Mind Prey

felt-tip pen. It could be John. There’s something not quite right about the chin line.”
    Lucas nodded. He knew he was right. “Okay. Does the name Gloria Crosby mean anything to you?”
    “Gloria?” Rehder said. “Gloria was an aide—Gloria worked for us.”
    Lucas closed his eyes. Gotcha.

22
    A NDERSON, HARRIED, HIS hands full of paper, his sharecropper’s face pickled in a permanent squint, said, “Sloan said to tell you he’s bringing the car. Dunn’s moving: you gotta get out of here.”
    “Stay on the Mail thing,” Lucas said, pulling on his jacket.
    Anderson ticked it off on his fingers. “We’re tracking his friends, to see if anybody’s run into him since the bridge, if anybody has a name. We’re trying to figure out who the body really was, but that will be a problem. It has to be somebody at the hospital who had dental care, who was close to Mail’s size and age, and who was out at the same time, but there are hundreds of people who fit, all of them are mentally ill, and a lot of them are impossible to find. We’re trying to find Mail’s parents—his mother and stepfather. We think they might have split up. We know they moved to the Seattle area, but one of the stepfather’s friends heard they split out there, and the mother might have remarried.”
    “What about decent photos of the guy?”
    “We’ve got photos coming from the hospital and the DMV, but they’re all years old,” Anderson said.
    “Yeah, but with something real to work from, we can age him. Get them over to the company, if you need to. They were doing some good stuff this morning.”
    “Okay. But you need to talk with the chief about whether to release them to the press. If he’s as close to the edge as you say he is…”
    “Yeah. I’ll be back. Don’t do anything until we talk about it. And if anything breaks— anything —call me. I’ll be on the phone.”
     
    W HEN L UCAS RAN out, Sloan was walking up to the building, carrying a baseball cap.
    “Where is he? Dunn?”
    “He’s coming through town right now,” Sloan said over his shoulder as he turned and headed back into the street. He had a gray, four-year-old Chevy Caprice sitting in traffic with its engine running. “We’ve got to motivate.”
    The radios they’d gotten from the feds were standard: Lucas called in, checking the identification protocols, and was told that zebra is underway; the subject has been acquired.
    “That means they can see the car from the chopper,” Lucas said.
    “Fuckin’ wonderful,” Sloan said.
    “It’s better than the ten-four bullshit,” Lucas said. “I never did understand that.”
    “Did you bring the maps?”
    “Yeah, and I got one for the Hudson area, just in case.” Lucas took the maps out of his pocket. The radio burped:
    Approaching White Bear Avenue Interchange.
    “This is really fucked, you know?” Lucas said. “I’m sitting here thinking that it’s a little too strange.”
    As they paced Dunn’s car through the city and into the ’burbs, Lucas told Sloan about the identification of John Mail. “Haven’t pinned him yet,” Lucas said.
    “If he’s the guy, we will,” Sloan said confidently. “Once we get a face…”
    “I hope,” Lucas said.
    They were in the countryside now, and white puffy clouds cast long shadows on new-cut hay, the last cut of the year. The beans and corn, as far as Lucas could tell, were about as good as they ever got in Minnesota, the corn showing stripes of gold along the edge of the leaves, the beans already brown and drying. A few miles out of St. Paul, an ultra-light aircraft circled over the highway, the pilot plainly visible in his leathers and black helmet. Further on, toward the St. Croix River, a half-dozen brightly colored hot-air balloons drifted east toward Wisconsin.
    And the radio said, He’s off at 95…he’s back on, heading east.
    This is five; we got him coming in.
    Dumbo: Everybody in position, now.
    “Get off at Highway 15,” Lucas said, pointing at an exit sign. “Go north, find a place to turn around and start back. We don’t want to sit anywhere. If Mail is out roaming around and sees us, he’d recognize me.”
    Sloan took the off-ramp, paused at the top, and started north on the blacktopped road. “Van coming up from behind,” Sloan said.
    Lucas slid down in his seat and Sloan took the first left. The van stayed on the main road. Sloan, looking in the rearview mirror, said, “Blonde. Woman.” He did a U-turn and started