Mind Prey

When you get to the mall, ask for a policeman and tell them who you are. They’ll take you home to Daddy.”
    The door slammed in her face. Faintly, faintly, she could hear footsteps outside in the basement, but nothing else behind the muffled steel door.
    “She’ll be okay,” Grace said. But she was beginning to cry, and the words came hard through the tears: “She’s been in lots of malls. She’ll just find a policeman and she’ll go home. Dad’ll take care of her.”
    “Yes.” Andi dropped to the mattress, her hands covering her face: “Oh my God, Grace. Oh my God.”

6
    “I HATE RICH people,” Sherrill muttered. She was wearing the same coat as the night before, but she’d added her own hat, a green baseball cap with a pale blue bill. Her hair was tucked underneath. She finished the outfit with pale blue sneaks, a tomboy-with-great-breasts look. With her rosy cheeks and easy smile, Black thought she looked good enough to eat.
    They’d dumped the city car in the parking lot outside Andi Manette’s office building. The building, Sherrill thought, had been designed by a seriously snotty architect: black windows, red bricks, and copper flashing, snuggled into the side of a cattail-ringed pond, with a twisted chunk of rusty Cor-Ten steel out front. Black paused by the sculpture: the plaque said, Ray-Tracing Wrigley.
    “You know what that’s supposed to be?” he asked, looking up at it.
    “Looks like a big stick of rusty steel chewing gum that somebody twisted,” Sherrill said.
    Black said, “Jesus, you’re an art critic. That’s what it must be.”
    Sherrill led the way across a bridge over a moatlike finger from the pond. Somebody had thrown a half-bucket of corn into the water, and a cluster of mallards and two Canada geese rooted through the shallow water weeds for the kernels. A half-dozen koi circled slowly among the ducks, their golden bodies just under the surface. The rain had stopped, and a thin sunshine, broken up by the yellow branches of weeping willows, dappled the pond.
    “There’s Davenport,” Black said, and Sherrill looked back at the parking lot. Lucas was just getting out of his Porsche. The lot around him was sprinkled with 700-series BMWs and S-Class Mercedeses, a few Lexuses and Cadillacs, and the odd Jaguar, among the usual Chevys and Fords. Lucas circled a black Acura NSX that had been carefully parked away from other cars, stopped to look in the driver’s side window.
    “Speaking of rich,” Sherrill said.
    They waited and, after a second, Lucas broke away from the NSX and came up the walk, nodded at Black, grinned at Sherrill, and she felt a little thump. “If I was gonna steal cars, this would be the place,” he said. “Gotta have money to get your head shrunk.”
    “Or get the county to pay for it,” Black said.
    “Did you ask her?” Sherrill asked.
    “Not yet,” Lucas said.
    They checked the building directory, an arty rectangle decorated with a blue bird. Manette’s office was at the back of the building, a multiroom suite with quiet, gray carpets and Scandinavian furnishings. A matronly Scandinavian receptionist sat behind a blonde oak desk, writing into a computer. She looked up when Lucas, Black, and Sherrill walked in, turned away from the computer. “Can I…?”
    “We’re Minneapolis police officers. I’m Deputy Chief Lucas Davenport and we have a subpoena for Dr. Manette’s records and a search warrant for her office,” Lucas said. “Could you show us her office?”
    “I’ll get Mrs. Carney and Dr. Wolfe…”
    “No. Show us the office, then get whomever you wish,” Lucas said politely. “Who is Mrs. Carney?”
    “The office manager,” the woman said. “I’ll get…”
    “No. Show us Dr. Manette’s office.”
    Manette’s office was large, informal, with a comfortable couch and a loveseat at right angles to each other, and a glass coffee table in the angle. Two Kirk Lyttle ceramic sculptures stood in the middle of the table; they looked like crippled birds, straining for the sky.
    “Where are her files?”
    “In, um, there.” The receptionist was ready to panic, but she poked a finger at a line of wood folding doors. Sherrill crossed to the doors and pulled them back. A half-dozen four-drawer file cabinets were lined up in an alcove, along with a short table that held an automatic espresso maker and a small refrigerator.
    “Thank you,” Lucas said, nodding at the receptionist. The woman stepped backwards through the