Mind Prey

office: why Aunt Lisa?
    “Lisa Farmer was my first wife’s sister,” Manette said. “She had this big place out in the country, with horses, and when Andi was a kid she’d go out and ride. Maybe she’s telling us that the guy’s a farmer—or that he’s a horse guy, or something. It’s gotta be something like that.”
    “Unless she’s just lost it,” Dunn said quietly.
    “My daughter…” Manette started.
    “Hey.” Dunn pointed a finger at Manette, his voice cold. “I know you love your daughter, Tower, but I do too, and frankly, I know her better. She is fucked up. Her voice has changed, her manner’s changed, she is desperate and she’s hurt. I want to think that she’s sending a message, but I don’t want to cut off everything and just concentrate on that one thing. Because it’s possible that she’s lost it.”
    Manette looked away, sideways at nothing, down at the floor. Dunn, uncomfortable, patted him on the back, then looked across Manette at Lucas. “Genevieve’s dead, isn’t she?”
    “You better be ready,” Lucas said.
     
    T HEY WOULD DO a fast scan of farms and horses, running the Dakota County agricultural assessment rolls against sex crime records and other lists. Lucas got Anderson’s running case log and carried it back to his office and read for a while. Nothing occurred to him. Restless, he wandered down to Homicide, and ran into Black and Sherrill.
    “What’s happening at the U?” he asked.
    “We’ve got five more possibles, including one with fire and sex. We’re looking for him now,” Sherrill said. She held up a stack of files. “You want Xeroxes?”
    “Yeah. Anderson said something about the one guy—Mail?—that he was a washout?”
    “Yeah,” Black said. “Really washed out. He washed out of the river. He’s dead.”
    “Shit,” Lucas said. “He sounded good.”
    Sherrill nodded. “They let him out of St. Peter and two months later he went off the Lake Street Bridge, middle of the night. They found him down by Fort Snelling. He’d been in the water for a week.”
    “How’d they ID him?” Lucas asked.
    “They found a state ID card on the body,” Sherrill said. “The ME went ahead and did a dental on him; it was him.”
    “All right,” Lucas nodded. “Who’s this other guy, the fire and sex guy?”
    “Francis Xavier Peter, age—now—thirty-four. He set sixteen fires in ten days out in St. Louis Park, nobody hurt, several houses damaged. We talked to his parents, and they say he’s out on the West Coast being an actor. They haven’t heard from him lately, and he doesn’t have a phone. Andi Manette treated him; he was a patient for two years. She didn’t like him much. He came on to her during a couple of therapy sessions.”
    “An actor?”
    “That’s what they say,” Sherrill said.
    “This guy we’re dealing with,” Lucas said, “he could be an actor. He likes games…”
    “One thing,” Black said. “Francis Xavier Peter is a blond and wore his hair long.”
    “Jesus: could be the guy. Does he look anything like the composite?” Lucas asked.
    “He has a round face, sort of German-country boy,” Sherrill said.
    “What you mean is, No ,” Lucas said. “He doesn’t look like the composite.”
    “Not too much,” she conceded.
    “Well, push it,” Lucas said.

15
    T HE VOICE WAS tense: “They’re getting close to you. You’ve got to move on.”
    Mail, standing in the litter of two decapitated mini-tower systems—he was switching out hard drives—sneered at the phone, and the distant personality at the end of it. “Say what you mean. You don’t mean, move on. You mean, kill them and dump them.”
    “I mean, get yourself out,” the voice said. “I didn’t think anything like this was going to happen…”
    “Bullshit,” Mail said. “You thought you were manipulating me. You were pushing my buttons.”
    He could hear the breathing on the other end—exasperation, desperation, anticipation? Mail would have enjoyed knowing. Someday, he thought, he’d figure the voice out. Then…“Besides, they’re nowhere near as close as you think. You just want me to get rid of them.”
    “Did you know that Andi Manette sent a message with that tape recording you let her make? Her aunt is dead—she’s been dead a long time. Her name was Lisa Farmer, and she lived on a farm. And they’re looking in Dakota County, at farmhouses, because that’s where they put you with that little cellular phone trick. You don’t