Wicked Prey

STOMPED OFF to her bedroom to mope, but she didn’t stomp as hard as she might: she had no intention of keeping the agreement.
    * * *
    LUCAS, ON THE WAY HOME, had called his secretary and told her to chase down the Washington cop, Sams, who’d looked into Raphael Sabartes’s death.
    “It’s Sunday,” Carol said. “I might not be able to get him.”
    “Try,” Lucas said. “Have we heard anything at all about this Justice Shafer guy?”
    “No . . .”
    “Of course not,” Lucas said. “If we had, you’d have called me instantly.”
    “Right.”
    “So find Sams.”
    As it turned out, Sams was working nights, and was due to come on at 11 P.M. Lucas called the number Carol got, and left a note with Sams’s supervisor that he’d be calling right at 11 o’clock.
    The rest of the evening was fairly tense, with Letty trudging up and down the stairs between her room and the refrigerator, stopping only once to say, “All my friends say it’s unfair.”
    “All your friends are teenagers,” Lucas said.
    Letty said, “You told me one time that you had a beer in a hockey bar when you were fourteen.”
    “That was different,” Lucas said.
    “How was that different?”
    “There were adults around,” Lucas said.
    “Huh, great. Adults giving a fourteen-year-old a beer,” Letty said.
    Weather said, “Shut up, shut up, shut up, both of you, shut up.”
    On her last trip down, she went to the refrigerator, got a bottle of water, and on the way back through the family room, where Weather and Lucas were watching the news, stopped and gave Lucas a kiss on the forehead, and went on her way.
    “I think you’re okay,” Weather said.
    * * *
    AT TEN O’CLOCK, eleven Eastern, Lucas called Sams, got him, gave him the history, and told him about the interview with the women at the hospitality committee.
    “Well, they might be right, but we couldn’t prove it,” Sams said. “No sign of violence, the kid was lying on his back on his bed, his shoes off, his hands crossed on his chest. Bottle of rum in the kitchen, glass by the bed.”
    “But no note.”
    “Nothing,” Sams said. “We never did find the woman. We didn’t know where to start, because nobody knew her name.”
    “Find any DNA in the apartment?”
    “There might have been some semen stains, but we didn’t run it—I mean, it didn’t come from the woman,” Sams said. “We didn’t do a full process, because . . . there didn’t seem to be any reason to. Everything in the apartment was pretty neat and clean.”
    “No references to the woman . . . cell phone, date book . . . ?”
    “Okay, here’s one thing. The kid’s cell phone had a lot of calls on it to one number, and the number was in the three-two-three area code. That’s LA. Pretty much downtown LA. We ran the phone down, and it was a dead end—one of those over-the-counter pay-as-you-go phones. We called it, but it was out of service. It never came back, as long as we called it.”
    “So you don’t even know that it’s the woman’s phone,” Lucas said.
    “Nope. We don’t. But: I talked to his uncle, from Spain, because his folks don’t speak English, and we figured out between us that he’d never been to California, and as far as anybody knew, he didn’t know anybody from there. But he was calling the number six times a day for two months.”
    “So it’s gotta be her,” Lucas said. “He was in love.”
    “I think so. Now that you’re asking, I’d have to say it was all a little odder than we thought at the time. She was just flat gone, and she shouldn’t have been that gone.”
    “These committee women I talked to, they said you might have a picture of her,” Lucas said.
    “We do have that,” Sams said. “When I got your note, I went and looked. The thing is, it was just odd enough that the ME didn’t want to rule it as a suicide. He left the cause of death open. Means of death was a load of sleeping pills with alcohol. Anyway, we’ve still got all the evidence, what there was of it.”
    “Could you scan that photo and send it to me?” Lucas asked.
    “Sure. Keeps me off the street—I’ll do it tonight.”

    WHILE LUCAS was talking to Sams, Jesse Lane and Rosie Cruz were sitting at the back of Spor’s, an upscale deli off West Seventh Street, two blocks from the convention center, watching Shelly Weimer finish a corned-beef sandwich with a mound of yellow sauerkraut.
    “The guy is a pig,” Cruz said.
    “He ain’t all that neat, is he?”
    Weimer