He was going to tell Shadow Love that he'd called the Crows from the police station, to tell them about the coming raid. But he couldn't do that. It would sound as though he were trying to ingratiate himself, as if he were crawling. Tears started down his cheeks. The cold, he thought. Just the cold.
He was taking it all in, breathing it, feeling the eagle soar, when Shadow Love put a hand on his shoulder. Hart turned his head, but the other man had stepped behind him.
"What-" Hart began to say, and then he felt the fire in his throat, a stinging, and looked stupidly at the blood on his coat, pouring like a stream onto his hands. Hart sank to his knees in wonder, then fell on his face, rolled a few feet and stopped, the eagle gone forever.
Shadow Love watched his body for a moment, then put the knife back in his jacket and looked around. Nobody.
That's two, he thought. He turned and climbed the embankment, and as he did, the TV tape of the killing of Billy Hood unrolled before his eyes, the woman cop with her pistol, blasting young Billy in the face. Lillian Rothenburg, the TV said.
He crossed the top of the hill, walked down the street, turned the corner and got in the car with Barbara.
"You okay?" Barbara asked fearfully. She looked quickly around. "See anybody around? Where's Hart?"
"Hart's gone," Shadow Love said, slumping in the passenger seat, his eyes half closed. "Saw an eagle. Great big fuckin' bald eagle, floating out over the river."
He looked away from her fear, out the window. In the reflections on the glass, he saw Lily's face, and nodded to it.
Daniel was in a dark mood. He prowled his office, peering at the political photographs that lined his walls.
"I thought we were doing good," Sloan ventured.
"So did I," said Lester. He had his loafers off and his feet hung over the side of his chair. He was wearing white sweat-socks with his blue suit.
"I can't complain," Daniel admitted. He was nose to nose with a black-and-white photo of Eugene McCarthy that dated back to the Children's Crusade of '68. McCarthy looked pleased with himself. Daniel scowled at him and counted the coups.
"One: We took out Bluebird and cleared the only killings on our turf. Two: We got Hood with Lily's help. Three: We broke the names out of Liss and damn near nailed the Crows at their apartment. That's all good."
"But?" Lily asked.
"Something's going to happen," Daniel said, turning back toward the group around his desk. "And it'll happen here. I feel it in my bones."
"Maybe the Crows'11 call it off for a while, cool out," Lucas suggested. "Maybe they'll figure that if they lie low, the heat'll die down, give them a break."
Daniel shook his head. "No. The tempo's wrong," he said. "This has been a planned progression. They kill two people to establish a philosophical basis, then Andretti to grab major headlines, then the judge and the attorney gen-eral, major federal and state law officials. The next act is going to be something big. It won't get smaller."
Anderson arrived as Daniel was talking. He took a chair and nodded to Lucas and Lily.
"Got something?" Daniel asked.
Anderson cleared his throat. "It ain't good," he said.
South Dakota authorities had located Shadow Love's driver's license. The license showed an address at Standing Rock. Standing Rock cops said he hadn't lived there for years. They had no idea where he was. The news from the National Crime Information Center was both bad and good: there was plenty of information on Shadow Love, and it was all frightening. Most of it came from California, where he'd served two years on an assault charge.
"Two years? Must have been a hell of an assault," Lily said.
"Yeah. There was a race fight outside a bar. Shadow Love took some guy down and put the boot to him. Damn near kicked him to death."
"How about here in Minnesota?" Daniel asked. "He grew up here?"
"Yeah. Went to Central. We've got Dick Danfrey over at the school board now, looking through their records. He should be getting back anytime. We're looking for addresses, friends, attorneys, anything that might make a connection."
"Is he a psycho? Shadow Love?" asked Lucas.
"The California people did a pretty thorough psychiatric evaluation on him," Anderson said, shuffling through his papers. "They're going to fax the records to us. There were indications of schizophrenia. They say he talked to invisible friends and sometimes invisible animals. And the prison shrink said the other inmates were scared of him. Even the guards. And this was in a hard-core California prison."
"Jesus," Lucas said.
"We'll have a whole file on him later this afternoon," An- derson said. "Pictures, prints, everything. Pretty recent too. Last five years, anyway."
There was nothing on the Crows. "Zilch," Anderson said.
"Nothing?"
"Well, Larry's heard of them and he knows some stuff. Mostly rumors, or legend. Nothing that would track them."
"Where is Larry?" asked Daniel, looking around.
Sloan shrugged. "He's been pretty down in the mouth since that business with the Liss kid, and us putting the money on the street."
"What the fuck, he think we're playing tic-tac-toe or something?" Daniel asked angrily.
Sloan shrugged again and Lucas asked Anderson, "What about the feebs and the fingerprints? What about the truck?"
"The FBI's still running the prints, but they say if they're old… it could take a while. The truck has different plates front and back. When we checked, the plates were supposedly lost off trucks out in South Dakota. There was no theft report, because the owners thought they'd just bounced off. So we got more prints, but no IDs."
"What you're telling us is, we've probably got them in the system, pictures and all, but we don't have any way to figure out which ones they are?" Daniel asked.
"That's about it," said Anderson. "The feebs are giving top priority to picking out the prints…"
"Maybe you could check with State Vital Records. Look for a birth certificate on Shadow Love, see who the father is, if one is listed," Lucas suggested.
"I'll do that," Anderson said. He made a note on a file cover.
"What else?" asked Daniel. The question met with silence. "Okay. Now. Something's going to happen. It's given me the creeps. We gotta get these motherfuckers. Today. Tomorrow. God damn it. And when you see Larry, tell him I want his ass in here for these meetings."
Two kids found Hart's body. They were playing on the hillside in the late-afternoon shadows when they saw him, crumpled in the weeds. For a few seconds, the older of the two thought it was a bum; but the lump was so unmoving, so awkwardly piled on itself without regard to tendon or muscle strain that even the younger one quickly realized that it must be death.
They looked at the body for a moment, then the older boy said, "We better go get your mom to call the cops."
The younger boy stuck his thumb in his mouth; it was something he hadn't done for two years. When he realized what he was doing, he pulled his thumb out and thrust his hands in his pants pockets. The older one grabbed him by the shirt and tugged him up the hillside.
The first cop on the scene was a patrolman riding single in his squad. He stepped close enough to see the blood, leaned forward to feel the cold neck and backed away. If there was evidence around the body, he didn't want to destroy it.
Two Homicide cops arrived fifteen minutes later, but nobody had yet recognized Hart.
"Throat cut," one cop said. "Could be a Crow hit. That'd be bad. Look at his clothes-decent clothes, the guy's got some bread."
The second cop, the same bespectacled investigator who'd caught the Benton murderer, eased Hart's billfold out of his hip pocket, stood up, opened it and looked at the driver's license behind the plastic window.