Mind Prey

know what it is?” A skeptical eyebrow went up.
    “Sure. I write role-playing games…”
    “Really? My boyfriend…”
    “Mercedes!” Her mother’s voice took a warning tone and Mercedes swerved into safer territory.
    “A friend at school has one. I recognized it right away—the shirt isn’t the same as my friend’s, but it was a GenCon. Great big GenCon right on the front, and one of those weird dice. Everything black and white, kinda cheap…”
    “What’s a GenCon?” asked Thomas Bernet, looking suspiciously from his daughter to Lucas, as though GenCon might somehow be linked to ConDom.
    “It’s a gamer’s convention, over in Lake Geneva,” Lucas said. To Mercedes: “Why didn’t you tell the other officer?”
    “I could barely get his attention,” she said. “And that asshole Girdler…”
    “Mercedes!” Her mother was on the word like a wolf on a lamb.
    “Well, he is,” she said, barely defensive. “He kept talking all over me—I don’t think he saw hardly any of it. He was mostly hiding down the hall.”
    “Okay,” Lucas said. “What about the truck? Anything unusual about it?”
    She nodded. “Yeah, there was, and I told the other cop. They’d painted over the sign on the truck. I don’t know what it said, but there were letters on the door and they were painted right over.”
    “What letters?”
    She shrugged. “I don’t know. It was just something I sorta noticed when I went up closer to the windows and he was driving away. It wasn’t a good paint job, you know? They just slopped right over the old letters.”
     
    L UCAS USED THE Bernets’ phone to call back to the office, and dropped the T-shirt and truck information with Anderson.
    “Heading home?” Anderson asked.
    “Not much more to do tonight, unless we get a call. Are we still doing the door-to-door?”
    “Yeah, up in Manette’s neighborhood now. Asking for suspicious activities. Haven’t heard anything back.”
    “Let me know.”
    “Yeah, I’ll be putting together a book on it…Have you asked Weather yet?”
    “Jesus Christ…” Lucas laughed.
    “Hey, it’s primo gossip.”
    “I’ll let you know,” Lucas said. He could feel the engagement ring in his pants pocket. Maybe ask her, he thought.
    “I got a feeling about this,” Anderson said.
    “About Weather?”
    “No. About the Manettes. There’s something going on here. So they’re not dead yet. They’re out there waiting for us.”
     
    W EATHER K ARKINNEN MADE a bump on the left side of the bed, near the window. The window was open an inch or two, so she could get the fresh cold air.
    “Bad?” she asked, sleepily.
    “Yes.” He slipped in beside her, rolled close, kissed her on the neck behind the ear.
    “Tell me,” she said. She rolled onto her back.
    “It’s late,” he said. She was a surgeon. She operated almost every day, usually starting at seven o’clock.
    “I’m okay; I’ve got a late starting time tomorrow.”
    “It’s Tower Manette’s daughter and her two children, her daughters.” He outlined the kidnapping, told her about the blood on the shoe.
    “I hate it when there are kids involved,” she said.
    “I know.”
    Weather was a surgeon, but she looked like a jock—a fighter, actually, somebody who’d gone a few rounds too many. She had wide shoulders and she tended to carry her hands in front of her, fists clenched, like a punch-drunk boxer. Her nose was a little too large and bent slightly to the left; her hair was cut short, a soft brown touched with white. She had the high Slavic cheekbones of a full-blooded Finn, and dark blue eyes. For all of her jockiness, she was a small woman. Lucas could pick her up like a parcel and carry her around the house. Which he had done, on occasion; but never fully clothed.
    Weather was not pretty; but she reached him with a power he hadn’t experienced before: His attraction had grown so strong that it scared him at times. He’d lie awake at night, watching her sleep, inventing nightmares in which she left him.
    They’d met in northern Wisconsin, where Weather had been working as a surgeon in a local hospital. Lucas had run down a child-sex ring, and the killer at the heart of it. In the final moments of a chase through the woods, he’d been shot in the throat by a young girl, and Weather had saved his life, opening his throat with a jack knife.
    Hell of a way to get together…
    Lucas put his hands on her waist. “Just how late can you go in?” he