Broken Prey

around it. Medical examiner said the guy’d been in the river for a month.”
    Sloan jumped to a conclusion: “Another Rice thing? He did a guy first?”
    “No. It was, uh, Charlie Pope.”
     
    SLOAN LOOKED AT HIM for a long time over the beer; he seemed almost amused. And smiling, he said, “You gotta be shitting me.”
    “I said that exact same thing to another guy about an hour ago.”
    Sloan took a pull on the long neck, smacked his lips, sighed, and said, “I’m gonna fuckin’ quit.”
    “I talked to Elle when I couldn’t get you. She says this clears up the confusion. The guy we’re looking for is smart, organized, probably good-looking. Probably in his thirties . . .”
    He ran down the rest of it for Sloan, who then asked, “But what about Mrs. Bird? She saw Pope standing by that wall phone.”
    “I thought about that,” Lucas said. Then, “ We did it.”
    “Huh?”
    “We contaminated her. That’s the only thing I can think of.”
    Sloan pulled his feet into the booth, onto the seat, closed his eyes, thinking, and finally, reluctantly, nodded. “All she did all day was watch TV. Nobody ever came to visit her. Pope’s picture was on TV every fifteen minutes. So then we came with my photo book, and we treated her like she was important, and she looked in the book and sure enough . . .”
    “She sees a familiar face, and picks it out,” Lucas said. “That doesn’t mean she didn’t see somebody on the street. She probably did.”
    “But not Pope. And now she’s got Pope’s face in her head, and she’ll never think different.”
    “We were too fast with the book,” Lucas said. “We should have tried to get a description. We fucked up.”
    “So who knows about the white Olds,” Sloan said. “That always seemed a little weird . . . she could have pulled that right out of an old movie.”
    “So. Pope’s dead. Where does that leave us?”
    “First, but not most important, we start covering our asses,” Lucas said. He told Sloan about the second-man theory. “Do you know who’s leaking to Ignace?”
    “I’ve got an idea.”
    “Get your group together, leak the second-man thing to him. It’d be nice to have it in the paper tomorrow. Then, the most important thing . . . we gotta find the guy. We’ve gotta think about it. We’ve got quite a bit of information, we need more.”
    “How about another trip down to St. John’s? See if we can scare anything more out of those assholes?”
    “I thought of that, too. That’s where it all starts. Let’s do it tomorrow morning. I’ve got to get some sleep, and I’ve got three guys out looking for Mike West: I’d really like to get that guy.”
    “I’ll get my guys working on it, too. Have Del call me.”
    “Good. I’ll be at home. Call when anything happens. I’ll call St. John’s right away, set up the trip. Why don’t you come over to my place at, like, seven o’clock tomorrow morning.”
    “See you then.”

16
    LUCAS TRIED TO SLEEP but was too wired; he watched CNN for a while, went out for a walk, trying to smooth himself out. Got a sandwich, walked back home. Read the murder file again, the latest information from the co-op center.
    Called around: nothing moving but the news.
    “We’re starting to attract some serious attention now,” Rose Marie said, in a late-afternoon call. “We’ll make the networks tonight. We’ll start getting some out-of-towners.”
    “That always helps,” Lucas said.
    He finally got to sleep at seven o’clock, only to wake up in the middle of the night, sweating, disoriented, worried about the sudden silence around him, and the beeping sound, like a truck backing up. His face hurt, but a dull pain: the worry came from something else.
    Then boom/crackle/flash : a thunderstorm rolling in. What else? There was more. He sat up, glanced at the clock. No clock. He got out of bed, listened, flipped on the lights. No lights. He looked out the window, the hair rising on the back of his neck, the killer’s phone call in his mind. The guy knew who he was . . .
    No lights on the street. He got his pistol, padded out through the living room, moving confidently through the house in the dark. He’d designed the place; he knew every inch of it. In the kitchen, he looked out the back windows: no lights.
    Power outage. The beeping sound continued. He went into the study, crawled under the desk, turned off the computer’s battery backup system, and the beeping stopped. He flipped