Mind Prey

back. “They were only here for a minute. He was a big guy, though. Sort of mean-looking, like he could fight. Not the kind Gloria usually came back with.”
    “What type was that?”
    “Bums, mostly,” Crosby said flatly. “No-goods who never did anything.” Then, confidentially, to Sloan: “You know, Gloria’s crazy. She got it from her father’s side of the family. Several crazy people there—though, of course, I didn’t know it until it was too late.”
    “We need the names of all her friends,” Lucas said. “Friends or relatives that she might turn to. Anybody. Doctors.”
    “I don’t know anything like that. Well, I know a doctor.”
    “There’s a reward for information leading to an arrest,” Lucas said. “Fifty thousand.”
    “Oh, really?” Marilyn Crosby brightened. “Well, I could go get the things she left here. Or maybe you’d like to come up and look in her room. You’d know better than I do what you’re looking for.”
    “That’d be good,” Sloan said.
     
    G LORIA C ROSBY’S BEDROOM was an eleven-foot-square cubicle with a window in one wall, a bed, and a small pine desk and matching dresser. The dresser was empty, but the desk was stuffed with school papers, music tapes, rubber bands, broken pencils, crayons, rock ’n’ roll concert badges, drawings, calendars, pushpins.
    “Usual stuff,” Sloan said. He went through it all. Lucas helped for a few minutes, then found Marilyn Crosby in the kitchen, drinking from the wine bottle, and got the name of Gloria’s last doctor. He looked the name up in the phone book, noted the address, and called Sherrill, who was doing phone work on the patients they’d uncovered at the university. “Anything you can get,” Lucas said.
    When he got back to the bedroom, he lay down on Gloria Crosby’s bed, a narrow, sagging single-width that was too short by six inches. A Mr. Happy Tooth poster hung on the wall opposite the bed. “Hi! I’m Gloria!” was written in careful block letters on the cartoon molar. The molar was doing a root dance on a red line that might have been an infected gum.
    “Three names so far,” Sloan said, nodding at the pile of junk on the desk. He was halfway through it. “From high school.”
    “We’ve got a better shot at the pharmacy. She’ll have to go in there sooner or later,” Lucas said. He sat up. “We should check the places she was hospitalized and get the names of patients who overlapped with her, and run them against Manette’s patient list.”
    “Anderson’s already doing that,” Sloan said.
    “Yeah?” Lucas dropped back on the bed and closed his eyes.
    After a minute, Sloan asked, “Taking a nap?”
    “Thinking,” Lucas said.
    “What do you think?”
    “I think we’re wasting our time, Sloan.”
    “What else is there to do?”
    “I don’t know.”
     
    A S THEY WERE leaving, Marilyn Crosby leaned in the kitchen doorway. She held a twelve-ounce tumbler of what looked like water, but she sipped like wine. “Find anything?”
    “No.”
    “If, uh, my daughter got in touch—you know, if she wanted more money or something—and if I put you in touch with her, who’d get the reward?”
    “If you put us in touch and we got the information from her, you’d get it,” Lucas said. “We know she knows who it is. All we have to do is ask her.”
    “Leave a number where I can get you quick,” Marilyn Crosby said. She took a sip from the glass. “If she calls, I’ll get in touch. For her own good.”
    “Right,” Lucas said.
     
    S LOAN TOOK THE wheel again, and Lucas slumped in the passenger seat and stared out the window as they dropped past the wooded lawns and headed toward the gate.
    “Listen,” he said finally, “have you met the new PR chick? I only talked to her a couple of times.”
    “Yeah. I met her,” Sloan said.
    “Is she decent?”
    Sloan shrugged. “She’s okay. Why?”
    “I’d like to get a story written about my company, but I don’t want to go around and ask somebody to do it. I’d like to get the PR chick to talk the idea around, and have the TV people come to me.”
    Sloan said doubtfully, “I don’t know, it’s a private business and all. What’re you thinking?”
    “This guy, whoever he is, is fairly intelligent, right?”
    “Right.”
    “And he plays computer games. I’d be willing to bet that he’s a computer freak. Ninety percent of male gamers are,” Lucas said. He was staring sightlessly out the window, thinking of Ice, the