Night Prey

said.
    She put down the paper. “Basically, the kind of chemo I get is poisonous. It knocks down the cancer, but it also knocks down my body,” she said. Her voice was neutral, informed, like a medical commentator on public television. “They can only use it so long before the chemotherapy starts doing too much damage. Then they take me off it, and my body starts recovering from the chemo, but so does the cancer. The cancer gains a little every time. I’ve been on it for two years. I’m down to seven weeks between treatments. I’ve been five. I’m feeling it again.”
    “Lots of pain?”
    She shook her head. “Not yet. I can’t really describe it. It’s a hollow feeling, and a weakness, and then a sickness, like the worst flu in the world. I understand, toward the end, it’ll get painful, when it gets into my bone marrow . . . I expect to opt for other measures before then.”
    “Jesus,” he said. Then: “What are the chances that the chemo will knock it down completely?”
    “It happens,” she said with a brief, ghostly smile. “But not for me.”
    “I don’t think I could handle it,” Lucas said.
    The balcony door was closed, and Lucas moved over toward it, staying six feet back from the glass, and looked out at the park. Nice day. The rain had quit, and the light-blue sky was dappled with fair-weather clouds, cloud shadows skipping across the lake. A woman dying.
    “But the other problem,” Connell said, almost to herself, “besides the key, I mean, is why he hasn’t come up here. Four days. Nothing.”
    Lucas was still thinking about cancer, had to wrench himself back. “You’re talking to yourself,” Lucas said.
    “That’s because I’m going crazy.”
    “You want a pizza?” Lucas asked.
    “I don’t eat pizza. It clogs up your arteries and makes you fat.”
    “What kind don’t you eat?”
    “Pepperoni and mushroom,” Connell said.
    “I’ll get one delivered to the manager. I can run down and get it when it comes in,” he said, yawning again. “This is driving me nuts.”
    “Why doesn’t he come?” Connell asked rhetorically. “Because he knows we’re here.”
    “Maybe we just haven’t waited long enough,” Lucas said.
    Connell continued: “How does he know we’re here? One: he sees us. Two: he hears about us. Okay, if he sees us, how does he know we’re cops? He doesn’t—unless he’s a cop, and he recognizes people coming and going. If he hears about us, how does he hear about us? We’ve been over that.”
    “Pepperoni and mushroom?”
    “No fuckin’ anchovies.”
    “No way.” Lucas picked up the phone, frowned, hung it up, and walked back to the glass door. “Did somebody check the roof on the other side of the street?”
    Connell looked up. “Yeah, but Jensen was right. It’s below the level of her window. She doesn’t even bother to pull the drapes.”
    “It’s not below the level of the air-conditioner housing,” Lucas said. “C’mere. Look at this.”
    Connell stood up and looked. “There’s no way to get up on it.”
    “He’s a cat burglar,” Lucas said. “And if he got up on it, he’d be looking right into the apartment. Who went over the roof?”
    “Skoorag—but he just strolled around the roof. I saw him do it. Said there wasn’t anything up there.”
    “We ought to take a look,” Lucas said.
    Connell looked at her watch. “Greave and O’Brien’ll be here in an hour. We could go over then.”
     
     
     
    O’BRIEN CARRIED A brown paper sack with a magazine inside, and tried to hide it from Connell. Greave said, “I’ve been thinking: how about if we picked up all three of them, the brothers and Cherry, separate them, tell them we’ve got a break, and tell them the first one who talks gets immunity.”
    Lucas grinned but shook his head. “You’re thinking right, but you’ve got to have something. If you don’t, they’ll either tell you to go fuck yourself, or, which is worse, the guy who actually did the killing is the one who talks. He walks, and Roux hangs you out the window by your nuts. So, you gotta get something.”
    “I’ve gotten something,” Greave said.
    “What?”
    “I’ve gotten desperate.”
     
     
     
    “O’BRIEN HAD A Penthouse ,” Connell said.
    “It’s a very boring job,” Lucas said mildly.
    “Think about this,” Connell said. “What if women brought porno magazines to work, pictures of men with huge penises? And the women sat there and looked at the pictures, then looked at