Mind Prey

door, then turned and ran. “Gonna be some noise,” he said.
    “Tough shit,” said Sherrill.
    Lucas took off his coat, tossed it on a chair, went to the first of the file cabinets, and pulled open a drawer.
    “Get out of there,” Nancy Wolfe shouted at him. She steamed through the door, her hands out to grab him, push him, or hit him. Lucas set his feet, and when she grabbed him and pushed, he didn’t move. Wolfe went backward with a little hop.
    “If you push me again, I’ll arrest you and send you downtown in handcuffs,” Lucas said quietly. “Assault on a police officer has a mandatory jail sentence.”
    Wolfe’s black eyes were blazing with anger: “You’re in my files, you’ve got no right…”
    “I’ve got a subpoena, a search warrant, and the written approval of Dr. Manette’s next of kin,” Lucas said. “We’re gonna look at the files.”
    She stepped toward him again, her hands moving, and Lucas turned just a half an inch and tucked his chin even less, but he saw the flinch in her eyes. She believed he’d hit her back, and she stopped, stepped sideways, and crossed her arms. “You’re referring to George Dunn?”
    “Yes.”
    “George Dunn is hardly close to Andi, not anymore,” Wolfe said. Her face had been white with anger, but now it was reddening, with heat. She was an attractive woman, in a professorial way—slender, salt-and-pepper hair, just a boarding-school touch of makeup. But her red face clashed with her cool, mint-green suit and the Hermès scarf at her neck. “I don’t believe…”
    “Mr. Dunn is her husband,” Sherrill said. “Andi Manette and her children have been kidnapped, and even though nobody has said it, they may already be dead somewhere.”
    “If they’re not, they may be, soon,” Lucas added. “If you try to fuck us around on the records, you’ll lose. But the delay could kill your partner and her daughters.”
    Lucas said fuck deliberately, to harden the statement, to shock, to keep her on the defensive. Wolfe talked right through it: “I want to call my attorney.”
    “Call him,” Lucas said.
    Wolfe looked at him, then spun on a heel and stormed out.
    When Wolfe was gone, Black asked, “How solid are we?”
    “Solid, but they might find a friendly judge and slow us down,” Lucas said. Sherrill nodded and pulled open another file cabinet. “Skim everything, get all the names and addresses—read them into your tape recorders, transcribe later. We need speed. If there’s a problem, we’ll have that much, anyway. And if there is a problem, refer it to Tyler down at the County Attorney’s office and just keep working. When you get all the names on the recorder, go back through the records and look for anything likely. References to violence, to threats. Sexual deviation. Males only, to start.”
    “Where’re you going?” Sherrill asked.
    “To see some guys about some games,” Lucas said.
    Nancy Wolfe met him in the hallway as he was going out. “My attorney is on the way. He said for you to leave the files alone until he gets here.”
    “Yeah, well, as soon as your attorney is elevated to the district court, I’ll follow his instructions,” Lucas said. Then he let some air into his voice: “Look, we’re not gonna persecute your patients—we won’t even look at most of them. But we’ve got to move fast. We’ve got to.”
    “You’ll set us back years with some of these people. You’ll destroy the trust they’ve built up with us—the only people they can trust, for most of them. And the people who need treatment for sexual deviation, or other possibly criminal behavior, they won’t be back at all. Not after they hear what you’ve done.”
    “Why do they have to hear?” Lucas asked. “If you don’t make a big deal out of it, nobody’ll know except the few people we actually talk to. And with them, we can make it seem like we got the information from someplace else—not deal with the records.”
    She was shaking her head. “If you go through those records, I’ll feel it incumbent upon me to inform the patients.”
    Lucas tightened up and his voice dropped, got a little gravel. “You don’t tell them before we look at them. If you do, by God, and one of them turns out to be the kidnapper, I’ll charge you as an accomplice to the kidnapping.”
    Wolfe’s hand went to the Hermès scarf at her throat: “That’s ludicrous.”
    “Is it true that you’ll get a half-million dollars if Andi Manette is