Secret Prey

all of them . . . I’d guess a few are missing. The problem is figuring out how the McDonalds might have gotten one.’’
    ‘‘Huh. If it was all arranged ahead of time, we’re fucked anyway. What if she had to do it off the top of her head? Maybe a day’s thought?’’
    Sloan shrugged. ‘‘You figure it out.’’
    They got off on O’Dell’s floor, and Lucas stood with his back to the door of her apartment. ‘‘She went down first, then she had to get back up to kill her.’’
    ‘‘Right.’’
    Lucas looked at the elevator: ‘‘Even if she’s got a key card, there’s a problem coming back up to kill O’Dell. She can’t guarantee the guard won’t look at the monitor out of sheer boredom, if he sees movement on the screen. If he does, she’s dead meat. He’s just seen her leave, and now she’s going up to kill somebody. Therefore . . .’’
    ‘‘She doesn’t use the elevator, she uses the stairwell,’’ Sloan said. ‘‘She has a Schlage key for the door in the skyway. She signs out of the building, runs across the street to the skyway, goes up, walks across the skyway to the skyway fire door, uses her Schlage to get into the stairwell, walks up here. Where you have a problem: she can’t get out of the stairwell. There’s no key at all that’ll get you out of the stairwell onto another floor. You can only get out in the skyway or the lobby.’’
    Lucas worked on it for a moment. ‘‘Like this,’’ he said finally. ‘‘She knows she doesn’t have the votes to make a real deal with O’Dell: she claims she’s got them, but Bone says she didn’t, and she knows she doesn’t. She’s come here specifically to kill O’Dell—she knows that when she gets here. She can’t just sneak up and do it, because she doesn’t have any key. She doesn’t have anything. So she calls O’Dell to talk about making a deal, and her only purpose is to get into the building. So she gets out of the elevator, and right when she arrives, before she talks to O’Dell, she walks over to the fire door, opens it, takes some duct tape out of her purse, tapes the lock, walks down the stairs to the skyway, opens that door, tapes it, and then comes back up here and rings the doorbell.’’
    ‘‘O’Dell answers it, they talk, the deal falls through, and she leaves. O’Dell sees her into the elevator, and she goes down through the lobby and signs out,’’ Sloan said.
    ‘‘Then she runs across the street, comes up into the skyway, goes in through the taped door, runs up the stairs, knocks on the door, and boom. She has to do it then—even though she knows we’ll look at her—because she can’t count on the tape being left on the door for more than a short time.’’
    ‘‘Which explains something,’’ Sloan said. ‘‘O’Dell told Louise Compton that there was ‘somebody at the door,’ which meant that she didn’t know who was at the door, which meant that she didn’t know who’d be arriving. She wasn’t expecting anyone, like a boyfriend. There was no easy explanation for that knock, at least not in her mind.’’
    ‘‘So Audrey shoots her, checks her to make sure she’s dead, runs back down the stairs, carefully pulling the tape off the locks . . . and goes home.’’
    ‘‘Fuckin’ cold, man,’’ Sloan said.
    ‘‘She is cold. I wonder if she was cold enough to wash the sticky stuff off the doors when she pulled off the tape? She’d need acetone, or something,’’ Lucas said.
    They were both staring at the fire door. Sloan reached out to the doorknob, pulled the door open, bent forward to look at the lock tongue, then knelt. Lucas squatted beside him.
    ‘‘Looks like sticky stuff,’’ Sloan said. He tapped his index finger next to what looked like gray tape residue.
    ‘‘Wonder how many movers have gone in and out, using tape?’’
    ‘‘Up this high? None. That’s why the elevator’s so big. And I think this stuff would wear away, if the door was opened and closed on it enough. So it’s probably fairly new.’’
    ‘‘Let’s get Crime Scene over here,’’ Lucas said, standing up. ‘‘And let’s get a search warrant ready, see if we can find some tape at her place that matches this sticky stuff—if the lab guys can make a match like that.’’
    On the way back down in the elevator, Sloan said, ‘‘It’s a reach.’’
    ‘‘ She’s a reach. She looks like Old Mother Hubbard and she’s really the Wicked Witch of the West.’’
    THE