Silent Prey

looked around the room. “All right, so let’s go over it. John, what’d we have from Narcotics?”
    “We’re hassling everybody, but nothing sounds good,” said Blake. “Lotsa bullshit, we’re chasing it . . .”
    As they reviewed the status of the case, and routine assignments, Fell whispered to Lucas, “Your interviews are all set up. A couple of reporters are already here, and three or four more are coming.”
    Lucas nodded, but as she was about to add something,her eyes shifted away from him toward the door. A fat man walked in, his body swaying side to side, bumping the door frame, small dark eyes poking into the corners of the room, checking off the detectives, pausing at Lucas, pausing at Fell. He looked like H. L. Mencken in the later years. Spidery veins crisscrossed the gray cheeks; his thinning reddish hair was combed straight back with some kind of oil. His jowls were emphasized by a brooding, liverish underlip that seemed fixed in a permanent pout. He wore a three-piece suit in a color that might have been called oxblood, if anyone made oxblood suits.
    “O’Dell,” Fell said under her breath, at his ear. “Deputy commissioner in charge of cutting throats.”
    Lily followed O’Dell into the room, picked out Lucas, tipped her head and lifted her eyebrows. She wore a tailored navy-blue suit and a long, mannish red necktie knotted with a loose Windsor. She carried a heavy leather cop’s purse over her shoulder, her hand lying casually on the strap at the back of the purse. If she moved her hand four inches, she’d be gripping the butt of a .45. Lucas had seen her use it once, had seen her shove the .45 in a man’s face and pull the trigger, the man’s face smearing as though he’d been struck with a hammer, all in the space of a tenth of a second . . . .
    Lily touched O’Dell’s elbow, guided him toward a chair, then moved around where she could sit next to Lucas. “Get a chance to talk to Dick?” she whispered.
    “Yeah. He seems like a pretty good guy . . . .”
    She looked at him, as though checking to see if he was serious, then nodded and looked away.
    O’Dell was up-to-date on the case’s progress, and had no particular ideas about what to do next, he told the cops. He just wanted to sit in, to get a feel for themovement. “What about decoys?” he asked. “Somebody downtown suggested that we might put a few people on the street . . . .”
    They argued about decoys for a while, a last-resort effort, but Kennett shook his head. “The area’s too big,” he said. He wandered over to a bulletin board-sized map of Manhattan, ran a finger from Central Park to the financial district. “If he was hitting a specific group, like hookers or gays, then maybe. But there’s no connection between the victims. Except some negatives. He doesn’t take street people, who’d probably be the easiest . . . .”
    “He may specifically pick victims who look healthy,” said Case, one of the serial-killer specialists. “This science thing he has—Danny and I think he rules out anybody who’s too odd, or diseased or infirm. They’d mess up his findings. The medical examiner reports are all pretty much the same: these people are healthy.”
    “All right,” said Kennett. “So he takes seven people, five female, two male, one black, six white. Two of the whites are Hispanic, but that doesn’t seem to mean anything.”
    “They’re all noticeably small, except the first one,” Kuhn said. “The second guy was only five-six and skinny.”
    “Disposal,” Huerta grunted.
    They all nodded, and there was another long moment of silence, everybody in the room staring at the map of Manhattan.
    “It’s gotta be a cab,” somebody said. “If he can’t let anybody see him, and he’s gotta have money for drugs, and he’s gotta have someplace to gas these people . . . .” One of the cops looked at Lucas: “What are the chances that he had some money stashed? He was pretty well-off, right? Could he have ditched . . . ?”
    Lucas was shaking his head. “When we took him, we blindsided him. He thought he was home free. When his wife’s estate got into court, all their money was accounted for.”
    “Okay, that was pretty thin.”
    “It seems to me that somebody’s protecting him,” Lucas said. “An old friend or a new friend, but somebody.”
    Kennett was nodding. “I’ve worried about that, but if that’s right, there isn’t much we can do about