Mind Prey

photograph of a Nazi prison-camp inmate.
    “So: we do it.” She went back to scraping the nail, then turned it in her hand. The rust was gone from the tip, and the wedge-shaped nail point was fining down to a needletip.
    “What we have to do is figure out a…scenario for attacking him,” she said. Grace was sitting at the end of the mattress, her knees pulled up under her chin. She had a bruise on her forearm. Where’d she gotten that? Mail hadn’t touched her, yet, though the last two times he’d assaulted Andi, he hadn’t bothered to dress before he pushed her back in the cell. He was displaying for Grace. Sooner or later, he’d take her…
    She put a finger to her lips. “Listen.”
    There was nothing. Grace whispered, “What?”
    “I thought I heard him.”
    Grace said, “I don’t hear anything.”
    They listened for a long time, tense, the fear holding them silent; but nobody came. Finally, Andi went back to honing the nail, the ragged zzzt zzzt zzzt the only sound in the hole.
    She had Mail in her mind as she honed it. They’d been in the hole for almost five days. He had attacked her…she didn’t know how many times, but probably twenty. Twenty? Could it be that many?
    She thought so.
    She honed the nail, thinking, with each stroke, For John Mail. For John Mail…

29
    L UCAS AND H AYWOOD went past Lucas’s building at seventy—Sloan still standing in the lot, now in the center of a circle of plainclothes cops; an ambulance had hauled Ricky away—slipped onto Highway 280 and then 1-94, east to I-35E, south through St. Paul, Haywood hanging on the safety belt, three cars trailing, all with lights.
    A dispatcher came back. “Eagan’s in. They’re pulling a search warrant right now and they ought to have it by the time you’re there.”
    “Patch me through—get them to pull us in there.”
    The directions from Eagan burped out over the radio and they crossed the Mississippi like a flock of big-assed birds, jumped off on Yankee Doodle Road, killed the flashers, and headed east.
    “That’s them,” Haywood said. He was holding on to the safety belt with one hand and had the other braced on the dashboard. Below them, in a shallow valley, two squad cars and a gray sedan were lined up at the curb. Lucas pulled over next to the sedan and hopped out. A man in a suit hustled around the nose of the car.
    “Chief Davenport?
    “Danny Carlton. I’m the chief out here.” Carlton was young, with curly red hair and a pink face. “We got your search warrant, but I don’t think you’re gonna be happy.”
    “Yeah?”
    Carlton pointed down the road, where it rose along the opposite wall of the valley. “The place you’re looking for is right up there. But it’s one of them self-storage places. You know, like two hundred rental garages.”
    “Damnit.” Lucas shook his head: this sounded unlikely. “We have to check it, we can’t fuck around.”
     
    T HE SELF-STORAGE WAREHOUSE was a complex of long, one-story, concrete-block buildings, the long sides of the buildings each faced with twenty white garage doors. The whole place was surrounded by an eight-foot chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. A small blue gatehouse stood next to the only gate through the fence. An elderly man, pale, worried, met them at the gate. He carried a .38 that looked older than he was.
    “No problem,” he said when they gave him the warrant. “Roses, that’d be fifty-seven.”
    “Have you seen him?” Lucas asked.
    “Hasn’t come through here, not tonight.”
    Lucas showed him a copy of the computer-aged Mail photo. “Is that him?”
    The guard held it under a light, tipping his head back the better to use his bifocals, stuck out a lip, raised his eyebrows, then handed it back. “That’s him. Got him to a T,” he said.
     
    T HE GARAGE DOOR was padlocked, but one of the Eagan cops had a pair of cutters and chopped the hasp. Lucas knocked it away, and with another cop, raised the door.
    “Computers,” Haywood said.
    He found the light and flipped it on. The room was lined with tables, and the computers were stacked on them, dozens of beige cases and sullen, gray-screen monitors. Under the tables were plastic clothes baskets full of parts—disk drives, modems, sound and color cards, a mouse with its cord wrapped around it, miscellaneous electronic junk.
    Nothing human.
    A desk and an old cash register sat off to the left. Lucas walked over to the desk, pulled open a drawer. Scrap paper, a single