Hidden Prey

Duluth.
     
    A T THE POST OFFICE , the superintendent of mails said that he didn’t care what the problem was, they weren’t getting any mail from him. “I’ll get the guy who’s sorting it—he ought to be just about done—and I’ll have him deliver it up there first. I’ll have him make a special stop. That’s as far as I can go.”
    “Well, Jesus, we’re right here. And he’s right there,” Lucas said.
    “Hey—we’re talking federal law. You ain’t coming in here and taking the mail out. You’re not even supposed to be here.”
    “We’re cops,” Del said.
    “I know—that’s the problem,” the superintendent said. “You’re not postal employees. See the sign?” He pointed. The sign on the wall said POSTAL EMPLOYEES ONLY .
    Del said, “Next time you have a massacre, who you gonna call? A mailman?”
    Lucas jumped in: “Wait, wait, wait . . . we’ll just follow the truck.”
     
    T HEY WOUND UP following a mail truck back through traffic to the BCA building.
    “That was really helpful about the fuckin’ massacre,” Lucas said.
    “Fuck the guy,” Dell said.
    “You been in that hamburger place too long.”
    “No shit.”
     
    T HE CARRIER , a cheerful man with an out-of-fashion brown ponytail, dumped twenty pounds of letters and cartons at the BCA mail-room, and said, “Have at it.”
    There were only half a dozen candidates, and one of them, wrapped in what looked like grocery-bag paper, with six feet of Scotch tape, had Lucas’s name on it.
    “Probably a bomb,” Del said.
    “Wish you hadn’t said that,” Lucas said.
    Del pulled on a vinyl glove and picked it up. “I’ll get the lab to unwrap it, and I’ll call you at your office. We oughta know in ten minutes,” he said.

     31 
    A CHUNKY MAN in a suede sport coat was looking at an NFL schedule poster outside Lucas’s office; Chuck Miles, one of the state’s more competent attorneys.
    “Chuck: good to see you. Come on in.”
    Lucas took him into his office, sat him down, and explained the situation.
    “ . . . so we have a witness who is providing us with material evidence, but we don’t know who she is. How do we prove we just didn’t make it all up?” Lucas asked.
    “Okay. We can get an affidavit from you now, about what you know about the woman. What the witnesses up north said, about the hut she lived in, about when she called you, both times. What she said. About the computer and how that paid off. About where she called from, what she says about cutting this kid, about the knife. We specify in the affidavit that you have not looked at the kid to see if he was cut, nor have youtaken any DNA from him. Then, we go look at him. If he’s been cut in the right area, on the left arm, and if the DNA from the knife is his, we might get the whole thing into court, especially since we’ve got independent corroborating evidence of this woman’s existence, in the shack. Plus, the witness from Catholic Charities who has actually seen her.”
    “But you’re not sure we’ll get it in. Into court.”
    Miles shook his head: “No. There are options, different approaches, possibilities. Some of it depends on what judge we get . . . But I can’t guarantee anything. I can guarantee that there’ll be an appeal, no matter what happens.”
    “How about if we use the knife to push him into a plea? Say, cooperation on the spy ring, plus a plea of guilty to something, with our agreement that there might have been an element of self-defense in the killing. And, say, we don’t fuck with his mother, as long as she’s not shown to be directly involved.”
    “Now that’s something we might pull off,” Miles said, brightening. “If we could offer him no more than a few years in the youthful offender lockup, until he was twenty-one, or twenty-five, plus cooperation . . . I can see a defense attorney buying that.”
    “Of course, we might be giving a multiple murderer four years in prison, then turning him loose to do it again.”
    “Life in the big city,” Miles said.
     
    T HE AFFIDAVIT TOOK an hour, Lucas dictating to a secretary with Miles looking over her shoulder, and asking questions. After getting the legal angles worked through, Lucas called Harmon with the FBI, and found him in Washington. “Getting people together. We’ve got the Duluth guys up there holding everything down. We’re sending in a counterespionage team to do the cleanup.”
    “You sound a little more cheerful.”
    “Yeah,