Mind Prey

said. “But we need to get on this right now. I mean, right now. We’re running out of time.”
    “But I really don’t think whoever it is would call from his own phone.”
    “They might, if they think they know what’s being monitored,” Lucas said. “And when the asshole needs to get in touch with them, he’s got to call. We need to know about anything anomalous—odd rings, cryptic phone calls, funny-sounding wrong numbers, anything.”
    Roux sighed, spread her hands on her desk, looked at them. “I knew there’d be days like this,” she said.
    “You gotta do it,” Lucas said.
    “All right,” Roux said. “I’ll call Larry Baxter—he’d sign a warrant on the Little Old Lady Who Lived in a Shoe.”
    “Tonight,” Lucas said. “Get Anderson to call the phone company and get a list of all their numbers, on every single one of the family members. Then get a guy over to the phone company and have him sit there and listen.”
    “We’re running out of guys,” Lester said.
    “Pull some uniforms,” Lucas said. “We don’t need Einstein over there.”
     
    O NE HUNDRED AND forty-four vans were stopped along I-694 after Mail’s call to Lucas. Two men were held briefly while checks were run on them, and then they were released.
    “You know what he was doing?” Lucas said, looking up at a wall map in the Homicide office. He pointed at the top of the map, at the belt highway. “I bet he’s on a secondary road driving parallel to the highway. I bet he was on County Road C, knowing that if we’re tracking him, we’d be looking on 694.”
    “So…that’s gonna be tough,” Lester said, looking at the map. “We’ll have to try to flood a whole area, instead of just a road, or a street.”
    “We won’t get him that way,” Lucas said. “He’ll keep changing up on us.”
    Lucas was just ready to leave again when Elle called back. “I’m pushing the button on my fax. You should have a fax coming in.”
    A second later, Lucas heard the fax phone ring once, and then the fax machine started buzzing at the other end of the office: “It’s coming now.”
    “Okay,” she said. “Now. If it’s the Bible, it’s Psalms, of course.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “Psalms is the only book that has chapter numbers as high as the ones he cited,” she said. “If they’re not from Psalms, then it’s just a bunch of gibberish. It could be anything.”
    “But what if they’re all from Psalms?” Lucas asked.
    “This is what he said,” Elle intoned. “He said, ‘A little blank verse’ and then the numbers. And here are the first three verses. These are from the King James Version, by the way—I think he’d probably be using one, since I doubt that he’s religious, and if he’s not, he’s probably got a James.”
    “All right. But the pope’ll be pissed.” There was silence on the other end and Lucas said, “Sorry.”
    She said, “Why don’t you go get that fax?”
    “Just a minute.” He put the phone down, got the fax, and walked back. “Ready.”
    “Psalm 112:10,” she said. Lucas followed along on the fax as she read, “ The wicked shall see it, and be grieved; he shall gnash with his teeth, and melt away: the desire of the wicked shall perish.
    “Psalm 4:4: Stand in awe and sin not: commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still. Selah.
    “Psalm 147:9: He giveth to the beast his food, and to the young ravens which cry. ”
    There was a rustling of paper and Elle said, “Got that?”
    “Yeah. But what is it?” He studied the Psalms but found no pattern at all.
    “I couldn’t see anything at first. I kept thinking that the verses must relate to his condition, or the condition of the women. I thought he must’ve made a psychotic connection between them. These are powerful images—gnashing teeth, ravens and beasts, the wicked and the grieved. The problem is, I couldn’t relate them to anything. There was no thread.”
    “Elle? What are you leading up to?” Lucas asked.
    “A silly question,” the nun said. “It’s so silly that I don’t want to explain it unless the answer is yes.”
    “So ask.”
    “Is there anybody named Crosby involved with this whole thing?”
    After a moment of silence, Lucas said, “Elle, we’re getting ready to plaster the papers and the TV newscasts with pictures of a woman named Gloria Crosby. She knows our man. How did you know?”
    Elle laughed softly and said, “I thought it was so stupid.”
    “What?”
    “The