Mind prey

CHAPTER 23

Mail's trap had snapped, but it had come up empty. Still, it had excited him: figuring it out, setting it up. He hadn't planned to put Gloria's body in the loft section, but it had worked so well in his mind-the cheese to pull them, unthinking, into the trap.

And it must've been close, because they'd tripped it. He could tell by the way they were acting.

"We knew there'd be a booby trap, that there'd be something," Davenport said. He seemed to find the situation almost funny, in a grim way. He stood with his back to the Bit amp; Bridle, his hard face made even harder by the television lights; his suit seemed unwrinkled, his tie went with his cool blue eyes. "We were hoping that by flooding the area with unmarked cars, we'd spot him. We're still processing license numbers."

"You're lying, asshole," Mail shouted at the television screen. Then he laughed, pointed at the screen with a beer bottle. "You got lucky, motherfucker."

Davenport looked out at him, unblinking. Behind Davenport, cops swarmed over the Bit amp; Bridle storefront. He missed some of what Davenport had said, and picked up on, "… we'll have to wait for the Medical Examiner's report on Gloria Crosby. She may have been up there for quite a while. We don't think he'd risk confronting us."

"You're fuckin' lying," Mail shouted. He jumped out of the chair and punched the TV off, sat down, bounced twice, picked up the remote, and punched it back on.

This was not right: he'd pulled them into Stillwater with the phony verses-he'd known that they'd look at Stillwater, but they wouldn't have gone into the city when Dunn was just outside it. They would've stayed with Dunn. Mail had been in Stillwater in the early morning hours, just after his first call to Dunn, and there'd been no cops anywhere. Unmarked cars, bullshit. He would have noticed.

But he worried about his plates; were they on a list somewhere?

The talking head had moved on: Davenport was gone, and the news program had gone to a room full of computer cubicles, and a group of young people gathered around a monitor. There was an air of urgency among them, like a war room.

The reporter was saying, "… is also the owner of a company that makes police and security-oriented computer training software. He has placed those resources at the command of the department, for the duration of the hunt for Andi Manette and her children. A working group of gaming and software experts anticipated the kidnapper's moves, including the possibility of a booby trap…"

What?

"… believe they are closing in on the kidnapper or kidnappers…"

"That's bullshit," Mail said. But as he watched the video of the group crouched over their screens, he envied them. Good equipment, good group. They were all dressed informally, and two of the men were holding oversized coffee mugs. They probably all went out at night for pizza and beer and laughed.

The reporter was saying, "… but everybody just calls her by her last name, Ice." A startlingly attractive young woman with a punk haircut and a nose ring grinned out at Mail and said, "We've almost had him twice. Almost. And it's really a rush. I never worked with the cops before-I mean, except for Lucas-and it's pretty interesting. Totally better'n programming some pinball game or something. Totally."

"Do you think you'll get him?" the reporter asked.

Ice nodded. "Oh, yeah, if the cops don't get him first 'cause of some routine f-mistake." She'd been about to say fuck-up, Mail thought. And he liked her. "Right now, over there"-she pointed at two women huddled over keyboards-"we're keying in everything we know about the guy, and we know quite a bit. We include a list of all the possible suspects, you know, like profiles of previous offenders from the police department, Andi Manette's patients, and so on. Not too long from now, we'll push a button and some names'll come out, cross-referenced by the other things we know. I'd bet my [beep] that our guy's name's like totally on the list."

When the story ended, Mail went into the kitchen and pulled out a phone book, looked up Davenport's company. He found it on University Avenue, in Minneapolis, down in the old warehouse and rail yard district west of Highway 280. Huh. Probably cops all over the place.

Back in the front room, a different talking head was going on about a troop movement in the Middle East, and Mail picked up the remote and surfed.

Ice came up again-Channel Three. "The guy has shown a certain crude intelligence, so we think it's possible that he wore a wig or colored his hair during the actual attack. One of the witnesses mentioned that his hair didn't look quite right. If he's really dark-haired, he'd look more like this…"

The TV went to a composite. Mail was riveted: the computer composite didn't look exactly like him, but it was close enough. And they knew about the van, and about the gaming.

He nibbled nervously on a thumbnail. Maybe these people really did amount to something.

This Ice chick: she was as good as Andi Manette. He'd like to try her sometime.

But Davenport and this computer operation… something should be done.

Andi and Grace had lost their grip on passing time: Andi tried to keep them alert but found that more and more they were sleeping between Mail's visits, huddled on the mattress, curled like discarded fetuses.

Andi had lost count of the assaults. Mail was becoming increasingly violent and increasingly angry. After the episode with the witch-woman, Mail had beaten her with her arms overhead, and she'd been unable to protect herself; that night, she'd found blood in her urine.

She was disappointing him, now, but she didn't know what he had expected and so couldn't do anything about it. He had begun talking to Grace-a word or two, a sentence-when he took Andi out and put her back in. Andi could feel his interest shifting.

So could Grace, who hid from it, in sleep. And sometimes, in nightmares, she'd groan or whimper. Andi first held her, then tried to cover her own ears, then got angry at the girl for her fear, then was washed at guilt because of her anger, and held the girl, and then she got angry again…

When they talked, Andi had little to suggest. "If he takes you, wet yourself. Just… pee. That's supposed to turn off a lot of people like this."

"God, mom…" Grace's eyes pleaded with her to do something: a nightmare of Andi's own, but she couldn't wake from it.

The nail in the overhead beam was perhaps half-exposed, and was as unmovable as before. They'd given up working on it, but when Andi rolled onto her back, she could see the nail head glowing faintly in the dark wood. A reproach…

She and Grace hadn't spoken for two hours when Grace, exhausted but unable to sleep, rolled from her left side to her right, and a spring-tensioner broke in the mattress. The spring pushed up into the pad that covered it, and thrust a small, uncomfortable bump into Grace's cheek.

"God," was all Grace said.

Andi: "What?" She rolled onto her back and looked up at the light bulb. Sooner or later, it'd burn out, she thought, and they'd be in the dark. Would that be better? She tried to think.

"Something broke in the mattress," Grace said. She pushed herself up with one hand and punched the bump with the other hand. "It makes a bump."

Andi turned her head to look: the bump looked like somebody were gently trying to push a thumb through the pad. "Just move over…" Then, suddenly, she sat up. "Grace-there's a spring in there."

Grace said, "So?"

"So a spring is as good as a nail."

Grace looked at her, then at the mattress, and some of the dullness seemed to lift from her face. "Can we get one out?"

"I'm sure."

They crawled off the mattress, flipped it over, and tried to scratch through the fabric. The fabric was as tough as leather; Andi broke a nail without even damaging it.

"We're trying to go too fast," Grace said. "We've got to go slow, like with the nail. Let me chew on it."

Grace chewed on it forever-for five minutes-then Andi chewed on it for another two, and finally cut through. The hole was small, but with a little worrying, they opened it enough that Grace could get a finger through. Tugging on the hole, she started to split the fabric, and then Andi could get fingers from both hands through at once, and she ripped a two-foot hole in the bottom of the mattress.

The springs were coiled steel, both tied and sewn in. They took another twenty minutes working one free, using their teeth.

"Got it," Andi said, lifting it out of the hole. Grace took it, turned it in her hands. The spring had a sharp, nipped-off tip. She used it to pick at the stitching around another spring, and in a minute had the second one free.

"I bet we could get the nail out with these," Grace said, looking up at the overhead. Her face was grimy, with dirt grimed into wrinkles around her eyes.

"We could try-but let's see what happens when we stretch these things out. Maybe we won't need it." Andi rubbed the end of the spring on an exposed granite rock in the wall, the concrete floor: after a moment she looked at it, and then at Grace. "It works," she said. "We can sharpen them."

A moment later, they heard the feet on the floor above. "Back in the mattress," Andi snapped. They put the springs back in the hole, flipped the mattress over, shoved it against the wall, curled up on it.

Grace's back was to Andi, so she whispered to the wall, "Be nice to him. Maybe he won't hurt you."

"I… can't be," Andi whispered. "When he takes me out there, something turns off."

"Try," Grace pleaded. "If he keeps beating you, you'll die."

"I'll try," Andi said. As the steps got closer, she whispered, "Head down. No eye contact."