Certain prey

Chapter Eleven

When Lucas got home, he took the CompactFlash card out of his pocket, dropped another one out of the Nikon, and read them into his home computer. After transferring the files to Photoshop, he sharpened the photos as much as he could and dumped them to his photo printer. That done, he called Davenport Simulations and let the phone ring until a man answered, his voice grumpy at the interruption.

'Steve? Lucas Davenport.'

'Hey, Lucas! Where've you been, man?' Steve smoked a little weed, from time to time; dropped a little acid on weekends, and let his beard grow. When the acid was on him, he could program in three dimensions. '"You don't come around any more.'

'I'd be like the ghost of bad news, the former owner hanging around,' Lucas said. 'But I needed somebody who could help me out with a computer problem. I thought about you… from your phreaking days.'

'I don't do that shit anymore, hardly ever,' Steve said. 'Uh, what do you need?'

'Is there anyone on the Net who could track down anonymous telephone numbers?'

Lucas asked. 'If there is, do you know how you could get in touch with him?'

Steve dropped his voice, though he probably was alone: 'Depends on what the numbers are and how much trouble you want to go to. And whether you want to pay for it.'

'How much would it cost?'

'If you want all the numbers and don't ask any questions… I know a guy who does that kind of work. He could e-mail them to you for a couple of bucks a name. How many do you have?'

'Maybe fifty,' Lucas said.

'Oh, Jesus, I thought you were talking about hundreds. Or thousands. I don't know if he'd be interested in a little job like that.'

'I'd pay him more,' Lucas said.

'I can ask,' Steve said. 'Say five hundred bucks?'

'That's good,' Lucas said.

'I'm putting my name behind this, man. I'll be stuck for the five hundred if you don't come through.'

'Steve…'

'All right, all right.'

'I could use any other information they can find on the people who belong to the phone numbers – I mean, if they can do that.'

'That'd cost you more.'

'Go up to a thousand.'

'You got it: send me an e-mail with the numbers. I'll pass it on. You'll get it back by e-mail.' jricy

Lucas copied odd, unusual or unidentified numbers from the photos and asked for names and addresses. He dumped the e-mail to Steve, then checked his own e-mail account, and found two letters, one advertising pornographic photographs of pre teens, which he deleted, and another from his daughter.

Sarah was in the first grade, starting to read and write: but her mother, a TV news producer, had shown her how to use a voice-writing software program. Using the voice-writer, Sarah now wrote Lucas a couple of times a week.

Lucas took fifteen minutes to interpret the voice-written text, and he wrote back, struggling to use words that Sarah could sound out, while at the same time trying to avoid the Dick-and-Jane syndrome. He was just finishing when a perky little female voice from the computer said, 'You have mail.'

He sent the e-mail note to Sarah, then clicked on his in-box. The sole piece of mail was a list of names and addresses attached to the phone numbers he'd sent out. All but two of the names had personal information attached. Lucas scanned it: the information appeared to come from credit bureaus, although some might have come from state motor-vehicle departments. At the end of it all was a price tag: 'Send $1000.'

'Quick,' he muttered. He looked at his watch. Just under half an hour.

He printed the numbers out, and turned to the documents he'd pulled from

Carmel's computer.

Though he spent less than five seconds with most of them – virtually all were work-related – it was after three in the morning before he wiped the disk, shut down the computer and went to bed.

The next day, he chopped the disk to pieces with a butcher knife, and dropped the pieces in two separate trash cans in the Skyway: he had an almost superstitious dread of computer files turning up when they weren't supposed to.

Then, while he was still in the Skyway, between the Pillsbury building and the government center, he noticed a woman in a shapeless black dress, wearing a white scarf on her head, babushka-style. He turned to watch her walking away; some religious or ethnic group, he thought, but he didn't know which. He went on to police headquarters, whistling, where he called Sherrill.

'Can either you or Black come by for a minute?'

'Which would you prefer? Me or Tom?'

'Stop,' he said. 'I just want to hear about the Allen case. And mention a couple of things to you.'

Sherrill came down a few minutes later and dropped into his visitor's chair.

'We're running out of stuff to look at,' she said.

'Let me tell you what Hale Allen told me yesterday,' Lucas said. He laid it out quickly, then told her about the ethnic woman in the Skyway. 'She looked like the aliens the kid described, when she was putting together that composite photo. So we need to get a low-angle photograph of somebody in a dark dress, wearing a scarf over her head; then we need to plug in a bunch of faces, including Carmel's.'

'Carmel Loan,' Sherrill said. 'That could get rough, if we went public and didn't have the goods.'

'Which is why I don't want her to know that we're looking at her. Not unless we get something solid.'

'All right,' Sherrill said. She pushed herself up. 'I can probably get a picture of Carmel from your lady at the Star-Tribune library, if she still works there.'

'She does,' Lucas said.

'And I'll have the ID guys put together a photo spread. We can base it on the composite the kid gave us. When do you want to talk to the kid?'

'The sooner the better,' Lucas said. 'I don't know how long memories last with little kids.'

'I'll try to set it up this afternoon.'

'Something else,' Lucas said. He dug in his pocket. 'Could you have the lab do an analysis on the slug?' He tossed the. 22 shell to her. She caught it one handed, looked at it, and then asked, 'What's going on, Lucas?'

'Nothing; it's one of my. 22s. I just want to look at the difference between a random analysis and what we're getting from the slugs we took out of the dead guys. Do we really have a case based on a metals analysis?'

She looked at him, suspicious, turned the cartridge in her hand. 'Then, if I lost this particular shell,' she said, 'You wouldn't mind if I just sent in one of my own.'

Lucas said, 'Send that one in, huh? Just send it in.' 'This one.' 'That one.'

'Lucas…'

'Off my case, Marcy,' he said. She grinned at him and said, 'Marcy, my ass.

We're operating, aren't we?'

'Send the fuckin' thing in,' he said.

Lucas spent the morning running through the numbers he'd taken from Carmel's address books and phone bills: he'd marked fifty-five of them to be checked. In three hours, he'd half-filled a yellow legal pad with notes, but nothing promising.

A few minutes before noon, he got to the final long-distance call on the last of the long-distance bills: a call made two weeks earlier, he noticed, a couple of days after Barbara Allen's death. The note from the hacker said only, 'Small business phone listed to Tennex Messenger Service.' Lucas dialed the number and a woman answered on the first ring: 'Tennex Messenger Service.'

'Yes, could I speak to the Tennex manager? Or whoever runs the place?'

'I'm sorry, sir, Mr. Wilson is out. I can give you his voice-mail.'

'Well, I was just wondering how I could set up an account with Tennex.'

'I'm sorry, sir; we're answering service. All I can do is give you his voice mail.'

'Okay, thanks, if you could do that…'

He was switched, and got a voice-mail introduction, a slightly vague voice that might have come from a drugged-out teenager: 'You have reached Tennex Messenger

Service, your, uh, fastest messenger service in the DeeCee area. We are either, uh, on the phone or out on a call. We check back for messages, so, like, leave your name and, uh, phone number. Thanks.'

Not interested in talking to a strung-out bicycle-messenger, Lucas hung up, yawned, stood up and stretched, and walked down to Homicide. Black was at his desk, shuffling through papers; Sloan had his feet up, reading a Pioneer Press.

'Lunch?' Lucas asked.

'Yeah, I could see my way clear to a lunch,' Sloan said.

Sherrill pushed through the office door, spotted Lucas and said, 'I sent that slug in, and we're all set for four o'clock this afternoon.'

Sloan's eyebrows went up. 'Really? Where at?' he asked.

Sherrill correctly interpreted his tone and implication: 'Shut up,' she said. To

Lucas: 'Mama is not happy with the fact that we're coming back to see the kid.

There was all the loose talk in the newspapers about hit men.'

'So I'll let you warm her up when we get there,' Lucas said. 'Woman talk, bonding, chit-chat, that kind of shit.'

'Sexism,' Sloan said, shaking his head sadly. 'And from a member of the

Difference Commission.'

Lucas's hand went to his forehead: 'Ah, Jesus, I forgot. There's a meeting tonight.'

They looked at him with sympathy, and Sherrill patted his shoulder. 'It could be worse.'

'How?'

'I don't know. You could be shot.'

'He's been shot,' Sloan said. 'It'd have to be a lot worse than that.'

Lunch with Sloan was a long hour of gossip, with brief side-trips into current styles of crime. Murder was down, even with Allen and the two dead in Dinkytown

– the fourth, Rolo, was on the St. Paul books. Rape was down, ag assault was down, coke was down, speed was up and so was heroin. 'Guiterrez told me that the day heroin started coming back, was a happy day in his life,' Sloan said, speaking of one of the dope detectives. 'He says Target's gonna get ripped off, and K-Mart and Wal-Mart, but at least they're not gonna have a bunch of robot crazy coke freaks running around with guns, thinkin' that nothing can hurt them.'

Lucas nodded: 'Give a guy a little heroin, he goes to sleep. Give him a little more, he dies. No problem.'

'Shoplift like crazy, though,' Sloan said.

'A cultural skill,' Lucas said, lifting up the top of his cheeseburger to inspect the solitary, suspiciously pale pickle. 'Passed on by heroin gurus.

Somebody oughta look into it. An anthropologist.'

'Or a proctologist,' Sloan said. 'Say, with that commission meeting tonight, you won't be shooting.'

'I'm thinking of giving it up, anyway,' Lucas said. 'That goddamn Iowa kid shot my eyes out last time.'

'He's a freak,' Sloan said. 'He's shooting Olympic, now. He's got a target on his locker, ten bulls, every shot in the X ring. In the middle of the X-ring – you can see black all around the edges.'

'He's good,' Lucas said. 'At my age, you can't be that good. Can't do it. Your fine muscle control isn't fine enough.'

'Yeah, yeah. He's sort of a dumb fuck,' Sloan said.

'I heard he was actually a smart fuck.'

'Yeah, well – he's a dumb smart fuck.' Sloan looked at his watch. 'I gotta get going. I gotta talk to a guy'

On the walk back to City Hall, Lucas realized that a mental penny had dropped during the lunch. Something was packed into the back of his head, now, but he didn't know what it was.

But it was, he thought, something important: he dug at it, and realized it involved the Iowa kid. The kid was still a uniformed cop, but he volunteered for everything hard, and he had a thing about guns. All kinds of guns: he dreamt about them, used them, fixed them, compared them, bought and sold them. A throwback to an old western gunfighter, Lucas thought.

He tried to think about the coming interview with

Jan and Heather Davis, the photo-spread that Sherrill was putting together. A photo-spread involved some risks: if the child identified Carmel as one of the killers, and they went to court, then a witness-stand identification could be challenged on grounds that the police had contaminated the witnesses' memory with the photographs… So the whole thing had to be done just right.

As much as he tried to think about the upcoming interview, the shooter from Iowa always came back. Something that Sloan said about him. Something small. He just couldn't nail it down.

This, he thought after a while, is what it's like be senile. He had something in his head, but he couldn't get it out. Finally, he walked down to the locker room, wandered through, looking for the Iowa kid's locker: found it, with the target on it, just like Sloan said.

'Checking out the competition?' a tall blond cop asked. Another shooter, and

Lucas nodded at him.

'I heard about the perfect score,' Lucas said. He leaned forward to look at it: the bullseye on the target was called the ten-ring, but inside the bull was another, much smaller circle: the X-ring, not much bigger around than a. 22 slug. There were ten small target faces on the target sheet: and in the middle of each X-ring, a slightly soft-edged hole. Around each of the holes, the full

X-ring line could be seen. Lucas whistled.

'Guy's abnormal,' the cop asked. He was pulling on a bullet-proof vest, slapping the Velcro fastening tabs in place. 'My eyes are supposed to be 20-20, but I can't even see the X ring on them. 22 faces. Keeping them inside the ten-ring is one thing; keeping them inside the X, man… that's abnormal.'

'It's tough,' Lucas agreed. 'I've never done it.' He took a last look, shook his head, and started back to the office. Keeping them inside the ten-ring was one thing, but inside the X…

He went back to his office, scrolled through the list of phone numbers he'd sent off on the Internet. And there it was, the last one.

Tennex Messenger Service.

'Sonofabitch,' he said. That had to be a coincidence.

He was still thinking about it when Sherrill and Black showed up with a file of full-length color photos of women, silhouetted, wearing head scarves with dark raincoats. A dozen different faces had been grafted into the folds of the scarf, as if the faces had suddenly been hit by light from a doorway.

'Not bad,' Lucas said, looking through them. 'This one is Carmel?'

'Yeah – it's weird how context makes a difference; I wouldn't recognize her in a thousand years in that get-up,' Sherrill said.

Black and Sherrill drove over together, Lucas followed. Davis met them at the door: 'I hope we can do this without a lot of trauma,' she said, her voice tight.

'There's no reason to be any trauma at all,' Lucas said. 'If she can't pick out a photograph, we're done.' 'What if she does? What if this killer hears about it?'

'The killer won't hear about it from the police,' Lucas said. 'We'd do a videotape deposition, and keep her name confidential until a defense attorney did his discovery motion – by that time we'd have somebody in jail for first degree murder, and there'd be nobody to come after her.'

'The whole thing just scares the heck out of me,' Davis said, hugging herself as though she were cold.

Heather was playing with a fleet of trucks in a back bedroom: 'You know what you need?' Sherrill asked. 'You need a farm tractor. Maybe a cultivator to pull behind it.'

'I had a tractor, a John Deere, but it got lost,' Heather said. Her eyes narrowed. 'The tractor was good, but you know what I really need?'

'What?'

'When we bought the tractor, we bought a combine to go with it, but I didn't have anything to put the corn in. I could use a grain truck.'

'Yeah… well.' Sherrill was out of her depth. 'Let's look at these pictures, and we'll get you back to the trucks.'

'Mom said you could probably get me a ride in a police car,' Heather said.

'Mmm, if you ask Uncle Lucas here, he could probably fix it.'

'He's not my uncle,' Heather said. 'I can probably fix it anyway,' Lucas said.

'Come on and look at the pictures.'

She did: she looked at them all, carefully, and when she was done she said, 'Nope.' 'Nope?'

She looked at her mother. 'They don't look right.' 'If they don't look right,'

Davis said, 'then, they don't look right.'

'You're sure none of them look right…' Lucas said.

'Well, they all look sorta right, but not really right.'

'If that's what you say, that's what you say,' Black said. They all stood up.

'Can Uncle Lucas still get me a ride in a police car?'

Out on the sidewalk, Sherrill said, 'Well, gosh-darn.'

'That's a big gosh-darn from me, too,' Black said. 'Though I don't know if I'd want to put a kid on a witness stand with Carmel Loan ready to cut her up.'

'I'd take anything right now,' Lucas said moodily. 'I'd take a chimp if it was ready to pick her out.'

'So what're you going to do?' Sherrill asked.

'Gonna go home,' Lucas said. 'Have a beer. Think about it. Cry myself to sleep.'