Silent Prey

took a quick turn around the kitchen, picked up an enamel coffee cup, turned it in her hands, put it down.
    “We’re looking at thirteen murders,” she said finally. “Not Bekker’s. Someone else’s. These are all . . . hits. Maybe. Of the thirteen—those are the ones we’re sure of, we think there are more, as many as forty—ten were out-and-out assholes. Two of them were pretty big: a wholesaler for the Cali cartel and an up-and-coming Mafia guy. The other eight were miscellaneous small-timers.”
    “Number eleven?”
    “A lawyer,” Lily said. “A criminal defense lawyer who represented a lot of big dopers. He was good. He put a lot of people back on the street that shouldn’t have been there. But most people thought he was straight.”
    “Hard to be straight, with that job,” Lucas said.
    “But we think he was. The investigation hasn’t turned up anything that’d change our mind. We’ve been combing his bank records, along with the IRS and the state taxpeople. There’s not a goddamned thing. In fact, there wouldn’t have been any point in his being crooked: he was pulling in so much money he didn’t need any more. Three million bucks was a slow year.”
    “Okay. Who was twelve?”
    “Number twelve was a professional black . . . spokesman,” she said. “A community leader, a loudmouth, a rabble-rouser, whatever you want to call him. But he wasn’t a crook. He was a neighborhood politician trying to climb the pole. He was shot in a drive-by, supposedly a couple of gang-bangers. But it was very slick for gang-bangers, good weapons, a stolen car.”
    “Thirteen?”
    “Thirteen was a cop.”
    “Crooked?”
    “Straight. He was investigating the possibility that we’ve got a rogue group inside the police department, inside intelligence, systematically killing people.”
    There was a moment of silence as Lucas digested it. “Sonofabitch,” he said finally. “They’ve killed thirteen people for sure, and maybe forty?”
    “The cop who was killed—his name was Walter Petty—claimed there were twelve, for sure. He’s the thirteenth. We think. He said there could be thirty or forty more.”
    “Jesus Christ.” Lucas pulled at his lip, turned away from her, blankly staring at the microwave. Forty? “You should’ve picked it up . . . .”
    “Not necessarily,” Lily said, shaking her head. The short hair whipped around her ears, like a television advertisement, and he caught a smile and suppressed it. This was business, she said. “For one thing, they were killed over a long time. Five years, anyway. And most of them died like you’d have expected, knowing theirrecords. Except more efficiently. That’s what you notice when you decide you’ve got a pattern: the efficiency of it. Bang, bang, they’re dead. Never any cops close by—once or twice, they were actually decoyed out. There are never any good witnesses. The getaways are preplanned. No collateral damage, no mushrooms getting knocked down.”
    “So you’ve got a pattern of small-time assholes killed by big-time shooters,” Lucas said.
    “Right. Like this one guy, I met him myself, years ago, when I was just coming off patrol. Arvin Davies.” She lifted her eyes to the ceiling and wet her lips, remembering the file. “He was forty-two when he was killed. He was a doper, a drunk. A brawler. He had twenty priors going back to age twelve, and he’d been picked up for one thing or another maybe twenty more times. All small stuff. Street muggings, burglaries, car thefts, rip-offs, possession. He’d get his nose clogged up with angel dust and beat his victims. He killed one five or six years ago, but we could never prove it. He spent twenty years inside, all short time. The last time he got out, he did a couple of muggings and then somebody put him on a wall. Shot him twice in the heart and once in the head. The head shot came when he was already down, a coup de grace. The shooter walked away,” she said, hopping back up on the breakfast-bar stool across from him.
    “A pro,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah. And there just wasn’t any reason a pro would go after Arvin Davies. He was small-time, chickenshit. But whoever killed him took a real asshole off the streets for good. Maybe forty or fifty nasty crimes a year.”
    “All the miscellaneous hits are like that?”
    “Yup. I mean the techniques are different, but they’re all cold, efficient, researched.”
    Lucas nodded, studying her. “All very