Certain prey

'Quick,' he muttered. He looked at his watch. Just under half an hour.

He printed the numbers out, and turned to the documents he'd pulled from

Carmel's computer.

Though he spent less than five seconds with most of them – virtually all were work-related – it was after three in the morning before he wiped the disk, shut down the computer and went to bed.

The next day, he chopped the disk to pieces with a butcher knife, and dropped the pieces in two separate trash cans in the Skyway: he had an almost superstitious dread of computer files turning up when they weren't supposed to.

Then, while he was still in the Skyway, between the Pillsbury building and the government center, he noticed a woman in a shapeless black dress, wearing a white scarf on her head, babushka-style. He turned to watch her walking away; some religious or ethnic group, he thought, but he didn't know which. He went on to police headquarters, whistling, where he called Sherrill.

'Can either you or Black come by for a minute?'

'Which would you prefer? Me or Tom?'

'Stop,' he said. 'I just want to hear about the Allen case. And mention a couple of things to you.'

Sherrill came down a few minutes later and dropped into his visitor's chair.

'We're running out of stuff to look at,' she said.

'Let me tell you what Hale Allen told me yesterday,' Lucas said. He laid it out quickly, then told her about the ethnic woman in the Skyway. 'She looked like the aliens the kid described, when she was putting together that composite photo. So we need to get a low-angle photograph of somebody in a dark dress, wearing a scarf over her head; then we need to plug in a bunch of faces, including Carmel's.'

'Carmel Loan,' Sherrill said. 'That could get rough, if we went public and didn't have the goods.'

'Which is why I don't want her to know that we're looking at her. Not unless we get something solid.'

'All right,' Sherrill said. She pushed herself up. 'I can probably get a picture of Carmel from your lady at the Star-Tribune library, if she still works there.'

'She does,' Lucas said.

'And I'll have the ID guys put together a photo spread. We can base it on the composite the kid gave us. When do you want to talk to the kid?'

'The sooner the better,' Lucas said. 'I don't know how long memories last with little kids.'

'I'll try to set it up this afternoon.'

'Something else,' Lucas said. He dug in his pocket. 'Could you have the lab do an analysis on the slug?' He tossed the. 22 shell to her. She caught it one handed, looked at it, and then asked, 'What's going on, Lucas?'

'Nothing; it's one of my. 22s. I just want to look at the difference between a random analysis and what we're getting from the slugs we took out of the dead guys. Do we really have a case based on a metals analysis?'

She looked at him, suspicious, turned the cartridge in her hand. 'Then, if I lost this particular shell,' she said, 'You wouldn't mind if I just sent in one of my own.'

Lucas said, 'Send that one in, huh? Just send it in.' 'This one.' 'That one.'

'Lucas…'

'Off my case, Marcy,' he said. She grinned at him and said, 'Marcy, my ass.

We're operating, aren't we?'

'Send the fuckin' thing in,' he said.

Lucas spent the morning running through the numbers he'd taken from Carmel's address books and phone bills: he'd marked fifty-five of them to be checked. In three hours, he'd half-filled a yellow legal pad with notes, but nothing promising.

A few minutes before noon, he got to the final long-distance call on the last of the long-distance bills: a call made two weeks earlier, he noticed, a couple of days after Barbara Allen's death. The note from the hacker said only, 'Small business phone listed to Tennex Messenger Service.' Lucas dialed the number and a woman answered on the first ring: 'Tennex Messenger Service.'

'Yes, could I speak to the Tennex manager? Or whoever runs the place?'

'I'm sorry, sir, Mr. Wilson is out. I can give you his voice-mail.'

'Well, I was just wondering how I could set up an account with Tennex.'

'I'm sorry, sir; we're answering service. All I can do is give you his voice mail.'

'Okay, thanks, if you could do that…'

He was switched, and got a voice-mail introduction, a slightly vague voice that might have come from a drugged-out teenager: 'You have reached Tennex Messenger

Service, your, uh, fastest messenger service in the DeeCee area. We are either, uh, on the phone or out on a call. We check back for messages, so, like, leave your name and, uh, phone number. Thanks.'

Not interested in talking to a strung-out bicycle-messenger, Lucas hung up, yawned, stood up and stretched, and walked down to Homicide. Black was at his desk, shuffling through papers; Sloan had his feet up, reading a Pioneer Press.

'Lunch?' Lucas asked.

'Yeah, I could see my way clear to a lunch,' Sloan said.

Sherrill pushed through the office door, spotted Lucas and said, 'I sent that slug in, and we're all set for four o'clock this afternoon.'

Sloan's eyebrows went up. 'Really? Where at?' he asked.

Sherrill correctly interpreted his tone and implication: 'Shut up,' she said. To

Lucas: 'Mama is not happy with the fact that we're coming back to see the kid.

There was all the loose talk in the newspapers about hit men.'

'So I'll let you warm her up when we get there,' Lucas said. 'Woman talk, bonding, chit-chat, that kind of shit.'

'Sexism,' Sloan said, shaking his head sadly. 'And from a member of the

Difference Commission.'

Lucas's hand went to his forehead: 'Ah, Jesus, I forgot. There's a meeting tonight.'

They looked at him with sympathy, and Sherrill patted his shoulder. 'It could be worse.'

'How?'

'I don't know. You could be shot.'

'He's been shot,' Sloan said. 'It'd have to be a lot worse than that.'

Lunch with Sloan was a long hour of gossip, with brief side-trips into current styles of crime. Murder was down, even with Allen and the two dead in Dinkytown

– the fourth, Rolo, was on the St. Paul books. Rape was down, ag assault was down, coke was down, speed was up and so was heroin. 'Guiterrez told me that the day heroin started coming back, was a happy day in his life,' Sloan said, speaking of one of the dope detectives. 'He says Target's gonna get ripped off, and K-Mart and Wal-Mart, but at least they're not gonna have a bunch of robot crazy coke freaks running around with guns, thinkin' that nothing can hurt them.'

Lucas nodded: 'Give a guy a little heroin, he goes to sleep. Give him a little more, he dies. No problem.'

'Shoplift like crazy, though,' Sloan said.

'A cultural skill,' Lucas said, lifting up the top of his cheeseburger to inspect the solitary, suspiciously pale pickle. 'Passed on by heroin gurus.

Somebody oughta look into it. An anthropologist.'

'Or a proctologist,' Sloan said. 'Say, with that commission meeting tonight, you won't be shooting.'

'I'm thinking of giving it up, anyway,' Lucas said. 'That goddamn Iowa kid shot my eyes out last time.'

'He's a freak,' Sloan said. 'He's shooting Olympic, now. He's got a target on his locker, ten bulls, every shot in the X ring. In the middle of the X-ring – you can see black all around the edges.'

'He's good,' Lucas said. 'At my age, you can't be that good. Can't do it. Your fine muscle control isn't fine enough.'

'Yeah, yeah. He's sort of a dumb fuck,' Sloan said.

'I heard he was actually a smart fuck.'

'Yeah, well – he's a dumb smart fuck.' Sloan looked at his watch. 'I gotta get going. I gotta talk to a guy'

On the walk back to City Hall, Lucas realized that a mental penny had dropped during the lunch. Something was packed into the back of his head, now, but he didn't know what it was.