Mind Prey

to be a patient. A nut,” Black said.
    “Whatever, I hope it was planned and done for the money,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah?” The mole looked at him with interest. “Why?”
    “’Cause if it was some doper or a goddamn gang-banger doing a spur-of-the-moment thing, and they haven’t dropped them off by now…”
    “Then they’re dead,” Sherrill finished.
    “Yeah.” Lucas looked around the little circle of cops. “If it wasn’t planned, Andi Manette and her kids are outa here.”

3
    T HE CHIEF LIVED in a 1920’s brown-brick bungalow in a wooded neighborhood east of Lake Harriet in Minneapolis, cheek-by-jowl with half the other smart politicians in the city; a house you had to be the right age to buy in 1978.
    The gabble of a televised football game was audible through the front door, and a moment after Lucas pushed the doorbell, the chief’s husband opened it and peered out nearsightedly; his glasses were up on his forehead. “Come on in,” he said, pushing open the door. “Rose Marie’s in the study.”
    “How is she?” Lucas asked.
    “Unhappy.” He was a tall, balding lawyer, who wore a button vest and smelled vaguely of pipe tobacco. He reminded Lucas of Adlai Stevenson. Lucas followed him down through the house, a comfortable accumulation of overstuffed couches and chairs, mixed with turn-of-the-century oak, furnishings they might have inherited from prosperous farmer-parents.
    Rose Marie Roux, the Minneapolis Chief of Police, was sitting in the den, in a La-Z-Boy, with her feet up. She was wearing a sober blue business suit with white sweat socks. She was smoking.
    “Tell me you found them,” she said, curling her toes at Lucas.
    “Yeah, they were shopping at the Mall of America,” Lucas said. He dropped into the La-Z-Boy facing the chief. “They’re all okay, and Tower Manette’s talking about running you for the U.S. Senate.”
    “Yeah, yeah,” Roux said sourly. Her husband shook his head. “Tell me,” she said.
    “She was hit so hard she was knocked out of her shoes and there’s blood on one of them,” Lucas said. “We’ve got some eyewitness who says that Andi Manette and the younger of the daughters were covered with blood, although there’s a possibility it was something else, like paint. And we’ve got a description of the guy who did it…”
    “The perp,” said Roux’s husband.
    They both looked at him. He hadn’t seen the inside of a courtroom since he was twenty-five. He got his cop talk from the television. “Yeah, the perp,” Lucas said. And to Rose Marie, “The description is pretty general: big, tough, dirty-blond.”
    “Damnit.” Roux took a drag on her cigarette, blew it at the ceiling, then said, “The FBI will be in tomorrow…”
    “I know. The Minneapolis AIC is talking to Lester,” Lucas said. “He wanted to know if we were going to declare it as a kidnapping. Lester said we probably would. We’re covering the phone lines at Tower Manette’s office and house. The same for Dunn and Andi Manette, offices and houses.”
    “Gotta be a kidnapping,” Roux’s husband said, getting comfortable with the conversation. “What else could it be?”
    Lucas looked at him and said, “Could be a nut—Manette’s a shrink. Could be murder. Marital murder or something in the family. There’s lots of money around. Lots of motive.”
    “I don’t want to think about that,” Roux said. Then, “What about Dunn?”
    “Shaffer talked to him. He’s got no alibi, not really. But we do know it wasn’t him in the van. He says he was in his car—he’s got a phone in his car, but he didn’t use it within a half-hour of the kidnapping.”
    “Huh.”
    “You don’t know him? Dunn?” Rose Marie Roux asked.
    “No. I’ll get to him tonight.”
    “He’s a tough guy,” she said. “But he’s not crazy. Not unless something happened since the last time I saw him.”
    “Marital problems,” Lucas suggested again.
    “He’s the type who’d have some,” Roux said. “He’d manage them. He wouldn’t flip out.” She grunted as she pushed herself out of the La-Z-Boy. “Come on, we’ve got an appointment.”
    Lucas looked at his watch. Eight o’clock. “Where? I was gonna see Dunn.”
    “We’ve got to talk to Tower Manette first. At his place, Lake of the Isles.”
    “You need me?”
    “Yeah. He called and asked if I’d put you on the case. I said I already had. He wants to meet you.”
     
    T HE CHIEF TRADED her sweat socks for panty hose