Broken Prey

phone call that make it possible or even likely that the caller was Charles Pope.’ That work for you?”
    “That works for me,” Ignace said, taking it all down.
    “You can add this,” Lucas said. He dictated: “Davenport added that any woman who feels that she is under surveillance, or might have been, or who has seen anyone who resembles Charlie Pope, should call her local police department and report it. Even a weak feeling—it’s better to be wrong than to be dead.”
    Ignace’s keyboard rattled along, keeping pace with the statement. “Good,” he muttered. “That’s great.”
    Sloan called, “Lucas,” and Lucas stepped over to him. “Rochester pay phone.”
    “Call the Rochester cops. Get them out on the street, make stops on any single males, on foot or in cars. Give them a description. Tell them to be careful, he’s probably got a gun. Tell them right now. Right now.”
    “I better put that in,” Ignace said.
     
    SLOAN WALKED OFF , working the cell phone, and Lucas asked Ignace to read his shorthand notes, and Ignace did. Lucas stopped him once or twice: “You say he said, ‘He come down the stairs . . .’ He didn’t say, ’He came down the stairs . . .’ ”
    “Just like I’ve got it,” Ignace said. He trailed his finger farther down the page of Gregg script. “And here he says, ‘wouldn’t have no fingerprints.’ ”
    “Not grammatical,” Lucas said.
    “No, he wasn’t. I picked it up a couple of times.”
    Then, a few seconds later, with Ignace reading, Lucas interrupted again, “He said he threw it into a field of ‘whatever-it-is’?”
    “That’s what he said.” Ignace nodded. “That’s what verbatim means. It’s exactly what he said.”
    One of the junior editors said, “He’s gotta push the button on the story . . .”
    White said to Lucas, “Do you have any other suggestions?”
    Lucas shook his head: “You’re gonna run it, so run it. I notice you shaded over the fact that he went out and bought a razor because of Ruffe’s earlier story.”
    “I don’t think that’s essential to the thrust of the story,” White said. “It confuses the issue.”
    “Besides, it’s embarrassing,” said Sloan, stepping up, wiping his nose. To Lucas: “Rochester’s working it; and they’re bringing in an on-duty Highway Patrol guy and the Sheriff’s Department.”
     
    IGNACE PUSHED THE BUTTON on the story, sending it on its way, and said to Lucas and Sloan, “You guys owe me big.”
    “Bullshit. You’re about one inch from being busted as a material witness,” Sloan said. He sounded defensive.
    Ignace smiled, calling the bluff: “So bust me. I might enjoy it.”
    “You wouldn’t enjoy it,” Sloan said.
    “What, you’d put me in some cell with some big faggot?”
    Sloan shook his head. “No, we’d put you in a locked room by yourself with a toilet and a sink and let you sit there. It’d be like taking a Northwest flight from Minneapolis to Duluth for three straight weeks. Except that the food would be better.”
    “Fuck you,” Ignace said, linking his fingers together over his soft gut. “You owe me, and you know it. When you get this guy, I want a phone call. If you get him.”
    “We’ll get him,” Lucas said. “Maybe we’ll call, maybe we won’t.”
     
    THEY TALKED FOR ANOTHER ten minutes, going over the story. Ignace gave Lucas a shortened transcript of the conversation, only the material covered in the story. Lucas told Stone that the state would subpoena Ignace’s shorthand notes. “Keep them safe.”
    “We’ll probably fight the subpoena,” Stone said.
    “Probably—but don’t lose the notes.”
     
    OUT ON THE STREET , Sloan said, “Ruffe is a noxious little motherfucker,” and then, “Stand back, I’m gonna sneeze.”
    Lucas stepped away, Sloan sneezed, and Lucas said, “One good thing—Pope’s staying in his home territory. He’s not off in some goddamn weird place where nobody’s seen the stories about him. He’s hiding out. That means somebody has seen him, whether or not they know it, and all we have to do is find the connection.”
    “So now what?”
    Lucas yawned and said, “I’m going over to the office to work the phones. I’ll put together a meeting in Rochester, tomorrow morning. Everybody I can find.”
    Sloan looked at his watch: “It’s way late.”
    “So I jerk a few people out of bed. Big deal. Uh—you personally might want to take some more pills.”
    “No kiddin’. My face