Broken Prey

occasionally turn on the reading light and look at one of the Xeroxed files.
    After a while, Sloan said, “Besides Hart, O’Donnell, and Sennet, I think we should take a close look at Grant and Beloit. For reasons that are a little stupid.”
    “How stupid?”
    “They both get great ratings from the patients. I figure, that’s maybe because they identify with them.”
    “Ah, Beloit’s out. The guy I talked to the other night—that was a guy. Regardless of the voice, he talked like a guy would. Like a shitkicker, like you’d expect from Charlie Pope. And didn’t Taylor, when he was yelling at us about the license, say him , or he ?”
    Sloan thought for a moment. “I think it was, ‘Our boy.’ ”
    “ ’That’s right,” Lucas said. “ ‘Our boy.’ You think that might have been put on to steer us away from a woman?”
    “It’s possible, but . . . not likely.”
    “If he was, he was giving away the license thing at the same time. I don’t think that was deliberate,” Lucas said.
    “Right. I knew that. So we scratch Beloit.”
    “About ninety percent,” Lucas said.
     
    A BIT LATER , Sloan said, “Cale was right about building a crucifix. He’d be a prime candidate for it.”
    “Or us, depending on where we are when the music stops,” Lucas said.
     
    LUCAS DROPPED SLOAN with a Minneapolis cop car on the south end of the city, went on to St. Paul, and picked up a tape machine that would work with his home television; took a long walk to a Baker’s Square restaurant on Ford Parkway and ate dinner; stuck his head in a Half-Priced Books; window-shopped a jewelry store, thinking about a welcome-home gift for Weather; and ambled back home, hands in his pockets, a tattered, pirate copy of Ernest Hemingway’s poems under his arm. Mulling, all the way, the assemblage of information.
    They were like squirrels who kept coming up with nuts they couldn’t crack, he decided.
    They had a guy who’d deliberately faked DNA, knowing that it would point the finger in the wrong direction. Who’d know about that? When he thought about it, he decided that . . . just about everybody would know.
    A medical doctor, for sure—and Beloit was a medical doctor, though, unfortunately, she was also female, and the voice wasn’t female. And almost any of the professionals at St. John’s would know, because the state DNA bank made a big deal out of getting samples from all convicted sex criminals. Besides, after the rash of crime-scene investigator shows on TV, half the TV watchers in the country knew about DNA. Hell, even George Bush would probably know about it.
    So that went nowhere.
    The killer used, or tried to use, Ruffe Ignace to point them in the wrong direction. Serial killers occasionally talked to the press or the cops, so that was nothing new, but usually they were looking for glory or turning themselves in. This guy pretended to be looking for glory, but he was actually trying to use Ignace in a manipulative way; or maybe he was doing both, but the manipulation was certainly there.
    Lucas thought about the meth lab. Could the killer have met Charlie Pope there? It was one nexus of criminals . . . but he didn’t really need that. He had a nexus of criminals in the security hospital, all that he required. The hospital was part of it . . .
    And then the real nut of the thing.
    How had the Big Three learned of Peterson?
    If he could crack that . . .
    But then, how’d they known of Rice and Larson?
     
    BACK AT THE HOUSE , he read the personnel files with the tapes running behind them, at about four times actual. The staff members came and left in a herky-jerky speeded-up way reminiscent of old silent films; every once in a while, he would slow the tapes down to watch the action.
    The only people to actually go into a cell were Beloit and another doctor named Rosen, and they were always escorted by two orderlies, and they never went into the cells of the Big Three, only into the cell of the fourth man, who was being disciplined for attacking another patient. They went in, gave him an insulin shot, and left. Routine.
    O’Donnell and Sennet actually helped deliver food, keying back the security panels, chatting with the Big Three as their meals were delivered. Chase went from slow to manic to crazed to cooler to slow and finally to catatonic as he watched. O’Donnell moved in a way that blocked the hall camera from the food tray. Lucas picked it up on the second delivery. He made a