Night Prey

gotta have something to do with the booze. The old lady takes booze and a couple of sleeping pills. That’s the most noticeable thing she did, far as we know. Then she’s murdered. That shit had to be poisoned. Somehow.”
    “Maybe she masturbated at night, and it put a heavy strain on her heart and she croaked,” Lucas said.
    “I thought of that,” Greave said.
    “You did?” Lucas started to laugh.
    “But how does that explain the fact that Cherry did it?”
    Lucas stopped laughing. Cherry had done it. “You got me there,” he said. He looked at the kid. “Do you think Cherry did it?”
    “He could do it,” the kid said. “He’s a mean sonofabitch. There was a little dog from across the street, belonged to this old couple, and he’d come over and poop on the lawn, and Ray caught it with a rope and strangled it. I seen him do it.”
    Greave said, “See?”
    “I know he’s mean,” Lucas said. Then, to Greave: “Connell and I are headed up north tomorrow, checking on a guy.”
    “Hey, I’m sorry, man,” Greave said. “I know I’m not helping you much. I’ll do whatever you want.”
    “Anderson’s doing a computer run: known sex offenders against trucks. Why don’t you start pulling records, looking for any similarities in old charges, anything that refers to the motorcycle gang called the Bad Seeds. Or any motorcycle gang, for that matter. Flag anything that’s even a remote possibility.”
     
     
     
    THE PHONE WAS ringing when Lucas got home: Weather. “I’ll be a while,” she said.
    “What happened?” He was annoyed. No. He was jealous.
    “A kid chopped his thumb off in a paper cutter at school. We’re trying to stick it back on.” She was both excited and tired, the words stumbling over each other.
    “A tough one?”
    “Lucas, we took two hours trying to find a decent artery and get it hooked up, and George is dissecting out a vein right now. Christ, they’re so small, they’re like tissue paper, but if we get it back on, we’ll give the kid his hand back . . . I gotta go.”
    “You’ll be really late?”
    “I’m here for another two hours, if the vein works,” she said. “If it doesn’t, we’ll have to go for another one. That’d be late.”
    “See you then,” he said.
     
     
     
    LUCAS HAD BEEN in love before, but with Weather, it was different. Everything was tilted, a little out of control. He might be overcommitting himself, he thought. On the other hand, there was a passion that he hadn’t experienced before. . . .
    And she made him happy.
    Lucas sometimes found himself laughing aloud just at the thought of her. That hadn’t happened before. And the house in the evening felt empty without her.
    He sat at his desk, writing checks for household bills. When he finished, he dropped the stamped envelopes in a basket on an antique table by the front door. The antique was the first thing they’d bought together.
    “Jesus.” He rubbed his nose. He was in deep. But the idea of one single woman, for the rest of time . . .

15
    SARA JENSEN WORKED at Raider-Garrote, a stockbrokerage in the Exchange Building. The office entry was glass, and on the other side of the glass was a seating area where investors could sit and watch the numbers from the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ scroll across a scoreboard. Few people actually went inside. Most of them—thin white guys with glasses, briefcases, gray suits, and thinning hair—stood mouth-open in the skyway until their number came up, then scurried away, muttering.
    Koop loitered with them, hands in pockets, his look changing daily. One day it was jeans, white T-shirt, sneakers, and a ball cap; the next day it was long-sleeved shirt, khakis, and loafers.
    Through the window, over the heads of the few people in the display area, past the rows of white-shirted men and well-dressed women who sat peering at computer terminals and talking on telephones, in a separate large office, Jensen worked alone.
    Her office door was usually open, but few people went in. She wore a telephone headset most of the day. She often talked and read a newspaper at the same time. A half-dozen different computer terminals lined a shelf behind her desk, and every once in a while she’d poke one, watch the screen; occasionally, she’d rip paper out of a computer printer, look at it, or stuff it in her briefcase.
    Koop had no idea what she was doing. At first, he thought she might be some kind of super secretary. But she never fetched