Shadow Prey

CHAPTER 7

Lucas worked on Drorg until four in the morning, and Daniel called at eight. When the phone rang, Lucas rolled onto his side, thrashing at the nightstand like a drowning swimmer. He hit the phone and the receiver bounced on the floor, and he took another moment to find it.

"Davenport? What the hell…?"

"Dropped the phone," Lucas said sleepily. "What happened?"

"They did another one. A federal judge in Oklahoma City."

"Shit." Lucas yawned and sat up. "The way you're talking, the killer got away."

"Yeah. He had braids, like…"

"… the guy who did Cuervo. So there had to be at least three of them, counting Bluebird."

"Yeah. Anderson's getting everything he can out of the Oklahoma cops. And those pictures-we're getting them at nine. We'll meet in Wink's office."

"No problems?"

"Aw, we gotta go through the usual bullshit, but we'll get them," Daniel said.

"Somebody ought to call Lily," Lucas said.

"My secretary'll take care of it. There's one more thing…"

"What?"

"The feds are in it."

Lucas groaned. "Aw, no, please…"

"Yeah. With both feet. Made the announcement an hour ago. I talked to the Minneapolis agent-in-charge and he says Lawrence Duberville Clay himself is taking a personal interest."

"Sonofabitch. Can we keep them off the street? Those guys could screw up a wet dream."

"I'll suggest that they focus on intelligence, but it won't work," Daniel said. "Clay thinks he can ride the crime business into the attorney general's job, and maybe the presidency. The papers are calling these killings 'domestic terrorism.' That'll get him out here for sure, just like when he went out to Chicago on that dope deal, and L.A. for the Green Army bust. When he gets here, he'll want some action."

"Fuck him. Let him find his own action."

"Try to be nice, all right? And in the meantime, let's get these pictures from the Trib and start hammering the street. If we nail these cocksuckers, Lawrence Duberville won't have any reason to come out."

They met with StarTribune executives in the office of Louis Wink, the paper's bald-as-a-cueball editor. Harold Probst, the publisher, and Kelly Lawrence, the city editor, sat in. Lily arrived on Daniel's arm; his elbow, Lucas noticed, was pressing Lily's breast. Daniel wore a gray suit that was virtually a mirror image of Wink's, and a self-satisfied smile. The meeting lasted ten minutes.

"The reason I object is that it brings up the question of whether we're an arm of the police. It damages our credibility," said the round-faced Lawrence.

"With who?" Lily asked heatedly. She was dressed in a rough silk blouse and another tweed skirt. She either had the world's best complexion or did the world's best makeup, Lucas thought.

"With people on the street," said the city editor. Law- rence was wearing a rumpled cotton dress that was just the wrong color of blue for her eyes. Lily looked so much better that Lucas wished she'd waited outside.

"Oh, bullshit," Lily snapped. "You have this great big goddamned building full of yuppies in penny loafers and you're worried about damaging your reputation with street people? Jesus H. Christ on a crutch."

"Take it easy," Lucas said soothingly. "She's right. It's a sensitive question."

"We wouldn't even ask, if the crimes weren't so horrendous. They killed a federal judge last night; butchered him. They killed one of the brightest up-and-coming politicians in the country and two people here," Daniel said in a syrupy voice. He turned to Lily. "The fact is, the press is in;i very delicate situation."

He turned back to Wink and Probst, where the power was. "All we want to do is look at the face of the man that Lily thinks might be the New York killer. And we want to look at the people around him, so we can question them. You might very well have run all of those pictures in the paper, for anyone to see. You promised confidentiality to nobody. In fact, they were soliciting attention by their very presence at this confrontation."

"Well, that's right," said Probst. A flash of irritation crossed Wink's face. Probst had come up on the advertising side.

"And you'll get a tremendous story out of it," Lucas put in. "You'll stick it right up the Pioneer Press's ass."

Lawrence, the city editor, brightened, but Lily continued to stew. "And if you don't we'll go to court and drag it out of you anyway," she snarled.

"Hey…" Wink sat up.

Daniel broke in before he could go any further. He pointed a finger at Lily's face and said, "No, we won't, Lieutenant. If they decide against us in this room, we'll look for other pictures, but we won't go to court. And if you keep this up, I'll ship your ass back to New York faster than you can say 'Avenue of the Americas.' "

Lily opened her mouth and just as suddenly snapped it shut. "Okay," she said. She glanced at Wink. "Sorry."

Daniel smiled his most charming smile at Wink and said, "Please?"

"I think… we should get some prints in here," Wink said. He nodded at Lawrence. "Get them."

They all sat silently until the city editor came back with three manila envelopes and handed them to Wink. Wink opened one, took out a set of eight-by-ten prints, looked at them, then passed them to Daniel. Daniel dealt them out across the table to Lily, who stood up, spread them out and began studying them.

"It's him," she said after a moment. She tapped one of the faces. "That's my man."

They got two sets of photos and stopped on the street corner before Daniel walked back to City Hall.

"Larry Hart is coming over this afternoon. He had to get his case load closed out," Daniel said to Lucas. "I'll get him a set of photographs. He may know somebody."

"All right. And I'll show my set around."

Daniel nodded and looked at Lily. "You should watch your temper. You almost lost it for us."

"Newsies piss me off," she said. "You were getting pushed around."

"I wasn't getting pushed. Everybody knew what would happen. We had to go through the ritual," Daniel said mildly.

"Okay. It's your turf. I apologize," she said.

"You should apologize. Being a hell of guy, I accept," Daniel said, and started off across the street.

Lily looked after him. "He's a piece of work," she said after a moment.

"He's okay. He can be an asshole, but he isn't stupid," Lucas said.

"So who's this Larry Hart?" Lily asked.

"He's a Welfare guy, a Sioux. Good guy, knows the streets, probably knows a thousand Indians. He's fairly large in Indian politics. He's written some articles, goes out to all the powwows and so on."

"We need him. I spent six hours on the street yesterday and didn't learn a thing. The guy I was with-"

"Shearson?"

"Yeah. He wouldn't know an Indian from a fire hydrant. Christ, it was almost embarrassing," she said, shaking her head.

"You're not going back out with him?"

"No." She looked at him without a sign of a smile. "Besides his woefully inadequate IQ, we had a little problem yesterday."

"Well:…"

"I thought I might ride along with you. You're showing the pictures around, right?"

"Yeah." Lucas scratched his head. He didn't like working with a partner: he sometimes made deals that were best kept private. But Lily was from New York and shouldn't be a problem that way. "All right, I guess. I'm parked down this way."

"Everybody says you've got the best contacts in the Indian community," Lily said as they walked along. Lucas kept looking at her and tripped on an uneven sidewalk slab. She grinned, still looking straight ahead.

"I know about eight guys. Maybe ten. And not well," Lucas said when he recovered.

"You came up with the picture from the paper," she pointed out.

"I had a guy I could squeeze." Lucas stepped off the curb and walked around the nose of his Porsche. Lily walked behind him.

"Uh, around there," he said, pointing back to the passenger-side door.

She looked down at the 911, surprised. "Is this your car?"

"Yeah."

"I thought we were crossing the street," Lily said as she stepped back to the curb.

Lucas got in and popped open her door; she climbed inside and fastened the seat belt. "Not many New York cops would have the guts to drive around in a Porsche. Everybody would figure he was in the bag," she said.

"I've got some money of my own," Lucas said.

"Even so, you wouldn't have to buy a Porsche with it," Lily said primly. "You could buy a perfectly good car for ten or fifteen thousand and give the other twenty or thirty thousand to charity. You could give it to the Little Sisters of the Poor."

"I thought about that," Lucas said. He gunned the Porsche through an illegal U-turn and punched it up to forty in the twenty-five-mile-per-hour business zone. "And I decided, fuck "em."

Lily threw back her head and laughed. Lucas grinned at her and thought that maybe she was carrying a few too many pounds, but maybe that wasn't all bad.

They took the photographs to the Indian Center, showed them around. Two of the men in the photos were known by face but not by name. Nobody knew where they lived. Lucas called Anderson, told him about the tentative IDs, and Anderson promised to get more photos on the street.

After leaving the Indian Center, they stopped at an Indian-dominated public housing project, where Lucas knew two old men who worked as caretakers. They got no new IDs. The hostility was palpable.

"They don't like cops," Lily said as they left.

"Nobody around here likes cops," Lucas said, looking back at the decrepit buildings. "When they see us, we're mostly getting their cars towed away in the winter. They don't like us, but at least they're not against us. But this is something else. This time, they're against us."

"Maybe they got reasons," Lily said. She was looking out the window at a group of Indian children sitting on the porch of a decaying clapboard house. "Those kids ought to be in school. What you've got here, Davenport, is a clean slum. The people are fucked up, but the street gets cleaned twice a week."

They spent the rest of the morning running the photos down Lucas' Indian acquaintances. Lily trailed behind, not saying much, studying the faces of the Indians, listening to them, the Indians looking curiously back.

"They think you might be an Indian, or part Indian, but they're not sure until they hear your voice," Lucas said between stops. "You look a little Indian."

"I don't sound Indian."

"You sound Lawn Guyland."

"There's an Indian reservation on Long Island," she said.

"No shit? Jesus, I'd like to hear those people talk…"

Late in the morning, Lucas drove to Yellow Hand's apartment at the Point, describing him to Lily as they went. Outside, on the stoop, he reached back and freed the P7 in its holster.

"Is this trouble?" she asked.

"I doubt it," he said. "But you know."

"Okay." When they were inside the door, she slipped her hand into a mufflike opening in her shoulder bag, took out a short Colt Officer's Model.45 and jacked a shell into the chamber.

"A forty-five?" Lucas said as she put it back in the purse.

"I'm not strong enough to wrestle with assholes," she said bluntly. "If I shoot somebody, I want him to go down. Not that the P7 isn't a nice little gun. But it's a bit light for serious work."

"Not if you can shoot," Lucas said through his teeth as he headed up the stairs.

"I can shoot the eyes out of a moving pigeon," she said. "And not hit the feathers."

The door on the top floor was open. Nobody home. Lucas eased inside, looked around, then tramped across a litter of paper, orange peels and empty personal-size catsup packs from McDonald's. "This is where he was," Lucas said, kicking Yellow Hand's mattress.

"Place feels vacant," Lily said. She touched one of the empty catsup packs with the toe of her shoe. Street people stole them from fast-food joints and used the catsup to make tomato soup. "They're really hurting for money."

"Crackheads," Lucas said.

Lily nodded. She took the Colt out of the purse, pulled the magazine, stuck it between the little and ring fingers of her gun hand, cupped the ejection port with her free hand and jacked the slide. The chambered round ejected into her palm. She snapped it back into the magazine and pushed the magazine back into the butt of the pistol. She'd done it smoothly, without thinking, Lucas thought. She'd spent some time with the gun.

"The trouble with single-action weapons," Lucas said, "is that shit happens and you're caught with an empty chamber."

"Not if you've got half a brain," she said. She was looking around at the litter. "I've learned to anticipate."

Lucas stopped and picked up an object that had been almost hidden by Yellow Hand's mattress where it had pressed against the wall.

Lily asked, "What?" and he tossed it to her. She turned it over in her hands. "Crack pipe. You said he was a crack-head."

"Yeah. But I wonder why he left it here? I wouldn't think the boy would be without it. All of his other shit is gone."

"I don't know. Nothing wrong with it. Yet," Lily said. She dropped the glass pipe on the floor and stepped on it, crushing it.

On the street again, Lucas suggested a check at Cuervo's rental office. If there was anyone running the place, he told Lily, there might be some word of where Yellow Hand had gone. She nodded. "I'm following you," she said.

"I hope the dipshit hasn't gone back to the res," Lucas said as they climbed back in the car. "Yellow Hand would be hell to find out there, if he didn't want to be found."

Lucas had been in Cuervo's office a dozen times over the years. Nothing had changed in the shabby stairway that went up to it. The building had permanent bad breath, compounded of stale urine, wet plaster and catshit. As Lucas reached the top of the stairs, Cuervo's office door opened on a chain and a woman looked out through the crack.

"Who're you?" Lucas asked.

"Harriet Cuervo," the woman snapped. All Lucas could see were her eyes, which were the color of acid-washed jeans, and a pale crescent of face. "Who in the hell are you to be asking?"

"Police," Lucas said. Lucas fished his badge case out of his jacket pocket and flashed the badge at her. Lily waited behind him, down a step. "We didn't know you'd taken over Ray's operation."

"Know now," the woman grunted. The chain rattled off and she let the door swing open. Her husband's murder had left a faint stain on the wooden floor and Harriet Cuervo was standing in the middle of it. She was wearing a print dress that fell straight from her neck to her knees. "I told the other cops everything I knew," she said bluntly.

"We're looking for a different kind of information," Lucas said. The woman went back around Cuervo's old desk. Lucas stepped inside the office and glanced around. Something had changed, something was wrong, but he couldn't put his finger on it. "We're asking about one of his tenants."

"So what do you want to know?" she asked. She was five feet, nine inches tall and weighed perhaps a hundred pounds, all of it rawboned knobs. There were short vertical lines above and below her lips, as though they'd once been stitched shut.

"You've got a renter named Yellow Hand, down at the Point?"

"Sure. Yellow Hand." She opened a ledger and ran a finger down an open column. "Paid up 'til tomorrow."

"You didn't see him yesterday or today?"

"Shit, I don't do no surveys. I just rent the fuckin' apartments," she said. "If he don't have the money tomorrow, out he goes. Today, I don't care what he does."

"So you haven't seen him?"

"Nope." She peered around Lucas at Lily. "She a cop too?"

"Yeah."

Cuervo looked Lily up and down. "Dresses pretty good for a cop," she sniffed.

"If Yellow Hand doesn't pay, do you go down and evict him yourself?" Lily asked curiously.

"I got an associate," Cuervo said.

"Who's that?" Lucas asked.

"Bald Peterson."

"Yeah? I thought he'd left town."

"He's come back. You know him?"

"Yeah. We go back."

"Say…" Harriet Cuervo's eyes narrowed and she made a gun of her index finger and thumb and pointed it at Lucas' heart. "You ain't the cop that pounded him, are you? Years ago? Like fuckin' crippled him?"

"We've had some disagreements," Lucas said. "Tell him hello for me." He took a step toward the door. "How about a guy named Shadow Love? You seen him around?"

"Shadow Love? Never even heard of him."

"He was living up at the Point…"

She shrugged. "Didn't rent from me," she said. "Must've been one of those other flatheads let him in. You know how it goes."

"Yeah," Lucas said as he turned away again. "Sorry about Ray."

"It's nice somebody is, 'cause I ain't," Cuervo said flatly. Her face showed some animation for the first time. "I was trying to think what I remembered best about Ray. One thing, you know? And you know what come to mind? He had a bunch of porno videotapes. He had one called Airtight Brunette. You know what an airtight brunette is? That's one who is filled up everyplace, if you know what I mean. Three guys. Anyway, his favorite part was when this guy 'jaculates on the brunette's chest. He was running that back and forth, back and forth. Everytime he stopped the VCR and rewound the tape, the regular TV show come on. You know what that was?"

"Uh, no, I wouldn't," Lucas said. He glanced quickly at Lily, who was staring at Cuervo, fascinated.

"Sesame Street. Big Bird was finding out how doctors take your blood pressure. So this guy 'jaculates on the brunette's chest and we get Big Bird. And he 'jaculates again and we get Big Bird. It was like that for fifteen minutes. 'Jac-ulate, Big Bird, 'jaculate, Big Bird."

She stopped to take a breath. "That," she said, "is how I remember Ray."

"Okay. Well, jeez, we gotta get going," Lucas said desperately. He pushed Lily out the door toward the stairs. They were ten steps down when Harriet Cuervo came to the landing.

"I wanted to have kids," she shouted down at them.

Lily grinned at him as they walked back to the car. "Nice girl," she said. "We wouldn't do much better in New York."

"Fuckin' gerbil," Lucas grumbled.

"Did you see the calendar on the wall? Big Boys' Buns?"

Lucas snapped his fingers. "I knew there was something different about the place," he said. "Ray used to have this old Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar. A wet-T-shirt shot. These great… ah…"

"Tits?"

"Right. Anyway, it was always the same picture. He found one he liked and stopped right there."

"So what we got is a change in management, but no change in style," Lily said.

"You got it."

In the car, Lucas checked the time. They had been on the street for three hours. "We ought to think about lunch."

"Is there a deli in town?" Lily asked.

Lucas grinned at her. "Can't stand to be away?"

"It's not that," she said. "I've been eating hotel food for too long. Everything tastes like oatmeal."

"All right, a deli," Lucas agreed. "There's one a couple blocks from my place, over in St. Paul. Got a restaurant in the back."

They headed east on Lake, across the Mississippi, then south down along the river through a forest of maples, elms and oaks, past a couple of colleges.

"All religious colleges. Highest density of virgins in the Twin Cities, right here," Lucas said.

"Your neighborhood too. What a shame; what a workload," she said.

"What's that mean?" Lucas asked.

"When I told people I was planning to go out with you, they all gave me the look. Like, Uh-oh, into the hands of Lothario."

"Bullshit," said Lucas.

The deli was in a yellow cinder-block building with a parking lot in back. When they got out of the car, an old woman was watching them through a restaurant window while she gnawed on the end of a whole pickle. Lily's face lit up when she saw it.

"That pickle… There's a marginal chance that this place could be all right," she said. Inside, she scanned the sandwich menu, then ordered a corned beef and cheese combo with coleslaw, a Side order of french fries, a seven-layer salad and a raspberry-flavored Perrier.

"A thousand calories," she said five minutes later, looking ruefully at the brown plastic tray the counterman had just delivered. The counterman snorted as he turned away. "What, you think more than a thousand?" she called after him.

"Honey, the sandwich is six, seven hundred and that's only half of it," the counterman said.

"I don't want to hear it," Lily said, turning back to the food.

Lucas got a sausage on rye, a bag of potato chips and a Diet Coke and led the way to the back.

"I'm an eater," Lily said as they slid into the booth. "I'll weigh two hundred pounds when they bury me."

"You look all right," Lucas said.

Her eyes came up. "I'd look great with ten less pounds."

"I'll stand by my original statement."

Lily got busy with her food, keeping her eyes away from his. "So," she said a moment later. "I understand you've got a new kid but aren't married."

"Yup."

"Doesn't that embarrass you a little?" She licked a fleck of slaw off her upper lip.

"Nope. I wanted to get married, but the woman wouldn't do it. We're still together, more or less. We don't live together."

"When did you last ask her to marry you?" Lily asked.

"Well, I used to ask her once a week. Then I just made a general open offer."

"Do you love her?"

"Sure," Lucas said, nodding.

"Does she love you?"

"She says so."

"So why doesn't she marry you?" Lily asked.

"She says I'd be a great father but a fuckin' terrible husband."

"Hmph." Lily took a big bite of her sandwich and chewed thoughtfully, watching him. "Well," she said after she swallowed, "it sounds like you might fool around a little."

"Not since she got pregnant," Lucas said. "Before that…"

"A little?"

"Yeah." He grinned. "Now and then."

"How about you?" Lucas asked. "You're wearing a ring."

"Yup." She snapped off a french fry. "My husband's a sociology professor at NYU. He did position papers for An-dretti. That's one of the reasons I'm out here. I knew the family."

"Good guy?"

"Yeah, for a.politician, I guess."

"I meant your husband."

"David? David's great," Lily said positively. "He is the gentlest man I've ever known. I met him when I was going to school. He was a graduate assistant, I took a class. It was about the time everything was going to hell up at Columbia, people were in the streets, McCarthy was running for president… Good times. Interesting times."

"So, what, you got married right after college?"

"Before graduation. Then I got my degree, applied to the department under a special program to bring in women, and here I am."

"Huh. How about that." Lucas watched her for a few seconds, finished a last chip and slid out of the booth. "I'll be right back."

They've got problems, Lily and David, he thought as he walked to the counter. He ordered another bag of chips and another Diet Coke. She likes him okay, but there's no heat. When he looked back, she was watching people in the street, a shaft of sunlight cutting across the table and her hands. She's beautiful, he thought.

When he got back to the table, she was licking her fingertips. "Done," she said. "Where to next?"

"Gotta go see a nun."

"Say what?"

A seven-foot-tall alabaster statue of the Virgin Mary hung over the driveway. Lily looked doubtfully up at it.

"I've never been to a nunnery," she muttered.

"It's not a nunnery," Lucas said. "It's a college."

"You said nuns lived here."

"There's a residence on the other side of the campus," Lucas said.

"How come her eyes are rolled back like that?" Lily asked, still looking up at the Virgin.

"The ecstasy of perfect grace," Lucas suggested.

"What's she doing to that snake?" The tail of a snake was visible beneath the Virgin's sandals. The snake's body curled up one of her robed legs, its head poised to strike at knee level.

"Crushing it. That's the devil."

"Huh. Looks like one of the investigators on my squad. The snake, I mean."

Lucas had been to grade school with Elle Kruger. They'd tracked each other over the years, Lucas on the Minneapolis police force, Elle Kruger as a psychologist and a Sister of Mercy. Her office was on the third floor of Albertus Magnus Hall. Lucas led Lily down a long, cool hallway that echoed with their footsteps. At Elle's office, he knocked once, opened the door and stuck his head inside.

"About time," Elle Kruger snapped. She was a traditionalist, and wore the black habit with a band of beads hanging down beside her hand.

"Traffic," said Lucas in way of apology. He stepped inside, Lily close behind. "Elle, this is Lieutenant Lily Ro-thenburg of the New York Police Department, out here investigating the death of John Andretti. Lily, this is my friend Sister Mary Joseph. She's the chief shrink around here."

"Pleased to meet you, Lily," Elle said, and reached out a bony hand.

Lily took it and smiled. "Lucas tells me you've helped on some of his cases."

"Where I can. But we mostly play games," Elle said.

Lily looked at Lucas, and Lucas explained, "We have a gaming group that meets once a week."

"That's interesting," Lily said, looking from one of them to the other. "Like Dungeons and Dragons?"

"No, no role playing," Elle said. "Historical reconstruction. Get Lucas to tell you about his Gettysburg. We played it three times last year and it always comes out wildly different. Last time, Bobby Lee almost got himself into Philadelphia."

"I've still got to do something about that damn Stuart," Lucas said to the nun. "When he gets loose too early, he fouls up all the calculations. I'm thinking of…"

"No game talk," Elle said. "Let's get some ice cream."

"Ice cream?" Lily said. She put her fingers over her mouth to cover a tiny burp. "Sounds good."

As they walked down the hall, Lily turned to Elle and asked, "What did you mean when you said, 'his Gettysburg'? Did Lucas make the game or something?"

Elle raised an eyebrow. "Our boy is a famous games inventor. Didn't you know that?"

"No, I didn't," Lily said, looking at Lucas.

"He surely is," Elle said. "That's how he got rich."

"Are you rich?" Lily asked Lucas.

"No," Lucas said. He shook his head.

"He is, take my word for it," Elle said to Lily with a phony confidentiality. "He bought me a gold chain last year that has scandalized my entire wing of the residence."

"For a good German Catholic girl, I think the influence of the Irish is beginning to seep in," Lucas said.

"The Irish?"

"The blarney." Lucas turned to Lily and said in a stage whisper, "I'd never use a word like 'bullshit' around a nun."

They sat in a booth in the ice cream shop, Lucas and Lily side by side, Elle across the table. Elle ate a hot-fudge sun dae while Lily worked on a banana split. Lucas blew into a cup of coffee and thought about Lily's warm thigh next to his.

"So you're working on Andretti," Elle prompted them.

"There's some kind of conspiracy," Lily said.

"The Indian man who killed the people in Minneapolis, and the Indian man who killed Andretti?"

"Yeah," said Lucas. "Except we think that two different guys killed the people in Minneapolis. And now the judge in Oklahoma City…"

"I haven't heard…"

"Last night… I was wondering… what kind of group would we be dealing with? If there is a group."

"Religious," Elle said promptly.

"Religious?"

"There are few things in the world that can hold together a murder conspiracy. Hate by itself is not enough, because it's too unfocused and not intellectual enough. There has to be some positive energy, as it were. That usually comes from religion. It's difficult to be intellectual and murderous at the same time, without some complicated rationale."

"How about these groups that develop in prison?" asked Lily. "You know, a group of guys gets together and they start holding up armored cars…"

"… raising money for a cause. Which usually has some kind of quasi-religious doctrine behind it. Save the white race from mongrelization by blacks, Arabs, Jews, whatever. You see the same thing in the leftist radical groups and even the groups or pairs of psychotic killers you get from time to time. There's a religious aspect, there's a group feeling of oppression. Usually there's a messiah figure who tells the others that it's all right to kill. That it's necessary."

"One of my people in the Indian community said that Bluebird-"

"That was the man killed in Minneapolis?" Elle interrupted.

"Yeah. He said Bluebird was a man looking for religion."

"I'd say he found it," Elle said. She had been saving the maraschino cherry for last, and finally she ate it, savoring the sweetness.

"You know how they make maraschino cherries?" Lucas asked, covering his eyes with his hand as it disappeared.

"I don't want to hear," Elle said. She pointed her long spoon at Lucas' nose. "If there's a group doing these killings, there probably aren't more than a dozen people in it and that would be an extreme. More likely it's five or six. At the most."

"Six? Jesus," Lily blurted. "Excuse me, my language. But six?"

"What are the chances that it's three?" Lucas asked. "Bluebird and this guy in New York and the guy in Oklahoma?"

Elle tipped her head back and peered at the ceiling, calculating. "No. I don't think so, but then, who knows? But I have the sense… these men in New York and Oklahoma, they traveled some way to do the killings, if they came from here. If they know Bluebird. I have a sense that they were sent out… that they are on missions. Bluebird was apparently ready to die. That would be more typical of people who saw themselves as part of a process, rather than as a last chance to strike back."

"So there'll be more?"

"Yes. But there is a limit on size. There really is no such thing as a grand criminal conspiracy. Or at least no such thing as a secret one. I suppose Adolf Hitler and his henchmen were a grand criminal conspiracy, but they needed the collaboration of a nation to pull it off."

"So there'd probably be at least two or three more, and maybe six or eight," Lucas said. "Probably held together by some sort of religious mania."

"That's right," Elle said. "If you want to stop it, look for the preacher."

In the car going back to Lucas' office, Lily looked him over.

"I have the feeling I'm being looked over," Lucas said.

"You have interesting friends," Lily said.

He shrugged. "I'm a cop."

"You invent games and play them with nuns?"

"Hey, I'm a wild kind of guy." He looked at her over the top of his sunglasses, winked and turned back to the traffic.

"Oooh, Mr. Cool," she said. "It makes my thighs hot."

Lucas thought, Mine too. He glanced quickly at her and she turned away, a blush creeping up her neck. She knew what he was thinking, and she had been aware of him in the booth…

At home, Larry Hart wore cowboy boots, blue jeans and work shirts with string ties. The string ties always had a chunk of turquoise buried in a silver slide. He could have worn that outfit to work, with a jacket to complete it, but he never did. He wore brown suits, with neckties in shades of brown and gold, and brown wingtip shoes. In the dead of summer, with the temperatures climbing into the nineties, Hart would sweat through the tiny tinderbox apartments of his welfare clientele, always in a brown suit.

Lucas had once asked him why. Hart shrugged and said, "I like it." What he meant was, / have to.

Hart jammed himself into the cookie-cutter frame of a municipal executive. It never worked, as hard as he tried. There was no way a brown suit could disguise his heritage. He was broad-shouldered and powerfully built, with black eyes and gray-shot hair. He was Sioux. Hart had the biggest case load in Welfare. Some of his clients refused to talk to anyone else.

"Lucas, what's happenin', babe?" Hart asked. Lucas lounged in his office chair with his feet on the rim of a waste-basket, while Lily rolled back and forth, a few inches one way and then a few inches the other, in an office chair on casters. Hart stepped inside the tiny office and dropped his bulk on a corner of Lucas' desk.

"Larry Hart, Lily Rothenburg, NYPD," Lucas said, gesturing between them.

"Nice to meet you," Lily said, taking Hart in. "You've been out?"

"Yup. Down on Franklin…"

Hart had been working through Indian Country with the photos. He knew two of the men himself.

"Bear is down at Rosebud and so is Elk Walking," Hart said. "They're pretty tough, but they ain't crazy. I can't see them getting involved in anything like this."

"You didn't know anybody else in the pictures?" Lily asked.

"Not names, but I know some of the faces. There are a couple of guys I see down at the Indian Center. You were asking Anderson about one of them. I played basketball against him last year."

"Could we get the team rosters?"

"They're mostly pickup games," Hart said. "But if I ask around enough, I could probably find out who he is. There-are a couple more faces I've seen at powwows, at Upper Sioux and Flandreau, Sisseton, Rosebud, all over the landscape."

"All Sioux?" asked Lucas.

"I think all but one. Give me the pictures again, let's see…" Hart thumbed through the stack of photographs until he found the one he wanted. He poked a finger at a man's face. "This guy's Chippewa. I don't know his name, it's Jack something, maybe like Jack Bordeaux. I think he's from White Earth, but I'm not sure."

"So how do we find out about Lily's man?" Lucas asked.

"There're a couple of guys out in SoDak who'd probably know him. Deputies. I gave Daniel the names, he called them and they're driving down to Rapid City tonight. I'm catching a plane out at six o'clock. I should be in Rapid City by seven-thirty. I'll take the pictures along."

"You think they'll know all these guys?" Lily asked.

"Most of them. They try to keep track of who has guns," Hart said.

"Why don't we just wire the pictures out…?"

"The technical guys said we'd lose too much resolution. We decided it'd just be best all around if I went. I could spend some time talking to them."

"That sounds right," Lily said.

"What about this computer tree you're building?" Lucas asked. "I understand you got all kinds of family stuff in there from Minnesota Sioux. Anything on Bluebird or Yellow Hand?"

"I looked up Bluebird. He's just about the last of the family. A lot of Bluebirds went East and married into the Mohawks and that bunch. There are still quite a few Yellow Hands out at Crow Creek and Niobrara. Those used to be Minnesota Indians before they got run out. But I know this Yellow Hand you talked to. He doesn't have much to do with the other Yellow Hands. This one is a loser."

"Nothing else?"

" Traid not." Hart checked his watch. "I've got a plane to catch."

"When will you know? About the pictures?" asked Lily.

"About five minutes after I get off the plane. Do you want me to call tonight?"

"Could you? I'll come back here and wait for the call," Lucas said.

"So will I," Lily added.

" 'Bout seven-thirty, we should know," Hart said.

"So now what?" Lily asked. They were standing on the sidewalk. Hart was on his way to the airport, riding in a squad.

Lucas glanced at his watch. "I've got to see my kid, get something to eat," he said. "Why don't we meet back here at seven o'clock? We can wait for Larry to call and figure out what we're going to do tomorrow."

"Depending on what he finds out," Lily said.

"Yeah," Lucas said, flipping his key ring around his finger. "Need a ride down to your hotel?"

"No, thanks." She smiled, starting away. "It's a nice walk."

Sarah was crawling around on the living room rug when Lucas arrived. He got down on his hands and knees, his tie dragging on the carpet, and played backup with her. First he backed up and she crawled toward him, gurgling; then, with her eyes wide, she backed away and he prowled forward.

"That'd be a lot more charming if you didn't have that big bump on your ass," Jennifer said from the kitchen. Lucas reached back, pulled out the P7 and put it on a lamp table.

"Jesus, not there," Jennifer said with asperity. "She could pull herself up and grab it."

"She can't pull herself up yet," Lucas objected.

"She will soon. It's a bad habit."

"Okay." Lucas stood up, slipped the pistol back in its holster and scooped up his daughter, who had been quivering in anticipation of the flight. He bounced her in his hands as he wandered toward the kitchen and propped himself in the doorway. "Have we got some kind of problem?"

Jennifer was making a salad. She turned her head. "No. Not unless you have."

"I just got here and I'm fine," Lucas said. "You sound a little tight."

"Not at all. I just don't want guns lying around tlu-house."

"Sure," he said. "Come on, Sarah, time for bed. Besides, your mom's being a grouch."

Lucas waited for it during dinner, watching Jennifer's face. Something was going on.

"Any lines on the guy from New York?" Jennifer asked finally. Rumors about the meeting at the StarTribune were circulating through all the media. Daniel had already fended off a half-dozen inquiries, but leaks were inevitable. Jennifer, called by her former partner at TVS, had spent the afternoon talking to old sources by phone. By the time Lucas had arrived, she had most of the story.

"Maybe. I've got a call coming in at seven-thirty."

"You're going back?"

"Yeah. Around seven."

"If Kennedy called you from the station, could you give him something for the ten-o'clock broadcast?"

"He'd have to talk to Daniel," Lucas said.

"Is he going to be there tonight?"

"No, I don't think so."

"How about this New York cop lady?"

Lucas thought, Ah, and said, "She'll be there."

"I hear she's terrific-looking," Jennifer said. She looked up from her dinner plate, straight into Lucas' eyes.

"She's pretty good," Lucas said. "A little chubby, maybe… Is this going to be a problem? Who I work with?"

"No, no." Jennifer looked down at her plate again. "There's something else too," she said.

"Okay," Lucas said, putting his fork down. "Let's have it."

"A guy at the station asked me out."

"Who?"

"Mark Seeton."

"What'd you say?"

"I said… I'd get back to him."

"So you want to go?"

Jennifer stood up, picked up her plate and carried it to the sink. "Yes, I think so," she said. "No big heavy deal. Mark's a nice guy. He wants somebody to go to the symphony with."

Lucas shrugged. "So go."

She looked sideways at him. "You wouldn't mind?"

"I'd mind. I just wouldn't try to stop you."

"Jesus, that's worse than trying to stop me," she said, one fist planted against her hip. "You're trying to mind-fuck me, Davenport."

"Look, if you want to go, go," Lucas said. "You know I'm not going to take you to the symphony. Not on any regular basis."

"It's just that you have your friends and the things you do, the games, the fishing, the police work… me and Sarah. You see somebody almost every day, one way or another. I hardly see anybody at all, outside of work. And you know what I'm like about music…"

"So go," Lucas said shortly. Then he grinned. "I can take Mark Seeton, I'm not worried," he said. He pointed a finger at her. "But I don't want to hear any shit about this New York cop. She is good-looking, but she's also happily married to a big-shot professor at NYU. Shearson made some kind of move on her yesterday and he's now carrying his nuts around in his lunch box."

"You're protesting too much," Jennifer said.

"No, I'm not. But you're looking for an excuse…"

"Let's not fight, okay?"

"Are we still in bed?" Lucas asked.

"You might get lucky," Jennifer said. "A little romance wouldn't hurt, though."

Lily had a short white line on her upper lip when she got back to Lucas' office. They were alone in the tiny office, the door open on the darkened hallway.

"Did you have a glass of milk?"

She cocked her head. "You're also psychic, right? In addition to the game-making and the money."

He grinned and reached out and wiped his thumb across her lip. "No. Just a little rim of milk, here. Like my daughter."

"What's her name? Your daughter?"

"Sarah."

"We've got a Marc and a Sam," Lily said. "Marc's fifteen now, God, I can't believe it. He's started high school and he plays football. Sam's thirteen."

"You've got a kid who's fifteen?" Lucas asked. "How old are you, anyway?"

"Thirty-nine."

"I thought maybe thirty-four."

"Oh, la, such a gentleman," Lily laughed. "How about you?"

"Forty-one.' "Poor guy. Your daughter will be hanging out with all the metal-heads at the high school and you'll be too old and feeble to do anything about it."

"I'm looking forward to my feebletude," Lucas said. "Sit around in a good leather chair, read poetry. Go up to the cabin, sit on the dock, watch the sun go down…"

"With your fly down and your dick hanging out because you're senile and can't remember how to dress yourself…"

"Jesus, I can barely stand the flattery," Lucas said, laughing despite himself.

"You were getting a little carried away with the retirement bullshit," Lily said wryly.

Hart called at quarter to eight from the Rapid City airport. "They knew him right away," he said. "His name's Bill Hood. He's a Sioux from Rosebud, but he married a Chippewa woman a few years ago. He lives in Minnesota. Somewhere up around Red Lake, they think."

"What?" Lily said. There was no extension in the office and she was watching Lucas' face.

Lucas nodded at her and said into the phone, "How about the other people. You got any more names?"

"Yeah, they know quite a few of them. During the trouble with the bikers, they did a bunch of IDs. I'll give them to Anderson, get him to crank them through the computer."

"What?" Lily asked again, when Lucas got off the phone.

"Your man's name is Bill Hood. He supposedly lives somewhere up by Red Lake…"

"Where's Red Lake?" she asked.

"It's a reservation up north."

"Let's get going. We'll have to stop at my-"

"Whoa. We've got things to do. We'll start with our identification people tonight, see if we can figure out exactly where he lives. The Indians are always back and forth from here to the res. For all we know, he may be down here, with Bluebird. If he's not, we'll arrange some contacts up north, then go. If we head up there tonight, we'd spend most of our time thrashing around."

Lily stood and put her hands on her hips and leaned toward him. "Why do guys always have to wait another day? Jesus, in New York…"

"You're not in New York. In New York, you want to go somewhere, you take a taxi. You know how far Red Lake is from here?"

"No. I don't know."

"About the same distance as it is from New York to Washington, D.C. It ain't just a taxi ride. I'll get some calls going tonight, and tomorrow…"

"We go."