Rhymes With Prey by Jeffery Deaver Page A

scratching the top sheet, thinking about clipping his nails and then walking over to Madison Avenue to do a little shopping for an autumn ensemble, when his cell phone rang.
    Amelia: “Get over here. Right now.”
    â€œWhat happened?”
    â€œIt’s not good. And better not to talk about it on a cell phone.”
    He needed to clean up: unless there was a shootout going on at Lincoln’s town house, he figured he had that much time. He was out of the hotel fifteen minutes after the call, and found a taxi outside the front door, dropping off a customer. Lucas got in the cab and gave the driver Lincoln’s address, and the driver said, “Not hardly worth turning on the meter for that.”
    â€œDo what you want; I’ll give you a twenty when we get there.”
    The driver drove with some enthusiasm, and Lucas was ringing Lincoln’s doorbell twenty minutes after Amelia called.
    â€œWhat happened?” he asked, when she opened the door.
    â€œLily’s been detained by Internal Affairs. They could be coming for us next.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI’ll let Lincoln tell you.”
    Lincoln smiled when Lucas came in and said, “Now things are getting interesting.”
    â€œTell me.”
    The evidence that Amelia had collected under Lincoln’s direction, which Lincoln conceded was “quite good, under typical circumstances,” had not been taken to Lincoln’s lab, but to the city laboratory.
    First, they found some evidence that the dead women had been tortured and murdered in a small storage area in the basement ofthe sculptor’s studio. Not much evidence was visible, but the small stuff—tiny spatters of blood, flakes of skin, urine samples—proved that the dead women had been there.
    The gun had also been examined—and that was where the problem arose.
    â€œLast year, we had another psycho roaming around the city, but he was not particularly clever. He was a serial shooter. Guy named Levon Pitt. Owned a junkyard here in town. That’s where he had dumped the bodies. Lily ran the team that tracked him down. They had an entry team, and cracked his apartment but there was nobody home. So they set up outside the apartment to wait for him, and pretty soon, here he came, with his adult son. When the police approached him, he figured out what was about to happen, and pulled a gun, and actually tried to take his son hostage. In the scuffle, he fired the gun, once, and Lily shot him, firing three times, and he died on the way to the hospital.
    â€œWhen the man had been shot, Lily froze the scene, and they brought in the crime scene crew. Among other things, they recovered seven different pistols in the man’s apartment. He’d used four different weapons in the murders that the police knew about, and after testing, they found that three of the guns they’d recovered were among the four used in the crime.”
    Lincoln paused in his narration, and Lucas prompted, “So?”
    â€œThe gun we found yesterday, by Verlaine’s hand, was the fourth gun.”
    â€œWhat?” Lucas was momentarily confused. “Verlaine was involved with Levon Pitt?”
    â€œThat’s not what they’re suggesting,” Lincoln said. “For one thing, there’s no apparent connection. For another, one of the shells in Verlaine’s gun had Lily’s fingerprint on it.”
    It took Lucas a moment to get it. “So they’re saying, what?That she picked up a gun at the first site, and kept it as a throw-down? And then she went into Verlaine’s apartment sometime last night, killed him, and made it look like a suicide?”
    â€œThat’s what they’re suggesting.”
    â€œThat’s ridiculous,” Lucas said.
    â€œInternal Affairs doesn’t think so,” Amelia said. “The thing is, they can’t figure out any other mechanism for getting Lily’s fingerprint on that shell. She