Broken Prey

that. We’re working on it as hard as we can, including using civilian experts to advise us. Your story was okay. Some of your details of the supposed display in the Larson case weren’t exactly correct, but I really can’t go into the precise problems . . .”
    “They were exactly correct,” Ignace said. He added something under his breath, which might have been, You fucking twit, or something close to that.
    Sloan stepped away from the microphone, as if to have a personal word with Ignace, but he spoke loud enough that everyone could hear. “Not exactly,” he said. “You weren’t at the scene, and I was. That whole thing about the way, mmm  . . .” He glanced at the TV cameras. “. . . about the sexual aspects of the arrangement of the body, were not exact. I don’t know where you got your information, but you have to be more careful about hearsay . . . or maybe the way your imagination works.”
    “It wasn’t hearsay, and it was exact,” Ignace insisted.
    “I won’t argue,” Sloan said, and he stepped away from microphone, turning it back to Lucas.
    “It’s not right for you to stand up there and suggest that I wrote something that was incorrect when both you and I know it was correct,” Ignace said.
    “I won’t argue,” Sloan said again, dismissively.
    The other reporters were enjoying the show, a little hand-to-hand combat at Ignace’s expense. They would all mention in the report that Sloan suggested that some of Ignace’s details were incorrect, revenge for his having beaten them.
    At the end of the press conference, with all questions repeated three times so the various media representatives could be shown on tape asking them, Lucas, Sloan, and Nordwall moved off the podium and out through the conference room’s back door.
    Ignace followed them through the door and said, “Wait a minute.”
    Lucas turned: “Uh, you’re not supposed to be back here . . .”
    “Yeah, yeah.” Ignace went after Sloan: “What was that all about? About my details being wrong? You know that’s not right.”
    “I know,” Sloan said. “I’m trying to figure out where our leak is. If all the details were right, and they were, and you insisted on it, and you did, then you probably saw photographs. There are about six people who could have made copies for you. I didn’t, so that gets it down to five. I’ll figure it out.”
    Ignace stared at him for a moment, then turned, shoved his notebook in a hip pocket, walked back out the door, and as he went through it, said, “Fuck you.”
    “Talk to you later, Rufus,” Sloan called back, adding, in a slightly lower tone, “You little asshole.”
     
    THE INFORMATION ABOUT POPE , and the press conference, froze the investigation: the routine continued, but there weren’t a lot of decisions to be made until the DNA came back. Lucas talked to the BCA director about space and personnel for the co-op center, then went home and ate a microwave dinner. He reread the murder file as he ate, talked to Elle by phone: she had no more suggestions.
    “I saw you on television,” she said. “This will add pressure to find somebody.”
    “Yup.”
    “And it might also put pressure on the perpetrator to act again—when the attention starts to fade away in a day or two, he may move to get it back.”
    “Thanks for the thought.”
    He read the file some more, he went out to a used bookstore, then on to a movie, a spy thriller about an assassin who’d lost his memory. None of it seemed likely, but it had a decent car chase involving BMWs and Mercedes Benz Yellow Cabs.
    The next morning, at eight o’clock, Weather called, and he told her about the press conference.
    “Has there ever been a crime solved by matching DNA from a scene to something that was already in the bank?” she asked. “I mean, the primary solution, rather than an after-the-fact thing?”
    “Yeah. A couple of times. But it’s rare.”
     
    AFTER CLEANING UP , he took 35E to the BCA headquarters, settled into his office, signed papers that Carol put in front of him, and then checked with Bill James, who was doing the biographical research on Adam Rice and who’d uncovered Rice’s connection to the hookers.
    “Not getting much more,” James said. “I’m doing background on the people he worked with, neighbors, like that, you know, but nothing is popping up. The hookers thing was . . . way out of control. If you knew everything else about him, you never saw that