Broken Prey

thin—wiry—high cheekbones. He dresses well, he’s well spoken. He seems pretty smart. He uses big words sometimes, I thought maybe he was showing off, but it seems pretty natural . . .”
    “Oh, boy . . . does he have a tattoo on his upper arm? Like a barbed-wire thing?”
    “ Ah, shit. ” Lucas dropped the phone to his thigh and put his hands over his eyes. The hookers at the Rockyard, they’d mentioned the tattoo. He’d never thought about it again. If he’d lined up all the possibilities, had all the men roll up their sleeves, Peterson would be alive.
    He put the phone back to his ear and Grant was saying, “Hello? Are you still there?”
    “I’m here. I just . . . remembered something. Another witness mentioned seeing a man with that tattoo talking to one of the victims. Goddamnit. ”
    “If it’s who I think it is, you’ve got a serious problem,” Grant said. “There was a patient named Roy Rogers at West Bend. Roy Rogers wasn’t his real name, but we never found out what his real name was. He killed a man in Denver, a street guy. He’d sat on the guy and nearly cut his head off with a piece of glass. This was over a radio. The cops figured it must have taken five minutes to get the job done: he started around back and sawed halfway through the guy’s neck.”
    “The guy we’re looking for has slashed the throats of all three victims . . . You turned this Rogers guy loose?”
    “No—he turned himself loose. I ran into one of my college pals at a convention in Chicago, and he mentioned it. Roy was supposedly in a secure area, but somebody left a door unlocked, or ajar, and he walked down through a mechanical area and out the other side. The staff thinks he rode out in the back of a food truck. Nobody’s seen him since.”
    “Is he smart? Any connection with California that you know of?” Lucas asked.
    “He’s very bright—his IQ, by the old standards, would have been considered genius level. We don’t call it that anymore, but he’s smart. And he came from California.”
    “Ah. Thank you . . .”
    The Cancun Leo Grant was into it now, his voice intense: Lucas realized that he sounded like the fake Leo Grant: “The thing is, whatever his name is, if his story is true . . . Roy’s the poster boy for unwanted children. He said he grew up locked in his room—he didn’t even have a window. When I pushed him on it, I got the impression that his ‘room’ might have been a walk-in closet. He wasn’t tortured or sexually abused, he was just locked away. His story’s a horror, depending on how much you could believe.”
    “How much did you believe?” Lucas asked.
    Grant considered for a moment, then said, “About the growing-up part, I believed most of it. He says the cops came and got him when he was nine or ten—he didn’t actually know how old he was—and put him in a foster home. He might have been in the closet from the time he was a baby. He said he ran away from the foster home after a while and grew up on the beach at Venice. The thing about Roy was . . .”
    Grant paused again, and Lucas prompted him, “Yeah? What?”
    “Roy has no real personality of his own,” Grant said. “That’s not exactly right, but you can think of him that way. He takes on the personality of the people he’s most impressed with. That’s how he pulled off this fraud at your security hospital. At West Bend, during treatment sessions, he talked and behaved like a staff member. But if you saw him around the orderlies, he acted and talked like an orderly. Once, in a group-therapy session, with a man who’d been accused of killing his wife . . . I saw him take on the other man’s personality in just a matter of a couple of sessions. He picked up the other guy’s mannerisms and way of talking, his gestures, facial tics . . . It was like the other guy had been poured into him.”
    “That explains a lot,” Lucas said. “Listen, Dr. Grant, I’m gonna pick this guy up, right now. We’d appreciate it if you’d come up, help us talk with him. The state will pay all your expenses and a fee, of course . . .”
    “I can do that,” Grant said. “This is a shock, of course. I’d like to talk to the hospital staff up there, and I’d like to see Roy again. Just to hear his story.”
    “Yeah, well . . .”
    “You know where he got the name? Roy Rogers?” Grant asked.
    “From the cowboy guy?”
    “Nope. Well, indirectly. He got it from a fast-food