Broken Prey

“I have to start cutting songs. I was thinking, maybe I should limit it to one song per group—but I can’t figure out how to do that, either. I’d leave out some of the best ones.”
    “You know what else you don’t got?”
    “What?”
    “ ‘Mustang Sally.’ ”
    “Ah, shit.”
    “You’ve got a choice between Wilson Pickett and Buddy Guy,” Sloan said.
    “I can’t make that choice.”
    “Life sucks and then you die.”
     
    SLOAN HAD STARTED calling the security hospital the “bat cave” and as they were driving up the kill, the phrase kept going through Lucas’s head. The place didn’t look anything like a bat cave, but it felt that way—felt like a haunted English country house, except bigger.
    “We don’t tell them about Pope,” Lucas said, as they got out of the truck.
    “Of course not. We talk about the second man.”
     
    I NS I D E , they were taken to the director’s office; Lawrence Cale had been fishing the first time they visited, and they hadn’t met him. He was a tall, slender, balding man, in his middle fifties, wearing too-large glasses that magnified his eyes. He reminded Lucas of the farmer in Grant Wood’s American Gothic painting. He was chewing on a toothpick.
    “My deputy says the last time you two were here, you, mmm , seriously disturbed some of the patients,” he said, after pointing them into visitor chairs.
    “That’s right,” Lucas nodded. “They were pretty much having screaming fits when we left.”
    “That’s not funny,” Cale said. “It can take days, weeks, sometimes, to calm them down.”
    “I see that as your problem,” Lucas said. He was tired of this patient shit. “Those three guys are responsible for three ordinary nice people being tortured to death.”
    Sloan was digging in his briefcase, pulled out an eight-by-ten print, slipped it across the desk. “This used to be Carlita Peterson. She was a college professor. They haven’t found the gut dump yet.”
    Cale took in the picture, flipped it over, and passed it back to Sloan without comment. “I had Chase, Lighter, and Taylor transferred to isolation. They don’t see anybody but staff. No radio or television. Everything that is said to them is taped, and we review the tapes daily. They are allowed two books a day. They specify the genre, and we choose the books, so nobody can plant a message in a book. And we check the books before they go into the cells.”
    “How about coming out? What happens with the books?” Lucas asked.
    “We check them again, for codes. We know most of the ways—pin holes over letters, that sort of thing. We make damn sure that nothing’s coming out, either.”
    “All right. Are you taking us in?”
    “No, Sam O’Donnell and Dick Hart will take you down. They know those guys. And it’s best if they don’t see me. I make the decisions on their disposition, and if I went down there, they’d be talking to me, not you.”
    “We’ll try not to disturb them any more than we have to,” Lucas said.
    Cale said, “ Mmm, that picture you showed me . . .”
    “What?” Sloan asked.
    “Fuck ’em. Do what you need to.”
     
    O’DONNELL AND HART were waiting on the other side of the security wall. When Lucas came through, Sloan a few seconds behind, Hart said, “We heard about the professor. That goddamn Pope; I never saw this in him.”
    “The killer?”
    “I saw the killer, I never saw . . . this.”
    O’Donnell said, “Charlie was one of those guys that nobody liked, but you could see, sometimes, that he was trying to be likeable. He wanted people to like him. But Lighter and Taylor and Chase turned him into a . . . I don’t know. He’s like one of those movie psychos, Freddie or the hockey-mask guy, or somebody.”
    “Might not be Pope,” Lucas said.
    The two docs stopped in their tracks. “What?”
    “You guys suggested it the last time we were here—Dr. Beloit, maybe. Our own psychologist up in the Cities came up with the idea independently. We think Charlie Pope is being handled by a second man, or a second woman. Somebody who does the planning, does the driving . . .”
    Lucas explained, and they started walking again, the two docs taking it in. When Lucas finished, he asked, “Anything more from any of them? The Big Three?”
    “Not really,” O’Donnell said. He flipped his long hair, unconsciously touched a silver earring. “They just bitch and moan about being down in the hole.”
     
    THEY TOOK AN ELEVATOR DOWN