Mind Prey

she whispered to the wall, “Be nice to him. Maybe he won’t hurt you.”
    “I…can’t be,” Andi whispered. “When he takes me out there, something turns off.”
    “Try,” Grace pleaded. “If he keeps beating you, you’ll die.”
    “I’ll try,” Andi said. As the steps got closer, she whispered, “Head down. No eye contact.”

24
    R OUX HAD HER feet up in the half-dark of her office. She was looking pensively out at the night street, the glow of her cigarette like a firefly.
    “I made nice with Stillwater,” she said without turning her head.
    “Thanks.” Lucas popped the top on a Diet Coke and sat down. “What about Dunn? Are the feds gonna charge him with anything?”
    “They’re making noises, but they won’t. Dunn’s already talking with Washington,” she said. She blew a smoke ring toward her curtains.
    “We should have known that it was too easy—that Mail was jerking us around,” Lucas said. “By the way, I don’t know if Lester told you, but Crosby was killed before she ever got to the loft. We didn’t kill her.”
    “He told me. You looked great on the tube, by the way. You almost might’ve been telling the truth, about figuring out the trap business,” Roux said.
    “The feds are going along,” Lucas said.
    “Not much choice. If they don’t, they look like fools.” Roux turned to tamp the cigarette out in an ashtray, fumbled another one out of the pack, and lit it with a plastic lighter. “Are you sure we’re looking for this Mail guy?”
    “Yeah. Pretty sure,” Lucas said.
    “But you don’t want to go out with it.”
    “I’m afraid it might trigger him. If we put his actual face on the air, he’d have to run for it. He wouldn’t leave anybody behind.”
    “Huh.” Roux tapped ashes off the cigarette. “I could use something that would look like progress.”
    “I don’t have anything like that.”
    “Mail’s name is gonna get out,” she said.
    “Yeah, but maybe not for a day or two. I don’t see it going much longer than that.”
    “I wonder if she’s still alive. Manette.”
    “I think so,” Lucas said. “When he kills her, we won’t hear from him any more. There wouldn’t be any point. As long as he’s fucking with us, as long as he’s calling me, she’s alive. And I think one of the girls.”
    “Christ, I’m tired,” she said.
    “Tell me,” Lucas said. He yawned. “I’m sleeping at the company tonight. On a cot.”
    “Who’s with you?”
    “Intelligence guys. And Sloan is over there tonight.”
    “You still think he’ll come in?”
    “If he’s watching TV, he might. He’ll be curious. And in the meantime, we’re trying to nail down his friends.”
     
    A FEW CLOUDS had come through in the late evening and dropped just enough rain to clear the air. Now they’d gone, and the brighter stars were visible through the ground lights. Lucas got the car and cut across town to University Avenue. He noticed a van in his rearview mirror and thought about it: there were tens of thousands of vans in the Twin Cities. If Mail showed up at the company during the day, and they flooded the area with squads, as they were planning, how many vans would be in the net? A hundred? A hundred might be manageable. But what if it were five hundred, or a thousand?
    Maybe the techies at the office had some kind of statistics software that would tell him how many vans he could expect in, say, a ten-minute period in a square mile of the city. Would the density of vans be higher in an industrial area than in a suburb?
    He was still mulling it over when he pulled into a Subway shop off University. He could see two young sandwich makers through the front window, both red-haired, maybe twins. Nobody else was in the shop. He yawned, went inside. The place smelled of pickles and relish; the clean, watery odor of lettuce mingled with the yeast smell of bread.
    “Give me a foot-long BMT on white, everything but the jalapeños,” he said.
    One of the redheads had disappeared into the back. The other started working on the sandwich. Lucas leaned on the counter and yawned again and turned his head. A van was parked across the street. As Lucas turned his head, the taillight flickered. Somebody inside the dark vehicle had stepped on the brake pedal. The van looked like the one he’d seen in his rearview mirror.
    “Hey, kid,” Lucas said, turning back to the sandwich man. “I’m a cop and I’ve got to make a cop call. I don’t want you to look up while