He crossed to the air-conditioner housing, grabbed the edge, and pulled himself up. He crawled to the vent and looked around the corner. Nobody in sight. He leaned back behind the vent, put his back to it. Looked up at the stars.
He thought about what he'd become, caught by this passion. He would have to stop. He knew he would have to stop, or he was doomed. He could think of only one way to stop it-and that way touched him. But he would like to have her first, if he could.
Before he killed her.
Koop looked around the corner past the vent, and, shocked, almost snatched his head back. Almost, but not quite. He had the reflexes and training of a cat burglar, and had taught himself not to move too quickly. Across the street, in Jensen's window, a man was looking out. He was six feet back from the glass, as though he were taking care not to be seen from the street. He wore dark slacks and a white dress shirt, without a jacket.
He wore a shoulder holster.
A cop. They knew. They were waiting for him.
CHAPTER
24
Weather curled up on the couch. The television was tuned to CNN, and Lucas watched it without seeing it, brooding. "Nothing at all?" she asked.
"Not a thing," he said. He didn't look at her, just pulled at his lip and stared at the tube. He was tired, his face gray. "Three days. The media's killing us."
"I wouldn't worry so much about the media, if I were you."
Now he turned his head. "That's because you don't have to worry. You guys bury your mistakes," Lucas said. He grinned when he said it, but it wasn't a pleasant smile.
"I'm serious. I don't understand…"
"The media's like a fever," Lucas explained. "Heat starts to build up. The people out in the neighborhoods get scared, and they start calling their city councilmen. The councilmen panic-that's what politicians, do, basically, is panic-and they start calling the mayor. The mayor calls the chief. The chief is a politician who is appointed by the mayor, so she panics. And the shit flows downhill."
"I don't understand all the panic. You're doing everything you can."
"You have to look at Davenport's first rule of how the world really works," Lucas said.
"I don't think I've heard that one," Weather said.
"It's simple," he said. "A politician will never, ever, get a better job when he's out of office."
"That's it?"
"That's it. That explains everything. They're desperate to hang on to their jobs. That's why they panic. They lose the election, it's back to the car wash."
After a moment of silence, Weather asked, "How's Connell?"
"Not good," Lucas said.
Connell's facial skin was stretched, taut; dark smudges hung under her eyes, her hair was perpetually disarranged, as though she'd been sticking her fingers into an electric outlet.
"Something's wrong," she said. "Maybe the guy knows we're here. Maybe Jensen was imagining it."
"Maybe," Lucas said. They waited in Jensen's living room, stacks of newspapers and magazines by their feet. A Walkman sat on a coffee table. A television was set up in the second bedroom, but they couldn't listen to the stereo for fear that it would be heard in the hallway. "It sure felt good, though."
"I know… but you know what maybe it could be?" Connell had a foot-high stack of paper next to her hand, profiles and interviews with apartment employees, residents of Jensen's floor, and everyone else in the building with a criminal record. She had been pawing through it compulsively. "It could be, like, a relative of somebody who works here. And whoever works here goes home and lets it slip that we're in here."
Lucas said, "The keys are a big question. There are any number of ways that a cat burglar could get one key, but two keys-that's a problem."
"Gotta be an employee."
"Could be a valet service at a restaurant," he said. "I've known valets who worked with cat burglars. You see the car come in, you get the plate number, and from that, you can get an address and you've got the key."
"She said she hadn't used a valet since she got the new key," Connell said.
"Maybe she forgot. Maybe it's something so routine that she doesn't remember it."
"I bet it's somebody at her office-somebody with access to her purse. You know, like one of the messenger kids, somebody who can go in and out of her office without being noticed. Grab the key, copy it…"
"But that's another problem," Lucas said. "You've got to have some knowledge to copy it, and a source of blanks."
"So it's a guy working with a cat burglar. The burglar supplies the knowledge, the kid supplies the access."
"That's one way that it works," Lucas admitted. "But nobody in her office seems like a good bet."
"A boyfriend of somebody in the office; a secretary picks up the key, lays it off…"
Lucas stood up, yawned, wandered around the apartment, stopped to look at a framed black-and-white photograph. It wasn't much, a flower in a roundish pot, a stairway in the background. Lucas didn't know much about art, but this felt like it. A tiny penciled signature said Andre something, something with a K. He yawned again and rubbed the back of his neck and looked at Connell going through the paper.
"How'd you feel this morning?"
She looked up. "Hollow. Empty."
"I don't understand how it works, the whole chemotherapy thing," Lucas said.
She put down the paper. "Basically, the kind of chemo I get is poisonous. It knocks down the cancer, but it also knocks down my body," she said. Her voice was neutral, informed, like a medical commentator on public television. "They can only use it so long before the chemotherapy starts doing too much damage. Then they take me off it, and my body starts recovering from the chemo, but so does the cancer. The cancer gains a little every time. I've been on it for two years. I'm down to seven weeks between treatments. I've been five. I'm feeling it again."
"Lots of pain?"
She shook her head. "Not yet. I can't really describe it. It's a hollow feeling, and a weakness, and then a sickness, like the worst flu in the world. I understand, toward the end, it'll get painful, when it gets into my bone marrow… I expect to opt for other measures before then."
"Jesus," he said. Then: "What are the chances that the chemo will knock it down completely?"
"It happens," she said with a brief, ghostly smile. "But not for me."
"I don't think I could handle it," Lucas said.
The balcony door was closed, and Lucas moved over toward it, staying six feet back from the glass, and looked out at the park. Nice day. The rain had quit, and the light-blue sky was dappled with fair-weather clouds, cloud shadows skipping across the lake. A woman dying.
"But the other problem," Connell said, almost to herself, "besides the key, I mean, is why he hasn't come up here. Four days. Nothing."
Lucas was still thinking about cancer, had to wrench himself back. "You're talking to yourself," Lucas said.
"That's because I'm going crazy."
"You want a pizza?" Lucas asked.
"I don't eat pizza. It clogs up your arteries and makes you fat."
"What kind don't you eat?"
"Pepperoni and mushroom," Connell said.
"I'll get one delivered to the manager. I can run down and get it when it comes in," he said, yawning again. "This is driving me nuts."
"Why doesn't he come?" Connell asked rhetorically. "Because he knows we're here."
"Maybe we just haven't waited long enough," Lucas said.
Connell continued: "How does he know we're here? One: he sees us. Two: he hears about us. Okay, if he sees us, how does he know we're cops? He doesn't-unless he's a cop, and he recognizes people coming and going. If he hears about us, how does he hear about us? We've been over that."
"Pepperoni and mushroom?"