Broken Prey

hospital. The word was, they’d never be back, and there might be more heads to roll.
    Lucas, Jenkins, Shrake, Sloan, and the wildlife officer were given citations by their various departments, a signal that the departments had decided they were clean.
     
    THE LEGISLATURE SCHEDULED hearings, and a group of Mankato residents demanded that a monument be built, with the names of the victims inscribed on it, in a plaza, or perhaps a new park. Rose Marie, reading the story, said to Lucas, “You know, it never occurred to me.”
    “What?”
    “That somebody might make a buck on this,” she said, as she turned the page.
     
    A WEEK AFTER the shootings, Sloan was gone. He had a lot of accumulated vacation, which he took as a lead-in to actual retirement. His vacation check also helped on the down payment on the bar; he assumed ten years of a fifteen-year mortgage, renamed the place Shooters, and, his wife told Lucas, “The first person he hired is nineteen years old and has tits out to here.”
    Lucas said, “Huh. He’s smarter than I thought.”
     
    WEATHER CAME BACK from London with the kids and the housekeeper. The orthopod took the steel rods out of Lucas’s arm but left two titanium screws, which would be permanent. The arm ached, and the cast drove him crazy. He found he could scratch his arm with an ingeniously bent clothes hanger.
    Letty, his ward, said, “You know, every time you scratch, there’s a bad smell.”
    “Thank you. You do so much to help my self-confidence in social situations,” he said.
    She was still teasing him when the phone rang. When Lucas picked it up, Nordwall told him that O’Donnell’s body had been found in the middle of a cornfield two miles from his home. The body was found by a farmer responding to his wife’s complaints of a persistent bad odor from across the road. O’Donnell had been shot once in the forehead.
    “Grant, Rogers, whoever he was, must have been looking him right in the eyes when he pulled the trigger,” Nordwall said.
     
    THEY NEVER FIGURED out who the killer was. He was buried under the name Roy Rogers, though nobody really thought that was his name. DNA records were kept in case anybody ever came looking for him.
     
    AND FINALLY , a month after the shootings, deep in the bowels of the security hospital, nine patients and a doctor met for a group-therapy session. One of the patients, a man known for his silence, timorously raised a hand as soon as everybody had a chair.
    Sennet, who was running the group, suppressed a look of surprise and said, “Lonnie? You have something for us?”
    Lonnie, who feared many things—too many things, hundreds of them, a new one every minute—dug into his pocket and took out a tattered roll of yellow paper. “I found this the day everybody got shot. I didn’t steal it, it was lying in the hall.”
    “Okay,” Sennet said, encouraging him. “What is it?”
    Lonnie unrolled the paper. “It’s a list. It says, Best Songs of the Rock Era. It has a hundred songs on it.”
    “May I see it?” Sennet asked.
    “May I have it back?” Lonnie looked frightened, as though the list might be seized. “I think about it a lot.”
    “Sure. If it’s only rock songs,” Sennet said.
    Lonnie passed the paper round the circle of the group, each person glancing at it. When Sennet got it, he scanned the list, then passed it around the rest of the circle, and back to Lonnie.
    “Do you have some thoughts about it?” Sennet asked.
    “Well, these are the one hundred best rock songs, okay?”
    “Okay.”
    Lonnie’s lip trembled. “But, there are no Beatles on the list. Don’t you see? There are no Beatles  . . .”

L UCAS D AVENPORT ’ S “Best Songs of the Rock Era”
    In no particular order, except that, as any intelligent person knows, any decent road trip will start with ZZ Top.
ZZ Top—Sharp-Dressed Man
ZZ Top—Legs
Wilson Pickett—Mustang Sally
Crash Test Dummies—Superman’s Song
David Essex—Rock On
Golden Earring—Radar Love
Blondie—Heart of Glass
Jefferson Airplane—White Rabbit
Jefferson Airplane—Somebody to Love
Derek and the Dominos—Layla
The Doors—Roadhouse Blues
The Animals—House of the Rising Sun
Aerosmith—Sweet Emotion
Aerosmith—Dude (Looks Like a Lady)
Bruce Springsteen—Dancing in the Dark
Bruce Springsteen—Born to Run
Bruce Springsteen—Thunder Road
The Police—Every Breath You Take
Tom Waits—Heart of Saturday Night
Van Halen—Hot for Teacher
The Who—Won’t Get