Mind prey

CHAPTER 19

Lucas's cellular phone buzzed, and he looked down at his pocket. "I told all my friends to stay off, unless it was an emergency," he said. Lester picked up another phone and dialed, and Lucas let the phone ring once more before he snapped it open and said, "Yeah?"

"Ah, Lucas." Mail's voice. Traffic was busy in the background. "Is your ass getting tired of chasing me? I'm thinking of going on vacation, tell you the truth."

"Are you driving around?" Lucas asked. He flapped his hand at Lester, nodding, and Lester whispered urgently into his phone, then dropped it and sprinted out of the room. "Feel pretty safe?"

"Yeah, I'm driving," Mail said. "Are you trying to track me?"

"I don't know. Probably," Lucas said. "I need to talk to you and I need to finish what I've got to say, with no bullshit."

"Well, spit it out, man. But don't take too long. I've got a clue for you. And this is a good one."

"Why don't you give me that, first?" Lucas said. "Just in case I piss you off."

Mail laughed, and then said, "You're a funny guy. But listen, this is a real clue. Not sort of remote, like the first one."

"Tell me about the first one?"

"Fuck no." Mail was amused. "But I'll tell you-if you figure this one out, you'll get me fair and square. You ever watch Monty Python? It'd be like"-he lapsed into a bad British accent-"a fair cop."

"So what is it?"

"Just a minute, I got it written down. I've got to read it to you, to get it right. Okay, here it is…" He paused, then said, in a reading voice: "A little blank verse, one-twelve-ten, four-four, one-forty-seven-nine, and a long line; twenty-three-two, thirty-two-nine, sixty-nine-twenty-two."

"That's it?" Lucas asked.

"That's it. This is a very simple code, but I don't think you'll crack it. If you do, I'm done. Mrs. Manette bet me that you'd break it. And I'll tell you, I have to be honest about this, you sure don't want her to lose the bet, Lucas. Hey, did you say it was all right for me to call you Lucas?"

Lucas said, "Mrs. Manette's still okay? Can I talk to her?"

"After the stunt she pulled last time? Bullshit. We had a hard little talk about that. What do you cops call it? Tough love?"

"She's still alive?"

"Yeah. But I'm gonna have to go. I feel like a whole cloud of cops are closing in on me."

"No, no-listen to me," Lucas said urgently. "You don't feel it, but you're ill. I mean, you're gonna die from it. If you come in, I swear to God nothing will happen to you, except we'll try to fix things…"

Mail's voice turned to a growl. "Hey, I've been fixed. Best and the brightest tried to fix me, Davenport. They used to strap me to a table and fix the shit out of me. Sometimes I remember whole months that I'd forgotten because they fixed me so good. So don't give me any of that fixed shit. I been fixed. I'm what you get, when they fix somebody." His voice changed again, went Hollywood. "But, hey, dude, I gotta run. Got a little pussy lined up after dinner, know what I mean? Catch you later."

And he was gone.

Lucas ran down the hall and through the security doors on the 911 center. Lester was already there, with a man Lucas recognized as an FBI agent. They were looking over the shoulder of one of the operators, who was speaking into a microphone: "Dark Econo-line van or like that, probably no further west than Rice Street…" Lester said to Lucas, "Probably 694, east to west. We're flooding it right now. We're taking every van off the road."

They hung around Dispatch for fifteen minutes, listening as vans were pulled off the highway wholesale. After a while, they walked back to the Homicide Office together and found Sloan with his feet on his desk, looking at a printout.

"Da clue," he said, waving the printout at them.

"Already?" Lucas said. "What do you think?"

"Could be Bible verses," Sloan said. "They got that kind of numbers and he used the Bible last time."

"Unless he's cooked up something clever and he's fucking with us," Lester said. "Maybe it's got something to do with the numbers."

"Maybe it's his address," Sloan said. "And his driver's license number."

"And maybe it's the Bible," Lucas said. "I've got somebody who can look into that possibility."

"Elle," Sloan said, looking up from the list of clues. "Does a nunnery got a fax machine?"

"Yeah," Lucas said, vaguely. He read through a transcript of the tape. "Shit."

"What?"

"Don't go away," Lucas said. "Let me fax this to Elle."

When he came back, five minutes later, he glanced around the Homicide Office. A half-dozen detectives were sitting at desks, talking, looking at maps, eating. Two of them had found a Bible and were paging through it with some perplexity.

Lucas stepped close to Sloan's desk and crooked a finger at Lester. Lester stepped over and Lucas said, in a low voice, "There were two things he said. He was fixed-so our guy has been in a state hospital. We've gotta be sure that every state hospital employee and every long-term resident has seen the composite."

Lester nodded. "Why are we whispering?"

" 'Cause of the other thing," Lucas said. "Remember how he knew that we'd spotted his gamer's shirt? Now he knows that Andi Manette tried to send a message to us. He knows. He's gotta be getting information. He's gotta."

"From here?" Lester breathed, looking around.

"Probably not, but I don't know. I'd bet it comes out of the family briefings. Somebody out there has a motive to get rid of Manette. Whoever it is, is talking to this guy."

Lester scratched his nose, nervous, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down. "The chief is gonna be delighted," he said.

"Maybe we shouldn't tell her," Lucas said. "I mean, for her own good."

"What're you thinking about?" Lester said.

"I'm thinking that we ought to come up with a bunch of little nuggets, different nuggets, bullshit, that we feed through all the different family members-and then we wait to see if anything comes out the other side. Stuff that our guy would react to. If we can find who's feeding him, we can crack him. Or her."

"Christ." Lester scratched his nose, then his head. Then, "We gotta tell Roux. That's what she's paid for."

Roux said, "I wish you hadn't told me."

"That's what you're paid for," Lucas said, straight-faced.

Roux sighed and said, "Right. So. Anything critical, we keep to ourselves, though I don't see how we could keep Manette's message to ourselves. We wouldn't have known what it meant."

Lester explained Lucas's idea about feeding false information through the family: Roux grudgingly approved but rolled her eyes to the ceiling and said, "Please, God, don't let it be Tower."

"One other thing," Lucas said. "We've got recorders on everybody's listed numbers, because we were only looking for incoming calls from a stranger. We should start looking at the private phones, too, the unlisted numbers, the outgoing calls. And we need to be quiet about it."

Roux looked at Lester, who nodded and said, "I agree," and then closed her eyes and said, "They'll be pissed when they find out."

"When they find out, we can explain it," Lucas said. "But we need to get on this right now. I mean, right note. We're running out of time."

"But I really don't think whoever it is would call from his own phone."

"They might, if they think they know what's being monitored," Lucas said. "And when the asshole needs to get in touch with them, he's got to call. We need to know about anything anomalous-odd rings, cryptic phone calls, funny-sounding wrong numbers, anything."

Roux sighed, spread her hands on her desk, looked at them. "I knew there'd be days like this," she said.

"You gotta do it," Lucas said.

"All right," Roux said. "I'll call Larry Baxter-he'd sign a warrant on the Little Old Lady Who Lived in a Shoe."

"Tonight," Lucas said. "Get Anderson to call the phone company and get a list of all their numbers, on every single one of the family members. Then get a guy over to the phone company and have him sit there and listen."

"We're running out of guys," Lester said.

"Pull some uniforms," Lucas said. "We don't need Einstein over there."

One hundred and forty-four vans were stopped along I-694 after Mail's call to Lucas. Two men were held briefly while checks were run on them, and then they were released.

"You know what he was doing?" Lucas said, looking up at a wall map in the Homicide Office. He pointed at the top of the map, at the belt highway. "I bet he's on a secondary road driving parallel to the highway. I bet he was on County Road C, knowing that if we're tracking him, we'd be looking on 694."

"So… that's gonna be tough," Lester said, looking at the map. "We'll have to try to flood a whole area, instead of just a road, or a street."

"We won't get him that way," Lucas said. "He'll keep changing up on us."

Lucas was just ready to leave again when Elle called back. "I'm pushing the button on my fax. You should have a fax coming in."

A second later, Lucas heard the fax phone ring once, and then the fax machine started buzzing at the other end of the office: "It's coming now."

"Okay," she said. "Now. If it's the Bible, it's Psalms, of course."

"How do you know that?"

"Psalms is the only book that has chapter numbers as high as the ones he cited," she said. "If they're not from Psalms, then it's just a bunch of gibberish. It could be anything."

"But what if they're all from Psalms?" Lucas asked.

"This is what he said," Elle intoned. "He said, 'A little blank verse' and then the numbers. And here are the first three verses. These are from the King James Version, by the way-I think he'd probably be using one, since I doubt that he's religious, and if he's not, he's probably got a James."

"All right. But the pope'll be pissed." There was silence on the other end and Lucas said, "Sorry."

She said, "Why don't you go get that fax?"

"Just a minute." He put the phone down, got the fax, and walked back. "Ready."

"Psalm 112:10," she said. Lucas followed along on the fax as she read, "The wicked shall see it, and be grieved; he shall gnash with his teeth, and melt away: the desire of the wicked shall perish.

"Psalm 4:4: Stand in awe and sin not: commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still. Selah.

"Psalm 147:9: He giveth to the beast his food, and to the young ravens which cry."

There was a rustling of paper and Elle said, "Got that?"

"Yeah. But what is it?" He studied the Psalms but found no pattern at all.

"I couldn't see anything at first. I kept thinking that the verses must relate to his condition, or the condition of the women. I thought he must've made a psychotic connection between them. These are powerful images-gnashing teeth, ravens and beasts, the wicked and the grieved. The problem is, I couldn't relate them to anything. There was no thread."

"Elle? What are you leading up to?" Lucas asked.

"A silly question," the nun said. "It's so silly that I don't want to explain it unless the answer is yes."

"So ask."

"Is there anybody named Crosby involved with this whole thing?"

After a moment of silence, Lucas said, "Elle, we're getting ready to plaster the papers and the TV newscasts with pictures of a woman named Gloria Crosby. She knows our man. How did you know?"

Elle laughed softly and said, "I thought it was so stupid."

"What?"

"The sequence of single words in the first three verses, with that 'blank verse' coming first."

"Elle, damnit…"

"Each verse has one of these words, in order: Blank, Gnash, still, young."

Lucas closed his eyes and then grinned. "God, I like this kid. It's the group: Crosby, Nash, Stills and Young. I think the order is wrong, but…"

"I think that's it."

Lucas's smile faded. "Then he's got her. Crosby."

"That would be my interpretation. After that verse, he says, 'long line.' That breaks the meaning of the top three verses from the next three. For the first two of those three, I have no clue. Well, I have some clue, but it's pretty general."

Lucas read the two verses, under the long line she'd drawn across the paper. The first was Psalm 23:2: He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters.

"She's dead," Lucas said. "That's the verse you read at a funeral."

"Unless he's hinting that he's taken her to Stillwater."

"Yeah." He scanned the fifth verse, Psalm 32:9: "Be ye not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no understanding: whose mouth must be held in with bit and bridle, lest they come near unto thee."

After a long moment of silence, Lucas said, "Doesn't mean anything to me."

"Me either. But I'll think about it."

"How about the last one?"

"That's the one that worries me: 69:22: Let their table become a snare before them: and that which should have been for their welfare, let it become a trap."

"Huh," Lucas said.

"Be careful," Elle said. "He's warning you."

"I will. And Elle: thanks."

"I'm praying for Dr. Manette and the children," Elle said. "But you've got to hurry, Lucas."

Before Lucas left, he called Anderson and said, "Check and see if there are any horse farms-or mule farms, for that matter-out near Stillwater."

"There are," Anderson said. "Lots of them. It's sorta St. Paul's horsey country."

"Better start running the owners," Lucas said. "Make a list."