Broken Prey

ARRIVED at the farm, they found two cop cars in the driveway, one of them just leaving. Lucas pulled onto the lawn and got out of the truck. Nordwall got out of the passenger side of the cop car that had been rolling down toward them.
    “What happened?” Lucas asked, as they crunched toward each other on the gravel drive.
    “Took about twenty minutes to find it,” the sheriff said, hitching up his uniform pants, looking back over his shoulder at the bean field. “You see the tape over there? Right in there . . . Right where Pope said it would be. And exactly what he said it would be—an aluminum baseball bat.”
    “You already pick it up?”
    “Yeah. We had our crime-scene guy photograph it, and he’s driving it up to your lab right now. He said there’s some hair stuck to the end of it, gotta be the kid’s, but we want to nail it down. We don’t want some smart-ass saying it was a practical joke.”
    “It never felt like a joke,” Lucas said. They both looked out at the field with the tape strung over the bean plants, the cops tromping up and down the rows. Then, “You coming over to Rochester?”
    “Yeah—but that’s not for a couple hours. I gotta stop back at the house. I haven’t had breakfast yet.” A man who didn’t miss many meals.
    “You see the paper?”
    “Yes. Pope scares the shit out of me,” Nordwall said. “I told my guys to shoot first, ask questions later.”
    “See you in Rochester.”
     
    THEY CUT CROSS-COUNTRY ; the trip took an hour. They rolled down a long hill, the towers of the Mayo Clinic in the distance. Sloan sniffed and said, “Look at the fuckin’ golf courses; just like a town full of doctors.”
    “Bigot.”
    “Ruin a perfectly good cornfield,” he said. “What do you want to do? We got some time.”
    “Let’s look at that pay phone. Maybe we can shake something loose.”
    “Like what?”
    “Security camera?”
    “Yeah, right,” Sloan said. “Fuckin’ waste of time.”
    “Hey, something could happen.”
    “And Snow White might come over to my house and sit on my face,” Sloan said. His voice was nasal, stuffed.
    “Okay. So let’s sit around with some cops and drink coffee and talk about pensions.”
    Sloan sighed, pulled out a sheet of Kleenex, and blew into it. Lucas winced. “Okay,” Sloan said. “We look at the phone. And don’t look like you’re trying to crawl out the side window.”
     
    ROCHESTER WAS DOMINATED economically and socially by the Mayo Clinic; but there was still a piece of the old downtown stuck to the south side of the hospital district—exfoliating brick and patched concrete block, halfhearted attempts at rehab, streets emptier than they should be in a town jammed with cars; streets from an Edward Hopper painting.
    The phone was on a wall of an out-of-business gas station, the only outside phone they’d seen in the city. “Must’ve known where the phone was,” Lucas said. He pulled into the parking area and killed the engine.
    “Probably a doc at the Mayo,” Sloan said. “Most docs are a little whacko.” The words were just out of his mouth when he remembered that he was talking to the husband of a surgeon. “I hope you took offense at that.”
    “I didn’t,” Lucas said. “I tend to agree.”
    They got out of the truck and looked up and down the street. “Two slim possibilities,” Sloan said. “The grocery store or the bookstore. Take your choice.”
    “I’ll take the bookstore,” Lucas said.
    “Maybe they got some poetry,” Sloan said. He looked across the street toward the grocery. “Park’s Grocery. With any luck, Park is a Korean. They tend to stay open late.”
     
    SLOAN WALKED ACROSS the traffic-free street; Lucas headed down the sidewalk toward Krim’s Rare and Used Books. The store occupied a twenty-foot-wide retail space with a single large window and a door to the side. The window was rimed with dust and showed two dozen fading hardback covers under an arc of hand-painted black letters: KRIM ’ S : THE COLLECTOR ’ S PLACE .
    An overhead bell tinkled when Lucas went through the door, and he was hit by the odor of paper mold: not unpleasant, he thought, if you liked books.
    Inside, two men huddled together over a book that sat squarely on the counter between them. The book’s dust jacket was carefully covered with protective cellophane; collectors did that, Lucas knew.
    “Can I help you?” The man behind the counter was overweight, blond, with smooth, ruddy cheeks. He