Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(43)

Lucas: “How do you get in touch with them?”

“I don’t. I mail the rent on the first of the month. If there are problems, I’m supposed to talk to the manager.”

“You don’t have a phone number?”

“No. All I’ve got is an address,” she said. “I’ll tell you, though, I watch my checking account and they haven’t cashed my July or August checks yet.”

“Not picking the checks up?” Rae said to Lucas. “Maybe they don’t care about money.”

Lucas asked if the owners had left anything behind, and Black said “Well, the furniture. There’s some junk in a closet and some barbecue stuff and a grill.”

“The junk in the closet—could we see it?”

The closet contained a cardboard box of Blu-ray movie disks and some country music CDs, old venetian blinds, an ancient vacuum cleaner with a frayed electric cord, a bowling ball in a bag that looked like it hadn’t been opened in years, two cases of empty beer bottles, and a litter of dead flies. Black said she’d looked in there when she first rented the place, but then closed the door and hadn’t really looked in since except when she’d played some of the movies.

“Did you put them back in the box?”

“No, they’re sitting on top of the DVD player.”

Lucas told her that they would talk to the FBI about sending a crime scene team around to check all the left behind stuff for fingerprints and asked her not to touch any of it.

“Do you think I’ll get kicked out of here?” she asked. “I’m going to college, but I don’t have any money and I’m waitressing my way through and this place is a super deal for me and Willa . . .”

“I don’t know why you’d get kicked out. But if the owners come back, you gotta call us. Be really, really careful if they do,” Lucas said. He wrote down the address where she sent the rent in his notebook.


OUTSIDE, Bob said, “We’ve gotta have the crime scene guys check that grill.”

Rae: “Ah, jeez, I don’t want to think about that.”


LUCAS SAID, “Somebody’s lying to us, and I don’t think it was that kid. I think it’s the manager. Though I can think of some complicated ways that it might not be.”

“Tell me,” Bob said.

“Well, we set off an alarm back at the Forum. Somebody spotted one of us—probably me—and made a call here, where the phone was answered. That means there’s a connection here. And I don’t think it was the kid.”

“She’s got the cheap rent,” Rae said.

“Yeah, but I don’t think it’s her. I don’t think she’s that good a liar. And I doubt they’d consider her reliable. I think it’s probably the manager. I think she takes messages and relays them. Somebody spotted me in the Forum and called her. Then, she waited to see if we’d show up. That would tell them that we’re watching the phone and we know about this place. So she’s probably got another burner phone that we don’t know about that goes directly to Beauchamps or one of the others. And Beauchamps probably dumped that phone immediately after she called.”

“If you’re right, we’ve gone backwards.”

“Unless Earl, the phone guy, can pull up the call she made. She probably called right after she took the call from the Forum and right after we showed up. If he can find it, we could still be hanging in.”

“We could try for a warrant to search her trailer,” Rae said.

Lucas shook his head. “We wouldn’t get it. We don’t have anything like what we’d need for a warrant. For one thing, it could be the kid. But it could be somebody like the manager’s neighbor. She’s home all day with the baby, nothing going on, then three marshals show up at her front door. She’s gonna talk about it.”

“I asked her not to,” Rae said.

Bob: “Right. That was a half hour ago. I bet she’s told only eight of her closest friends, after having them double-swear to keep it secret.”

Lucas said, “I’ll call Tremanty and have him call Earl. I don’t think he can do what we want him to without any phone numbers, but we can try.”

“Maybe get some dessert over at the Cheesecake Factory?” Bob said. “You know, while we wait for Earl to call back.”

“I think we need to go talk to this Toni and Calvin Wright, see if they have anything interesting to say about the home invasion,” Lucas said.

Bob groaned. “We’re not going to get to the Cheesecake Factory, are we? Ever?”

“It’s open late,” Rae said. “And I want to talk to the Wrights, too. If I gotta be there, so do you.”


LUCAS CALLED the Wrights using the number he’d gotten from Mallow, the Las Vegas cop. Toni Wright answered, said that Mallow had told them that Lucas would be calling. Lucas said, “I know it’s getting late . . .”

“Not in Vegas. Come on over,” Wright said.

The Wrights lived in a walled residential community called Kensington Gardens, in what would be the shadow—in the daytime—of two bland condominium towers northwest of the Strip. On the way there, Rae said, “Oh my God,” and pointed. “Another Cheesecake Factory.”

“I’m being taunted by God,” Bob said, as they drove past.