"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.