Broken Prey

question is, What do we do?”
    “I’ll talk to the governor,” she said. “Usually, it’s a bad idea to keep this sort of thing from the media. They’ll eventually find out, then they’ll start screaming ‘cover-up’ . . .”
    “Which it is . . .”
    “. . . and nobody in public office wants to hear that,” she said. “The media’s their own judge and jury on cover-ups, and we’ve got no say.”
    “So you think we should make an announcement?” Lucas asked. He was skeptical, and showed it.
    She turned in her chair so she could look out her window, rocked back and forth a couple of times; her face took on the blank expression she assumed when she was plotting. After a moment, she said, “No . . . We start talking secretly to a few sheriffs about the white car and the silver car and about a probable second man. You’ve been kicking that idea around for a few days anyway. Sloan will back us up on that. The media already has the white car, and sooner or later they’ll hear about the second man and the silver car. They’ll know that something is going on, and they’ll write about it . . .”
    “And?”
    “And then we tell them that we knew that Charlie Pope wasn’t the guy, and that we were trying to outwit the real killer by not letting him know that we were on to the frozen-blood thing,” she said. “That they—the media—ruined it all by releasing the second-man theory. It’s all their fault.”
    “Jesus.” Lucas was impressed.
    “I have to run this by the governor.” She poked a finger at Lucas: “In the meantime, you gotta find this guy. Start filtering out the word on the second man, for the media. Then find this motherfucker. If you find him soon enough, all this becomes moot.”
     
    SLOAN AND ELLE had to know.
    Lucas didn’t want to tell them on the phone. Sloan hadn’t been officially working that day and had come down to the Blue Earth murder scene on his own hook. Lucas called his office, was told that he was probably at home. Called Sloan’s home and got his wife.
    “He’s out walking, Lucas. He’s pretty shook up about Peterson.”
    “I need to talk to him about the case. We’ve got a thing going on . . . Could you ask him to call me?”
    “I will, but listen, Lucas: don’t try to talk him out of quitting,” she said. “Don’t do that.”
    “Ah, jeez . . .”
    “Lucas, he needs to do something else. I remember when you had your little problem, and Sloan’s working on something like that. I don’t know if he’ll go into a full-blown clinical depression, but he’s walking around the edges of it. Work’s making it worse.”
    “Is he sleeping at night?”
    “No. That’s why this cold got on top of him,” she said. “He’s completely exhausted. He hasn’t slept since he found Angela Larson, and then couldn’t find who’d killed her.”
    “All right. I’ll keep my mouth shut.”
    “I’ll have him call you, as soon as he gets back.”
     
    ELLE.
    Lucas decided that he needed to talk to her in person. He stopped at his office, saw Del, Jenkins, and Shrake gathered around his desk. Carol stopped him in the outer office and said, “You need to fill in some paper on the guys in the co-op center. It can’t wait, and I don’t know the answers; payroll needs it an hour ago.”
    As he filled in, signed, and initialed the papers, he could hear the three cops talking through the open door of his office; they were talking about Sloan:
    “He’s got the angst,” Jenkins said in his gravelly voice.
    “I thought it was the zeitgeist,” Shrake drawled.
    Del said, “I thought angst was the zeitgeist.”
    After a pause, somebody said, in a midwestern male version of valley-girl-speak, “Well, duh. ”
     
    LUCAS, A LITTLE PISSED , signed the last of the documents, stepped into his office, and said with a little heat, “Off Sloan’s back, for Christ’s sake. He’s fucked up.”
    “Hey,” Del said. “He’s our friend, too.”
    “All right.” Lucas bobbed his head and backed off: “Sorry: I got a problem. It’s biting me. You three gotta find Mike West. Del: Jenkins and Shrake will fill you in. They’ve looked, came up empty, but now: this is critical.”
    “What about Pope?” Shrake asked.
    “We’re working on a two-man theory,” Lucas lied. “We need West.”
    “There wasn’t much . . . ,” Jenkins began.
    “Fuck that. Roust people. Everybody. Take your saps with you,” Lucas said.
    Jenkins’s eyebrows were