Rules of Prey

month, gave them two months. They were happy to get it.”
    “Funny. That’s a pretty rich neighborhood,” Lucas said.
    “I was talking to them, they’re not doing so good. The old man said they lived too long. They retired back in the sixties,both had pensions, they figured they were set for life. Then the inflation came along. Everything went up. Taxes, everything. They’re barely keeping their heads above water.”
    “Hmmp. Which one are we going to?”
    “The architect’s. We park on the other side of the creek and walk across a bridge. We come up behind a row of houses along the water, then into the back of his house. Keeps us off the street in front of the place.”
    The architect’s house was large and well-kept, polished wood and Oriental rugs, artifacts of steel and bronze, beautifully executed black-and-white etchings and drypoints hung on the eggshell walls. The vice cop led the way up four flights of stairs into a dimly lit, unfinished attic space. Two cops sat on soft chairs, a telephone by their feet, binoculars and a spotting scope between them. A mattress lay on the floor to one side of the room. Beside it, a boombox played easy-listening music.
    “How you doing?” one of the cops asked. The other one nodded.
    “Anything going on?” Lucas asked.
    “Guy walked his dog.”
    Lucas walked up to the window and looked out. The window had been covered from the inside with a thin, shiny plastic film. From the street, the window would appear to be transparent, the space behind it unoccupied.
    “She home?”
    “Not yet. She does the ten-o’clock news, cleans up, usually goes out for something to eat. Then she comes home, unless she has a date. For the next couple of weeks, she’s coming straight home.”
    Lucas sat down on the mattress. “I think—I’m not sure—but I think if he hits her, he’ll come after dark but before midnight. He’s careful. He won’t want to walk around at a time when people will notice him, but he’ll want the dark to hide his face. I expect he’ll try to get in the house while she’s gone and jump her when she comes back. That’s the way he did it with Ruiz. The other possibility would be to catch her right at the door as she’s going in. Sap her, push her rightinside. If he did it right, it would look like he was meeting her at the door.”
    “We thought he might try some kind of con,” said one of the surveillance cops. “You know, go up to the door, say he’s a messenger from the station or something. Get her to open the door.”
    “It’s a possibility,” Lucas said. “I still like the idea—”
    “Here she comes,” said the cop at the window.
    Lucas got up and half-crawled, half-walked to the window and looked out. A red Toyota sports car pulled up to the curb directly in front of McGowan’s house, and a moment later she got out, carrying a shopping bag. She self-consciously didn’t look around and marched stiffly up to the house, unlocked the door, and went inside.
    “In,” said the first surveillance cop. The second shone a miniature flashlight on his wristwatch and counted. Thirty seconds. A minute. A minute and a half. A minute forty-five.
    The phone rang and the first surveillance cop picked it up.
    “Miss McGowan? Okay? Good. But keep the beeper on until you go to bed, okay? Have a good night.”
     
    “You coming up every night?” Henley asked casually.
    “Most nights, midweek. For three hours or so, nine to midnight or one o’clock, like that,” Lucas said.
    “You do it for too long, you wind up brain dead.”
    “And if the surveillance doesn’t do it, this fuckin’ elevator music will,” Lucas said. The easy-listening music still oozed from the boombox.
    One of the surveillance cops grinned and nodded at his partner. “Compromise,” he said. “I like rock, he can’t stand it. He likes country and I won’t listen to all that hayseed hillbilly tub-thumping. So we compromised.”
    “Could be worse,” Henley chipped in.
    “Not possible,” Lucas said.
    “Ever listen to New Age?”
    “You win,” Lucas conceded. “It could be worse.”
    • • •
    “Oh, God damn, folks, she’s doing it again.”
    “What?” Lucas crawled off the mattress toward the window.
    “We thought maybe she didn’t realize there’s a crack in the curtains,” the cop said. His partner had his binoculars fixed on McGowan’s house and said, “C’mon, babee.” Lucas nudged the first cop away from the spotting scope and peered