Secret Prey

seats, a blackboard, a wide-screen color television, and a VCR.
    Mayberry shoved the tape into the VCR and punched a few buttons, bringing the television up. ‘‘I looked at the tape last night . . . man, it’s been a long time. I could hardly remember who was who. Anyway, Arris shows up at about 224 on the dial . . .’’
    He was running through the tape; at the index number 210 he stopped the tape, then restarted it at real-time speed. They were both standing to look at the picture.
    ‘‘Okay,’’ Mayberry said, tapping the screen. ‘‘Here we have a parade of people going by . . . lots of women, going down to the meat rack. Half a dozen guys.’’
    The tape was black-and-white, focused on a thin man with a mustache selling soda, cigarettes, bread, and gasoline over a small counter in a convenience store. In the background, through a window and past two pair of gas pumps, people occasionally walked by the store, most of them on the far side of the street.
    ‘‘Okay,’’ Mayberry said. ‘‘Here we come up to Arris . . . This woman goes by and there he is.’’ He jabbed at the screen. Arris was wearing a light-colored shirt and what might have been tan slacks.
    ‘‘Pretty blurry,’’ Lucas said, his eyes less than a yard from the screen. ‘‘Can’t see his face.’’
    ‘‘Not very well,’’ Mayberry agreed. He stopped the tape, rewound it a few turns, and Arris rolled through the picture again, this time in slow motion. ‘‘We got the ID by having a bunch of his friends look at it, and they picked him out by, you know, general appearance, the flappy way he walked. And the dress was right. You can see his sleeves were rolled up, and that’s right.’’
    ‘‘Nobody looks like McDonald,’’ Lucas said, watching the people parade past the store.
    ‘‘You sure he’s your guy?’’ Mayberry asked.
    ‘‘He’s the guy we got a hard tip on,’’ Lucas said.
    ‘‘Most of these people were going down to the rack,’’ Mayberry said. ‘‘But Arris was just out for a walk, and he went on beyond it. So he was just about alone when he was shot, a block and a half further on. So if you’re looking for the killer . . . he’s quite a bit further down.’’
    ‘‘Jelly told me he didn’t think it was random.’’
    ‘‘He’s usually right,’’ Mayberry said.
    ‘‘If it wasn’t random, the shooter’d almost have to be following him,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘He couldn’t expect just to walk down the street and run into Arris at a convenient place to shoot. Especially not if Arris would recognize him. He’d want to come up behind him.’’
    ‘‘Well, Arris walked every night. Nobody knows if he took the same route every night, but his neighbors say he usually started out the same way. You want to look at this again?’’
    ‘‘Nah, that’s okay. What about the print on the shell?’’
    ‘‘We know McDonald’s got a fingerprint file, we’ve got NCIC confirmation on that—he had a secret clearance with the National Guard,’’ Mayberry said. ‘‘They’re supposed to be sending us something right away, but it wasn’t here five minutes ago. I had Chad Ogram pull up the print file on the shell. You know Ogram?’’
    ‘‘Think I met him,’’ Lucas said.
    Mayberry had been rewinding the tape, now popped it out of the VCR and handed it to Lucas. ‘‘This is for you. Let’s go see Ogram.’’
    Ogram worked in a bathroom-sized office stuffed with filing cabinets. At least one clock sat on each flat surface in the office, and a half-dozen more hung on the walls. Ogram, a thin man with vanishing hair, bent over his green metal desk, his bald spot as pink as a newborn’s gums.
    ‘‘Chad,’’ said Mayberry, and Ogram sat up with a start. ‘‘You know Lucas.’’
    ‘‘Yeah, hey,’’ Ogram said vaguely, glancing at Lucas and then bending over his desk again. ‘‘I got the fax.’’
    ‘‘What do you think?’’ Mayberry asked.
    ‘‘Well, heck,’’ Ogram said. ‘‘You know there’s not enough for a match.’’
    ‘‘Yeah,’’ Lucas said, ‘‘I was just wondering . . .’’
    ‘‘But McDonald’s right thumb matches what we’ve got,’’ Ogram said. ‘‘We got a piece of a whorl and he’s got a whorl that looks just like our piece.’’
    Mayberry and Lucas looked at each other. ‘‘Are you sure?’’ Lucas asked.
    ‘‘Pretty sure: I have to rescale the fax to get an overlay, but yeah: it looks just like