Certain Prey

pay for it.”
    “How much would it cost?” “If you want all the numbers and don’t ask any questions . . . I know a guy who does that kind of work. He could email them to you for a couple of bucks a name. How many do you have?”
    “Maybe fifty,” Lucas said.
    “Oh, Jesus, I thought you were talking about hundreds. Or thousands. I don’t know if he’d be interested in a little job like that.”
    “I’d pay him more,” Lucas said.
    “I can ask,” Steve said. “Say five hundred bucks?”
    “That’s good,” Lucas said.
    “I’m putting my name behind this, man. I’ll be stuck for the five hundred if you don’t come through.”
    “Steve . . .”
    “All right, all right.”
    “I could use any other information they can find on the people who belong to the phone numbers—I mean, if they can do that.”
    “That’d cost you more.”
    “Go up to a thousand.”
    “You got it: send me an e-mail with the numbers. I’ll pass it on. You’ll get it back by e-mail.” L UCAS COPIED ODD, unusual or unidentified numbers from the photos and asked for names and addresses. He dumped the email to Steve, then checked his own e-mail account and found two letters, one advertising pornographic photographs of preteens, which he deleted, and another from his daughter.
    Sarah was in the first grade, starting to read and write, but her mother, a TV-news producer, had shown her how to use a voice-writing software program. Using the voice writer, Sarah now wrote Lucas a couple of times a week.
    Lucas took fifteen minutes to interpret the voice-written text, and he wrote back, struggling to use words that Sarah could sound out, while at the same time trying to avoid the Dick-and-Jane syndrome. He was just finishing when a perky little female voice from the computer said, “You have mail.”
    He sent the e-mail note to Sarah, then clicked on his in box. The sole piece of mail was a list of names and addresses attached to the phone numbers he’d sent out. All but two of the names had personal information attached. Lucas scanned it: the information appeared to come from credit bureaus, although some might have come from state motor vehicle departments. At the end of it all was a price tag: “Send $1000.”
    “Quick,” he muttered. He looked at his watch. Just under half an hour.
    He printed the numbers out, and turned to the documents he’d pulled from Carmel’s computer. Though he spent less than five seconds with most of them—virtually all were work-related—it was after three in the morning before he wiped the disk, shut down the computer and went to bed.
    The next day, he chopped the disk to pieces with a butcher knife and dropped the pieces in two separate trash cans in the skyway: he had an almost superstitious dread of computer files turning up when they weren’t supposed to.
    Then, while he was still in the skyway, between the Pillsbury building and the government center, he noticed a woman in a shapeless black dress, wearing a white scarf on her head, babushka-style. He turned to watch her walking away; some religious or ethnic group, he thought, but he didn’t know which. He went on to police headquarters, whistling, where he called Sherrill.
    “Can either you or Black come by for a minute?”
    “Which would you prefer? Me or Tom?”
    “Stop,” he said. “I just want to hear about the Allen case. And mention a couple of things to you.”
    Sherrill came down a few minutes later and dropped into his visitor’s chair. “We’re running out of stuff to look at,” she said.
    “Let me tell you what Hale Allen told me yesterday,” Lucas said. He laid it out quickly, then told her about the ethnic woman in the skyway. “She looked like the aliens the kid described, when she was putting together that composite photo. So we need to get a low-angle photograph of somebody in a dark dress, wearing a scarf over her head; then we need to plug in a bunch of faces, including Carmel’s.”
    “Carmel Loan,” Sherrill said. “That could get rough, if we went public and didn’t have the goods.”
    “Which is why I don’t want her to know that we’re looking at her. Not unless we get something solid.”
    “All right,” Sherrill said. She pushed herself up. “I can probably get a picture of Carmel from your lady at the Star-Tribune library, if she still works there.”
    “She does,” Lucas said.
    “And I’ll have the ID guys put together a photo spread. We can base it on the composite the kid