There was an almost audible bing in the back of Lucas's brain, and a little cloud lifted off his cerebral cortex. He laughed and said, "Hey. That was it. I could hear it, but I couldn't see it."
"You think it's important?" She sounded pleased with herself.
"Could be. The guy could come from California," Lucas said. "Maybe he's just a fan of Boob-Watch reruns."
"Maybe. And maybe not. Maybe he's from California. If this pans out, I might have sex with you when you get back."
"That's so good of you."
"By the way-the rock 'n' roll surgeon. The reason the guy's got white circles around his eyes is he spends all of his spare time in a tanning booth…"
"I knew that…"
LUCAS SPENT THE DAY working with the co-op group. They didn't have much to coordinate, so he had them review records on the St. John's staff members picked as most-likelies. One of them, an orderly, had a felony record, but from thirteen years earlier. He'd done a year in Stillwater for a pharmacy break-in, had gotten Jesus while he was inside, and hadn't been arrested since.
Three more, also orderlies, had minor criminal records, misdemeanors, one apparently as a result of mental problems that had been treated with drugs. He had good performance reports; of the other two, one had been arrested for a gross violation of fishing laws-caught with 532 bluegills in an oil barrel, which was roughly 500 over the limit, Lucas thought-and the other had been arrested for shoplifting at Target.
None of the four had a record of violence.
Lucas looked for California and found it three times. An orderly named Lee Jones had gone to CalArts in Valencia, California, for two years. He looked in an atlas and found it at the north end of the San Fernando Valley, exactly the kind of place that they would say "the 35." Jones had no record; he had a citation for painting a mural-sized landscape in the cafeteria.
And two of the docs had connections with California: Sennet and O'Donnell had both worked at psychiatric clinics, O'Donnell in San Francisco and Sennet in San Diego. Lucas wasn't sure whether they would say "the 35" in San Francisco but thought they probably would in San Diego, since it was so close to LA.
Hart had been born, raised, and educated in Minnesota. No California connection at all. Grant was from a town called Holcomb in Colorado, had been educated at the University of Colorado, and worked at a private hospital in Denver before moving to Minnesota. Beloit was born in Chicago, did her undergraduate work at Illinois, got an M.D. at Iowa, and was married to a professor of anthropology at Mankato State.
Hmm, he thought. He'd known that Beloit was married, but he'd gotten a distinct not-very-married vibration from her. Then he thought: "So what?
He combed the files, looking for something, anything… took a call from Sloan: "I've gone over these files until my eyes bleed," Sloan said. "I don't see much."
Lucas told him about "the 35," and Sloan snorted: "You give me a hard time about my ideas. That's the weakest thing I ever heard of."
"Yeah? You ever heard 'the 35' from a Minnesotan?"
"Jesus; Lucas, I wouldn't even notice…"
Lucas sighed. "It's a little light. Keep plowing: something will pop. We gotta get the files on the outsiders, too. The docs they bring in." Sloan said, "How about this: Why don't we get search warrants for, say, the top five suspects? Everybody who's been to California? Or everybody who's smart enough, and we can't otherwise eliminate? We've got the group narrowed down."
"Ah, jeez, I don't know," Lucas said. "It'd be tough; I'm not sure you'd find a judge who'd go for it."
"Not up here, maybe. So we call around to all the sheriffs, find one with a district court judge who's a friend-there's gotta be something going on in all those small towns. We could get a bunch of warrants all at the same time and serve them all at once. Nobody would have time to appeal, to get the warrant thrown out. And the warrants would hold up in court if we found anything, even if they later decided the grounds weren't too good."
Lucas considered: "The judge would have to be either crooked or a moron…"
Sloan said "Or a friend. If we used every little stick of information we've got that points toward the top five, say, along with the pictures of Peterson and Rice and Larson as convincers… I'd bet we could get it."
"One problem," Lucas said. "Who are the top five?"
"Or six or seven or eight…we keep going through these lists, We've gotta start eliminating some of them."
LUCAS WAS STILL RELUCTANT: "If we don't get the guy the first try, and we all get hit with a shit storm… what're we gonna do when we really need one, and the grounds are still pretty shaky?"
"All right. Let's do this- we keep working the files, we keep talking to people here and at St.John's. Tomorrow or the next day, if we're not making any progress. We go for it. See if we can get the warrents. We gotta do something befoore we have another horror show."
AT NOON, Lucas got a call from Nordwall.
"We found the gut dump, right in a dry creek bed, like he said it would be. The GPS says it's four miles from the hanging post. By road, maybe six."
"Anything?"
"One thing: we found a footprint. He's not a huge guy: he has smaller feet, maybe size ten."
"Okay. That's good."
"Crime Scene is coming, maybe they'll find more."
LATER THAT DAY, the co-op got another batch of files from Cale-all the contract people who had substantial contact with the Big Three.
Too much paper; too much. Too many little facts crawling around Lucas's head. At the end of the day, he was more confused than when he started.
HE HAD TWO CALLS the next morning. "Hey. Closing in?" Weather asked.
"Not exactly." He yawned, and rubbed the stubble on his cheek. He told her about the warrants ideas.
"As long as you won't get in trouble…"
"Ah, I've been in trouble. They keep giving me better jobs."
"So I had another thought…"
"What?"
"Lynyrd Skynyrd, 'Gimme Three Steps.' The perfect cop song."
"How would you know about Lynyrd Skynyrd?" Lucas asked.
"They were playing it in the operating room this morning…" Weather operated a lot, sometimes two or three times a day, two hundred and fifty times a year. Most of the operations were small-scar revisions, excisions of various undesirable lumps and bumps-and some were enormously complicated, done only after weeks or months of study.
"I thought you guys listened to Mozart," Lucas said.
"Not when the rock 'n' roll surgeon's working… So everything's okay there? With you personally?"
"Sure. Why?"
"Things are a little tense here," Weather said. "We've just heard that France has raised its terror-alert level. They think something's going on." "Really?" Something else to worry about.
"Yes. They've gone from Run to Hide…"
The joke was so unexpected that Lucas snorted, and hurt his nose again. He said, "Oh, Jesus, don't make me laugh…"
The only two higher levels are Surrender and Collaborate," Weather said.
"You're killing my nose, goddamnit," Lucas said. "Davenport's a French name, by the way…"
THE SECOND CALL came a few minutes after nine o'clock as Lucas stood naked in front of his chest of drawers, digging around, certain that there was one more pair of clean shorts. He'd seen them the day before…
He ran the washer according to a severely logical schedule based on need: he had, he thought, perhaps twenty pairs of shorts. Why wash after only five or ten pairs have been used, as Weather would, thus putting all that extra water down the drain and through the sewage plant, when you could wait the whole twenty days and only have to wash once? Of course, if you miscalculated…