Mind prey

CHAPTER 21

Greave met Lucas at the elevator doors. He was in shirtsleeves, his tie hanging around his shoulders, his hair sticking up in clumps. "Christ, lit me up like a fuckin' Christmas tree," he said. "I couldn't believe what I was hearing."

He led Lucas down a bare but brightly lit hallway toward an open office door, their heels echoing on the tile floor.

"You call the feebs?" Lucas asked.

"No. Should I?"

"Not yet." The office was furnished with a cafeteria-style folding table, three office chairs, and a television. A group of beige push-button telephones and a tape recorder sat on the table with a plate of donut crumbs; the TV was on but the sound was off, Jane Fonda hustling a treadmill. A pile of magazines sat on the floor beside the table.

"Got it cued up," Greave said. He pushed a button on the recorder, and the tape began to roll with the sound of a phone ringing, then being picked up.

"George Dunn,"

"George?" Mail's voice was cheerful, insouciant. "I'm calling for your wife, Andi."

"What? What'd you say?" Dunn seemed stunned.

"I'm calling for your wife. Is this call being monitored? And you better tell the truth, for Andi's sake."

"No, for christ sakes. I'm in the car. Who is this?"

"An old friend of Andi's… Now listen; I want a hundred thousand for the package. For the three of them."

"How do I know this isn't a con?" Dunn asked.

"I'm gonna play a recording." There was some apparent fumbling, then Andi Manette's voice, tinny, recorded: "George, this is Andi. Do what this man tells you. Um, he said to tell you what we talked about the last time we talked… You called me from the club and you wanted to come over, but I said that the kids were already in bed and I wasn't ready to…"

The recording ended in mid-sentence and Mail said, "She gets a little sloppy after that, George. You wouldn't want to hear it. Anyway, you got any more questions about whether this is real?"

Dunn's voice sounded like a rock. "No."

"So. I don't want you to go to the bank and get a bunch of money with the numbers recorded and dusted with UV -powder and all that FBI shit. If you do it, I'll know, and I'll kill them all."

"I gotta get the money."

"George, you've got almost sixty thousand in case money, mostly kruggerrands, that nobody knows about, in a safety deposit box in Prescott, Wisconsin. Okay? You've got a Rolex worth $8,000 that you never wear anyway. Andi has $25,000 in diamond jewelry and a ruby from her mother, all in your joint safety deposit box at First Bank. And you've got several thousand dollars in cash hidden in the two houses… get that."

"You sonofabitch."

"Hey. Let's try to keep this businesslike, okay?" Mail's voice was wry, but not quite taunting.

"How do I get it to you? I've got cops staying with me, waiting for you to call."

"Take I-94 east all the way to the St. Croix, get off on Highway 95, get back on going west, and pull off at the Minnesota Welcome station. You know where that is?"

"Yeah."

"There's a phone by the Coke machine. Get on it just before seven o'clock, but keep your finger on the hook. I'll call right at seven o'clock. If it's busy, I'll try again at five after seven. If it's still busy, I'll try at ten after, but that's it: after that, I'm gone. Don't even think about telling the cops. I'll be driving around, and they can't track me when I'm moving. They've been trying. When I get you on the phone, I'll give you some instructions."

"Okay."

"If I see any cops, I'm gone."

The phone went dead.

"That's it," Greave said.

"Jesus." Lucas walked in a quick circle, stopped to look out the window at the lights of the city, then said, "We talk to Lester and the chief. Nobody else. Nobody. We've got to get a team going."

Roux brought the FBI in. Lucas argued against it, but she insisted: "For christ sakes, Lucas, this is the thing they do. This is their big specialty. We can't leave them out-if we do, and if we blow it, it'll be all our asses. And it should be."

"We can handle it."

"I'm sure we can, if it's real. But if it's anything else, we'd be in deep shit, my friend. No, they've got to come in."

Lucas looked at Lester, who nodded, agreeing with Roux.

"So. I'll call them, and you two can brief them. We'll want representatives on the team that tracks Dunn. You, Lucas, somebody else."

"Sloan or Capslock."

"Whichever, or both," Roux said. She turned away from them, flicked her lighter, and touched off another cigarette. "Christ, I hope this is the end of it."

Lucas, up all night, arguing with Roux or briefing the feebs, stopped home at five-thirty and ate breakfast with Weather.

"Do you think it's real?" she asked. She was running a seminar for post-docs that morning, and was dressed in a pale linen suit with a silk scarf.

"It sure sounded good," Lucas said. "Dunn was absolutely spontaneous. We didn't have that phone monitored until yesterday, and, we didn't tell him about it… so, yeah, I believe the call. I don't think this asshole is gonna hand over his wife and kids, though."

"Then the call was good for one thins," Weather said.

Lucas nodded. "If it's real, it eliminates Dunn from the list."

"Unless…" Weather said.

"What?"

"Unless he's talking to somebody in his office, and that person is passing the word along."

Lucas waved her off. "That's too complicated to think about. Possible, but we'd never get to them."

They heard the Pioneer-Press paper-delivery car slow outside the house, and the paper hit the walk. Lucas ran out to get it, and as he did, the Star-Tribune car came by, and he got that, too. Both papers had photos of Crosby above the fold.

"For all the good it does us," Lucas said, scanning the stories. "He's got her."

"Aren't you planning to talk to the papers today?"

Lucas slapped his forehead. "Yes. Damnit. Noon."

"Get some sleep," she said.

"Yeah." He glanced at his watch. Almost six. "A few hours, anyway."

Weather took her coffee cup and the plate on which she'd had her toast, carried them to the sink, then laughed as she walked back to the table and ruffled his hair.

"What?" he asked.

"You look like you're fifteen and going on your first date. You always do when you get something going. And the more awful it is, and the more tired you get, the happier you look. This whole thing is terrible: and you're getting high on it."

"It's interesting," Lucas admitted. "This kid we're talking to, he's an interesting kid." He looked out the window, where the neighbor from across the street was walking his elderly cocker spaniel, and the day was beginning as quietly as a mouse. "I mean, you know, for a nightmare."

Reporters from five television stations and both major papers showed up at the company headquarters at noon. Lucas talked for five minutes about police tactical simulation software and gaming programs, then passed the reporters to Ice.

Ice said, with the camera rolling, "We're gonna show you how we're gonna catch this sucker and nail his butt to the wall."

Lucas saw the quick smiles from the cameramen and the reporters: he had a hit on his hands. Barry Hunt caught his eye and they nodded at each other.

"The first thing is, we know what he looks like."

Ice ran the art program that manipulated the facial characteristics of the composite drawing of the suspect, adding and deleting hair, mustaches, beards, glasses, and collar styles. The other techies set up a camera to take pictures of the on-air reporters and manipulate their faces through the various styles. Then they put up a show that involved rotating three-dimensional maps of the Twin Cities, supposedly showing general locations of the kidnapper's hideout.

"It's going fuckin' great, as long as nobody asks what it means and how it'll help catch the guy," Ice muttered to Lucas just before he left.

Lucas looked back at the crowd of laughing reporters standing around the computer displays: "Don't worry about it," he said. "This is great video. Nobody'll be stupid enough to ask anything that'd spoil it."

At three o'clock the Dunn task force met at the federal building, with Roux, Lucas, and Sloan representing the city. Roux and Sloan were just walking in when Lucas arrived, and Roux said, "Dunn's picking up the money. The feds are all over him."

"Excellent," Lucas said.

Dumbo and twenty FBI agents were packed in a conference room, with space left for the three city reps. Lucas sat down next to a girl who he thought must be an intern of some sort, though she hardly seemed old enough. Fifteen, he thought, or sixteen. She looked at him, a level, speculating glance that struck him as too old for her body and face. He felt uncomfortable with her sitting behind him as he faced Dumbo.

Dumbo laid out the procedure: fourteen agents on the ground in seven cars, plus a chopper with a spotter in the air. "We've already marked his car with an infra-red flasher wired into the taillight. I understand that Minneapolis uses the same technique," Dumbo said, his ears flapping.

"Something like it," Sloan said. "I like the taillight deal. That's a nice touch. We oughta talk."

Dumbo looked pleased: "So. You guys want to ride in the chopper or go on the ground?"

"I'm ground," Lucas said.

"I'll go with Lucas," Sloan said. "We've got to coordinate on the radio codes."

"Sure." Dumbo pointed at one of the FBI technical people.

"Who's going into the rest stop?" Lucas asked. "It's gotta look good."

"Marie," Dumbo said, and nodded at the woman behind Lucas. Lucas glanced back at her and she grinned. "We'll put her in a high school letter jacket and a pleated skirt, give her some bubble gum. She'll go in right behind Dunn and head for the phones. There are four of them in a pod. We're monitoring all four. If Dunn has to wait, so will she. If they don't, she'll get on one and start talking to her boyfriend. She'll be looking for anything and anybody."

Roux, peering at the woman from across the table, said, "You're either precocious or older than you look."

"I'm thirty-two," the woman said, in a sweet young soprano.

"And Danny McGreff-" Dumbo nodded at a man with a large square face and two-day beard-"will get there a half-hour before Dunn is scheduled to, will get Dunn's phone and stay on it until he sees Dunn come in the door. Then he'll say good-bye, and drop it on the hook and leave. We don't think anyone should be waiting-there's never been a time when all four of them have been tied up, in the time we've been monitoring them."

"So you'll have one agent in the place and at least one outside…"

"We'll have three in the place," Dumbo said. "There's a storage room, lockable, and we'll put two men in there a couple of hours ahead of time. They simply won't come out, and there won't be any way to check inside without a key."

As the meeting was breaking up, Dumbo said, "Let's try to keep the radio communications clean, huh? Washington has asked us to allow a cameraman to ride with us tonight, for a documentary being made, uh, anyway for a documentary. I've agreed."

On the way out the door, an FBI technician muttered at Lucas,

"Keep your box on Fox."

Sloan said, "We could be in a world of hurt."

"How?" Roux asked. They pushed through the brass revolving doors onto the street.

"They've got everything figured out," Sloan said. He started peeling a Dentine pack. "Everything's on a schedule. But this can't be as easy as it looks-there's a joker in the deck somewhere."

Lucas looked up and down the street, and saw a one-time pimp named Robert Lika, whom the local wits called Leica because of his fondness for flashing preteen girls. Lika was peeing into a doorway, one hand braced on the door jamb as though the doorway were an ordinary urinal. "Will you look at this?"

"Rather not," said Roux, and her face colored.

"You're a little pink," Lucas said.

"You know, you didn't see much of that until the last two or three years," Roux said, looking down at Lika. "Now you see it all the time. It's such a weird… turn."

The federal operation was already moving, but Lucas and Sloan wouldn't be involved until Dunn started toward the rest stop. The feds were monitoring him: after making a morning round of the banks, he'd gone to his office and was still there.

Sloan's wife had had a bunion removed, and her foot was still tender, and Sloan snuck off to do some grocery shopping on city time. Lucas, restless, caught lunch at a cop bar, put twenty dollars on the Vikes over Chicago, eating the eight-point spread-the Bears sucked-walked the skyways for a while, looking at women and clothes, and played with the ring in his pocket.

He was gonna do it, he decided. Something simple-no juvenile tricks, no sophomoric misdirection or declarations. He'd just ask. What could she say, other than no? But she wouldn't say no. She had to know what he was thinking-she could read his mind, she'd proved that. Hell, she was probably getting impatient; maybe she saw all this delay as some land of insult. But the main thing was, she wouldn't say no. Well, technically, you know, she could say no. What if she started: out to be really nice about it… Fuckin' women.

Wonder what Dunn's doing?

At four-thirty, he went back to the office, got the files out, and started reading through again. The file on the dead kid, where was he? Let's see, subject reported to have jumped from the Lake Street Bridge, reporting officers called boat…

The PR woman stuck her head in the door. "Lucas, they're talking about you on TV, on the promos, so you'll be up in the next couple of minutes if you want to watch."

"Yeah, I want…" Lucas had just turned the page on the report and looked up at the PR lady, but an after-image stuck in his eye and the after-image was Gloria. He looked back down at the page, trying to find it.

"Lucas?"

"Yeah, I'll be along…" Where was it? He found it at the bottom of the page:

"… witness Gloria Crosby said he'd been depressed since getting out of the state hospital and had stopped taking his prescription medication. Crosby said he may have been taking street drugs and had been acting irrational and that on 8/9 she had him admitted to Hennepin General for apparent drug overdose. Crosby said subject called her and asked to meet him at the Stanley Grill on Lake Street and that when she got there he was already walking toward the bridge. She walked after him, but when she got to the bridge the subject was standing on the railing and stepped off before she could approach him. Crosby said she ran back to Stanley Grill to call for assistance…"

Damnit. Gloria Crosby. Crouched over the desk, he thumbed through the rest of the papers, trying to figure out what had happened. The phone rang and he snatched it off the desk:

"What?"

"Lucas, you're on…"

"Yeah, yeah." He banged down the receiver, went back to the papers, and then picked up the phone again, punched in Anderson's number.

"This is Lucas…"

"Lucas, you're on…"

"Yeah, yeah, fuck that, listen, you gotta get everything you can find on a guy named John Mail, DOB 7/7/68. Did time in the state hospital. We need the most recent photo we can find. Check the DMV and find his parents… wait, wait, I've got this…" Lucas shuffled through the papers. "His folks lived at 28 Sharf Lane in Wayzata. Goddamnit, that's where McPherson said he was from."

"Who?"

"Just get that shit, man. This is something."

Off the phone again, he went through the file on Mail and found the reference to the dental records. Damnit. He got his book, looked up the Medical Examiner's number.

"Sharon, this is Lucas Davenport… yeah, fine, it's all healed up, yeah, listen, I need you to pull something for me. You should have some records on a guy named John Mail went off the Lake Street Bridge a few years back, I can get you the date if you need it. John Mail. Yeah, I'll wait."

Ten seconds later, she was back. Mail was on the computer. "Just hold it there," Lucas said. "I'm gonna run over right now."

Lucas was out the door and down the street, a fast five-minute walk to the Medical Examiner's. An ME's investigator named Brunswick was peering at a computer.

"Something hot?" he asked.

"You say a guy is dead," Lucas said. "I think he might still be alive."

"Well, the guy we saw was dead," Brunswick said. "I've been looking at the pictures." He passed a group of eight-by-ten color photographs to Lucas. The remains of the body. Still partly wrapped in the remains of a pair of Levi blue jeans, was spread on a stainless steel table. Most of it was bone, although the torso looked like a gray ball of string or grass. The face was gone, but the dark hair was still there. Both hands were missing, as was one lee.

"Bad shape. Were the hands-is that natural? Is there any possibility they were taken off?"

Brunswick shook his head. "No way to tell. The body was falling apart. The one unusual thing is that there was evidence of a ligature around the torso-wire, or something. God knows, in that part of the Mississippi, it could have been anything."

"Could somebody have anchored the body somewhere? Until it was ready to be found?"

"You've got a nasty turn of mind, Davenport."

"But you already thought of that," Lucas said.

"Yeah. And it's possible. Whatever it was tied him down, had him for a while. Nearly cut the body through, in the end. There was no sign of any ligature when the body was found, though."

"What about the dental records?"

"It's the right guy, by the records. Here are the X rays on the body, and you can see the dental X rays."

Lucas bent over them and looked: they were patently identical. In the corner of the dental records was a response phone number at the state hospital. Lucas picked up Brunswick's phone and punched the number in.

"Can't be right," Lucas said.

A woman answered. Lucas identified himself and said, "I need to talk to Dr. L. D. Rehder, does he still work there? I'm sorry, she? Yeah, it really is important. Yeah."

To Brunswick, he said, "I'm on hold."

Brunswick said, "Is this the Manette case?"

"Part of it," Lucas said.

"My wife went on a inarch last night to protest violence against women," Brunswick said.

"Hope it works," Lucas said.

On the phone, a woman said, "This is Dr. Rehder."

"Yeah, Dr. Rehder, some time ago one of your patients apparently committed suicide. The body ID was confirmed by dental records from your office," Lucas said. "A kid named John Mail."

"I remember John." Her voice was pleasantly clipped. "He was with us for quite a while."

"Is there any way he could've gotten to the records to switch them with somebody else's? I mean, before he got out of the hospital?"

"Oh, I don't think so. He was confined in a completely different area. He would have had to escape over there, break in here without being detected, then get out of here and break back in over there. It would have been very difficult."

"Damnit," Lucas said.

"Is there some question about whether it was John who jumped off the bridge?" Render asked.

"Yes. Have you by any chance seen the police composite pictures of the man who kidnapped Mrs. Manette and her daughters?"

Rehder said, "Yes, I have. John had dark hair."

"He may have changed the hair color…"

"Just a minute, let me get my paper."

"Getting her paper," Lucas said to Brunswick. He shuffled through the pictures of the body while they waited. Then Rehder came back on and said, "If the hair was changed, if the hair was black, I've just colored it in with my felt-tip pen. It could be John. There's something not quite right about the chin line."

Lucas nodded. He knew he was right. "Okay. Does the name Gloria Crosby mean anything to you?"

"Gloria?" Rehder said. "Gloria was an aide-Gloria worked for us."

Lucas closed his eyes. Gotcha.