Broken Prey

note.
    Sennet did nothing but chat, and sometimes not even that, standing beside the meal-delivery man as the food went into the cell. He would occasionally make a note on a clipboard.
    Grant went only once, with Hart. He carried a notebook but never opened it; peeled off a good-looking sport coat, rolled up his sleeves, talked with Biggie; walked down toward the camera, following Hart to Chase’s cell, chatted with him for a moment; said nothing to Chase, only watched as the other man wandered helplessly around his cell.
    When they closed the window to Chase’s cell, Grant said to Hart, “His personality is coming apart. We’ve got to get him out of here.”
    “I don’t think they’ll let us do that, not until they catch Mr. Torture Guy.”
    Hart actually leaned against the security glass with one hand. Lucas ran the tape back: Hart had done that several times, at the different cells. Could he have written something on the palm of his hand? That seemed far-fetched; but Lucas made a note.
    He didn’t find much in the personnel files: he’d give them to the coordination center in the morning, have them run them.
    That night, trying to sleep, he kept coming back to the tapes. Something went into the cells, right under his eyes. How had they done it?
    Or maybe the killing had been planned in the smallest of details beforehand, and Sloan had been right in talking about a code. All it would take would be something like . . . he tried to think of something.
    Like Grant taking off his sport coat.
    Like Hart leaning against a window.
    Like Sennet or O’Donnell using some kind of key word, or perhaps something as simple as eye contact, with a nod and a smile.
    Something, and it was right there, and he couldn’t see it.

19
    THE MAN WITH THE whispery voice was worried now. He’d thought to easily take ten, or fifteen, or twenty . . . and then maybe drift away, and start again somewhere. He’d toyed with the idea of faking his own death in the style of himself, just for the implicit humor of the situation . . . Set it up by killing a couple of people and never revealing where he left them . . .
    Now, that’d be tough. The cops were nipping at his heels—that goddamn Pope was the one who did it to him. He’d come back like the ghost of Christmas. If he hadn’t . . .
    Without that accident, without those fuckin’ fishermen, they would have been looking for Pope for another year. He’d seen the activity down by the bridge, the divers, the cops, and as soon as he’d seen it, he’d known that Charlie had come back.
    The Gods Down the Hall had said that this might happen; that some weird happenstance would trip him. They’d told him in detail how they’d been caught, how small slips led to bigger ones, until finally they stepped on the fatal banana peel. To prevent that, to prevent the cops from isolating one man, they had to be fed options until they choked on them, Biggie said. Feed them leads that point away, he said.
    If all else failed, they said, it was better to go out in a blaze than in a cage.
    Biggie Lighter had grinned at him and said softly, “They got a name for it, the good Christians do.”
    “Yes?”
    “Armageddon. The final battle. If it comes to it, think how good that would feel . . .”
     
    IF THE FINAL BATTLE was coming, the man with the whispery voice wouldn’t leave Millie behind. Couldn’t do that—he’d waited so long to take her . . .
     
    THE NIGHT THAT the killer came to visit, Charlie Pope had been dozing on a broken-back couch in front of the TV. The killer, who’d scouted the trailer park the night before, nosed the state car past Charlie’s back door, then reversed and snugged up to the trailer. He sat for a moment, watching and listening, then took the book-sized medical kit off the front seat, climbed out, and knocked on Charlie’s back door.
    The killer was a slender man, dead white and muscular in a knotty, workman’s way, with a barbed-wire tattoo on his left biceps and a German art-deco eagle on his back, just above his buttocks. He had three black dots in a triangle on the web of skin between his right thumb and forefinger, and he told people—mysteriously reticent about the details—that he’d gotten them in the army. Everyone in the unit had one, he said. He couldn’t say what unit that was. Always the wisecrack, delivered with the well-practiced, engaging grin: “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”
    Charlie took a