Broken Prey

suspects.”
    “The list would include them?”
    “Yes. It would work like one of those market polls, where people make bets on the winners of political races . . . All the suspects know one another, and most of them, given their jobs, are intelligent, so you would wind up with dozens of evaluations that would include all kinds of things that you don’t get on paper. Personal feelings, rumor, gossip, personal encounters . . . you should probably survey the patients, too. They may have psychological problems, but lots of them are actually hyperperceptive, hypersensitive, to the qualities of other people . . .”
    “You might just wind up electing the ten most unpopular people,” Lucas said.
    “Not really—you’d just tell them not to judge on the basis of popularity. Some people would anyway, but you’d get enough hard, honest opinions that it might be very valuable. How many people are you looking at now?”
    “About eighty.”
    “If you were to give questionnaires to all eighty people, and if the killer is one of them, I would bet that his name is in the top five,” she said.
    Lucas scratched his chin. “If we go another day or two without a break, I might do that. Why don’t you put together the questionnaire, have it ready?”
    “Why wait a day or two? If you think this man is really on the staff, and he’s still out there . . .”
    “Because we’d have all kinds of legal and labor problems,” Lucas said. “We’re already working through some pretty questionable territory, calling up friends and relatives and asking about these people. We’re gonna hear from the unions any time now . . . And the media would go crazy about invasion of privacy and all that. I mean, we are on a fishing expedition.”
    “If he kills somebody else . . .”
    “That’s why I say I’ll do it if we don’t get anything in the next day or two,” Lucas said. “Right now, I think he’s hunkered down. He’ll start moving again, if he’s like you say, if he doesn’t have any choice . . .”
    “There’s something else. If you let me do this market thing . . . it would be a wonderful paper. The Journal of Forensic Psychology would be all over it.”
    The problems of a survey and the labor unions became moot the next day.
     
    THE CO-OP CENTER had pretty much closed down by seven o’clock in the evening. Lucas took home a stack of notes the staff had made on anomalies they’d seen in the incoming data. He read through the notes, sitting in a leather chair in his small library. The anomalies were slight: discrepancies in dates, times, schools; and a few comments by former employers that suggested that this staff member, or that one, hadn’t done well at a previous job.
    Lucas became interested in a staff member named Herman Clousy. He’d been hired as a medical technician, doing routine lab work, including blood tests on Charlie Pope. To get the job, he’d provided a transcript from a “Lakewood Community College” in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, but nobody could find a Lakewood Community College. He’d also provided three references, and none of the three could be reached at the phone numbers he’d listed. On the other hand, he’d worked for the state for fifteen years, and the references were out-of-date.
    The next morning, Clousy was at the top of Lucas’s list for almost fifteen minutes. After the daily chat with Weather, he called Dr. Cale, who said that Clousy was an average performer, one of the shadow people whom nobody paid much attention to. He was married, Cale knew, and lived in Mankato. Was there any special reason why Lucas was interested?
    “He says he graduated from a Lakewood Community College in White Bear Lake, and there isn’t one.”
    “Really? That would have been checked . . . let me ask my secretary, she used to work for the community college down here.”
    Cale went away for a minute, then came back and said, “Sandy says there used to be a Lakewood,” he said. “She says it’s called Century College now.”
    “Ah . . . poop. Let me check that.”
    He gave it to one of the co-op staff, who checked and came back five minutes later: “There was a name change, all right. Still can’t find the references . . .”
    “Take the most uncommon-looking last name in the references and start calling around to all of them you can find,” Lucas suggested.
     
    THEY SPENT THE REST of the morning tracking more dead ends: the work was tedious and left