Broken Prey

asked. He couldn’t feel blood moving, but he could taste something in the back of his throat.
    “A little tired,” Weather said. It was two o’clock in the afternoon in London. “After I talked to you yesterday, we had a six-year-old girl come in. She was hurt in a car wreck. I assisted. There were only two of us on the plastic-surgery staff still around; I was about to leave when she came in. Wound up staying until midnight, and we were working again this morning at seven.”
    “Get her fixed?”
    “Yup. Looked bad, but kids heal, if you get them fast enough.”
    “Her face?”
    “Yes. She was in the front seat of one of those tiny cars they have here.”
    The girl, belted in, had been playing with a toy laptop with a plastic screen. The car she was riding in was rear-ended and jammed into the car in front of them. The air bags went, and they punched the laptop into the girl’s face, Weather said. “The plastic shattered, and she had ten or fifteen cuts, three bad, up and down the right cheek and temple.”
    “Ah, man.” Lucas could imagine it: he’d seen similar stuff when he was in uniform with the Minneapolis cops.
    “She’ll show the cuts for a while,” Weather said. “In a couple of years, you’ll have to know her to see the scars.”
    “And you only assisted.”
    “Well, technically. I’m not licensed here, so Jerome was the lead surgeon—but on the tricky bits, he stepped back and let me do the work.”
    “Smart guy.”
    “Yes. He is. And really, really good-looking,” Weather said. “Have I mentioned that? He’s like a rock ’n’ roll surgeon, you know? Big muscles, good shoulders, nice tan, except for the little white circles around his eyes. We women get really excited when he’s around. Did I say excited? I meant aroused. ”
    “Thank you. I needed that, I’m feeling so good anyway.”
    The light tone went way: “No luck, huh?”
    “No.”
    “You’re stuck?”
    “Pretty stuck . . . maybe gaining a little ground.”
    “How long?”
    “Soon—I’m not so worried about how long, as how many,” Lucas said. “Elle says he’s manic, that he’s moving really fast, he’s like a smart killing machine.”
    He told her about looking at the tapes, about Sloan’s increasing gloom, about Mike West burying himself in the hillside, about Chase’s descent into a rabid lunacy . . . He told her about not being able to see what was going on in the isolation cells.
    “Something happened, but I couldn’t see it. That’s the second time I’ve had the problem, of knowing something was there but not being able to see it.”
    “What’s the other thing?” she asked.
    “There’s something in the notes that this reporter took the last time he talked to the killer. I can feel it, but I can’t figure out what it is. Sloan doesn’t even feel it.”
    “Want to read it to me?”
    So he got the papers, read through it, aloud. When he finished, she was quiet for so long that he said, “Weather? You still there?”
    “Just thinking. You say there’s something in there? You mean, his syntax, or the facts of what he’s saying, or what?”
    “I don’t know,” Lucas said.
    “I could see only one thing, but it’s probably just a mistake . . .”
    “What?”
    “He said he was taking this Peterson woman up I-35, but he said the 35. I’ve never heard anybody from the Midwest say that. The 35. I’ve only heard that in Los Angeles.”
    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