Mind Prey

flooding the area with unmarked cars, we’d spot him. We’re still processing license numbers.”
    “You’re lying, asshole,” Mail shouted at the television screen. Then he laughed, pointed at the screen with a beer bottle. “You got lucky, motherfucker.”
    Davenport looked out at him, unblinking. Behind Davenport, cops swarmed over the Bit & Bridle storefront. He missed some of what Davenport had said, and picked up on, “…we’ll have to wait for the Medical Examiner’s report on Gloria Crosby. She may have been up there for quite a while. We don’t think he’d risk confronting us.”
    “You’re fuckin’ lying,” Mail shouted. He jumped out of the chair and punched the TV off, sat down, bounced twice, picked up the remote, and punched it back on.
    This was not right: he’d pulled them into Stillwater with the phony verses—he’d known that they’d look at Stillwater, but they wouldn’t have gone into the city when Dunn was just outside it. They would’ve stayed with Dunn. Mail had been in Stillwater in the early morning hours, just after his first call to Dunn, and there’d been no cops anywhere. Unmarked cars, bullshit. He would have noticed.
    But he worried about his plates: were they on a list somewhere?
    The talking head had moved on: Davenport was gone, and the news program had gone to a room full of computer cubicles, and a group of young people gathered around a monitor. There was an air of urgency among them, like a war room.
    The reporter was saying, “…is also the owner of a company that makes police and security-oriented computer training software. He has placed those resources at the command of the department, for the duration of the hunt for Andi Manette and her children. A working group of gaming and software experts anticipated the kidnapper’s moves, including the possibility of a booby trap…”
    What?
    “…believe they are closing in on the kidnapper or kidnappers…”
    “That’s bullshit,” Mail said. But as he watched the video of the group crouched over their screens, he envied them. Good equipment, good group. They were all dressed informally, and two of the men were holding oversized coffee mugs. They probably all went out at night for pizza and beer and laughed.
    The reporter was saying, “…but everybody just calls her by her last name, Ice.” A startlingly attractive young woman with a punk haircut and a nose ring grinned out at Mail and said, “We’ve almost had him twice. Almost. And it’s really a rush. I never worked with the cops before—I mean, except for Lucas—and it’s pretty interesting. Totally better’n programming some pinball game or something. Totally.”
    “Do you think you’ll get him?” the reporter asked.
    Ice nodded. “Oh, yeah, if the cops don’t get him first ’cause of some routine f——mistake.” She’d been about to say fuck-up , Mail thought. And he liked her. “Right now, over there”—she pointed at two women huddled over keyboards—“we’re keying in everything we know about the guy, and we know quite a bit. We include a list of all the possible suspects, you know, like profiles of previous offenders from the police department, Andi Manette’s patients, and so on. Not too long from now, we’ll push a button and some names’ll come out, cross-referenced by the other things we know. I’d bet my [beep] that our guy’s name’s like totally on the list.”
    When the story ended, Mail went into the kitchen and pulled out a phone book, looked up Davenport’s company. He found it on University Avenue, in Minneapolis, down in the old warehouse and rail yard district west of Highway 280. Huh. Probably cops all over the place.
    Back in the front room, a different talking head was going on about a troop movement in the Middle East, and Mail picked up the remote and surfed.
    Ice came up again—Channel Three. “The guy has shown a certain crude intelligence, so we think it’s possible that he wore a wig or colored his hair during the actual attack. One of the witnesses mentioned that his hair didn’t look quite right. If he’s really dark-haired, he’d look more like this…”
    The TV went to a composite. Mail was riveted: the computer composite didn’t look exactly like him, but it was close enough. And they knew about the van, and about the gaming.
    He nibbled nervously on a thumbnail. Maybe these people really did amount to something.
    This Ice chick: she was as good as Andi Manette. He’d like