Mind prey

CHAPTER 8

Lucas spent the early afternoon reading the papers, then tripping around to the television stations. After his last stop, he called in to Homicide and asked that Sloan be sent to meet him at Nancy Wolfe's office.

When Lucas arrived at Wolfe's, Sloan was examining the same NSX that Lucas had cruised in the morning.

"Heavy metal," he said, as he slouched over to Lucas. "Makes the Porsche look like a fuckin' Packard."

Sloan was a thin man, a man who looked at the world sideways, with a skeptical grin. He liked brown suits and had several of varied intensity: in the summer he leaned toward off-tans and not-quite-beiges, and striped neckties, and straw hats; in the winter, he went for darker tones and felt hats. He'd just shifted to winter wear, and was a dark spot in the parking lot.

"The NSX could bite you on the ass," Lucas said, looking at the car. He flipped the engagement ring in the air, caught it, and slipped it over the end of his thumb. The stone sparkled like high-rent fire.

"What're we doing?" Sloan asked.

"Good guy-bad guy with Nancy Wolfe, Manette's partner. You're the good guy."

"What has she got to do with it?"

"You know about the call from the asshole?" Lucas asked.

"Yeah, Lester played the tape for me."

"I've been running around asking questions," Lucas said. "Nobody-none of the papers, none of the stations-carried anything about the shirt. Nobody had anything about me working the case. The only people who knew, outside the department, were the family and a few people close to the family. Wolfe. A lawyer."

"Christ." Sloan scratched his head. "You think somebody's talking to him? The asshole?"

"Maybe. I can explain him knowing about me," Lucas said. "I can't explain the shirt, unless he made a pretty big intuitive leap."

"Huh." They passed the chewing-gum sculpture. Sloan looked up at it and asked, "How about Miranda?"

"Yep. We do the whole thing… And she asks for an attorney, we say fine. I'm going after her pretty hard. We want to shake her up. Same thing for the rest of the family, when we get to them."

"Lucas, hey, Lucas." They'd started across the bridge, stopped for just a second to look at the koi, heard the woman's voice, turned and saw Jan Reed hurrying across the street. A TV van was making an illegal U-turn that would take it into the parking lot.

"This one makes my dick hard," Sloan muttered.

Reed had large dark eyes, auburn hair that fell to her shoulders, and long, tanned legs. She wore a plum suit and matching shoes, and carried a Gucci shoulder bag. She had a slight overbite; a tiny lisp added to her charm.

"Are you working this?" Lucas asked as Reed came up. "This is…"

"Detective Sloan, of course," Reed said. She took Sloan's hand, gave him a two-hundred-watt smile. Then to Lucas: "I'm trying for an interview with Nancy Wolfe. I understand her records were subpoenaed this morning by the local Nazis."

"That was me," Lucas said.

Reed's smile widened slightly: she'd known. "Really? Well, why'd you do that?"

Lucas glanced toward the truck and then said to Reed, "Jan, Jan, Jan. You've got a sleazy unethical microphone in the truck, don't you? I mean, my golly, that's very slimy, a really tacky, disgusting, snakelike invasion of my privacy. In fact, it's very close to criminal. It may even be criminal."

Reed sighed. "Lucas…"

Lucas leaned close to her ear and whispered, "Go fuck yourself."

She leaned close to his ear and said, "I like the basic concept, but I hate flying solo."

Lucas, backing away, felt the ring in his pocket and said, "C'mon, Sloan, let's see if we can get to Mrs. Wolfe before the media does…"

"Goddamnit, Lucas," Heed said, and she stamped her foot.

Inside, Sloan asked, "Do you really think they had a mike?"

"I'm sure they did," Lucas said.

"Do you think they heard what I said? About Reed making my dick hard?"

"No question about it," Lucas said, biting back a grin. "And they'll use it, too, the treacherous assholes."

"You're giving me shit, man. Don't give me shit, I need to know."

The receptionist looked like she wanted to hide when she saw Lucas and Sloan coming down the hall. Lucas asked to see Wolfe, and she said, "Dr. Wolfe is with a patient. She should be finished"-she looked at a desk clock-"in five minutes or so. I hate to interrupt…"

"When she's done," Lucas said. "We'll be in Dr. Manette's office."

Sherrill and Black were sitting on the floor, working through a pile of manila folders.

"Anything new?" Lucas asked.

"Hey, Sloan," said Sherrill.

"These people are nuts," Black said, patting a small stack of folders. "These are neurotic"-he pointed toward another, larger stack-"and the big stack are just fucked up," he said, pointing at a third pile. "Some of the nuts are in jail or in hospitals; some of them we don't know about. When we get one, we call it downtown."

"What are we doing about the bank guy?" Sherrill asked.

"I unloaded it on the chief," Lucas said. "Did you find any more of those?"

"Maybe. There are a couple where it seems like she's getting cute… cryptic notes. References to other files, which we haven't found. There are computer Piles somewhere, but we haven't found the disks. Anderson's gonna come down and take a crack at her system." She nodded at an IBM computer on a credenza behind Manette's desk.

Wolfe walked in then, her face grim, her anger barely suppressed, and faced Lucas. Her arms were straight to her sides, her fists clenched. "What do you want?"

"We need to ask you some questions," Lucas said.

"Should I get my attorney?"

Lucas shrugged. "It's up to you. I do have to warn you: you have a right to an attorney."

Wolfe went pale as Lucas recited the Miranda warning. "You're serious."

Lucas nodded. "Yes. We're very serious, Dr. Wolfe."

Sloan broke in, his voice cheerful, placating. "We really are just asking basic stuff. I mean, you have to make the decision, but we're not gonna sweat you, Miz Wolfe, I mean, we're not gonna pull a light down over your head. We're just trying to figure out a few angles. If this wasn't done by one of her patients, why was it done? It was obviously planned, so it wasn't just some maniac picking people at random. We need to know who would benefit…"

"This man"-Wolfe, talking to Sloan, jabbed a finger at Lucas-"suggested this morning that I would benefit from Audi's death. I resent that. Andi's my dearest friend, a life-long friend. She's been my best friend since college, and if something should happen to her, it would be a personal disaster, not a benefit. And I bitterly…"

Sloan glanced at Lucas, shook his head, looked back at Wolfe and said, "Sometimes Lucas and I don't see eye-to-eye on these things…"

"Sloan," Lucas said, in a warning tone. But Sloan held up a hand.

"He's not a bad guy," Sloan said to Wolfe. "But he's a street guy. I'm sure he didn't mean to offend you, but sometimes he sort of… overstates things."

Lucas let the irritation show. "Hey, Sloan…"

But Sloan put up a warning hand. "We're really just looking for facts. Not trying to put pressure on you. We're trying to find out if anyone would benefit from Andi Manette's death or disappearance, and we don't mean you. At least, I don't."

Wolfe was shaking her head. "I don't see how anybody would benefit. I would get some key-person insurance if Andi died, but that wouldn't make up for the loss, financially or emotionally. I would imagine that George Dunn would get quite a bit-you know, she started out with all the money in her family. George would be a carpenter some place if he hadn't married Andi."

"Can we do this down in your office? We should be someplace a little more private, huh?" Sloan asked winningly.

On the way to Wolfe's office, with Wolfe several steps ahead, Sloan leaned to Lucas and muttered: "You know that Sherrill? She makes my dick hard, too. I think something's going on with my dick."

"That's not what you'd call a big change," Lucas said. He flipped the ring in the air and caught it. Sherrill. Sherrill was nice; so was Jan Reed, and he most certainly would have bundled Reed off to his cabin if it hadn't been for Weather. Lucas liked women, liked them a lot. Maybe too much. And that was another item on the long list of mental questions he had about marriage.

He was always shocked when a married friend went after another woman. That never seemed right. If you hadn't made the commitment, all right-do anything you wanted. But now, with the possibility of marriage looming… would he miss the hunt? Would he miss it enough to betray Weather? Would he even be considering this question if he should ask her to marry him? On the other hand, he really didn't want Reed. He didn't want Sherrill. He only wanted Weather.

"What's wrong?" Sloan asked quietly.

"Huh?" Lucas started.

"You looked like you'd had a stroke or something," Sloan said. They were just outside Wolfe's office, and Sloan was staring at him curiously.

"Ah, nothing. Lot of stuff going on," Lucas said.

Sloan grinned. "Yeah."

Wolfe's office was a mirror of Manette's, with furniture of the same style, and the same files-and-coffee niche in one wall. Sloan was charming and got Wolfe talking.

She did not like George Dunn. Dunn was facing imminent divorce, Wolfe said. If Andi died, not only would he inherit and collect any life insurance, he would also save half of his own fortune. "That's what she'd get-when they got married, he had the shirt on his back, and that was all. He made all of his money since they were married, and you know Minnesota divorce law."

Tower Manette wouldn't get anything from his daughter's death, Wolfe said, except at the end of a long string of unlikely circumstances. Andi and both the children would have to die, and George Dunn would have to be convicted of the crime.

"All you would get is the key-man insurance?" Lucas asked.

"That's right."

"Who'd take Dr. Manette's patients?"

Wolfe looked exasperated. "I would, Mr. Davenport. And I would make a little money on them. And as quickly as I could, I would bring somebody else in to handle them, I have a full slate right now. I simply couldn't handle her patient load, not by myself."

"So there's the insurance and the patients…"

"Goddamnit," Wolfe said. "I hate these insinuations."

"They're not insinuations. We're talking serious money and you're not being very forthcoming," Lucas rasped.

"All right, all right," said Sloan. "Take it easy, Lucas."

They talked for half an hour, but got very little more. As they were leaving, Wolfe said to Lucas, "I'm sure you've heard about the lawsuit."

"No."

"We've gone to court to repossess our records," she said.

Lucas shrugged: "That's not my problem. The lawyers can sort it out."

"What you're doing is shameful," she said.

"Tell that to Andi Manette and her kids-if we get them back."

"I'm sure Andi would agree with our position," Wolfe said. "We'd review the records and pass on anything that might be significant."

"You aren't cops," Lucas snapped. "What's significant to cops might not be significant to shrinks."

"You aren't doing much good," Wolfe snapped back. "As far as I know, you haven't detected a thing."

Lucas took the composite drawing from his pocket; the accumulated memories of two eyewitnesses and Marcus Paloma, the game store owner. "Do you know this man?"

Wolfe took the picture, frowned, shook her head. "No, I don't think so. But he does look sort of… generic. Who is he?"

"The kidnapper," Lucas said. "That's what we've detected so far."

"There's a woman who doesn't think the sun shines out of your ass," Sloan said as they walked down the hall.

"Yeah, that's what?" Lucas didn't mind being disliked, but sometimes the taste was sour. "Six thousand that we know of?"

"I think it's eight thousand," Sloan said.

"Does she make your dick hard?" Lucas asked.

"No-no," Sloan said. He pushed through the door outside. "She's the one with the hard-on, and it ain't for me." After a moment, Sloan said, "Where now? Manette's?"

"Yeah. Jesus, I can feel the time passing." Lucas stopped to look at the koi, hovering in the pond, their gill flaps slowly opening and closing. Mellow, the koi: and he felt like somebody had stacked another brick on his chest. "Manette and the kids… Jesus."

Tower Manette again said that Dunn would get everything unless he was convicted of a part in the crime.

"Do you think he could do it?" Sloan asked.

"I don't know about the kids," Tower said. He took a turn around the carpet, nibbling at a thumbnail. "He always acted like he loved the kids, but basically, George Dunn could do anything. Suppose he hired some cretin who was supposed to… take Andi. And instead, the guy takes all of them because they're witnesses in this screwed-up kidnapping. George would hardly be in a position to tell you about it."

"I don't think so," said Helen Manette. Her face was lined with worry, her eyes confused. "I always liked George. More than Tower did, anyway. I think if he was in on this, he'd make sure that the kids weren't hurt."

Manette stopped, turned on a heel, poked a finger at Lucas. "I really think you're barking up the wrong tree-you should be out looking for crazy people, not trying to figure out who'd benefit."

"We're working every angle we can find," Lucas said. "We're working everything."

"Are you getting anything? Anything at all?"

"Some things: we've got a picture of the kidnapper," Lucas said.

"What? Can I see it?"

Lucas took the picture out of his pocket. The Manettes looked at it, and both shook their heads at the same time. "Don't know him," Tower said.

"And nobody benefits from her death, except George Dunn…"

"Well," Helen Manette said hesitantly. "I hate to…"

"What?" Sloan asked. "We'll take anything."

"Well… Nancy Wolfe. The key-man insurance isn't the only thing she'd get. They have a partnership and six associates. If Andi disappeared, she'd get the business, along with the insurance money."

"That's ridiculous," Tower Manette said. "Nancy's an old friend of the family. She's Andi's oldest friend…"

"Who dated George Dunn before Andi took him away," Helen said. "And their business-they've done very well."

"But Dr. Wolfe says that if Andi was gone, she'd just have to hire another associate," Sloan said.

"Sure, she would," Helen said. "But instead of a partnership, she'd be a sole owner and she'd get a piece of everybody's action." The word action tripped easily from Helen Manette's mouth, out-of-place for a woman in this house; too close to the street. "Nancy Wolfe would… make out."

"Another happy couple," Sloan said on the way to the car. "Helen is a tarantula disguised as Betty Crocker, And Tower looked like somebody was pulling a trotline out of his ass."

"Yeah-but that partnership business. Wolfe didn't exactly tell us everything, did she?"

George Dunn had two offices.

One was furnished in contemporary cherry furniture, with leather chairs, a deep wine carpet, and original duck-stamp art on the walls.

The desk was clear of everything but an appointment pad and a large dark wooden box for cigars.

The other office, in the back of the building, had a commercial carpet on the floor, fluorescent lighting, a dozen desks and drafting tables with computer terminals, and two women and two men working in shirtsleeves. Dunn sat at a U-shaped desk littered with paper, a telephone to his ear. When he saw Lucas and Sloan, he said a few last words into the phone and dropped it on the hook.

"Okay, everybody, everybody knows what to do? Tom will run things, Clarice will handle traffic; I'll be back as soon as we find Andi and the kids."

He took Lucas and Sloan down to the green-leather office, where they could talk. "I've turned everything over to the guys until this is done with," he said. "Have you heard anything at all?"

"We've had a couple of odd incidents. We think we have a picture of the kidnapper, but we don't know his name."

Lucas showed the picture to Dunn, who studied it, scratched his forehead. "There was a guy, a carpenter. Goddamn, he looks something like this. He's got those lips."

"What's his name? Any reason to think…?"

"Dick, Dick, Dick…" Dunn scratched his forehead again. "Saddle? Seddle. Dick Seddle. He thought he ought to be a foreman, and when he didn't get a job that opened up, he got pissed and quit. He was mad-but that was last winter. He went around saying he was gonna clean my clock, but nothing ever came of it."

"You know where we could find him?"

"Payroll would have an address. He's married, he lives over in South St. Paul somewhere. But I don't know. He's an older guy than what you were talking about. He's maybe thirty-five, forty."

"Where's payroll?" Sloan asked.

"Down the hall on your left…"

"I'll get it," Sloan said to Lucas.

As Sloan left, Dunn picked up his phone, poked a button, and said, "A cop is on his way down. Give him whatever he needs on Dick Seddle. He's a carpenter, worked on the Woodbury project until last winter, January, I think. Yeah. Yeah."

When he hung up, Lucas said, "We're talking to everybody, all over again. We're asking who'd win if Andi Manette's dead. Your name keeps coming up."

"Fuck those people," Dunn snarled. He banged a large fist in the middle of the leather appointment pad. "Fuck 'em."

Lucas said, "They say that Andi was going after a divorce…"

"That's bullshit. We'd have worked it out."

"… and if you were divorced, you'd lose at least half of everything. They say you started this company with some of her money, and having to pay out half could be pretty troublesome."

"Yeah, it would," Dunn said, nodding. "But there's not a dime of her money in this place. Not a goddamn dime. That was part of the deal when I married her: I wasn't gonna owe her. And it would take a fucking lunatic to suggest I'd do anything to Andi and the kids. A fuckin' lunatic."

"Then we got a bunch of fuckin' lunatics, 'cause everybody we talked to suggested it," Lucas said.

"Yeah, well…"

"I know, fuck 'em," Lucas said. "So: who else would benefit?"

"Nobody else," Dunn said.

"Helen Manette suggested that Nancy Wolfe would pick up a pretty thriving business."

Dunn thought for a moment, then said, "I suppose she would, but she's never been that interested in business… or money. Andi's always been the leader and the businesswoman. Nancy was the intellectual. She publishes papers and that. She's still connected to the university and she's a bigwig in the psychiatric society. That's why they're good partners-Andi takes care of business, Nancy builds their reputation in the field."

"You don't think Wolfe's a candidate?"

"No, I don't."

"I understand you dated her."

"Jesus, they really did dump it on you, didn't they," Dunn said, his voice softening. "I took Nancy out twice. Neither one of us was much interested in a third try. So when we were saying good-bye that second time, the last time, she said, 'You know, I've got somebody who'd be perfect for you.' And she was right. I called up Andi and we got married a year later."

Lucas hesitated, then said, "Does your wife have any distinguishing marks on her body? Scars?"

Dunn froze: "You've got a body somewhere?"

"No, no. But if we should contact the people who have her, if there's a question…"

Dunn wasn't buying it. "What's going on?"

"We got a call from a guy," Lucas said.

"He said she's got a scar?"

"Yeah."

"What kind of scar?"

Lucas said, "He said it looked like a rocketship…"

"Oh, no," Dunn groaned. "Oh no…"

Sloan came in, looked at the two men facing each other. "What's going on?"

Lucas told Dunn, "We'll get back."

Dunn swung a large workman's hand across the cherry desk, and the cigar safe flew across the room, the fat Cuban cigars spraying out like so much shrapnel. "Well, fuckin' find something," Dunn shouted. "You're supposed to be the fuckin' Sherlock Holmes. Quit hanging around my ass and get out and do something."

Outside the office, Sloan said, "What was all that?"

"I asked him about the rocketship."

"Oh-oh."

"Whoever it is, he's raping her," Lucas said.

As they stood talking in the parking lot, Greave called from the Minneapolis Public Library. "It's the Bible," he said. "The Nethinims are mentioned a bunch of times, but they don't seem to amount to much."

"Xerox the references and bring them back to the office. I'll be there in ten minutes," Lucas said. He punched Greave out and called Andi Manette's office, and got Black: "Can you bring a batch of the best files downtown?"

"Yeah. On the way. And we got another problem case. A guy who runs a chain of video-game arcades."

"So what're we doing?" Sloan asked.

"You want to work this?" Lucas asked.

Sloan shrugged. "I ain't got much else. I got that Turkey case, but we're having trouble getting anybody who can speak good Turk, so it's not going anywhere."

"I've never met any Turks who didn't speak pretty good English," Lucas said.

"Yeah, well, you oughta try investigating a Turk murder sometime," Sloan said. "They're yellin' no-speaka-da-English when I'm walking down the street. The guy who was killed was outa Detroit, he was sharkin', he probably had thirty grand on the street and nobody was sorry to see him go."

"Talk with Lester," Lucas said. "We need somebody to keep digging around the Manettes, Wolfe, Dunn, and anybody else who might make something out of Andi Manette dying…" He flipped the engagement ring up in the air and caught it, rolled it between his palms.

Sloan said, "You're gonna lose that fuckin' stone. You're gonna drop it and the ring is gonna bounce right down a sewer."

Lucas looked in his hand and saw the ring: he hadn't been conscious of it. "I gotta do something about this, with Weather."

"There's pretty general agreement on that," Sloan said. "My old lady is peeing her pants, waiting for you to ask. She wants all the details. If I don't get her the details, I'm a dead man."

Greave was waiting with a sheaf of computer printer-paper and handed it to Lucas. "There's not much. The Nethinims were mostly just mentioned in passing-if there's anything, it's probably in Nehemiah. Here, 3:26."

Lucas looked at the passage. Moreover the Nethinims dwelt in Ophel unto the place over against the watergate toward the east, and the tower that lieth out.

"Huh." He passed the paper to Sloan and walked down the office to a wall map of the Metro area, traced the Mississippi with his finger. "One thing you can see from the river is all those green water towers," he said. "They're like mushrooms along the tops of all the tallest hills. The water gate could be any of the dams."

"Want me to check?"

Lucas grinned. "Take you two days. Just call all the towns along here." He snapped his finger at the map. "Hastings, Cottage Grove, St. Paul Park, Newport, Inver Grove, South St. Paul, like that. Tell them you're working Manette and ask them to swing a patrol car by the water towers; see if there's anything to see."

Black showed up ten minutes later, morose, handed Lucas a file and a tape. "Guy's messing with kids. Somebody ought to cut his fuckin' nuts off."

"Pretty explicit?"

"It's all there, and I don't give a shit what the shrinks say. This guy likes doing it. And he likes talking about it-he likes the attention he's getting from Manette. He'll never stop."

"Yeah, he will," Lucas said, flipping through the file. "For several years… I'll take it to the chief. We want to hold off until Manette's out of the way."

Black nodded. "We got some doozies in the files." He sat down opposite Lucas, spread five files on the desk like a poker hand, pushed one toward Lucas. "Look at this guy. I think he may have raped a half-dozen women, but he talks them out of doing anything about it. He brags about it: breaks down for them, weeps. Then he laughs about it. He says he's addicted to sex, and he's coming on to Manette… right here, see, she mentions it, and how she might have to redirect his therapy."

They were reading files an hour later when Greave hurried in. "They've got something in Cottage Grove."

Lucas stood up. "What is it?"

"They said it's like an oil drum under one of the water towers."

"How do they know?"

"It's got your name spray-painted on it," Greave said.

"My name?"

Greave shrugged. "That's what they said-and they are freaked out. They want your ass down there."

On the way down to Cottage Grove, the cellular buzzed and

Lucas flipped it open. "Yeah?"

Mail cooed, "Hey, Davenport, got it figured out?"

Lucas knew the voice before the third word was out. "Listen, I…"

But he was gone.