Broken Prey

had fallen off a truck somewhere; Shrake referred to them as quasi-Armanis.
    “Fuckin’ waste of time,” Jenkins said. He habitually walked around with his hands in the pockets of his jacket, so all his jackets had stretched-out pockets. “The guy’s been gone for a month. We talked to the administrator over there. He said West’s meds were fogging him up so bad that he couldn’t stand them. The house rules are that you have to take your meds—and since he couldn’t stand doing that, he took off.”
    “Any idea where he might be?”
    “Doc says he’s probably on the street. His parents live in Arizona—they’re retired. We could check with the Scottsdale cops.”
    “Do that,” Lucas said. “See if they could have somebody stop by. And get a bulletin out to the local uniforms, get them to poke around. We really would like to talk to him.”
     
    AT LUCAS’S OFFICE , they found a note from Carol: “Dr. Grant called from St. John’s and asked that you call him back. He’s on his cell phone.”
    “Grant was the shrink,” Sloan said.
    Lucas called him, and Grant answered on the third ring: “Listen, I don’t know if you’re interested, but I pulled out all my session tapes on Pope,” he said. “There’re five or six hours of material. Most of it was just talk. How was he feeling, what was he doing. But there’s an hour or so when he’s talking about getting out, what he’ll do, about the women he attacked. I edited down to the good stuff, an hour or so.”
    “I need that,” Lucas said. “Can you messenger it up?”
    “I’m coming up there tonight. If you want to tell somebody that I’m coming, I could drop it at the BCA office . . . it’s just a regular cassette tape.”
    “Where’re you going in the Cities?”
    “Downtown Minneapolis.”
    “Why don’t you drop it at my house? That’ll save you a half hour, and it’s easy to find.”
     
    LUCAS WENT HOME , ate a steak-and-onions low-carb, low-fat, low-protein microwave meal that had apparently been made purely from coal tars and goobers, perhaps seasoned with industrial phlegm; watched the television news; thought his suit looked pretty good but that his face looked too harsh—maybe from the diet? He looked at himself in the mirror, wondered if he should use a moisturizer—Weather’s solution for anything that didn’t involve bleeding or broken bones—but was embarrassed by the thought and eventually went out to the garage.
    When Grant showed up, a few minutes before eight o’clock, Lucas was lying in the driveway, his head under the ass end of his Lexus, trying to rewire the trailer harness. The harness hung in an exposed position and had gotten trashed while he was dragging a boat around Wisconsin. More fine auto design.
    “You under there? Lucas?”
    “Yeah.” Lucas turned his head, saw a pair of cordovan loafers, and pushed himself out. “Just a minute. I almost got it.”
    He didn’t, though. After fooling with the inadequate male-female connection for a moment, he decided he’d have to readjust the wiring distance between a support bracket and the connection. That would take more light than he had. He pushed himself out again and got to his feet.
    “How’s it going?” Lucas hadn’t paid special attention to Grant at St. John’s, but now he looked him over. He was about Lucas’s height, but maybe fifteen pounds lighter, with edges. He didn’t look like he worked out, but there was a feral toughness about him.
    Grant fished a tape cassette out of his jacket pocket and handed it to Lucas. “There’s not really anything hard on it; it just sort of shows you what he thinks about.”
    “That could help,” Lucas said. “I’ll listen to it tonight . . . I hope you didn’t come all the way up to bring the tape.”
    “No, there’s not much to do down by St. John’s, so I hang out up here. I’m too old to chase college girls.”
    “Especially Lutheran college girls,” Lucas said.
    “Especially intellectual Lutheran college girls,” Grant said. He drifted over toward the Porsche, which was crouched in the garage. “Of course, if I had a car like this . . . this is the wide one, right? Wide enough for Lutheran girls?”
    “I’m a happily married man,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah . . . And if you happened to be unhappily married, I can tell you that Karen Beloit liked your looks. She was sort of bubbling about you.”
    Lucas laughed and said, “Hmm . . . Listen, you want a beer? What do