Mind Prey

again.”
    As they rewound the tape, Lucas said, “He knew about the shirt. Who’d we tell?”
    “Nobody. I mean, the family, maybe. And the kid knows…”
    “And probably that fuckin’ Girdler. We better see if we can get a tape of that radio show, see if what all he talked about…”
    “And maybe that goddamn kid is talking to the press—everybody else is blabbing.”
    Greave punched the tape, and they listened to it again and Greave said, “Yeah, he said Nethinims. N-E-T-HI-N-I-M-S or N-E-T-H-A-N-I-M-S.”
    Lucas looked in the phone book, Lester tried directory assistance. “Nothing.”
    Lucas, walking around, staring at the ceiling, came back to Lester. “Was I on the news? In the paper, about being on the case?”
    Lester showed a thin grin: Lucas attracted a lot of publicity over the years. Sometimes it chafed. “No.”
    “This guy said he knew I was investigating, because he’d seen it in the paper…”
    “Well, we got the Pioneer Press around here somewhere, and all kinds of Star-Tribunes , you could look—but I don’t think so. I read the stories.”
    “TV or radio?”
    He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. They know you by sight—they know your car. There were all kinds of reporters around that school. Or maybe somebody interviewed Manette or Dunn and they mentioned something. Or that guy on the radio last night…”
    “Huh.” And he thought about the kid he’d seen in the game store that morning, sitting down. The kid who’d left so quickly, who looked like the right guy.
    “You want me to check out these Nethinims dudes?” Greave asked.
    Lucas turned to him, nodded. Greave was okay with books. “Yeah. If you ask around, and nobody knows, check a couple of game stores and see if it’s a new game character or set. Then check like, uh, Tolkien’s Ring cycle— Lord of the Rings , all that. There’re a couple of science fiction stores in town—call and talk to a clerk, see if anybody recognizes the name from a book series…a fantasy series probably.”
    “The guy sounds like a smart little wiseass,” Lester said.
    “Yeah.” Lucas nodded. “And he can’t help proving it. He’ll last five days or a week—I just hope somebody’s left alive when we get him.”

7
    T HE RAPE HAD done something to her, beyond the obvious. Had damaged her.
    When Mail had finished with her, she was panicked, injured, in pain—but generally coherent. When Mail had taken Genevieve, she’d argued with him, pleaded.
    An hour after that, she began to drift.
    She curled on the mattress, stopped talking to Grace, closed her eyes, trembled, shuddered, tightened into a ball. She lost the most elemental sense of what was going on—how much time was passing, where sounds came from, who was in the cell with her.
    Grace came to her several times, gave her strawberry soda, tried to get her to eat, took off her own coat and gave it to her mother. This last, the coat, Andi found useful: she huddled under it, away from the naked lightbulb, the Porta-Potti, the stark gray walls. With the coat over her head, she could almost believe she was at home, dreaming…
    She seemed to wake a few times and she spoke with both Grace and Genevieve, and once with George. Sometimes she felt her mind drifting above herself, like a cloud: she watched her body huddled on the mattress, and wondered, why ?
    But sometimes she felt needle-sharp: she opened her eyes and looked at her knees, pulled up tight to her chin, and felt herself clever not to come out from under the coat.
    Beneath it all, she knew her mind simply wasn’t functioning correctly. This, she thought during a passing moment of rationality, was insanity. She’d been outside of it for years: this was the first time she’d been inside.
    Once she had a dream, or a vision: several men, friendly but hurried, wearing technicians’ or scientists’ coats, lowered her into a steel cylinder with an interior the size of a phone booth. When she was inside, a steel cap with interlocking flanges was lowered on top of the cylinder, to seal it off. One of the technicians, an intelligent, soft-spoken man with blond hair, glasses, and an easy German accent, said, “You’ll only have to last through the heat. If you make it through the heat, you’ll be all right…”
    Some kind of protection dream, she thought, during one of the lucid moments. The blond man, she thought, she’d seen in a Mercedes-Benz commercial, or a BMW ad. But the man wasn’t the thing. The cylinder