Invisible Prey

got those loyalties—but we go out for a sandwich, now and then, and we always argue about it: Who has the right to know what? And when? And what about the people who get hurt? Is it going to help Jesse to get her ass dragged through the courts?”
    “Yeah, yeah,” Flowers said again.
    “So I gotta go talk to this Cole guy, down in Dakota County,” Lucas said.
    “Sounds like another in a long line of assholes,” Flowers said.
    “Probably,” Lucas said.
    They walked along for a while and then Flowers grinned, clapped Lucas on the shoulder, and said, “Thanks, boss. I needed the talk.”
     
    T HE THIRD INTERVIEW was better, but not much, and Lucas left it feeling a little more grime on his soul.
    Jim Cole was a stiff; a guy who’d get out of the shower to pee. He said, “That all sounds a little thin, Agent Davenport, on the elements, but I’ll assign my best person to it.” Behind him, on the wall, among the political pictures, plaques, and a couple of gilt tennis trophies, was a photo-painting that said, “Dave Cole—A Man for the Ages.”
    Lucas thought the elder Cole looked like a woodpecker, but, that was neither here nor there. Dave’s boy, Jim, bought the case.
    “I would assume there’s been a lot of concern about this,” Cole said. “It seems like a touchy affair.”
    “Yes, it is.”
    “Why don’t you ask Neil Mitford to give me a call—I’d like to discuss it. Purely off the record, of course.”
    “Sure,” Lucas said.
     
    A LL OF THAT took two days. On the third day, Lucas made a quick call to Smith about the Bucher case. She was still dead.
    “I’m gonna get eaten alive if something doesn’t break,” Smith said. “Why don’t you do some of that special-agent shit?”
    “I’ll think about it,” Lucas said.
    He did, and couldn’t think of anything.
     
    H E HAD his feet on his top desk drawer, and was reading Strike! Catch Your River Muskie!, a how-to book, when his secretary came into the office and shut the door behind her.
    “There’s a hippie chick here to see you,” she said. The secretary was a young woman named Carol, with auburn hair and blue eyes. She had been overweight, but recently had gone on a no-fat diet, which made her touchy. Despite her youth, she was famous in the BCA for her Machiavellian ruthlessness. “About the Bucher case, and about her grandmother, who fell down the stairs and died.”
    Lucas was confused, his mind still stuck in how to fish the upstream side of a wing dam without losing your lower unit; something, in his opinion, that all men should know. “A hippie? Her grandmother died?”
    She shrugged. “What can I tell you? But I know you’re attracted to fucky blondes, especially the kind with small but firm breasts…”
    “Be quiet,” Lucas said. He peered through the door window past the secretary’s desk into the waiting area. He couldn’t see anybody. “Is she nuts?”
    “Probably,” Carol said. “But she made enough sense that I thought you should talk to her.”
    “Why doesn’t she talk to Smith?” Lucas asked.
    “I don’t know. I didn’t ask her.”
    “Ah, for Christ’s sakes…”
    “I’ll send her in,” Carol said.
     
    G ABRIELLA C OOMBS HAD an oval face and blue-sky eyes and blond hair that fell to her small but firm breasts. Lucas couldn’t tell for sure—she was wearing a shapeless shift of either gingham or calico, he could never remember which one was the print, with tiny yellow coneflowers, black-eyed Susans—but from the way her body rattled around in the shift, he suspected she could, as his subordinate Jenkins had once observed of another slender blond hippie chick, “crack walnuts between the cheeks of her ass.”
    She had a string of penny-colored South American nuts around her neck, and silver rings pierced both the lobes and rims of her ears, and probably other parts of her body, unseen, but not unsuspected.
    Given her dress and carriage, her face would normally be as un-clouded as a drink of water, Lucas thought, her wa smooth and round and uninflected by daily trials. Today she carried two horizontal worry lines on her forehead, and another vertically between her guileless eyes. She sat down, perched on the edge of Lucas’s visitor’s chair, and said, “Captain Davenport?”
    “Uh, no,” Lucas said. “I’m more like a special agent; but you can call me Lucas.”
    She looked at him for a moment, then said, “Could I call you mister? You’re quite a bit older than I