Chosen Prey

he says yes.”
    “I’ll get a bite and then I’ll run back up there,” Lucas said. “Is Gibson on the way?”
    “Pretty soon.”
    Lucas walked across to the cafeteria, got a tapioca pudding and a cup of coffee, glanced at the morning papers, and then headed out again. At Barstad’s, he saw Gibson standing in the parking lot behind his van; when he swung past to park, he saw Barstad using her keys to open the door. “Goddamnit.” What was she doing here?
    “She told me she was supposed to come along,” Gibson said when Lucas got out and asked him. “Is that wrong?”
    “It would be if Qatar swung by for an afternooner,” Lucas said.
    Inside, Barstad said, “I needed to come back anyway. I forgot some stuff—I refuse to wash my hair with hotel shampoo. You never know what’s in it.”
    “We need to keep you out of sight.”
    “James is teaching,” she said. “He’d never come all the way here without calling, so . . .” She shrugged, then smiled and said, “C’mon. I’ll introduce you to Dave Culver. He’s a nice guy.”
    “What does he do?”
    “Sells big meat cutters and grinders and so on to restaurants.”
    Culver was a heavyset man in his late fifties with a square dark face with a Stalinesque mustache. He was in the back of his business, ripping cardboard boxes, when they pushed through the front door. A buzzer went off in the back, and Barstad shouted, “Hey, Dave, it’s me. And the cops.”
    They were standing in a small reception room, with three easy chairs and a coffee table. The coffee table had three deer-hunting magazines, a four-wheeler magazine, a battered copy of The New Yorker, and sales literature for automated meat cutters.
    Culver came out of the back, said “Hi, sweetie” to Barstad and “Dave Culver” to Lucas. Lucas shook his hand and introduced himself, and outlined what they hoped to do.
    “Is Miss Crazy Quilt gonna get her ass in trouble?” Culver asked.
    “That’s why we need to be close,” Lucas said. “We don’t think he’ll pull anything, but just in case . . .”
    “All right,” Culver said. “My only other problem is, I don’t want to be dealing with some gang or something that’s gonna be coming by here afterward and tear up the place. I’ve got a quarter-million bucks’ worth of new equipment in the back.”
    “It’s one guy,” Lucas said. “He’s not connected to anyone. If we take him off, he won’t be out of Stillwater for thirty years minimum.”
    Culver nodded. “So, use the place. You got any friends in the restaurant business, give them my card.”
     
    C ULVER’S SHOP WAS divided into three: a front reception area with the coffee table, only a few feet deep; two offices behind the reception area; and a big warehouse area behind that. Gibson looked at it, measured it, walked over to Barstad’s, did some more measuring, and wound up in one of the middle offices. “I can go right through the wall here, and here, no permanent damage,” he told Culver. “Is that okay?”
    “Fine with me. . . . Get some of my stuff out of your way.”
    “How good will the sound be?” Lucas asked.
    “Should be great,” Gibson said. “When I get done miking the place a goddamn cockroach couldn’t sneak through on its hands and knees. We won’t need any transmitters—we can hard-wire everything. Digital sound. You want a camera?”
    “I don’t know. Is there a problem with a camera?” Lucas asked.
    “It’s a little more intrusive,” Gibson said. “I think we could fix it so he couldn’t see it—in the big room, anyway; there’s no good place in the bedroom or the bathroom—but there’s always the chance that he’ll spot it. If the camera can see him, he can see it. The lens, anyway.”
    “See what you can do,” Lucas said.
    “There’s also a privacy question,” Gibson said.
    Barstad was there, and said, “What’s that?”
    “If you are . . . luring him . . . and if you’ve slept together, then he may expect some physical contact. Sound is one thing, pictures are something else.”
    She shook her head. “Go ahead. I’m not body-shy.”
    They both looked at her. Lucas shook his head and said to Gibson, “Whatever you can do.”
    When they were done, and the equipment had tested out, Lucas looked at his watch and said, “We’re all done for the day. Jim, if you’d drop Ellen off at the hotel on the way back, I’d appreciate it. We all gotta be back here, in place, at noon tomorrow. Ellen,