Naked Prey

she picked it up, listened for one second, then dropped it back on the hook. “Governor just came through the front door.”
    G OVERNOR E LMER H ENDERSON was six feet tall and willowy, with lightly gelled blond hair fading to gray, long expressive hands, and watery blue eyes. He wore narrow, gold-rimmed glasses that gave him a scholarly look, and conservative gray, blue, or black suits handmade in London, over handmade English shoes.
    Henderson’s clan had money and a history in Minnesota politics, but Elmer hadn’t been expected to carry the family banner. He had, in fact, always been the family weenie, with a whiff of sexual difference hanging around him from his college and law-school days.
    He’d been expected to spend his life as a second-stringer in the boardrooms of large Minnesota corporations, while his two brothers grew up to be governors and senators and maybe presidents. But one of the brothers turned to cocaine and multiple divorce, and the other got drunk and powered his antique wooden Chris Craft under a dock and made a quadriplegic of himself. Elmer, by default, was chosen to soldier on.
    As it happened, he’d found in his soul a taste for power and a talent for intrigue. He’d created a cabal of conservative Democratic state legislators that had decapitated the Democratic Party machine, and then had taken it over. He’d maneuvered that victory into a nomination for governor. A little more than a year into his first term, he looked good for a second.
    Henderson was also a northern Catholic conservative Democrat, in his mid-forties, nice-looking, with an attractive wife and two handsome if slightly robotic children, one of each gender, who never smoked dope or rode skateboards or got tattooed or visibly pierced—although a local talk show host had publicly alleged that Henderson’seighteen-year-old daughter had two clitorises. That, even if true, could hardly be held against Henderson. If the party should choose a southern Protestant liberal for president, and needed some balance on the ticket . . . well, who knew what might happen?
    H ENDERSON CAME IN in a rush, banging into Roux’s office without knocking, trailed by the odor of Bay Rum and his executive assistant, who smelled like badly metabolized garlic. They were an odd couple, almost always together, the slender aristocrat and his Igor, Neil Mitford. Mitford was short, burly, dark-haired, badly dressed, and constantly worried. He looked like a bartender and, in his college days, had been a good one—he had a near-photographic memory for faces and names.
    “Has Custer County called yet?” Henderson asked Roux, without preamble.
    “Not yet. We’re not officially in it,” Roux said.
    The governor turned to Lucas: “This is what you were hired for. Fix this. Get up there, let the regular BCA guys do their thing, let the sheriff do his thing, but I’m going to lean on you. All right?”
    Lucas nodded. “Yes.”
    “Just so that everybody is on the same page,” Mitford said. He’d picked up a crystal paperweight from one of Rose Marie’s trophy shelves, and was tossing it in the air like a baseball. “This is a murder, not a lynching. We’ll challenge the word lynching as soon as anybody says it.”
    “They’re going to say it,” Roux said from behind her desk.
    “We know that,” Henderson said. “But we need to kill it, the use of the word.”
    “Not a lynching,” Mitford repeated. To Lucas: “Thesooner we can find anything that supports that view, the better off we’ll be. Any little shred. Get it through to me, and I’ll spin it out to the TV folks.”
    “Gotta knock it down quick,” Henderson said. “Can’t let it grow.”
    Lucas nodded again. “I better take off,” he said. “The quicker we get up there—”
    “Go,” said Henderson. “Knock it down, the word, then the crime.”
    Roux added, “I’ll call you in the air, as soon as Custer County calls in. I’ll get the BCA down here to coordinate you with the guys out of Bemidji.”
    “All right,” Lucas said. “See ya.”
    And as Lucas was going out the door, Henderson called after him, “Great briefcase.”
    O N HIS WAY to Del’s house, Lucas called Weather at the hospital, was told that she’d just gone down to the locker room. He left a message with her secretary: he’d call with a motel number when he was on the ground.
    Del lived a mile east and north of Lucas, in a neighborhood of post-war ramblers and cottages, all modified and