Mind Prey

where he lives?”
    “No, but he was with this girl, and we were at her house, so she knows him.”
    “How sure are you?”
    “I wouldn’t be sure except for his eyes? The eyes are the same. The mouth’s different? But the eyes are right? And he was really a gamer, he was a good dungeon master, he knew everything. But he was scary? Really wired? And something this girl said made me think he’d been in treatment?”
    Lucas looked at his watch. “Where are you? I’d like to come over and talk.” He wrote it down.
    “Sloan, c’mon,” Lucas said.
    The narrow man got his jacket, a new one, a new shade of brown. “Where’re we going?”
    Lucas explained as they walked out. “She had a sound about her,” Lucas said. “I don’t think it’s bullshit.”
    The woman lived in a student apartment complex across I-494 from the university. Lucas put the gray city Plymouth in a fire zone and they went inside, following a blonde co-ed in a short skirt and bowling jacket. They all stopped at the elevator, Sloan and Lucas looking at the girl from the corners of their eyes; she was very pretty, with round blue eyes and a retroussé nose that might have been natural. The girl studied the numbers at the top of the elevator doors with rapt attention. Nobody said anything. The elevator came, they all got on, and all three watched the numbers at the top of the door.
    The woman got off at three, turned, smiled, and walked away. The doors closed and Sloan said, “I think she smiled at me.”
    “I beg your pardon,” Lucas said. “I believe it was me she smiled at.”
    “Bullshit. You stepped in front of it, that’s all.”
     
    C INDY M C P HERSON, THE gamer, was a confused Wisconsin milkmaid. She was a large girl with a perfect complexion and a sweet country smile, who dressed in black from head to foot, and wore a seven-pointed star around her neck on a leather shoestring.
    “The more I looked at the picture, the more I was sure it was him,” she said. She sat on the edge of the Salvation Army couch, using her hands to talk: Lucas had the impression that under the black dress was a former high school basketball jock. “There’s something about his face,” she said. “It’s like a coyote’s—he’s got those narrow eyes and the cheekbones. He could’ve been pretty sexy, but it was like there was something…missing. He just didn’t connect. I think he connected with Gloria, though. She was pawing him.”
    “This Gloria—what’s her last name?”
    She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve seen her around with people, we hang out over there, but she’s not a good friend of mine. A couple of years ago, there were some raves over, like, in the industrial park up 280? That’s where I met her. Then I’d see her over in Dinkytown, and a couple of months ago I saw her and she said they were starting a game. So I went up and he was the dungeon master.”
    “Can you show us the place?” Sloan asked.
    “Sure. And Gloria’s name is on the mailbox. She checked her mailbox when we were going up the stairs and I saw that it said Gloria something.”
     
    D INKYTOWN IS AN island of well-worn commerce off the campus at the University of Minnesota, two-and three-story buildings selling clothes and fast food and compact discs and pharmaceuticals and Xerox copies. They were backing into a parking space when McPherson pointed across the street and said, “There she is. That’s Gloria. And that’s her building.”
    Gloria was a thin, hunch-shouldered woman, dressed, like McPherson, in head-to-toe black; like McPherson, she wore an amulet. But while McPherson had that perfect, open face and peaches-and-cream complexion, Gloria was dark, saturnine, her face closed and wary like a fox’s.
    “Wait here, or go get a sandwich or something,” Lucas said to McPherson. “We might have some more questions for you.”
    He and Sloan scrambled through the traffic and hurried through the apartment house door. Gloria was just locking her mailbox and held a green electric-bill envelope in her teeth.
    “Gloria?” Lucas was out front.
    She took the envelope out and looked at them. “Yes?”
    “We’re police officers, we’d…
    “Like your help,” Sloan finished.
     
    G LORIA C ROSBY MIGHT have been pretty, but she wasn’t: she was unkempt, a little dirty, her face was formed in a frown. She reluctantly took them to her apartment on the top floor. “Been working on a thesis, haven’t had much time to clean,” she said.