Naked Prey

office. He looked fine, but Lucas could take some thin comfort from Neil Mitford, who looked like a bad car-train accident. He was wearing jeans and a tattered tweed jacket over a black-and-gold Iowa Hawkeyes sweatshirt, and had lost his shoes somewhere—he wore gray-and-red woolen hunting socks. John McCord, the BCA superintendent, huddled in a corner in khakis and a sweater with a red-nosed reindeer on the chest. Rose Marie Roux was still among the missing.
    “Coffee?” Henderson asked cheerfully. “Wonder where Rose Marie is?”
    “Probably killed by the cold,” Lucas grumped. “Or run over by a car in the dark. Gimme about six sugars.”
    “Good to get up at this time, get going,” Henderson said. “You get a four-hour jump on everybody. You’re on them before they know what hit them.”
    “Unless you have a heart attack and die,” Lucas said.
    McCord had a sixteen-ounce Diet Pepsi in his coat pocket, his own source of caffeine. Mitford drained onecup of coffee in fifteen seconds, and poured another. The governor settled behind his desk and sipped. “What’s going on, and what do we do about it?”
    Lucas outlined the theory, upon which everyone agreed—that Sorrell had somehow learned who had killed his child, and had killed them in return.
    “That’d take some brass balls,” McCord said.
    “He might be like that,” Mitford said. “I did some research . . . ”
    Rose Marie slipped into the room, said, “Sorry—it was just so damn cold and dark,” and found a chair. Henderson gave her a one-minute update, and then turned back to Mitford. “You were saying?”
    “I pulled everything I could find on the guy. After he graduated from Cal Tech, he turned down a bunch of heavy-duty jobs and enlisted in the Army. He spent six years as an infantry and then a Special Forces officer. There are some hints that he had combat decorations, but there wasn’t a war going on, so . . . ”
    “So he did snoop-and-poops and maybe cut a few throats,” Henderson said. He seemed pleased with the snoop-and-poops and the throat cutting.
    “That’s what I think,” Mitford said.
    “So.” Henderson picked up a ballpoint pen and toyed with it, leaned way back, and asked the ceiling, “When do we take him? We have enough, I think.”
    “We should get the DNA back tomorrow morning,” Lucas said. “We could go tomorrow, but if anything else comes up, it wouldn’t hurt to wait until Monday.”
    Mitford seemed startled. “Monday?” He looked at Henderson. “We can’t wait until Monday.”
    Henderson was shaking his head and said, “Lucas, when I said when . . . I meant before breakfast, or after? We can’t wait until tonight, or tomorrow. Washington is killing us. Fifty states, you know, CBS . . . ”
    “Yeah, yeah, I know it.”
    “They want me to go over to Channel Three and do a segment at eleven o’clock,” Henderson said. “Then they’re switching out to Fargo for a segment with Washington. I want to be able to say that we’ve made an arrest, and I want to say something about what we think happened. If I do that, we’ll fuck the guy. Washington. I’d love to fuck him. Love it.” He turned in his chair, once all the way around, and then again, his pink tongue stuck on his bottom lip as if tasting the word fuck, his glasses glittering from the overhead lights. “Love to fuck him.”
    “It’d be good,” Mitford said. “And it’d be national.”
    Lucas began, “If we’re trying to build a case . . . ”
    “It doesn’t matter. Look, we’ve got X amount of information to arrest him with, and to get a DNA sample from him. Then we’ve got to wait a day or two to process his sample. So . . . why not grab him now?”
    “Just . . . ” Lucas looked at Rose Marie. “Doesn’t seem orderly.”
    “Can I get some of that coffee?” Rose Marie asked. “I talk better when I can see.”
    “Of course,” Henderson said. “Let me . . . ”
    “Lucas, everybody else is right and you’re wrong,” Rose Marie said as Henderson poured her a cup. “We’ve got two things going: a big crime and a big publicity problem. We can strangle the publicity problem before it gets out of control, and not do much harm to the criminal case.”
    “If we do hurt the criminal case,” Mitford said, “what we’ve done is, we’ve fucked up a case against a bright, hard-working guy who employs hundreds of Minnesotans, and who killed a couple of thugs who kidnapped and presumably