Mind Prey

where we could find him?”
    “Payroll would have an address. He’s married, he lives over in South St. Paul somewhere. But I don’t know. He’s an older guy than what you were talking about. He’s maybe thirty-five, forty.”
    “Where’s payroll?” Sloan asked.
    “Down the hall on your left…”
    “I’ll get it,” Sloan said to Lucas.
    As Sloan left, Dunn picked up his phone, poked a button, and said, “A cop is on his way down. Give him whatever he needs on Dick Seddle. He’s a carpenter, worked on the Woodbury project until last winter, January, I think. Yeah. Yeah.”
    When he hung up, Lucas said, “We’re talking to everybody, all over again. We’re asking who’d win if Andi Manette’s dead. Your name keeps coming up.”
    “Fuck those people,” Dunn snarled. He banged a large fist in the middle of the leather appointment pad. “Fuck ’em.”
    Lucas said, “They say that Andi was going after a divorce…”
    “That’s bullshit. We’d have worked it out.”
    “…and if you were divorced, you’d lose at least half of everything. They say you started this company with some of her money, and having to pay out half could be pretty troublesome.”
    “Yeah, it would,” Dunn said, nodding. “But there’s not a dime of her money in this place. Not a goddamn dime. That was part of the deal when I married her: I wasn’t gonna owe her. And it would take a fucking lunatic to suggest I’d do anything to Andi and the kids. A fuckin’ lunatic.”
    “Then we got a bunch of fuckin’ lunatics, ’cause everybody we talked to suggested it,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah, well…”
    “I know, fuck ’em,” Lucas said. “So: who else would benefit?”
    “Nobody else,” Dunn said.
    “Helen Manette suggested that Nancy Wolfe would pick up a pretty thriving business.”
    Dunn thought for a moment, then said, “I suppose she would, but she’s never been that interested in business…or money. Andi’s always been the leader and the business-woman. Nancy was the intellectual. She publishes papers and that. She’s still connected to the university and she’s a bigwig in the psychiatric society. That’s why they’re good partners—Andi takes care of business, Nancy builds their reputation in the field.”
    “You don’t think Wolfe’s a candidate?”
    “No, I don’t.”
    “I understand you dated her.”
    “Jesus, they really did dump it on you, didn’t they,” Dunn said, his voice softening. “I took Nancy out twice. Neither one of us was much interested in a third try. So when we were saying good-bye that second time, the last time, she said, ‘You know, I’ve got somebody who’d be perfect for you.’ And she was right. I called up Andi and we got married a year later.”
    Lucas hesitated, then said, “Does your wife have any distinguishing marks on her body? Scars?”
    Dunn froze: “You’ve got a body somewhere?”
    “No, no. But if we should contact the people who have her, if there’s a question…”
    Dunn wasn’t buying it. “What’s going on?”
    “We got a call from a guy,” Lucas said.
    “He said she’s got a scar?”
    “Yeah.”
    “What kind of scar?”
    Lucas said, “He said it looked like a rocketship…”
    “Oh, no.” Dunn groaned. “Oh, no…”
    Sloan came in, looked at the two men facing each other. “What’s going on?”
    Lucas told Dunn, “We’ll get back.”
    Dunn swung a large workman’s hand across the cherry desk, and the cigar safe flew across the room, the fat Cuban cigars spraying out like so much shrapnel. “Well, fuckin’ find something,” Dunn shouted. “You’re supposed to be the fuckin’ Sherlock Holmes. Quit hanging around my ass and get out and do something.”
    Outside the office, Sloan said, “What was all that?”
    “I asked him about the rocketship.”
    “Oh-oh.”
    “Whoever it is, he’s raping her,” Lucas said.
     
    A S THEY STOOD talking in the parking lot, Greave called from the Minneapolis Public Library. “It’s the Bible,” he said. “The Nethinims are mentioned a bunch of times, but they don’t seem to amount to much.”
    “Xerox the references and bring them back to the office. I’ll be there in ten minutes,” Lucas said. He punched Greave out and called Andi Manette’s office, and got Black: “Can you bring a batch of the best files downtown?”
    “Yeah. On the way. And we got another problem case. A guy who runs a chain of video-game arcades.”
     
    “S O WHAT’RE WE doing?” Sloan