Certain Prey

a coil of videotape going up in smoke. And about guns.

EIGHT

    Lucas and Black followed the Ramsey County medical examiner into the workroom, where the body of Rolando D’Aquila was stretched out on a stainless-steel tray.
    “They really fucked this boy over,” Black said, with a low whistle of disbelief. He’d heard about it, but hadn’t seen the body. “Look at his kneecaps.”
    “Look at his heels, if you want to see something that must’ve hurt,” the ME said. He was a dark, hairy man with a beard. A Rasputin with a Boston accent.
    “So what are these letters?” Lucas asked.
    “I’ve got a photograph for you, but I thought you might want to see it in person,” the ME said. He picked up one of the dead man’s hands and turned it over. On the back of the hand were a series of bloody scrapes that looked like:

    Lucas and Black squatted, got down close. “What is it?” Black asked.
    “I don’t know,” the ME said. “But he did it himself, because we found the skin under his fingernails. He did it not long before he died—he had blood on his fingertips, which would have been worn away if his hands had been free, and he used them for anything. So: we think he might have known he was going to be killed, and tried to leave something behind.”
    “Like the name of the killer,” Black said. “Which is probably Dew.”
    “Really?” The ME bent over the hand and said, “I never saw Dew. I was looking at it the other way—I saw Mop.”
    Black looked at Lucas: “What do you think? M-O-P or D-E-W?”
    “Beats the shit out of me,” Lucas said, standing up. “Maybe we can actually see it better in a photo.” To the ME: “What are the chances he cut himself up just thrashing around? I mean, they were drilling holes in his kneecaps . . .”
    “Who knows, if a guy’s being tortured? The scratches look deliberate—the skin looks almost plowed off the back of his hand. And the shapes look deliberate, not like thrashing or involuntary contraction . . . I think he did it on purpose.”
    “Yeah.” Lucas scratched his head. “Took some balls.”
    “You don’t see D-E-W?” Black asked.
    “Yeah, and I see M-O-P, and I see something else, too, and I don’t know what the hell that might mean,” Lucas said.
    “What?” Black and the ME turned their heads, trying the scratches at different angles.
    “I can see C-L-E-W—like the British spelling of clue, ” Lucas said. “But there’s no clue. Unless it was something back at the house, near his hands.”
    “Aw, man, that’s too weird,” Black said. “C-L-E-W equals clue?”
    “Don’t you see it?” Lucas asked.
    “I see it, but I don’t think that’s it. I think it’s initials, I think . . . Hey.”
    “What?”
    Now Black was scratching his head. “I was talking to the St. Paul guys. They’re looking for Rolando’s sister—she lives over by the university, but they haven’t been able to catch her at home. Her name is Marta Blanca. If you read the scratches backwards it could be an M instead of a W, and a B instead of a D . . .”
    “Then what’s all that shit in the middle?” the ME asked, pointing at the scratches.
    “I don’t know, this is just a theory,” Black said. “But his hands were chained up . . . how were his hands?”
    “Like this,” Lucas said, demonstrating. “Over his head.” “Then he couldn’t see what he was doing, he was in all kinds of pain, he’s panicked because he knows what’s coming. I wonder if he was trying to get us to his sister?”
    “Or that his sister had something to do with it,” Lucas said.
    “Hey,” Black said. “It’s a clew, with an E-W. Let’s go knock on her door.”

    A LITTLE GIRL was playing with a plastic dump truck in the hallway of Marta Blanca’s apartment house, in front of an open apartment door.
    “Hello,” Lucas said. A mommy’s voice called, “Who’s that?”
    Lucas leaned over the little girl and knocked once on the doorjamb: “Minneapolis police, ma’am. We’re looking for a Marta Blanca?”
    “Down the hall. Apartment A.”
    Black stepped down the hall and knocked on the Paris-green door at the end. A young woman appeared from the back of the open apartment, carrying a dish towel and a pan that she was in the process of drying. “Is there some kind of trouble?”
    Lucas nodded: “Yes. Her brother was killed. We need to interview her; just a routine thing.”
    The woman’s eyebrows were up: “I haven’t heard them out this