Silent Prey

up at the window, then down at the sidewalk. “He must’ve been about right here, you see the chip marks.”
    Caught by the geometry and technicalities of the killing, he’d paid no attention to her. Now he looked up and she had one hand on the restaurant window, as if for support, her face pale, waxen.
    “Jesus, I’m sorry . . . .”
    “I’m okay,” she said.
    “I thought you were gonna faint.”
    “It’s anger now,” she said. “When I think about Walt, I want to kill somebody.”
    “That bad?”
    “So bad I can’t believe it. It’s like I lost a kid.”
    They flagged a cab to go to Petty’s apartment. Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, Lily asked, “Have you ever been here? Brooklyn Heights?”
    “No.”
    “Great place for an apartment. I thought about it, I would’ve come, except, you know, once you live in the Village, you don’t want to leave.”
    “This looks okay . . .” Lucas said, peering out the window as they rolled off the end of the bridge. “The woman at Petty’s apartment building . . .”
    “Logan.”
    “She says somebody was in his apartment when he was already dead, and before the cops arrived?”
    “Yes. Absolutely. She remembers that she thought he’d come home and then gone out again. She was watching television, remembered the show, and what part of the show. We checked—he’d been dead for ten minutes.”
    “Somebody was moving fast.”
    “Very fast. Had to know the minute Walt went down. Had to be waiting for it. There’s a question about how he got into Walt’s apartment. Whoever it was must have had a key.”
    “That’s simple enough, if you’re talking about an intelligence operation.”
    “You should know,” she said.
     
    Petty’s apartment was in a brown brick building stuck on the side of a low hill, in a cul-de-sac, the area long faded but pleasant. Marcy Logan’s door was the first one to the left, inside the tiny lobby.
    “Very late,” Logan said, peering over the door chain at Lily’s badge. She was an older woman, in her middle sixties, gray hair and matching eyes. “You said ten o’clock.”
    “I’m sorry, but something else came up,” Lily said. “We just need to talk for a minute.”
    “Well, come in.” Her tone was severe, but Lucas got the impression that Logan was happy for the company. “I’ll have to warm up the coffee . . . .”
    She had made cookies and coffee, the cookies laid out on a silver tray. She stuck a carafe of coffee in a microwave, fussed with cups and saucers.
    “Such a nice apartment,” Lily said.
    “Thank you. They filmed Moonstruck just down the way, you know. Cher was right down by the Promenade, I saw her . . .”
    When the coffee was hot, Logan poked the tray of cookies in Lucas’ face. Lucas tried one: oatmeal. He took another, with a cup of coffee.
    “It wasn’t a woman,” Logan said, positively, when Lily asked. “The footsteps were too heavy. I didn’t see him, but it was a man.”
    “You’re sure?”
    “I hear people come and go all day,” Logan said. “That’s something I’d know. I thought it was Walter coming back—I wouldn’t have thought that if it was a woman.”
    “He went up, was there for a few minutes, then came right back down?” Lily asked.
    “That’s right. Couldn’t have been more than a half-hour, because my show was a half-hour, and he came after the show started and left before it ended.”
    “You told the investigators that it occurred to you that it wasn’t Petty,” Lily said. “But not seriously enough that you actually looked. Why did you think it might not be him?”
    “Whoever it was, stopped in the lobby. Like he was looking at my apartment door or maybe listening foranybody inside. Then he went up. Walter was always very forthright. Walked right in, went right up. Especially on his Fridays. He’d always have two or three beers, and he couldn’t hold it at all, and by the time he got here, he’d . . . you know: he had to go. You could hear the water running from the toilet, right after he went up. That night, though, whoever it was stopped inside. He did the same thing on the way back out. Stopped in the lobby. It gives me the shivers. Maybe he was thinking about rubbing out witnesses.”
    “I don’t think that’s much of a threat,” Lily said, smiling at the “rubbing out.”
    “Why don’t you say something, young man?” Logan asked Lucas, who was eating his sixth cookie. He couldn’t seem to stop.
    “Too busy