Broken Prey

hand.”
    Lucas continued: “Now, we have the same situation. Guy disappears. Evidence is found both in the refrigerator and in the car. Charlie Pope’s frozen blood and Carlita Peterson’s blood, not frozen. But nobody ever sees the guy. Nobody sees his face. Nobody sees him anywhere  . . . and Elle says he doesn’t fit.”
    “You think we’re being conned?”
    “I’m forty-six percent sure of it,” Lucas said.
    “Forty-six percent. You gotta go with that.”
    “Listen, this is what I think: the guns thing was a fuckup. He’s still out there, and he’s still got the guns.”
    “Who?”
    “Somebody on the staff,” Lucas said. “Somebody medical. Somebody who could get to Pope, and then get to O’Donnell. I mean, the guy was using O’Donnell’s play voice when we were still looking for Pope. ”
    “Jesus. I can’t even think about that,” Sloan said. “All the way back then, he was faking us out on something we might not ever figure out.”
    “Yeah.”
    Sloan said, “But.”
    “But what?”
    “But all this only works if it really isn’t O’Donnell. Do we stop looking for him?”
    “I will bet you one hundred depreciated American dollars right now that it’s not O’Donnell,” Lucas said. “We’ll keep looking—but I think we go back to square one with the staff. Let’s get everybody together again and start tearing up the staff backgrounds. There’s something in there.”
    “The guy from California, huh?”
    “Yup. The guy from California.”
     
    LUCAS HIMSELF CLEARED Dr. Cale, while the coordination staff worked on the other staff members whose records they had. When Lucas was convinced that Cale was clear—he never seriously suspected him, he was too old for a new serial killer—he drove to St. John’s, and he and Cale spent two hours in the personnel office Xeroxing staff records for anyone who might have even an indirect connection to the Big Three.
    There were eighty files, altogether. Lucas loaded them into the passenger side of the Porsche and hustled them back to the Cities.
     
    “OKAY,” he told the group, “This is gonna be tedious. But every single anomaly, I want to hear about it. No matter how silly you think it might be. I want to hear about it.”
     
    THEY CALLED REFERENCES listed in the files, and authors of letters of reference, and doctors, and police stations in towns where the staff members had lived, high schools and colleges and psychiatrists. They found minor crimes, alcoholism, drug abuse, altered academic records, mistakes, friends, and enemies.
    They found one staff member who had apparently lost his foot in an automobile accident but listed “none” under disabilities and distinguishing marks. They found a woman who’d had an abortion but had listed “none” under operations and treatments by physicians; they found a man who was apparently internationally famous for making box kites.
    One man, named Logan, who worked in the laundry and appeared to be immune to embarrassment, sued the manufacturer of a prosthetic pump designed to produce an erect penis, as well as the doctors who surgically implanted the silicone sacs that the pump inflated. He claimed that he’d not been warned that overinflating the sacs could cause his penis to “explode.” The suit added that he and his wife could no longer achieve conjugal satisfaction because the surgical repairs had left his penis looking and feeling like a small cauliflower.
    “Ouch,” said the guy who found the stories about the lawsuit. “Here’s a guy who could have stored up some serious bitterness . . .”
    He gave a dramatic reading of the news stories, taken from the Internet: but the lawsuit was Logan’s only appearance in public print. Lucas agreed that there might have been some pump-related bitterness but noted that Logan had been given a jury award of $550,000, which might well alleviate it; and he couldn’t figure out a way to put Logan and the Big Three together at the critical times.
     
    ELLE CAME IN LATE in the afternoon, to look at the process, at the three BCA staffers with telephone headsets, sitting in front of computers, looking for all the world like a political boiler room.
    “The quality of information you’re getting is not the right kind to pull him up,” she said. “You would have to be lucky to find him. What we need to do is to set up a whole series of interviews and ask each person to nominate his or her top suspect out of a list of