Broken Prey

for a fight, because I got me some guns and I know how to use them. They fucked with me all my life. Now I’m gonna fuck with everybody. I’m not going back to St. John’s. I’m not coming in alive.”
    Click.
     
    IGNACE PUSHED BACK from his desk, staring at the phone and his steno pad. A guy from the desk was coming his way, trying to assemble some authority, trailed by the woman Ignace had chased off: “Holy shit,” Ignace said. “Holy shit!”
     
    SLOAN AND HIS WIFE were in bed. Sloan had come down with a bug, and his sinuses felt like overinflated basketballs; his wife was asleep, but Sloan was rolling around restlessly, fighting to breathe, when the phone rang. His wife said, “What?” and groaned. The phone never rang at that time of night unless it was trouble: Sloan rolled over and picked it up. “Hello?”
    “Sloan, this is Ruffe Ignace. Charlie Pope just called me.”
    “What?” Cobwebs.
    “Charlie Pope just called me. I need you to call Davenport and have him call me back—I assume you don’t have jurisdiction in the Mankato kill.”
    Sloan recognized Ignace’s voice. “Is this a joke?”
    “This is no fuckin’ joke.” Ignace was shouting into the phone. “I need to talk to Davenport right now or we’re just gonna put this story in the paper raw and you can read it tomorrow morning when you get up.”
     
    SLOAN WOKE UP LUCAS. “Give him my number,” Lucas said. Then he lay facedown on Weather’s side of the bed, in the faint lingering odor of her perfume, until the phone rang again: “This is Davenport.”
    “Did the killer cut off Adam Rice’s penis?” Ignace asked without preamble.
    “What?”
    “The guy who called me—I assume Sloan told you I was called by a guy who said he was Charlie Pope—the guy said he cut off Adam Rice’s penis,” Ignace said.
    “Ah, man, are you going to use that?”
    “That’s negotiable—but did he? ’Cause if he did and if this was really Pope, I have some other information.”
    “What information?”
    “Did he cut off Adam Rice’s penis?”
    Lucas thought for a moment, then said, “If you use that specific information, I will find some way to fuck you up. That’s not fair to any of the survivors.”
    “So I was talking to Charlie Pope.”
    “I don’t know, but that information is accurate,” Lucas said.
    “All right. He said he killed the kid with an aluminum baseball bat, wiped it with Adam Rice’s undershirt, and then threw the bat into a field next to the house. Is that possible?”
    “I don’t know. Of course, it’s possible,” Lucas said. “We’ll look tomorrow morning . . . Listen, I need to know exactly what this guy told you.”
    “Then you can either come over here and I can give you a transcript, or I can read it to you . . . Hang on, hang on.”
    Lucas could hear the phone being fumbled, then a woman’s voice said, “Lucas, this is Sharon White.”
    “Hey, Sharon.”
    “You better come over here. We don’t want to use anything that would mess anybody up or interfere with the investigation, but we’re going to run something, and I would like to discuss it with you. And Ruffe. If you can get here in like, fifteen or twenty minutes?”
    “I’ll meet somebody at your door in fifteen,” Lucas said.
     
    WHEN LUCAS TURNED the corner in downtown Minneapolis, Sloan was already standing in the street outside the Star-Trib building. Thin, gray, unshaven, with hair sticking sideways out over his ears, he looked like a bum; and his nose seemed to be swollen. Lucas dumped the Porsche behind Sloan’s Chevy, put a cop-on-duty sign on the dashboard—they were both parked in a no-parking zone—and got out.
    “Gotta be the guy,” Sloan said. He held a handkerchief to his face and coughed into it. “Man. I’m sick.”
    “What happened?” Lucas leaned away from him.
    “I don’t know. I was fine at dinner, and now I’m all fucked up. I took four green Nyquils, and my nose keeps getting bigger.”
    “Well, Jesus Christ, don’t sneeze on me.”
     
    A YOUNG MAN WAS STANDING behind the Strib ’s front doors. When Lucas and Sloan walked up, he lifted an eyebrow, and Sloan held up a badge case. The young man pushed the door open and said, “They’re waiting.”
    They followed him into an elevator, then down through the cluttered newsroom to a cluster of people standing and sitting around a desk where Ruffe Ignace sat behind a computer, typing.
    Lucas recognized Sharon White, the executive editor,