Mind Prey

like a pinhole.” He picked up a dandelion leaf, caught the drop on the leaf, smelled it, and passed it to Martinez.
    “What?” Lucas asked.
    Martinez said, “Nothing—probably water.”
    “So let’s jerk the lid.”
    Path fixed a block to an access ladder on the water tower, while Martinez fitted a harness around the lid. Then he tied a rock climber’s rope to the harness, ran it up through the block and down to the tow truck. The truck let out all of its cable, and when they finished, they were a hundred and fifty yards from the barrel.
    “You ready for a big noise?” Path asked Carpenter.
    The chief said, “Don’t talk like that. Do you mean that? Do you think?”
    They all squatted behind cars, the wrecker rolled forward, and the lid flipped off like a beer cap. Nothing happened. Lucas could hear a plane droning down the river.
    “Well, shit,” Martinez said after a moment. He stood up. “Let’s go look.”
    They walked slowly back to the barrel. From thirty feet away, Lucas could see that it was filled with water. When they got next to it, they looked carefully inside. A small body was at the bottom of the barrel, a pale oval face turned to look up at them. The water was cloudy with a sediment of some kind, and the body shimmered, out of focus, a white dress floating around it like gauze, black hair drifting around the head.
    Martinez looked in the barrel and said, “No. I don’t do this.” And he walked away.
    “Oh, shit. Who is it?” Carpenter asked, peering open-mouthed into the barrel.
    The body was small. “Probably Genevieve Dunn,” Lucas said. “Are we sure this is water?”
    Path, looking in, put his face close to the surface and said, “Yeah. It’s water. He could have a big chunk of white phosphorus in there, waiting for us to get rid of the water.”
    Lucas shook his head: “Nah. This is what he wanted me to see. A jack-in-the-box. The motherfucker is playing games…Is that the Medical Examiner down there?”
    Carpenter nodded. “Yeah. I’ll get him.”
    Lucas stepped away and looked down the hill, waiting. There should be something else—or Mail would call again, to gloat. Carpenter, standing beside him, said, “I’d pull the trigger on this guy. How can you kill a kid?”
    Lucas said, “Yeah?” He remembered the line from a Vietnam vet, a street guy. How can you kill a kid? Just lead them a little less…
    The Medical Examiner was a young man with a thin face, thin spectacles, and a large Adam’s apple. He walked up, glanced in the barrel, and said, “What’s the shit in the water?”
    Nobody knew.
    “Well, give me something I can fish around with, huh?” He was unself-consciously cheerful, even for a Medical Examiner. “Give me one of those fire axes. I don’t want to put my hand in there if we don’t know what it is.”
    “Take it easy with the ax,” Carpenter said.
    “Don’t worry about it,” the examiner said. He looked in the barrel again. “That’s not a kid.”
    “What?” Lucas walked back.
    “Not unless she had deformed hands and too big a head,” he said confidently.
    Lucas looked in the water again—it still looked like a child’s body. “I think it’s some kind of big plastic doll,” the examiner said. A fireman came up with a long curved tool that looked like an oversized poker. “Here.”
    The Medical Examiner took it, grabbed the body, but it slipped away. “Anchored with something,” he grunted. “Look, if this is just water, why don’t we dump it?”
    They did; the water spilled out on the grass, and the ME reached inside and pulled out a four-foot doll, plastic flesh, black hair, and paint-flaking baby blue eyes. Its feet were folded beneath it and tied to a brick to keep the doll from floating.
    “Got the big sense of humor, huh?” said the examiner. A white plastic tag floated from the doll’s neck. The examiner turned it. It said, in black grease pencil, “ CLUE .”
    “I don’t think he has a sense of humor,” Lucas said. “I really don’t think he does.”
    “Then what is this shit?”
    “I don’t know,” Lucas said.
     
    L UCAS CALLED IN, then headed back toward Minneapolis. As he passed the refinery off Highway 61, Mail called again.
    “Goddamn, you were fast, Lucas. Can I call you Lucas? How’d you like all those fire trucks? I drove by while you guys were up there. What were you doing? Somebody said they thought it was a bomb or something. Is that right? Did you have the bomb squad up