Night Prey

you, then looked at the picture. Wouldn’t you find that just a little demeaning?”
    “Not me, personally,” Lucas said, face straight. “I’d just see it as another career opportunity.”
    “Goddamn you, Davenport, you always weasel away.”
    “Not always,” Lucas said. “But I do have a well-developed sense of when to weasel.” Then, as they crossed the street, “This is where the woman was killed and the guy fucked up.”
    They climbed the steps and buzzed the manager. A moment later, a door opened in the lobby and a middle-aged woman looked out. Her hair was not quite blue. Lucas held up his badge, and she let him in.
    “I’ll get somebody to let you up on the roof,” the woman said when Lucas explained what they wanted. “That was awful, that poor guy stabbed.”
    “Were you here when those two people were attacked outside?”
    “No, nobody was here. Except tenants, I mean,” she said.
    “I understand the guy was between the inner and outer doors when he was attacked.”
    The woman nodded. “One more second and he would have been inside. His key was in the lock.”
    “Sonofabitch,” Lucas said. To Connell: “If somebody wanted to get a key and cover what they were doing . . . The whole attack didn’t make sense, so they said gang kids did it. Trouble is, the gang unit hasn’t heard a thing from the gangs. And they should have heard.”
     
     
     
    THE JANITOR’S NAME was Clark, and he opened the door to the roof and blocked it with an empty Liquid Plumber bottle. Lucas walked across the gravel-and-tar-paper roof. Greave and O’Brien were standing in Jensen’s apartment, visible from the shoulders up.
    “Can’t see much from here,” Lucas said. He turned to the air-conditioner housing.
    “It looks high enough,” Connell said. They walked around it: it was a gray cube, with three featureless metal faces. A locked steel service hatch, and a warranty sticker with a service number, were the only items on the fourth side. There was no access to the top of the cube.
    “I can get a stepladder,” Clark offered.
    “Why don’t you just give me a boost,” Lucas said. He slipped out of his shoes and jacket, and Clark webbed his fingers together. Lucas put his foot in the other man’s hands and stepped up. When his shoulders were over the edge of the housing, he pushed himself up with his hands.
    The first thing he saw were the cigarette butts, forty or fifty of them, water-stained, filterless. “Oh, Christ.” One butt was fresh, and he duckwalked over to it, peered at it.
    “What?” Connell called.
    “About a million cigarette butts.”
    “Are you serious? What kind?”
    Lucas duckwalked back to the edge, peered down, and said, “Unfiltered Camels, each and every one.”
    Connell looked across the street. “Can you see in the apartment?”
    “I can see O’Brien’s shoes,” Lucas said.
    “The sonofabitch knew ,” Connell cried. “He was up here, he looked in, he saw us. We were this fuckin’ close. ”
     
     
     
    THE CRIME-SCENE TECH lifted the single fresh Camel with a pair of tweezers, put it in a bag, and passed it down. “We can try,” he said to Lucas, “but I wouldn’t count on much. Sometimes you get a little skin stuck to the butts, sometimes enough to do a DNA or at least get a blood type, but these have been out here awhile.” He shrugged. “We’ll try, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.”
    “What’re the chances of DNA?” Connell demanded.
    He shrugged. “Like I said, we’ll try.”
    Connell looked at Lucas. “We’ve had cold matches on DNA.”
    “Yeah—two,” Lucas said.
    “We gotta make a run at it,” she said.
    “Sure.” He looked across the street. Sloan waved. “We’ll put a night-vision scope over there, in case he comes back. Goddamnit. I hope we haven’t scared him completely.”
    “If we haven’t, he’s nuts,” Connell said.
    “We know he’s nuts,” Lucas answered. “But I’m afraid that if he has seen us, we’re frustrating the hell out of him. I hope he doesn’t go for another. I hope he comes in first. . . .”

25
    JOHN POSEY’S HOUSE was a three-level affair, like a white-brick-and-cedar layer cake, overlooking a backyard duck pond rimmed by weeping willows. From a street that ran at a ninety-degree angle to Posey’s street, Koop could see the back of the house. Two separate balconies overlooked the pond, one above the other, slightly offset.
    A security-system warning sign was stuck in the front yard, by