Secret Prey

Frank that you need me to work on this, and I’d get another neat case to work on. Now, we’d sorta have to jump through our asses.’’
    ‘‘Nothing happening yet, anyway,’’ he said.
    ‘‘Well, if you’re going out to shoot somebody, call me,’’ she said, as she went out the door.
    ‘‘Do that.’’
    THREE CALLS: TO PRUDENTIAL, TO THE DOCTOR WHO signed the death certificate, and to the funeral home that handled Amelia Lamb’s body.
    Prudential was cooperative, but the right guy would have to get back.
    The doctor was cooperative, but had no memory of the event at all. ‘‘I was doing a surgical residency and working part-time as an emergency room doc,’’ he said. ‘‘I worked emergency rooms for seven years and must’ve signed five hundred of those things. Maybe a thousand. I’m sorry, but I just don’t remember.’’
    The funeral home was confused, but a woman with a quavery, elderly voice finally found the record: Amelia Lamb had been cremated.
    ‘‘Shit,’’ Lucas said aloud.
    ‘‘I beg your pardon?’’
    THE PRUDENTIAL GUY CALLED BACK A HALF HOUR later, as Lucas was pulling together records on the murders proposed by Helen Bell, as well as the two proposed by Annette Ingall.
    ‘‘We paid sixty-four hundred dollars on George Lamb, which was not an inconsiderable sum at the time; and then four and a half years later, we paid fifteen thousand on Amelia Lamb. That insurance policy had been in effect only three years, which was probably why we called the hospital on it,’’ the Prudential man said.
    ‘‘Who was beneficiary on the Amelia Lamb policy?’’
    ‘‘Uh, let’s see . . . this is an older form . . . Um, an Audrey Lamb. Apparently her daughter.’’
    ‘‘Not Audrey and Helen?’’
    ‘‘No, just an Audrey.’’
    ‘‘How about on George Lamb?’’
    ‘‘That was . . . Amelia.’’
    ‘‘Huh. Did Amelia Lamb have to take a physical?’’
    ‘‘Um . . . yup. Passed okay.’’
    ‘‘Anything about high blood pressure?’’
    ‘‘Nope. But this form isn’t specific—you’d have to see the original doctor’s report, and that was so long ago . . .’’
    ‘‘Do you have the doc’s name?’’
    ‘‘Yup.’’
    But the doctor was dead. His son, a dentist, said his father’s records had been transferred to other doctors when he gave up his practice, and records not transferred had been stored for ten years, then destroyed.
    ‘‘Shit.’’
    ‘‘I beg your pardon?’’
    LUCAS WENT BACK TO THE RECORDS FOR AN HOUR, and finally came to a push-comes-to-shove point. If Audrey was guilty of all of this, then she must have killed O’Dell. But according to the investigative records, signed off by Franklin and Sloan, she left the building before O’Dell was killed. That was confirmed: she logged out of the building at 10:53. Two people visiting their son in the building, who had logged out after her, confirmed that they had left just as a Roseanne rerun was ending. Nightline ended a couple of minutes before eleven, and they were shown as logging out at eleven, while O’Dell was confirmed killed at 11:02.
    It was possible, of course, that Audrey was a master burglar and that she had some way of getting into a building with a security desk in the lobby. Or that she had somehow obtained a key card for the elevator. But the first of those possibilities seemed laughable, while the second was only barely reasonable—she wouldn’t have had much time to plan the killing of O’Dell, unless the killing was part of a long-range plan.
    He thought about that for a moment. Maybe she did have a long-range plan. Maybe she had access to everybody she might ever need to kill. Then he shook his head. Couldn’t think that way. If she was working off a long-range plan, which had somehow involved getting home keys for all her possible victims, then she was a perfect killer and they were out of luck.
    He glanced at his watch, punched up his computer, and wrote a memo, with copies to Frank Lester, head of the investigative division, and Rose Marie Roux.
    Halfway through, a sheriff’s deputy called from Itasca County. ‘‘You called yesterday about the Baird case?’’
    ‘‘Yeah, thanks for calling back,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘How well do you know the case?’’
    ‘‘I was lead investigator,’’ the deputy said. ‘‘I pretty much know it all.’’
    ‘‘I understand it was a firebombing,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘A Molotov cocktail.’’
    ‘‘Yeah,