Hidden Prey

dark complected, blue eyed, and tanned with the summer. A few white scars were distributed around the tan—an old bullet wound in the throat, and trailing through an eyebrow and down one cheek, what looked like a romantic knife slash from the docks of Marseilles, but was actually a cut from a fishing-leader snap-back. And there were others, the hide punctures of a rambunctious life.
    Lucas ran the Office of Regional Research at the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, after years of working intelligence and homicide in Minneapolis. His brief was to look at interesting and, usually, but not always, violent crimes, and to “fix shit” for the governor. He’d done well at it, in the six months he’d been in the job.
    The horizon was not without clouds. He was forty-six and worried that he was too old to have an infant son, with a wife who was probably plotting another pregnancy; too inexperienced and not hard-nosed enough to handle his ward, Letty, who was fast becoming a teenager; that he was too rigid to relax into what was a late first marriage. As a cop, he still loved the hunt, but suspected that twenty-five years of contact with violent death and brutal criminals was beginning to corrode something essential inside him; the cynicism was rising like water in the basement. He’d seen it in other cops, always laughing at the wrong time, always skeptical about good deeds, suspicious of generosity. And as a longtime athlete, he could feel the years wearing on him: he’d lost a step.
    Maybe, he thought, he should do something else. The trouble was, he couldn’t figure out what that might be. Weather suggested that he go back to school, but he couldn’t think what he might study, nor, from what he’d seen of educational bureaucracy, was he sure that he could put up with the bullshit.
    He didn’t have to work. At the height of the Internet boom, in the late nineties, he’d sold a small simulations software company for more money than he would ever need. He’d sold out because he wasn’t a businessman, and the idea of beginning another business didn’t interest him.
    On the other hand, he couldn’t sit on his ass. He wasn’t made that way, and neither was Weather. If ever they had marital problems, he thought, it wouldn’t be over the usual problems of sex or money, it’d be over work. They both worked all the time. He wasn’t sure that either of them could stop.
    So: he was hung up and they were talking about it.
    At least he had a spy to think about.
     
    L UCAS AND W EATHER and Letty and Sam, with Ellen Jansen, the housekeeper, lived on Mississippi River Boulevard in St. Paul, more or less halfway between the downtown areas of Minneapolis and St. Paul. From the master bedroom, on the second floor, Lucas could see the steel-colored surface of the Mississippi in the gorge that separated the house from Minneapolis.
    The house was new. Lucas had worked out the design with an architect, had torn down his old house, and put up the new one. They all called it the Big New House.
    After his brief chat with Rose Marie, Lucas went up to the bedroom, changed out of his T-shirt and athletic shorts into jeans, a golf shirt and loafers, and a light wool-knit sportcoat to cover the .45 clipped to his belt. From his house to downtown St. Paul was fifteen minutes;the Department of Public Safety was located in a converted department store. A half hour after he spoke to Rose Marie on the telephone, he was walking down the hall to her office, trying to scrub a spot of garage-door guide-rail grease from his thumb.
     
    H ER RECEPTIONIST SAID , “I hear Weather ran through the garage door.”
    “Yeah. Door fell on her car.”
    “You gonna sue?”
    “Sue who?”
    The receptionist shrugged: “Gotta be somebody.” She touched an intercom button. “Lucas is here.”
     
    R OSE M ARIE R OUX was an old friend and boss; she and Lucas went back twenty years, in a couple of different jobs. She’d been the Minneapolis chief of police when a shift in administration impelled her into the state job. She’d convinced Lucas to move with her.
    Rose Marie smoked too much and was known to take a drink and use coarse language; she despised exercise and guns. She was working with an assistant on a PowerPoint presentation for a legislative committee when Lucas stuck his head in.
    “Come on in,” she said. To her assistant: “I’ve got to talk to Lucas. Why don’t you redo the pies on the rif and the restruck and I’ll call