Night Prey

television was tuned to CNN, and Lucas watched it without seeing it, brooding. “Nothing at all?” she asked.
    “Not a thing,” he said. He didn’t look at her, just pulled at his lip and stared at the tube. He was tired, his face gray. “Three days. The media’s killing us.”
    “I wouldn’t worry so much about the media, if I were you.”
    Now he turned his head. “That’s because you don’t have to worry. You guys bury your mistakes,” Lucas said. He grinned when he said it, but it wasn’t a pleasant smile.
    “I’m serious. I don’t understand. . . .”
    “The media’s like a fever,” Lucas explained. “Heat starts to build up. The people out in the neighborhoods get scared, and they start calling their city councilmen. The councilmen panic—that’s what politicians do, basically, panic—and they start calling the mayor. The mayor calls the chief. The chief is a politician who is appointed by the mayor, so she panics. And the shit flows downhill.”
    “I don’t understand all the panic. You’re doing everything you can.”
    “You have to look at Davenport’s first rule of how the world really works,” Lucas said.
    “I don’t think I’ve heard that one,” Weather said.
    “It’s simple,” he said. “A politician will never, ever, get a better job when he’s out of office.”
    “That’s it?”
    “That’s it. That explains everything. They’re desperate to hang on to their jobs. That’s why they panic. They lose the election, it’s back to the car wash.”
    After a moment of silence, Weather asked, “How’s Connell?”
    “Not good,” Lucas said.
     
     
     
    CONNELL’ S FACIA LSKIN was stretched, taut; dark smudges hung under her eyes, her hair was perpetually disarranged, as though she’d been sticking her fingers into an electric outlet.
    “Something’s wrong,” she said. “Maybe the guy knows we’re here. Maybe Jensen was imagining it.”
    “Maybe,” Lucas said. They waited in Jensen’s living room, stacks of newspapers and magazines by their feet. A Walkman sat on a coffee table. A television was set up in the second bedroom, but they couldn’t listen to the stereo for fear that it would be heard in the hallway. “It sure felt good, though.”
    “I know . . . but you know what maybe it could be?” Connell had a foot-high stack of paper next to her hand, profiles and interviews with apartment employees, residents of Jensen’s floor, and everyone else in the building with a criminal record. She had been pawing through it compulsively. “It could be, like, a relative of somebody who works here. And whoever works here goes home and lets it slip that we’re in here.”
    Lucas said, “The keys are a big question. There are any number of ways that a cat burglar could get one key, but two keys—that’s a problem.”
    “Gotta be an employee.”
    “Could be a valet service at a restaurant,” he said. “I’ve known valets who worked with cat burglars. You see the car come in, you get the plate number, and from that, you can get an address and you’ve got the key.”
    “She said she hadn’t used a valet since she got the new key,” Connell said.
    “Maybe she forgot. Maybe it’s something so routine that she doesn’t remember it.”
    “I bet it’s somebody at her office—somebody with access to her purse. You know, like one of the messenger kids, somebody who can go in and out of her office without being noticed. Grab the key, copy it. . . .”
    “But that’s another problem,” Lucas said. “You’ve got to have some knowledge to copy it, and a source of blanks.”
    “So it’s a guy working with a cat burglar. The burglar supplies the knowledge, the kid supplies the access.”
    “That’s one way that it works,” Lucas admitted. “But nobody in her office seems like a good bet.”
    “A boyfriend of somebody in the office; a secretary picks up the key, lays it off. . . .”
    Lucas stood up, yawned, wandered around the apartment, stopped to look at a framed black-and-white photograph. It wasn’t much, a flower in a roundish pot, a stairway in the background. Lucas didn’t know much about art, but this felt like it. A tiny penciled signature said Andre something, something with a K. He yawned again and rubbed the back of his neck and looked at Connell going through the paper.
    “How’d you feel this morning?”
    She looked up. “Hollow. Empty.”
    “I don’t understand how it works, the whole chemotherapy thing,” Lucas