Broken Prey

and hammered in a few numbers, listened, and then said, “It’s me. You see anything yet? Well, what do you think you see? Well, when can you confirm that? How much? Call me back.”
    He slammed the receiver back in the cradle: “Okay. When we do DNA, we don’t examine the blood cells. That’s not part of the deal. You just don’t do that.”
    “So?”
    “So I had Anita take some of the back sample from Rice’s fingernails and put it under the ’scope. She says she can see blood cells that have burst.”
    “I don’t know what that means. Burst?”
    “That means that they could have been frozen. That means that the guy killed Pope, took blood from him, and planted it on the body.”
     
    LUCAS LOOKED AT Hopping Crow for a long three seconds: “You gotta be shitting me.”
    “I shit you not.”
    “Charlie Pope was never out there to find,” Lucas said.
    “That’s right. The medical examiner says he’s been dead for at least a month,” Hopping Crow said. “How long ago did he disappear?”
    “Little more than a month, now.”
    “There you are.”
     
    LUCAS CONSIDERED THE PROBLEM for another long minute, then he leaned forward and tapped Hopping Crow’s desk with his index finger: “If this gets out, there’s going to be hell to pay. The media will look for somebody to drop a brick on. Me, or, maybe, you. Or both of us, or all of us.”
    “I know that.”
    “So you tell Anita that her job’s on the line,” Lucas said. “Sooner or later, somebody will find out that we didn’t look at the blood cells under a microscope.”
    “We never look at them. Nobody does. DNA’s a whole different thing. ”
    “Think that’ll make any difference to the TV stations?” Lucas asked.
    Hopping Crow thought about it for a moment, then said, “If it was presented exactly right . . .”
    “Bullshit. There’s no way to present it. There’s a kind of Occam’s razor that applies to TV: the simplest answer is the best,” Lucas said. “The simplest answer is we fucked up. People can understand that. All this science shit, they don’t understand. It might as well be magic.”
    “So what are we gonna do?” Hopping Crow sounded a little desperate.
    “Gotta find this cocksucker.”
    “Yeah, right. I can see us holding off on mentioning this for a day or two, but what if he grabs somebody else like this Peterson woman?” Hopping Crow asked. “What do we do then, tell a million cops to look for Charlie Pope? And what do I tell the medical examiner?”
    “Tell him you came up negative. That’s what he expects, anyway.”
    “Ah, man.” Then: “What are you going to do?”
    “I gotta talk to Rose Marie and maybe the governor. Figure something out. In the meantime, you get Anita and you tell her that I personally will run her out of the state if she says a fuckin’ thing to any-fuckin’-body.”
     
    LUCAS STOPPED AT his office and made a call to Del Capslock, his lead investigator. Del was working dope with a task force from the suburban town of Woodbury, trying to figure out who was putting methamphetamine into the high school. Lucas called him: “What are you doing?”
    “Reading a magazine and watching a house.”
    “Could you break off?”
    “If I had to.”
    “Get in here, quick as you can. I’ve gotta go talk to Rose Marie, just wait in my office. Get Jenkins and Shrake, too.”
     
    ON THE WAY TO Rose Marie’s office, Lucas thought: What about Mrs. Bird, the old lady from Rochester? She’d identified Pope as making the call to Ruffe Ignace. She’d seen him, on the phone, she said. She’d picked him out of a photo lineup . . .
     
    ROSE MARIE ROUX had once been a state senator from Minneapolis and knew how the legislature worked, which didn’t always help. The financial crisis had escalated to the point that a special session had to be called if the state wanted to keep the parks open and continue to pay for cops, snow removal, and highway repair.
    Rose Marie was in charge of cops, and she was pulling her hair out: when Lucas showed up at her door, she looked like somebody had tried to electrocute her, her parlor-blond hair standing out from her ears like fighter-jet wings.
    “Tell me you got good news,” she said.
    Lucas groped for words for a minute, then said, “We found Charlie Pope.”
    Her eyes lit up.
     
    A FEW MINUTES LATER , she said, “I’ll get even with you, someday, for that ‘We found Charlie Pope’ line.”
    “Yeah, yeah,” Lucas said. “The