Easy Prey

else at the game might know where he is.”
    “How’s Marcy?”
    “I’m going over there now. She was still on the table, the last I heard.”
    “Listen, she’s gonna make it,” Towson said. He knew that Lucas and Marcy had had a relationship. “She’s in good shape, and once they get her on the table . . .”
    “Yeah, well. I hope.”
    “She’s gonna make it, man.”
     
 
AT THE HOSPITAL, Lucas nodded at a couple of loitering cops and headed straight for the desk. A nurse saw him coming, shook her head, and said, “She’s still not out, but Dr. Gunderson came out for a Coke and said they’ve got almost everything hooked up again. It shouldn’t be much longer.”
    “She’s doing okay?”
    The nurse equivocated. “She’s doing as good as she could. I understand . . .” She looked both ways, as though worried she might be caught giving out unauthorized information.
    “Yeah, yeah?”
    “I understand that the bullet hit her just below her breast and a couple of inches off the centerline, so there’s a lung problem and they’ve got a problem with bone splinters from her ribs, but there’s no spinal involvement. I think if they’ve got the bleeding under control and if she’s strong enough, she should make it. That’s what I think, but I’m not in there.”
    “Bless you,” Lucas said. “She’s pretty strong.”
    He headed down to the room that Rose Marie had commandeered, and found her talking with Frank Lester.
    “Anything new?” Lester asked.
    “Maybe the edge of something,” Lucas said. “How about you? And where’s Jael?”
    “You talk first.”
    Lucas gave them a quick account of the raid on Bee’s house, Bee’s suggestion that Al-Balah might come up with the name, and Del’s search for Trick Bentoin. Rose Marie took it all in and said, finally, “You’re still about three levels away from the killer.”
    “Or maybe four or five,” Lucas said. “Where’s Jael?”
    “We had Franklin take her back to her place to get some clothes. We’re gonna ditch her someplace safe, maybe over in Hudson, keep her covered. She wants to talk to you again. I think she blames herself for what happened to Marcy.”
    “Good—keep her out of the way,” Lucas said. “What’d you get?”
    The police shrink, Angela Harris, had come in to talk with Lester an hour earlier, after she’d heard about the death of Alie’e’s parents. “She doesn’t think it’s a murder-suicide,” Lester said.
    “She knows about the bullet hole in the car door?”
    “Yeah, but she’s predicting that we’ll find the killings weren’t murder-suicide. She thinks that they were killed in revenge for the murder of Alie’e. Along with Plain, and along with the attempt on Corbeau, if that’s what it was. She thinks we need to take another very close look at Tom Olson. She’s talked to some guys who know him, and he’s apparently had some odd psychological episodes in the past that suggest he may have multiple personalities. Harris thinks one of the personalities is a psycho.”
    “Aw, man. That’s too weird,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah, but she says it explains what happened with the parents. Olson gets in psycho mode, and starts eliminating people who he blames for killing Alie’e—people who led her into her lifestyle with dope and lesbians and all that. The tabloid pictures set him off: the rouged nipples and all of that, some kind of psychosexual trip with his sister.
    “So he goes after Plain, then he goes for Corbeau because of this lesbian stuff that’s been coming out—he hits Marcy instead, but he was going for Corbeau. Then he kills his parents, the people who are really responsible for putting her in this life . . . and we know he blames them for that. Then, having killed them, he wanders off in psychological exhaustion to the mall, changes personalities. This personality has no idea what the other personality did . . . and then in that same personality comes back to the motel, runs into you, then goes up to his parents’ room and finds the bodies. He comes running after you, but in the shock, he begins to disassociate.”
    “Disassociate?”
    “Fuck me, I don’t know,” Lester said. “That’s what she said.”
    “He falls apart,” Rose Marie said. “Somewhere, his main personality knows what he did but can’t handle it. So his whole jury-rigged persona starts falling to pieces. He has what you saw—some kind of fit.”
    Lucas thought about it, then said, “He’d have