Shadow Prey

CHAPTER 22

"You're sleeping with that New York cop. Lily." Jennifer looked at him over the breakfast bar. Lucas was holding a glass of orange juice and looked down at it, as if hoping it held an answer. The newspaper sat next to his hand. The headline read: CROWS KILL COP.

He wasn't a cop, Lucas thought. After a moment he glanced away from the table and then back at the newspaper and nodded. "Yes," he said.

"Are you going to again?" Her face was pale, tired, her voice low and whispery.

"I can't help it," he said. He wouldn't look at her. He turned the glass in his hand, swirling the juice.

"Is this… a long-term thing?" Jennifer asked.

"I don't know."

"Look at me," she said.

"No." He kept his eyes down.

"You can come back and see the baby, but call first. Once a week for now. I won't continue our sexual relationship and I don't want to see you. You can see the baby on Saturday nights, when I have a sitter. After Lily goes back to New York, we'll talk. We'll make some kind of arrangement so you can visit the baby on a regular basis."

Now he looked up. "I love you," he said.

Tears started in her eyes. "We've been through this before. You know what I feel like? I feel pathetic. I don't like feeling pathetic. I won't put up with it."

"You're not pathetic. When I look at you…" "I don't care what you see. Or anybody else. I'm pathetic in my own mind. So fuck you, Davenport."

When Jennifer left, Lucas wandered around the house for a few moments, then drifted into the bedroom, undressed, and stood under a scalding shower. Daniel wanted every man on the street, but after Lucas had toweled off, he stood in front of an open closet, looking at the array of slacks and shirts, and then crawled back into bed and lapsed into unconsciousness. The Crows, Lily, Jennifer, the baby and game monsters from Drorg all crawled through his head. Every once in a while he felt the pull of the street scene outside Hood's apartment: he'd see the bricks, the negotiating cop, a slice of Lily's face, her.45 coming up. Each time he fought it down and stepped into a new dream fragment.

At one o'clock, Lily called. He didn't answer the phone, but listened as her voice came in through his answering machine.

"This is Lily," she said. "I was hoping we could get some lunch, but you haven't called and I don't know where you are and I'm starving so I'm going out now. If you get in, give me a call and we can go out to dinner. See you."

He thought about picking up the phone, but didn't, and went back to the bed. The phone rang again a half-hour later. This time it was Elle: "This is Elle, just calling to see how you are. You can call me at the residence."

Lucas picked up the receiver. "Elle, I'm here," he croaked.

"Hello. How are you?" ••'

"A down day," he said.

"Still the shotgun dream?"

"It's stiM there. And sometimes during the day. The sensation of the steel."

"It's a classic flashback. We see it all the time with burn victims and shooting victims and people who've gone through other trauma. It'll go away, believe me. Hold on."

"I'm holding on, but it's scary. Nothing's ever gotten to me like this."

"Are you going to play Thursday night?" Elle asked.

"I don't know."

"Why don't you come a half-hour early? We can talk."

"I'll try to make it."

The bed was like a drug. He didn't want it, but he fell back on the sheets and in a minute was gone again. At two o'clock, suddenly touched with fear, he sat up, sweating, staring at the clock.

What? Nothing. Then the cold ring of the shotgun muzzle rapped him behind the ear. Lucas clapped a hand over the spot and let his head fall forward on his chest.

"Stop," he said to himself. He could feel the sweat literally pop out on his forehead. "Stop this shit."

Lily called again at five o'clock and he let it go. At seven, the phone rang a fourth time. "This is Anderson," a voice said to the answering machine. "I've got something…"

Lucas picked up the phone. "I'm here," he said. "What is it?"

"Okay. Lucas. God damn." There was the sound of computer printouts rustling. Anderson was excited; Lucas could picture him going through his notes. Anderson looked, talked and sometimes acted like an aging hillbilly. A few months earlier he had incorporated his private computer business and was, Lucas suspected, on his way to becoming rich with customized police software. "I went into Larry's genealogical files for the Minnesota Sioux-you know how he had them stored in the city database?"

"Yeah, I remember."

"I looked up all the Crows. They were all too old-not many Crows in Minnesota. So I got a typist and had her put all the names from Larry's file into my machine in a sort routine…"

"What?"

"Never mind. She put them in my machine in a list. Then I went over to State Vital Records and found all the women named Love who had babies between 1945 and 1965. You said this Shadow Love dude looked like he was in his thirties…"

"Yeah."

"So I pulled all of those. There were a hell of a lot of them, more than four hundred. But I could eliminate all the ' girl babies. That got rid of all but a hundred and ninety-seven. Then I put the names of the fathers into my machine-"

"So you could run them against the genealogy-"

"Right. I got about halfway through and found a Rose E. Love. Mother of Baby Boy Love. No name for the kid, ' but that wasn't uncommon. Get this. I don't know how she j did it, but she got them to list two names in the space for the father."

"Interesting…"

"Aaron Sunders and Samuel Close."

"Shit, Aaron and Sam, it's gotta be…"

"Their race is listed as 'other.' This was back in the fifties, so it's probably Indian. And they turn up on Larry's genealogy. They are the grandsons of a guy named Richard Crow. Richard Crow had two daughters, and when they married, the Crow name ended. We got Sunders and Close-but I'd bet my left nut those are the real names for Aaron and Sam Crow." i "God damn, Harmon, that's fuckin' terrific. Have you run-" 1 "They both had Minnesota driver's licenses, but only way back, before the picture IDs. The last one for Sunders was in 1964. I called South Dakota, but they were shut down for the day. I asked for a special run and the duty guy told me to go shit in my hat. So then I rousted the feebs and they got on the line to the SoDak people. They got to the duty guy and now he's shitting in his hat. Anyway, we got the special run. They're checking the records now. I figure with* everything that's happened, that's the most likely place…"

"How about NCIC?"

"We're running that now." i "We ought to check prison records for Minnesota and the Dakotas and the federal system. Be sure you check the feds. The federal system gets the bad-asses off the reservations…"

"Yeah, I've got that going. If the Crows were inside in the last ten or fifteen years, it'll show at the NCIC. The feebs said they'll check with the Bureau of Prisons to see about their records before that."

"How about vehicles? Besides the truck?" Lucas asked.

"We're looking for registrations. I doubt they'd leave a car on the street, but who knows?"

"Any chance that Rose Love is still alive?"

"No. Since I was over there anyway, I went through the death certificates. She died in 'seventy-eight in a fire. It was listed as an accident. It was a house in Uptown."

"Shit." Lucas pulled at his lip and tried to think of other data-run possibilities.

"I went through old city directories and followed her all the way back to the fifties," Anderson continued. "She was in the 'fifty-one book, in an apartment. Then she missed a couple of years and was in 'fifty-four, in an apartment. Then in 'fifty-five she was in the Uptown house. She stayed there until she died."

"All right. This is great," Lucas said. "Have you talked to Daniel?"

"Nobody's at his house, that's why I called you. I had to tell somebody. It freaked me out, the way it all came out of the machines, boom-boom-boom. It was like a TV show."

"Get us some fuckin' photos, Harmon. We'll paper the streets with them."

Andersen's discoveries brought a flush of energy. Lucas paced through the house, still naked, excited. If they could put the Crows' faces on the street, they'd have them. They couldn't hide out forever. Names were almost nothing. Pictures…

Half an hour later Lucas was back in bed, falling into unconsciousness again. Just before he went out, he thought, So this is what it's like to be nuts…

"Lucas?" It was Lily. "Yup." He looked down at the bed. He could see the outline of where his body had been from the sweat stains. The dreams had stayed with him until he woke, a little after seven in the morning. He reached out, popped up the window shade, and light cut into the gloom. A moment later, the phone rang.

"Jesus, where were you yesterday?" Lily asked.

"In and out," he lied. "Tell you the truth, I went back to my old net, to see if any of my regulars had heard anything. They're not Indians, but they're on the street…"

"Get anything?" she asked.

"Naw."

"Daniel's pissed. You missed the afternoon meet."

"I'll talk to him," Lucas said. He yawned. "Have you had any breakfast yet?"

"I just got up."

"Wait there. I'll get cleaned up and come get you."

"Turn on a TV before you do that. Channel Eight. But hurry."

"What's on?"

"Go look," she said, and hung up.

Lucas punched up the TV and found an airport press conference with Lawrence Duberville Clay.

"… in cooperation with local enforcement officials… expect to have some action soon…"

"Bullshit, local officials," Lucas muttered at the television. The camera pulled back and Lucas noticed the screen of bodyguards. There were a half-dozen of them around Clay, professionals, light suits, identical lapel pins, backs to their man, watching the crowd. "Thinks he's the fuckin' president…"

Lucas' heart jumped when Lily came out of the hotel elevator. The angles of her face. Her stride. The way she brushed at her bangs and grinned when she saw him…

Anderson had a stack of files for the morning meeting. South Dakota, he said, had files on Sunders and Close. There were photos in the driver's-license files, bad but recent. And when the white names were run through the NCIC files, a list of hits came back, along with fingerprints.

With a direct comparison available, fingerprint specialists confirmed that Sunders and Close were the men the Minneapolis cops had just missed in the apartment raid. An FBI computer specialist said later that the wide-base search of the fingerprint files would have identified them in "another four to six hours, max."

The South Dakota files had been faxed to Minneapolis, and the best possible reproductions of the driver's-license photos arrived on an early-morning plane. Copies were being made for distribution to all the local police agencies, the FBI and the media.

"Press conference at eleven o'clock," Daniel said. "I'll hand out the photographs of the Crows."

"We got some more coming from the feds," Anderson announced. "Sunders spent time in federal prison, fifteen years ago. He shot a guy out at Rosebud, wounded him. He spent a year inside."

"Old man Andretti has agreed to put up an unofficial reward for information leading to the Crows. They don't have to be arrested or anything. He'll pay just to find out where they are," Daniel said. He looked at Lucas. "I'd like to get that out to the media through the back door… I'll confirm it, but I don't want to come right out and say there's a price on their heads. I want to keep some distance from it. I don't want it to sound like we're turning a bunch of vigilantes loose on the Indians. We've got to live with these people later."

Lucas nodded. "All right. I can set that up. I'll get the guy from TV3 to ask a question at the press conference."

Daniel flipped through his Xerox copies of the rap sheets. "It doesn't seem like they've done much. A couple of smalltime crooks. Then this."

"But look at the pattern," Lily said. "They weren't smalltime crooks like most small-time crooks. They weren't breaking into Coke machines or running a pigeon-drop. They were organizing, just like Larry said."

The files on Sunders and Close showed a sporadic history of small crime, except for the shooting that sent Sunders to prison. Most of it was trespassing on ranches, unlawful discharge of firearms, unlawful threats.

The latest charge was six years old, on Sunders, who had been arrested for trespassing. According to the complaint file, he had entered private property and allegedly damaged a bulldozer. He denied damaging the bulldozer, but he did tell police that the rancher was putting a service trail through a Dakota burial ground.

Close's file was thinner than Sunders'. Most of the charges against him were misdemeanors, for loitering or vagrancy, back when those were legal charges. There was a notation by a Rapid City officer that Close was believed to have been responsible for a series of burglaries in the homes of government officials, but he had never been caught.

On a separate slip of paper was a report from an FBI intelligence unit that both Sunders and Close had been seen at the siege of Wounded Knee, but when the siege ended, they were not among the Indians in the town.

"I'd say they've got a deep organization, going all the way back to the sixties, and maybe back to the forties," Lily said, looking at the file over Lucas' shoulder. A lock of her hair touched his ear, and tickled. He moved closer and let her scent settle over him. He had not yet told her about Jennifer. The thought of it made him uncomfortable.

"The StarTribune this morning called them our first experience with dedicated domestic terrorists," Lucas said.

"They picked that up from the Times," Lily said. "The Times had an editorial Friday, said the same thing."

Daniel nodded gloomily. "It'll get worse when they do whatever it is they're planning to do. Something big."

"You don't think… like the airport?" Anderson asked.

"What?" asked Sloan.

"You know, like the Palestinians? I mean, if you were going to do something big, shooting up the airport or blowing up a plane would do it…"

"Oh, Christ," Daniel said. He gnawed on his lower lip, then got up and took a turn around his desk. "If we go out there and suggest tighter controls and the word gets out, the airlines'll take it right in the ass. And I'll be right there with them, gettin' it in the same place."

"If we don't tell them, and something happens…"

"How about just a light touch… just talk to the security, a hint to the FBI, maybe put some people out there undercover?" suggested Sloan.

"Maybe," said Daniel, sitting down again. He looked at Anderson. "Do you really think…?"

"Not really," Anderson said.

"I don't think so either. All the people they've hit so far have been symbols of something. Shooting up an airport full of innocent people wouldn't prove anything."

"How about the Bureau of Indian Affairs?" Lucas asked. "A lot of old-line Indians hate the BIA."

"Now that's something," Daniel said, his eyes narrowing. "An institution instead of an individual… It'd be a logical step, to go after the people they see as their oppressors. I better talk to the feebs. Maybe they could put a couple of people in the BIA office."

"Wait a minute," Lucas said. He stood up and walked around his chair, thinking. Then he looked at Daniel and said, "Jesus-it could be Clay."

They all thought about it for a moment, and Daniel shook his head. "Everything they've done has been pretty well planned. Nobody knew that Clay was coming in until the last couple of days."

"No, no, think about it," said Lucas, jabbing a finger at Daniel. "If you look at this whole… progression… in the right way, you could see it as a lure to pull Clay in. The terrorist angle, the publicity… That's exactly the kind of thing Clay'd bite on."

"That's an awful big jump," Daniel argued. "They couldn't be sure he'd come. You could wind up killing a half-dozen people and getting all of your own people killed, and Clay might sit on his ass in Washington."

"And why Clay?" Sloan asked.

"Because he's a big target and he's got a bad rep among Indians," Lily said. "You remember that hassle out in Arizona with the two factions on that reservation? I can't remember what the deal was…"

"Yeah, he sent in all those agents to kick ass…" Anderson said.

"If I remember right, there was an article in Time that said Clay has had a bunch of run-ins with Indians over the years. Doesn't like them…" Lucas said.

"The Crows can't get at him," said Sloan. "He's got an unbelievable screen of bodyguards-you should have seen them this morning. If the Crows tried to shoot their way through them… I mean, these guys got Uzis in their armpits."

"All it takes is a guy on a rooftop with a deer rifle," said Lucas.

"Ah, shit," said Daniel. He whacked the desktop with an open palm. "We can't take a chance. We'll talk to Clay's security people. And let's put some people around his hotel. Up on the rooftops, in the parking garage. Just put some uniforms in street clothes… Christ, the guy is a pain in the ass."

"We oughta take a look at the hotel too," Lucas said. He was still moving around the office, thinking about it. The idea fit: but how could the Crows get at Clay? "Look for a hole in the security…"

"I still don't think it's Clay. It's gotta be something they could plan for," Daniel said. "Keep thinking about it. Let's get some more ideas going."

The meeting broke up, but ten minutes before the press conference, Daniel called them back together.

"I'm going to tell you this quick and I don't want any argument. I've been talking to Clay and his people, and the mayor. Clay will come here and will make the announcement about the identification of the Crows. He'll pass out the photos."

"God damn it," said Anderson, white-faced. "That's our work…"

"Take it easy, Harmon. There's a lot going on here…"

"They bought the information from us, is that right?" Anderson demanded. "What'd we get?"

"You won't believe it." Daniel smiled a self-satisfied smile, spread his arms and peered at the ceiling, as though receiving manna from heaven. "You're looking at the new Midwest on-line information-processing center…"

"Holy shit," Anderson whispered. "I thought Kansas City had that wrapped."

"They just came unwrapped. We're doing the deal right now."

"Our own Cray II," Anderson said. "The fastest fucking machine ever built…"

"What a crock of shit," said Lily.

"Let's try to keep that opinion to ourselves," Daniel sa«d. "After the press conference, Clay wants to talk to the team. I think he wants to give us a pep talk."

"What a crock of shit," Lily repeated.

"Did you suggest that he might be the target?" asked Lucas.

"Yeah," Daniel nodded. "He agreed with me that it was unlikely, but he also went along with the idea of a screen of cops on the buildings around the hotel. And his guys are looking for holes in the security."

Four advance men arrived ahead of Clay. One waited outside City Hall, where Clay's car would unload. The other three, guided by a cop, walked the hallway to the room where the press conference would be held. Lucas and Lily, lounging outside the door of the conference room, watched them coming. Two of the men stopped, a pace away.

"Police officers?" he asked.

"Yeah," said Lucas.

"Got an ID?"

Lucas shrugged. "Sure."

"I'd like to see it," the advance man said. His tone was courteous, but his eyes were not.

Lucas looked at Lily, who nodded and flashed her N YPD case. Lucas handed over his ID. "Okay," said the advance man, still courteous. "Could you point out the other plain-clothes people inside…?"

It was quick and professional. In five minutes, the room was secure. When Clay arrived, he got out of his car alone, but two more advance men blocked either end of the car. The mayor came out and met Clay at the car, and they walked, chatting as casual friends, into City Hall. If any of the newsies noticed that the two men were walking through an invisible corridor of professional security, none of them said anything.

Clay and Daniel did the press conference together, the mayor beaming from the wings. Anderson and an FBI functionary passed out photos of the Crows.

"An hour from now, the Crows won't be able to go on the streets," Lucas said as the conference ended.

"We've had Shadow Love's face out there, and that hasn't gotten anywhere…" Lily said, when he got in the car beside her.

"We're tightening down. It'll work, with a little time."

"Maybe. I just hope they don't pull some shit first. We better get down to Daniel s office for this meeting with Clay."

Sloan, Lucas, Lily, Anderson, Del and a half-dozen other cops had been waiting ten minutes when Daniel and Clay arrived, trailed by the mayor, two of Clay's bodyguards and a half-dozen FBI agents.

"Your show, Larry," Daniel said.

Clay nodded, stepped behind Daniel's desk and gazed around the crowded office. He looked like an athlete gone to fat, Lucas thought. You wouldn't call him porky, but you could get away with "heavyset."

"I always like to talk to local police officers, especially in serious situations like this where everything depends on cooperation. I spent several years on the streets as a patrolman-got to the rank of sergeant, in fact…" Clay began, and he nodded at a uniform sergeant standing in the corner of the room. He was a solid speaker, picking out each local cop in turn, fixing him with his eyes, soliciting agreement and cooperation. Lily glanced up at Lucas after Clay had given them the treatment, and cracked a smite.

"Good technique," she whispered.

Lucas shrugged.

"… wide experience with Indians, and I will tell you this. Indian rules are not our rules, are not the rules of a rational, progressive society. That statement-I'd prefer to keep it in this room-is not a matter of prejudice, although it can be twisted to sound that way. But it's a solid fact; and most Indians themselves recognize it. But we don't have two sets of rules in America. We have law, and it applies to everybody…"

Heil Hitler," Lucas muttered.

When they finished, Clay whipped out of the building in his cloud of bodyguards.

"Let's go look at his hotel," Lucas suggested.

"All right," Lily said. "Though I'm starting to have my doubts. His guys are pretty good."

Clay's chief of security was a nondescript, pale-eyed man who looked like a desk clerk until he moved. Then he looked like a viper.

"We've got it nailed down," he said after Lucas and Lily identified themselves. "But if you think you might see something, I'd be happy to walk you through."

"Why?" asked Lucas.

"Why what?"

"Why are you happy to walk us through, if it's all nailed down?"

"I never figured myself to be the smartest guy in the world," the security man said. "I can always learn something."

Lucas looked at him for a minute, then turned to Lily. "You're right. They're good," he said.

They took the tour anyway. Clay was on the fourteenth floor. There were higher buildings around, but none closer than a half-mile.

"Couldn't take him through a window," the security man said.

"How about something set up in advance? Clay's stayed at this hotel before, right?"

"Like what?"

Lucas shrugged. "A bomb in an elevator?"

"We sniffed the place out. Routine," the security man said.

"How about a suicide run? The Crows are crazy…"

"We've checked the staff, of course. No Indians at all, nobody with the kind of background that we'd worry about.

Most of them are career people, been here a while. A few new people on the desk and kitchen staff, but we screen them out when the boss comes and goes… And when he does come and go, we check the lobby and the street first. He's in and out in a hurry, with no warning. So it wouldn't be anybody on the street."

"Hmmph," said Lucas.

They were headed back down in the elevator and Lucas asked, "Is there any way to get up on top of the elevator from the basement or the roof, ride up that way?"

The security man allowed himself a small grin. "I'm not going to talk about that," he said, glancing at Lucas. "But in a word, no."

"You've got the elevators wired," said Lily. kThe security man shrugged as the elevator stopped at the ird floor. An elderly woman wearing a fur wrap got on, peered nearsightedly at the lighted buttons and finally pushed the button for the second floor. A room-service waiter pushed a dinner cart past the elevators just as the doors were closing.

"How about a disguise?" Lucas asked after the old lady had gotten off. "What if somebody came in disguised as an old lady…"

"Metal detectors would pick up the gun."

"… and had a gun stashed on the third floor. Rode up to the third floor, picked it up and then went up to fourteen…"

The security man shrugged again. "That's a fantasy. And when they got up there, they'd have to shoot their way past three trained agents. And the boss is armed, and he knows how to use it."

Lucas nodded. "All right. But I got a bad feeling," he said.

He and Lily left the security man in the lobby and headed for the doors. Just as they were about to go out, Lucas said, "Wait a minute," and turned back.

"Hey," he called to the security man. "How did that room-service food get up on three?"

The security man looked at Lucas, then at Lily, then at the elevators. "Let's go ask," he said.

"In a dumbwaiter," a cook told them. He pointed to an alcove, where they could see the opening for the chain-driven lift.

The security man looked from the dumbwaiter to the cook to Lucas. "Could a man ride up in that?" he asked the cook.

"Well… I guess a couple guys have. Sometimes," the cook said, his eyes shifting nervously.

"What do you mean, 'sometimes'?"

"Well, when it's busy, you know, the boss doesn't want a lot of waiters riding up in the elevators with the customers. The waiters are supposed to take the stairs. But sometimes, I mean, if it's on the tenth floor…"

"How often do guys ride up?" the security man asked.

"Look, I don't want to get anybody in trouble…"

"Nobody'11 hear a word from us," Lily promised.

The cook wiped his hands on his apron, then lowered his voice and said, "Every day."

"Shit," said the security man.

The security man laid it out: "A suicide run. Four guys. They come down the alley to the service dock. They push the bell. One of the staff opens the door to see who it is. The Crows stick a gun in his stomach. One guy stays in the kitchen while the other three ride up in the dumbwaiter, one at a time. They come out in the service area on fourteen. They've got automatic weapons or shotguns. They check the hall, somehow… maybe just peek, or they use a dental mirror… they come out and take the two agents in the hall. That leaves one guy with the chief. They knock the door out with a shotgun, and then it's three on two, maybe three machine guns or shotguns against two pistols…"

"It's a possibility," said Lily.

Now it was Lucas' turn to shake his head. "You know, when you lay it out like that, it sounds pretty unlikely…"

"The Crows are pretty unlikely," the security man said.

"I'll tell you what we're going to do. We'll freeze the kitchen. Stick a monitor somewhere. If they come in, we'll snap them up."

"A trap," said Lily.

"Right. Well-excuse me, I gotta go talk to the chief. And listen: Thanks."

On the sidewalk in front of the hotel, Lucas shook his head again.

"It was a hole, but that's not what the Crows are up to," he said.

"Then what?"

"I don't know."

In the car, Lily looked at her watch. "Why don't we talk about it over lunch?"

"Sure. Want to go to my place?" Lucas asked.

Lily looked at him curiously. "This is a new attitude," she said. "What happened?"

"Jennifer…"

"… figured us out," she finished, sitting up straight in her seat. "Oh, shit. Did she throw you out?"

"That's about it," Lucas conceded. He cranked the car and pulled away from the curb.

"You don't think she'd call David, do you?" Lily asked anxiously.

"No. No, I don't. She's spent some time in bed with married men-I know some of them-and she'd never have thought of talking to their wives. She wouldn't break up a marriage."

"It makes me nervous," Lily said. "And that must be why you're so bummed out. You sat in Daniel's office looking like your dog had died."

"Yeah. It's Jen and it's this fuckin' case. Larry killed, executed. And I've been useless. That feels weird, you know? When something important is happening-drugs, gambling, credit-card scams, burglary rings-I've got these contacts. Daniel comes to me and says, Talk to your net. We got thirty-six burglaries on the southeast side last week, all small shit, stereos and TVs.' So I go out and talk to the net. A good part of the time, I'll find out what's happening. I'll squeeze a gambler and get sent to a fence and squeeze the fence and find a junkie, and squeeze the junkie and get the whole ring. But this thing… I got nobody. If they were regular crooks, I could find them. Dopers need dope or need to sell it, so they're out and about. Burglars and credit-card hustlers need fences. But who do these guys need? An old friend. Maybe a former university professor. Maybe an old sixties radical. Maybe some kind of right-wing lunatic. Maybe Indian, maybe white. Who the fuck knows? I spent my whole goddamn life in this town, and most of the time I lived right around where the Indians live and I never saw them. I know a few, but it's because they're in drugs or burglary, or because they're straight and I go to their stores. Other than that, I just don't have a net out there. I've got a black net. I've got a white net. I've even got an Irish net. I don't have an Indian net."

"Stop feeling sorry for yourself," Lily said. "You got the tip on the trouble out at Bear Butte and found the photograph that I picked Hood out of."

"I got tied up like a fuckin' pig by Hood and almost got my brains blown out…"

"You figured out how to squeeze the Liss woman and got the names of the Crows out of her. You're doing all right, Davenport."

"It's been luck, and that ain't going to hack it from here on out," Lucas said, glancing at her. "So stop trying to cheer me up."

"I'm not," she said cheerfully. "We don't have a lot to be cheerful about. As a matter of fact, unless we get real lucky, we're completely fucked."

"Not completely," Lucas said. He downshifted, let the car wind down to a red light and touched her thigh. "But in an hour, who knows?"

Lily prowled through the house like a potential buyer, checking each of the rooms. Once, Lucas thought, he caught her sniffing the air. He grinned, said nothing and got two beers.

"Pretty good," she said finally, as she came up the stairs from the basement. "Where'd you get that old safe?"

"I use it as a gun safe," Lucas said, handing her a beer. "I picked it up cheap when they were tearing out a railroad ticket office here in St. Paul. It took six guys to get it in the house and down the stairs. I was afraid the stairs were going to break under the weight."

She took a sip of beer and said, "When you invited me for lunch…"

"Yeah?"

"… am I supposed to make it?"

"Oh, fuck no," he said. "You got your choice. Pasta salad or chicken-breast salad with slices of avocado and light ranch dressing."

"Really?"

"It's a zoo over on Franklin and down on Lake," Lily said as she worked down into her salad. "With Clay in town, the feebs are crawling all over the place."

"Assholes," Lucas grunted. "They've got no contacts, the people hate them, they spend twenty-four hours a day stepping on their dicks…"

"They're doing that now, in major numbers," Lily agreed. She looked up from her chicken-breast salad and said, "That was delicious. That pasta looks pretty good too…"

"Want a bite?"

"Maybe just a bite?"

After lunch, they went to the study and Lily pulled out one of Anderson's notebooks for review. They both drank another beer, and Lucas put his feet up on a hassock and dozed.

"Warm in here," Lily said after a while.

"Yeah. The furnace kicked in. I looked at the thermometer. It's thirty-six degrees outside."

"It felt cold," she said, "but it's so pretty, you don't notice it. With the sun and everything."

"Yeah." He yawned and dozed some more, then cracked his eyes open as Lily peeled off her cotton sweater. She had a marvelously soft profile, he thought. He watched her read, nibbling at her lower lip.

"Nothing in the notebooks," he said. "I've been through them."

"There must be something, somewhere."

"Mmm."

"Why did the Crows kill Larry? They must have known that it would be counterproductive, in the political sense. And they didn't have to kill him-he wasn't helping us that much."

"They didn't know that. He was on TV after the raid on the Crows' apartment… Maybe they thought…"

"Ah. I didn't think of that," she said. Then she frowned. "I was on TV the other night. After Larry was cut."

"Might be a good idea to lie low for a while," Lucas said. "These guys are fruitcakes."

"I still can't figure Larry," she said. "Or this other guy, Yellow Hand. Why kill Yellow Hand? Revenge? But revenge doesn't make any sense in this kind of situation, against one of your own people. It just muddies things up. And they never mention those shootings in their press releases…"

"I got no ideas," Lucas said. After a moment he added, "Well, that's not quite right. I do have one idea…"

"What's that?"

"Why don't we sneak back to the bedroom?"

She sighed, smiled a sad smile and said, "Lucas…"

When they talked about it later, Lucas and Lily agreed that there wasn't anything notable about the time they spent in bed that afternoon. The love was soft and slow, and they both laughed a lot, and between times they talked about their careers and salaries and told cop stories. It was absolutely terrific; the best of their lives.

"I've decided what I'm going to do about David," Lily said later in the day, rolling out to the edge of the bed and putting her feet on the floor.

"What are you going to do?" Lucas asked. He had been putting on his jockey shorts, and he stopped with one foot through a leg hole.

"I'm going to lie to him," she said.

"Lie to him?"

"Yeah. What we've got going, David and I, is pretty good. He's a good guy. He's attractive, he's got a nice sense of humor, he worries about me and the kids. It's just…"

"Keep talking."

"There's not the same kind of heat as there is with you. I can look at him sometimes and I get a lump in my throat, I can't even talk. I just feel so… warm toward him. I love him. But I don't get that kind of driving hot feeling. You know what I mean?"

"Yeah. I know."

"I was thinking about it the other night. I was thinking, Here's Davenport. He's large and he's rough and he makes himself happy first. He's not always asking me if I'm okay, have I come. So what is this, Lily? Is this some kind of safe rape fantasy?"

"What'd you decide?"

"I don't know. I didn't decide anything, really. Except to lie to David."

Lucas got fresh underwear from his chest of drawers and said, "Come on. I'll give you a shower."

She followed him into the bathroom. In the shower she said, "David wouldn't do this either. I mean, you just kind of… work me over. Your hands are… in everything, and I… kind of like it."

Lucas shrugged. "You're hurting yourself. Stop talking about David, for Christ's sake."

She nodded. "Yeah. I better."

When they got out of the shower, he dried her, starting the rough towel around her head and slowly working down her legs. When he finished, he was sitting on the side of the bathtub; he reached around her and pulled her pelvis against his head. She ruffled his hair.

"God, you smell good," he said.

She giggled. "We've got to stop, Davenport. I can't handle much more of this."

They dressed slowly. Lucas finished first and lay on the bed, watching her.

"The hardest part of lying to him will be the first ten or fifteen minutes," he said suddenly. "If you can get through the first few minutes, you'll be okay."

She looked up, a guilty expression on her face. "I hadn't thought of that. The first… encounter."

"You know when you bust a kid for something, a teenager, and you're not sure that they did it? And they get that look on their face when you tell them you're a cop? And then you knowl If you're not careful, you'll look like that."

"Ah, Jesus," she said.

"But if you can get through the first ten minutes, just keep bullshitting along, you'll stop feeling guilty and it'll go away."

"The voice of experience," she said, with the tiniest stain of bitterness in her voice.

"I'm afraid so," he said, a little despondently. "I don't know. I love women. But I look at Sloan. You know, Sloan's wife calls him Sloan? And they're always laughing and talking. It makes me jealous."

Lily dropped onto the foot of the bed. "Let's not talk about this," she said. "It'll put me in an early grave. Like Larry."

"Poor old Larry," Lucas said. "I feel for the sonofa-bitch."

The next day was sunny. Lucas had on his best blue suit with a black wool dress coat. Lily wore a dark suit with a blue blouse and a tweed overcoat. Just before they left Lily's hotel room, TV3 had begun live coverage of Larry Hart's funeral. The coverage opened with a shot of Lawrence Du-berville Clay arriving at the funeral. Clay spoke a few cliches into a microphone and went inside.

"He thinks he's the fuckin' president," Lucas said.

"He might be, in six more years," Lily said.

The Episcopalian church was crowded with welfare workers and clients, cops and Indian friends and family. Daniel spoke a few words, and Hart's oldest friend, whom he'd called brother, spoke a few more. The casket was closed.

The cortege to the cemetery shut down traffic in central Minneapolis for five minutes. The line of funeral cars ran bumper to bumper through the Loop, escorted by cops on motorcycles.

"It's better out here," Lily said as they walked into the cemetery. "Churches make me nervous."

"This is the first place 1 ever saw you," Lucas said. "Bluebird's buried here."

"Yup. Weird."

Gravestones were scattered over twelve acres of slightly shaggy grounds, beneath burr oaks. Lucas supposed it would be a spooky place on moonlit nights, the oaks looming like shadows cast by the Headless Horseman. Anderson, stiff in a black suit, looking more like an undertaker than the undertaker, wandered over to stand beside them.

"This is where Rose E. Love is buried," he said after a while.

"Oh, yeah? Where'd you find that out?" Lucas said.

"I found it in some notes with the old coroner's files. There weren't any relatives handy when she died, so they made a note on the death certificate about the funeral home and cemetery, in case somebody came looking for her."

"Hmph."

"Bluebird too," Lily said.

"Mmm."

After a while, Anderson wandered away, edging around the accumulation of funeralgoers. Film crews from all the local television stations and several foreign and national news services stood as close as seemed circumspect, as the cops rolled out their most martial ceremony. When it was over, they passed a folded flag to Hart's mother and fired a military salute.

When the service ended, Anderson strolled up again.

"She's right along here," he said.

"Who?"

"Rose E. Love. I had them look up the gravesite in the cemetery office."

Lucas and Lily, pulled along by Anderson's interest, followed him a hundred yards to a gravesite under the boughs of an aging oak, a dozen feet from the wrought-iron fence surrounding the cemetery.

"Nice spot," Anderson said, looking up into the spreading oak tree with its hand-size leaves still clinging to the branches.

"Yeah." The grave had been kept up spotlessly; on the oblong pink granite stone was inscribed ROSE E. LOVE, in large letters, and below that MOTHER, in smaller script. Lucas looked around. "The grave looks a lot better than the other ones around here. You don't think maybe Shadow Love stops by and works on it?"

Anderson shook his head. "Naw. The cemeteries don't allow that. They'd get all kinds of shit going on. Me and my old lady bought our plots, you know, a couple of years back. They had all these care plans you could sign up for. Give them two thousand bucks now and they'll take care of your grave in perpetuity. It's called Plan Perpetual. You can put it right in your will."

"That's a little steep, isn't it?" Lily asked. "Two thousand bucks?"

"Well, I mean, its forever," Anderson said. "When the next ice age comes through, they'll have a guy out here with a heater…"

"Still a little steep."

"If you can't afford it all at once, you can pay by the year. You know, like seventy-five, a hundred bucks."

"Gives me the creeps thinking about it," Lucas said.

"He doesn't plan to die," Lily confided to Anderson.

"I hate to tell you this," Anderson said as they wandered away from Rose Love's grave, "but there comes a time in every man's life…"

Lucas thought of a question for Anderson. As he opened his mouth to speak, the cold steel of a gun barrel touched him behind the ear. He jerked to a halt, staggered, closed his eyes, slapped his neck and let out a deep breath.

"Lucas?" asked Lily. She had stopped and was looking up at him. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," he said after a moment. "I was just daydreaming."

"Jesus, I thought you had a heart attack or something." Anderson was looking at him curiously, but Lucas shook his head and took Lily's arm. Anderson broke offjust before they got to the fence, and headed across the slope toward the cemetery road. Lily and Lucas strolled out of. the ceme- tery through a side exit, away from the remnants of the somber crowd.

The question was lost.

"What do you want to do?" Lily asked.

"I think I might go back out on my regular net," Lucas said. He had been thinking about his lie of the day before, and decided that talking to his regulars might be a good idea.

"Okay. You can drop me at the hotel," Lily said. "I'm going to sit around and read Anderson's notebooks for a while. Maybe go for a run before dinner."

"I told you. There's nothing in it-Anderson's stuff," Lucas said. "We won't find them on paper. If the Crows are lying low, we need somebody to talk to us."

"Yeah. But somewhere, there's something. A name. Something. Maybe somebody from their prison days…"

The day was chilly, but the bright sunlight felt fine on Lily's face. She walked with her head tilted back as they crossed the street, taking in the rays, and Lucas' heart thumped as he walked behind her, marveling. Shadow Love was parked a block away, watching them.