careful,” Del said.
    “When?” Connell asked.
    “Tomorrow,” Lucas said. “I’ll call the sheriff tonight, and we’ll go first thing in the morning.”
    “Driving?”
    Lucas showed a sickly grin. “Driving.”

    LUCAS AND CONNELL agreed to meet at eight o’clock for the drive up north. “I’ll check the medical examiner on Marcy Lane and see if anything’s come up,” she said. “I’ll get everything I can on the Hillerods. The whole file.”
    Lucas stopped at homicide to check with Greave, but was told he was out. Another cop said, “He’s down with that thing at Eisenhower Docks. He should be back by now.”
    From his office, Lucas called Lincoln County Sheriff Sheldon Carr at Grant, Wisconsin; touched the scar on his neck as Carr picked up the phone. Carr had been there when Lucas was shot by the child.
    “Lucas, how are things?” Carr was hardy and country and smart. “You comin’ up to fish? Is Weather pregnant yet?”
    “Not yet, Shelly. We’ll let you know . . . Listen, I gotta talk to George Beneteau over in Carren County. Do you know him?”
    “George? Sure. He’s okay. Should I give him a call?”
    “If you would. I’ll call him later on and talk. I’m going up there tomorrow to look at a guy involved with the Seeds.”
    “Ah, those assholes,” Carr said with disgust. “They used to be around here, you know. We ran them off.”
    “Yeah, well, we’re bumping into them down here now. I would appreciate an introduction, though.”
    “I’ll call him right now. I’ll tell him to expect to hear from you,” Carr said. “You take it easy with those bad boys.”
     
     
     
    GREAVE CAME IN with a kid. The kid was wearing a black-and-white-striped French fisherman’s T-shirt, dirty jeans, and stepped-on white sneaks. He had a pound of dirty-blond hair stuck up under a long-billed red Woody Woodpecker cap.
    “This is Greg,” Greave said, throwing a thumb at the kid. “He does handyman work around the apartments.”
    Lucas nodded.
    “Don’t tell nobody you talked to me or they’ll fire my ass,” Greg said to Lucas. “I need the job.”
    “Greg says that the day before the old lady died, the air-conditioning went out and it got really hot in the apartments. He and Cherry spent the whole day down the basement, taking things apart. He says it was so hot, almost everybody left their windows and even their doors open.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yeah.” Greave prodded the kid. “Tell him.”
    “They did,” the kid said. “It was the first real hot day of the year.”
    “So maybe they could have gotten in the old lady’s apartment,” Greave said. “Come in with a ladder and figured out some way to drop the window, locked. We know it couldn’t be the door.”
    “What’d they do to her after they came in the window?”
    “They smothered her.”
    “The medical examiner could determine that. And how do you drop a window, locked? Did you try it?”
    “I haven’t got it figured out yet,” Greave said.
    “We tried it a lot,” the kid said to Lucas; Greave looked at him in exasperation. “Ain’t no way.”
    “Maybe there’s some way,” Greave said defensively. “Remember, Cherry’s the maintenance man, he’d know tricks.”
    “Woodworking tricks? Listen, Cherry’s no smarter than you are,” Lucas said. “If he could figure out a way to do it, you could. Whatever it was, must’ve been quiet. The neighbor didn’t hear a thing. He said it was spooky-quiet.”
    “I thought maybe you could come down and take a look,” Greave said. “Figure something out.”
    “I don’t have the time,” Lucas said, shaking his head. “But if you can figure a way to get them in and out . . . but even then, you’d have to figure out what killed her. It wasn’t smothering.”
    “They must’ve poisoned her,” Greave said. “You know how jockeys dope up horses and still pass the drug tests? That must be what they did—they went out and got some undetectable poison, put it in her booze, and she croaked.”
    “No toxicology,” Lucas said.
    “I know that. That’s the whole point. It’s undetectable, see?”
    “No,” said Lucas.
    “That’s gotta be it,” Greave said.
    Lucas grinned at him. “If they did, then you should lie down, put a cold rag on your forehead, and relax, ’cause you’re never gonna convict anybody on the vanishing-drug theory.”
    “Maybe,” Greave said. “But I’ll tell you something else I figured out: it’s