Rhymes With Prey Read Online Free PDF Page A

for a moment, found nothing of particular interest, and continued his tour of the studio. And found, at the back, an internal door, sheathed in metal, that was set in a frame a step below the rest of the floor—a door that most likely led to a basement, Lucas thought. He looked at the lock, and realized that the rake wouldn’t work: the thing was probably a year old, a Medeco.
    After the quick tour of the lower floor, he turned out the lights, stepped back in the hallway, and used the flashlight to climb the stairs to the second floor. The second floor was a trash heap: a line of single rooms that had apparently last been used as a flophouse, each with a wrecked cot or a stained mattress, various pieces of mostly broken furniture. More rats: he never saw one, but he could hear them.
    Nothing for him there.
    He went back down to the studio, closed the door, turned the lights on, went to look at the cellar door again. No way to open it: it was impossible. He pounded on it a few times and listened, heard nothing. What they really needed, he thought, was behind that door, and he had no way to get there.
    He’d been inside for five or six minutes, and time was wearing on him.
    He took a plastic bag out of his pocket, and from the bag, several more Ziploc-style bags, each with a white spongelike pad in it. Lincoln’s instructions had been simple enough: press the pad into anything you’d like to pick up, then put the pad back in the plastic bag, and seal it. Lucas worked his way through the studio, doing just that: sampling bronze filings from the floor, off a workbench, and out of the teeth of a metal file. Moving to the welding area, he found a selection of welding rods, and stuck one of each kind in his pocket, and, from a trash bin, several used rods.
    He sampled several stains that might possibly have been blood, but there were enough stains around the place, oil and lubricants, that he had his doubts. He was taking a sample when he saw, in a small niche off the main working space, a half dozen crucifixes on neck chains, along with a necklace of cheap aqua-colored stones, a thin string of seed pearls, a ring on a chain, and three sets of earrings, all pinned to the wall with tacks. And he thought, Trophies? Ifthey were, there were twelve of them. There was nothing else like them in the room: he took a half dozen photos with his cell phone.
    Time to leave. On his way out, he looked at each of the bronze sculptures, and a clay maquette for another, and noticed that each of the women portrayed in the sculptures was wearing a single piece of jewelry of some kind, apparently to emphasize her nakedness. Was it possible that the jewelry collection did not represent trophies, but was for use with models?
    He was thinking about that when Lily called. “He’s moving.”
    â€œAnd I’m gone,” Lucas said. And he thought, Not for models. They were trophies, and there were twelve of them.
    Â·Â Â Â·Â Â Â·
    â€œYou believe it?” Lucas Davenport said, walking into the town house. He held up the plastic bags. “This shit fell out the window when I was walking by Verlaine’s apartment.”
    Lincoln spun the motorized wheelchair around, noting eagerly—almost hungrily—the evidence in the Minnesotan’s hand.
    â€œSometimes you catch a break. Anything obvious?”
    â€œNo piles of bones or bloody shackles. There’s a steel door leads somewhere—the cellar, I think. Love to see what’s behind that.” He explained that the lock rake wasn’t up to the task, though. They’d need a warrant and a sledgehammer.
    Lincoln turned his attention to the evidence.
    Lucas dropped down into one of the wicker chairs near one of the large high-definition monitors that glowed like a billboard in Times Square.
    â€œLucas?” Thom Reston, Lincoln’s aide, stood in the doorway. He was a slim, young man, dressed in a lavender shirt, dark tie, and