Broken Prey

time it came in.”
    “Don’t touch it,” Lucas said. “I’m sending my crime-scene guys over. Have somebody stand by the truck.”
    While the crime-scene truck rolled, Lucas got the co-op center calling the airlines, looking for the ride that O’Donnell took out of town. He watched them work it for a while, got bored when nothing happened, walked down to the canteen, and got a cup of coffee.
    Hopping Crow called: “The blood in the refrigerator was frozen, of course. We don’t have a DNA yet, maybe by tomorrow. I can tell you that it’s human, and that it’s Charlie Pope’s blood type. Pope was an O positive, O’Donnell’s records say he’s an A positive. So.”
    “So Pope’s blood was in O’Donnell’s freezer.”
    “Probably his. Peterson’s was also O, but we don’t have any reason to think her blood was frozen.”
     
    HE WAS IN his office when the Crime Scene crew called. “The parking ticket on the floor was from seven o’clock last night.”
    “I’ll pass it on to the coordination center. What else?”
    “Nothing really, just the usual car junk. He was pretty neat. We’ll be done in a half hour. You want us to take it to the impound?”
    “Yeah. Seal it up. We may want to go over it with a microscope, depending on how things break.”
    The same guy called back twenty minutes later. “We found some blood. It was under the mat in the cargo compartment. It looks relatively fresh . . . it’s dry, but not dusty. Thought you ought to know.”
    “We need a blood type and DNA,” Lucas said. “Get it back here as quick as you can.”
     
    THEY WERE RUNNING NOW. He got another blood type: it was O again, could be Pope, could be Peterson. He made a mental bet on Peterson. He called Hopping Crow, to tell him to push the tests. “We’ll know by tomorrow night,” Hopping Crow said. “Who knows, maybe it’s somebody else?”
    “Don’t even think that.”
    They picked up bits and pieces of information about O’Donnell and his lifestyle all through the day, but nothing that would point a finger. Cops were talking with a kayak club, a singles cycling club, the last woman O’Donnell was known to have dated. She said, “It came down to a choice between me and the Pontiac, and I had the feeling I wasn’t going to win. So we sort of broke it off . . .”
    Early in the day, Lucas felt that the logjam was breaking, that the ice was going out, that the peel was coming off the banana. And then everything slowed, and he began to see nothing but trivia . . . He wandered out of the office at nine o’clock, discouraged.
    Where the fuck was he?
     
    RUFFE IGNACE LAY AWAKE in bed, listening to Ruffe’s Radio, cataloging the day’s events and insults: What the fuck is she doing, telling me that I have to watch my adverbs? She wouldn’t know an adverb if one jumped up and bit her on the tit. Green is a bad color for me, it makes my skin look yellow; gotta get rid of the green golf shirt. I wonder if my dick reaches up to my bellybutton when I’m really hard? I don’t think it does. Does anybody’s? Maybe I oughta get dressed and go out for a slice . . .
    When the phone rang, he said, “Pope,” and he scrambled through the dark to the phone charger, fumbled with the phone, punched the TALK button: “Ignace.”
    And it was: “Hey, Ruffe. Thought I’d call you and say good-bye.”
    “Good-bye? Where are you now?”
    A rumbling, wheezing, whispery laugh, and then, “If this phone is tapped, you’ll find out soon enough. Anyway, the police were getting too close: this Davenport guy is smarter than I expected.”
    “I don’t know anything about that—as far as I know, they’ve got no idea where you are, Charlie.”
    Another whispery chuckle: “That’s another thing. My name isn’t Charlie. Charlie, unfortunately for him, but not for the rest of us, is in a black bag somewhere. That’s what caused the trouble—I threw his dead ass into the river. Life was sweet until he came floatin’ up. Anyway, the cops found him, and they know.”
    “They know they’re not looking for Charlie Pope? Jesus Christ . . . who is this, anyway?”
    “They don’t know who I am yet, so I’m not going to tell you. In any case, I’m moving on. Maybe . . . New England. Manhattan. I’ve got to think, I’ve got to see what I’m becoming, the Gods Down the Hall . . .”
    “They know you’re not Charlie . . . ?” Ignace was outraged: And they hadn’t told me?
    “I’ll tell