Rhymes With Prey by Jeffery Deaver Page A

kinda bad about it.”
    â€œDidn’t have any trouble looking at Amelia,” said Lily Rothenburg.
    â€œBe nice,” Lucas said, as they walked toward the front steps. “I’m happily married.”
    â€œDoesn’t keep you from checking out the market,” Lily said.
    â€œI don’t think she’s on the market,” Lucas said. He made a circling motion with an index finger. “I mean, can they—?”
    â€œI don’t know,” Lily said. “Why don’t you ask? Just wait until I’m out of there.”
    â€œMaybe not,” Lucas said. “I’m getting over it, but I’m not that far over it. And he’s not exactly Mr. Warmth.”
    â€œSomebody might say that about you, too,” Lily observed.
    â€œHey. Nobody said that to me while getting busy in my Porsche.”
    Lily laughed and turned a little pink. Way back, back before their respective marriages, they’d dallied. In fact, Lucas had dallied her brains loose in a Porsche 911, a feat that not everyone thought possible, especially for people their size. “A long time ago, when we were young,” she said, as they climbed the steps to Lincoln’s front door. “I was slender as a fairy then.”
    Lucas was a tall man, heavy in the shoulders, with a hawk nose and blue eyes. His black hair was touched with a bit of silver at the temples and a long thin scar ran from his forehead across his brow ridge and down onto his cheek, the product of a fishing accident. Another scar, on his throat, was not quite as outdoorsy, though it happened outdoors, when a young girl shot him with a piece-of-crap .22 and he almost died.
    Lily was dark-haired and full-figured, constantly dieting and constantly finding more interesting things to eat. She never gained enough to be fat, couldn’t lose enough to be thin. She’d never been a fairy. She was paid as a captain in the NYPD, but she was more than that: one of the plainclothes influentials who floated around the top of the department, doing things meant to be invisible to the media. As someone said of her, she was the nut cutter they called when nuts seriously needed to be cut.
    Like now. She’d brought Lucas in as a “consultant” from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, because she didn’t know who she could trust in her own department. They might have a serial-killer cop on the loose—or even worse, a bunch of cops. And if that was right, the cops wouldn’t be out-of-control dumbass flatfoots, but serious guys, narcotics detectives who’d become fed up with the pointlessness and ineffectiveness of the war on drugs.
    The four dead were all female, all illegal Mexicans, all had been tortured, and all had some connection to drug sales—although with two of them, Lucas thought, the connection was fairly thin. Still, if they were dealing with the cartels, and if there was a turf war going on, they could have been killed simply as warnings. And torture was something the cartels did as other people might play cards.
    On the other hand, the women may have been tortured not aspunishment, or to make a point, but for information. Somebody, the commissioner feared, had decided to take direct action to eliminate the drug problem, with the emphasis on eliminate . The bodies were piling up: so he called his nut cutter and the nut cutter called Lucas. The duo had just been downtown checking out and talking with the honchos that made up the department’s famous Narcotics Unit Four. Or infamous, some said. The trio of shields—two men and a woman—had earned the highest drug-conviction rate in the city with, the rumors went, less than kosher tactics. Lately they’d been running ops in the area where the women had been killed.
    Lily pushed the doorbell.
    Amelia Sachs came to the door, chewing on a celery stalk, and let them in. She was a tall woman, slender and redheaded, a former model, which