Broken Prey

restaurant. Said it was the best place he ever ate, until he went to jail.”
     
    LUCAS CALLED SLOAN : “It’s Leo Grant. I’ll tell you on the way down to get him.”
     
    JENKINS ANSWERED HIS cell phone and said he was just getting a bite to eat. Shrake was with him. “We’re heading down to the security hospital,” Lucas said. “I want you guys with us.”
    “We got a break?”
    “Yeah. I’m gonna run over to Minneapolis and pick up Sloan . . .” They agreed to meet at a gas station in the town of Shakopee, on the edge of the metro area.
    “Listen, Shrake and me have been talking,” Jenkins said. “That list of yours . . . It’s gotta have “Fuck the Police,” right? NWA?”
     
    THE MINNEAPOLIS CITY HALL was an ugly building, a pile of purple stone almost exactly the color, Lucas had once realized after a hunting trip, of fresh deer turds. Sloan was standing on the sidewalk outside. Lucas pulled up beside him, and he jumped into the truck.
    “Tell me,” he said.
    So Lucas told him, and Sloan was properly astonished. He said, “I forgot all about those hookers, and the tattoo. It all seemed so . . . distant.”
    “There ought to be some kind of cop computer program,” Lucas said. “Like a spreadsheet. You’d put in all the facts that you have, all the suppositions, and rank the suppositions by credibility. Then you’d put in all the suspects, and the program would remind you of what you need to do. If we had something like that, that never forgot anything . . .”
    “We’d spend all of our time typing shit into it,” Sloan said.
    “Yeah, but we would have had everybody rolling their sleeves up . . . Goddamnit.”
     
    THEY TALKED ABOUT the details of the case on the way out of town; stopped at Shakopee and waited for five minutes until Jenkins and Shrake arrived, filled them in, and headed south again. Twenty miles out, Sloan asked, “You think we ought to call the sheriff?”
    “No. This kind of thing gets around too fast. I want to have Grant on the ground, with cuffs on him, before anybody even knows we’re coming.”
    Sloan looked at his watch. “His shift is gonna be over about now.”
    “Ah . . . ,” Lucas glanced at his own watch. “Call Dr. Cale. Ask him to find out if Grant’s gone yet. Tell him not to be obvious about it.”
    Sloan dialed, got Cale, asked, listened, and said, “Just a minute.” He took the phone down and said, “Grant left early—half an hour or forty-five minutes ago.”
    “Uh-oh. Does Cale know why?”
    Sloan asked, listened, then said, “No. He doesn’t know why. He just saw him going out through the security wall, and he was carrying a briefcase and looked like he was in a hurry. Cale assumed he was leaving.”
    “Get a home address. Tell Cale not to mention this, in case he comes back there.”
     
    WHILE SLOAN GOT THE address, Lucas pulled out his cell phone and tapped the speed dial for the office. Carol answered: “Carol, check with the co-op guys. When I told them to get every speck of information on Grant . . . did they call the hospital directly?”
    She called back: “Yes. They talked to a couple of people. They got the name of a Mrs. Hardesty in Personnel.”
    Lucas hung up and looked at Sloan. “He might know we’re coming.”
     
    SLOAN CALLED JENKINS and Shrake in the trailing car, and they pulled into a gas station. The software on Lucas’s navigation system wouldn’t allow an address to be entered while the truck was moving; he punched it in, got a map, and they took off again.
    “Maybe we better call the sheriff now,” Sloan suggested, when they were back on the road. “Get somebody looking for his car.”
    “Do it,” Lucas said.
    Sloan called the Department of Motor Vehicle Registration, identified himself, and gave them Grant’s name and address. A moment later he had the car and the tag number. He caught Nordwall in his office, and Lucas listened as Sloan outlined the situation. Then Sloan said, “I’ve got the car, tag, and his address. We’re coming up on the address, we’re just outside of Mankato, now. We’re only about a mile out . . .”
    He gave Nordwall the description of the car, the tag number, and the address, listened for a moment, said, “Yeah, I can hold. What’s going on?”
    Lucas glanced at Sloan, who shrugged, then the sheriff came back up and Sloan, suddenly intent, “Uh-huh, ah, jeez, it’s gotta be related. We’re gonna be there in a minute. See you