Rules of Prey

looked at it. I wouldn’t swear to it in a court, but I think he just might’ve gone down to have lunch. He hadn’t eaten lunch yet.”
    “Hmph.”
    “So? What do we do?”
    Lucas raked his hair with his fingertips and thought about the Fuckup. It shouldn’t influence him, he knew, but it did.
    “Leave him,” Lucas said. “I just hope no dead bodies show up under a counter in a skyway shop.”
    “Good,” the surveillance chief said in relief. If they’d had to grab Vullion because the surveillance had screwed up, somebody could wind up working the tow-truck detail in February.
     
    The game was done; the final night had been one of discussion, not play. It was deemed a great success. A few touches might be desirable . . .
    Lee had been mauled by Meade’s well-protected troops dug in along Pipe Creek. Meade himself had taken severe casualties. The three days of fighting were as confusing and bloody as the Wilderness or Shiloh. The worst of it had fallen on Pickett: as the first into Gettysburg, his division had held the high ground just south of town. In the pursuit of the Union forces as they retreated on Washington, Pickett’s division had been last in the route of march. On the final day at Pipe Creek, Lee had thrown Pickett’s relatively fresh division into the center of the line. It died there. The Union held the ground and the Confederates reeled toward a hasty recrossing of the Potomac. The southern tide was going out.
    “Something’s changed,” Elle said to Lucas. They were standing near the exit, away from the others. Elle spoke in a low voice.
    Lucas nodded, his voice dropping to match hers. “We think we know who he is. Maybe it was your prayers: a gift from God. An accident. Fate. Whatever.”
    “Why haven’t you arrested him?”
    Lucas shrugged. “We know who he is, but we can’t prove it. Not quite. We’re waiting for him to make a move.”
    “Is he a man of intelligence?”
    “I really don’t know.” He glanced around the room, dropped his voice another notch. “A lawyer.”
    “Be careful,” Elle said. “This is galloping to a conclusion. He’s been playing a game, and if he’s a real player, I’m sure he feels it too. He may go for a coup de maître. ”
    “I don’t see that one’s available to him. We’ll just grind him down.”
    “Perhaps,” she said, touching his coat sleeve. “But remember, his idea of a win may not be a matter of avoiding capture. He’s a lawyer: perhaps he sees himself winning in court. Walking off the board with impunity after an acquittal. This is a very tricky position all the way around.”
     
    Lucas left St. Anne’s at eight o’clock, drove restlessly home, punched up his word processor, sat in a pool of light, and tried to put the finishing touches on the Everwhen scenario. The opening prose must be lush, must hint of bare-breasted maidens with great asses, sword fights in dark tunnels, long trips, and hale-and-hearty good friends—everything a fifteen-year-old suburban computer freak doesn’t have and yearns for. And it had to do all that while scrupulously avoiding pornography or anything else that would offend the kid’s mother.
    Lucas didn’t have it in him. He sighed and shut down the computer, tossed the word-processing disk into his software file, and walked down to the library and sat in the dark to think.
    The missing two hours worried him. It could have been anaccident. And if the maddog had slipped away deliberately, why had he done it? Where had he gone? How and when did he spot the watchers? He hadn’t gone out to kill—he wouldn’t have his equipment, unless he carried it around in his briefcase, and he wasn’t that stupid.
    The trip to the antiques shop on the previous day was also worrisome. True, the maddog had stopped first at the computer store and picked up a case of paper. But Lucas remembered a half-case of paper sitting under the printer. He really didn’t need any more. Not badly enough to make a special trip for it. Then he’d gone into the antiques shop, and one of the watchers, who had been passing on the opposite side of the street, saw the shop owner take the fishing lure out of the window. That had been confirmed after the maddog left, when Sloan had been sent in to pump the woman.
    An antique fishing lure. Why? The maddog’s apartment was virtually bare of ornament, so Lucas couldn’t believe he’d bought it for himself.
    A gift? But for whom? As far as they could tell, he had no