Mind Prey

seeming to pull willfully out of their pants and rumple on their own, they stood around a six-by-five Metro wall map and looked at the red-crayoned box southeast of the airport.
    “It’s something,” Lester insisted. “He was smarter than we gave him credit for. Christ, another minute. One more minute and we’ve got him.”
    Lucas threw a paper coffee cup at a wastebasket, the old coffee like acid in his mouth. “We gotta go for the full-court press. He’ll be calling back. I’m surprised he hasn’t already.”
    “We can do it with the next shift,” Anderson says. “Right now, we’d be eighty percent. By tomorrow morning, we’ll be at full strength.”
    “We gotta be ready to do it now,” Lucas said.
    “We are—just not a hundred percent. It’s a matter of getting people through the shifts,” Anderson said.
    “We should flood the 494 strip, and extra people down I-35 all the way through Apple Valley,” Lucas said.
    “Smart little fuck,” Lester said, staring moodily at the map.
     
    W EATHER WAS ASLEEP and moaned softly when he slipped into bed. He needed to wake her up to talk, but she would be cutting on someone in the morning, and he didn’t dare do it. Instead, he lay awake for an hour, plotting the twists and turns of the day, feeling the warmth from Weather seeping over him. He finally slept, one arm at her waist, the smell of Chanel around him.
     
    W EATHER WAS GONE, and Lucas was just out of the shower when the cellular phone rang. He stopped, listening, then hurried into the living room, trailing streams of water. He’d left the phone on the dining room table, and now he picked it up and clicked it on.
    “Lucas, how they hanging?” Mail sounded unnaturally cheerful.
    “Are they still alive?” The squad cars should be rolling. Thirty seconds.
    “Are you trying to trace me?”
    Lucas hesitated, then repeated his original question: “Are they alive, or not?” Lucas asked.
    “Yeah, they’re alive,” Mail said grudgingly. “In fact, I’ve got a message for you from Andi Manette.”
    “Let me get a pencil,” Lucas said.
    “Oh, horseshit, this is all recorded,” Mail said impatiently. “Not that it’s gonna do you any good. I’m using the cellular, but this time I’m riding around, a long way from anywhere.”
    Shit. “Go ahead: I’ve got a pencil.”
    “Here it is. I don’t know how clear it’ll be…”
    George, Daddy, Genevieve, Aunt Lisa, this is Andi. We’re okay, Grace and me, and we hope Genevieve is back and everything is fine with her. The man with us won’t let us say anything about him, but he was good enough to let us send this. I hope we can talk to you again, and this man with us, please give him whatever he wants so we can come back safely. That’s all I can say…
    Andi Manette’s voice was plaintive, fearful, trembling with hope; cut off with a click of a recorder button.
    “That’s all for now, sports fans,” Mail said cheerfully. “I have to say, though, I liked the disk-jockey thing. It really woke me up. Tell the guy I’m gonna stop by his house and visit his family some day while he’s gone. I’m gonna bring a pair of wire cutters with me. We’re gonna have a lot of fun.”
     
    W HEN M AIL HUNG up, Lucas turned the phone off, laid it on the table, and stared at it like an ebony cockroach; fifteen seconds later, Martha Gresham called from the communications center and said, “We got it all.”
    “Excellent. Is Lester there?”
    “No, but Donna’s talking to him now, so he knows.”
    Lucas hurried back to the bedroom and dressed, waiting for the phone to ring. It rang as he was knotting the tie: “Yeah, Frank. Was it her?”
    “It’s her. And she’s trying to tell us something, but we don’t know what,” Lester said.
    “How do you know?”
    “Because she said hello to her aunt Lisa.”
    “Yeah?”
    “I talked to Tower Manette one minute ago,” Lester said. “Her aunt Lisa’s been dead for ten years.”
    “Get somebody going: we need everything we can get on the aunt.”
    “We’re going, but I want you looking at it,” Lester said. “Goddamnit, Lucas, we need somebody to pull a rabbit out of a hat.”
    Lucas said, “You gotta cover Milo, over at the station. And his family. He’s got two kids himself.”
    “We’re on the way. But what about Genevieve?”
    “Genevieve’s dead,” Lucas said. “We know that, but Andi Manette doesn’t.”
     
    T HEY DID A group therapy with Manette and Dunn, in Roux’s