Broken Prey

Lucas feeling stupid. At lunchtime, he went out for a BLT, then returned to his office and told Carol not to let anyone in, short of an emergency.
    He closed the door, put his feet up on his desk, and thought about all the activity in the co-op room. Elle might be right: the kind of information they were getting wouldn’t really pinpoint anyone. The other problem was, when you were dealing with so many possibilities, you tended to forget about the facts you already had.
    For instance, he thought, somebody had passed the information about Peterson to the Big Three. That was a fact, and they hadn’t emphasized it enough. It had to be one of fewer than a dozen people. They were all on tape.
    Did O’Donnell make any small specific move, did he touch all three food trays, did he do anything that might possibly involve the passing of information? How about the guys up in the cage? Was there some way to fiddle with the time code on the tape, or mess with the tape itself, so the guy in the back could have a little chat with Taylor, Lighter, and Chase and nobody would know?
    Lucas couldn’t stand going down to the co-op room again, so he dragged out the tapes of the St. John’s isolation wing. He ran through them at high speed, the people coming and going in their silent-movie way.
     
    HERE CAME O’DONNELL. Here was the food. He says something to Lighter, and the food goes in. Didn’t touch anything that time. He talks to Chase. Food goes in . . .
    He couldn’t see it. Maybe O’Donnell put the messages in the food in the hallway? Might he have some power over one of the orderlies who delivered the trays?
    He ran back and forth through the tapes, watching people come and go, staffers talking to prisoners, interacting with other staffers. Here’s Beloit, here’s Grant, here’s Hart, here’s O’Donnell, here goes Sennet . . .
     
    “WHAT’S HE DOING?” Lucas asked himself.
    He was watching Leo Grant. Hard to pick up, if you weren’t running the tapes at high speed.
    Okay: Grant walks down the corridor, dressed in slacks and a sport coat, hands in his pockets. He’s with Sennet. Sennet pushes a button, and they talk to Lighter. While they talk, Grant takes off his sport coat, folds it over his arm.
    Lucas couldn’t make out what the conversation was about, but watched as Grant turned his back to the window where Lighter was standing. Grant was facing both the camera and Sennet. They talked some more, and then Sennet punched the window release, and the window closed, shutting Lighter away again.
    Sennet steps across the hallway. Grant, still with his coat off, steps sideways across the hall, never turning his back fully to the camera or to Sennet. Sennet opens Chases’s window. They talk, Grant turns his back to Chase, as they talk. He’s facing Sennet. Sennet closes Chase’s window. Taylor’s window is down the hall. Sennet heads that way, and Grant slips his jacket on, and follows Sennet, his back to the camera. They talk to Taylor, and Grant casually slips his jacket off again. He turns his back to Taylor, but never to Sennet or the camera . . .
    Sennet punched Taylor’s window when they were finished, and he and Grant walked back toward the camera, Grant a step behind so that Sennet had to turn slightly to talk to him. They disappeared under the camera and, presumably, out the door.
     
    LUCAS RAN THE SEQUENCE several times. Maybe Grant just couldn’t get the jacket right. Maybe the temperature was uncomfortable. But maybe . . . could he have had something written on the back of his shirt? Or a piece of paper or cloth tacked to his shirt?
    Lucas dug out the anomalies list and found only one short entry for Grant: a Dr. Peter Baylor, from a clinic in Colorado, had mentioned that Grant had gone to a private psychiatric clinic in Cancun after leaving Colorado. The anomaly was that there were three references from Colorado in Grant’s record, but none from Cancun.
    Lucas looked up the telephone numbers for Colorado, called, asked for Peter Baylor, and was told that he wasn’t working that day. “I’m trying to find the phone number for a former staff member of yours, Leo . . .” He flipped through the paper. It wasn’t Leonard, it was . . . “Leopold Grant. He left your hospital and apparently went to Cancun.”
    After being routed around, he talked to a woman in the clinic’s personnel department who didn’t have a number, but had a name: The Coetrine Center. After a hassle