Rules of Prey

rookie. Case told him this was how it’s done on the street. Gettin’ knob-jobs in alleyways.”
    Lucas shook his head.
    “Right on the street, in daylight,” said the fat cop.
    The last horse was pushed into the back of the gate, locked, and there was a second-long pause before the gate banged open and the announcer called “They’re all in line . . . and they’re off, Pembroke Dancer breaks on the outside, followed by . . .”
    Dancer ran away from the pack, two lengths going into the turn, four lengths at the bottom of the stretch, eight lengths crossing the wire.
    “Holy shit,” the fat cop said reverently. “I won six hundred bucks.”
    Lucas stood up. “I’m going,” he said. He was staring atthe tote board, calculating. When he was satisfied, he turned to the other two. “You coming behind? I’ll drive slow.”
    “No, no, we’re all done,” said the fat cop. “Thanks, Lucas.”
    “You ought to quit now,” said Lucas. “The rest of these races are junk. You can’t figure them. And, Bucky?”
    “Yeah?” The fat cop looked up from his winning ticket.
    “You won’t forget to tell the IRS about the six hundred?”
    “Of course not,” the cop said, offended. Lucas grinned and walked away and the fat cop muttered, “In a pig’s eye.” He looked at his ticket again and then noticed that the woman with the violet eyes was hurrying after Lucas. She caught him just before he got inside, and the fat cop saw Lucas grin as they walked together into the building.
    “Look at this,” he said to the thin cop. But the thin cop was looking at the tote board and his lips were moving quietly. The fat cop looked at his partner and said, “What?”
    The thin cop put up a hand to hold off the question, his lips still moving. Then they stopped and he turned and looked after Lucas.
    “What?” said the fat cop, looking in the same direction. Lucas and the woman with the violet eyes had disappeared.
    “I don’t know much about this horse-race bullshit,” said the thin cop, “but if I’m reading the tote board right, this exacta payoff, Davenport took down twenty-two thousand, two hundred and fifty bucks.”
     
    The office of the chief of police was on the first floor of City Hall, in a corner. Windows dominated the two walls that faced the street. The other two walls were covered with framed photographs, some in color, some in black and white, stretching back in time to the forties. Daniel with his family. With the last six Minnesota governors. With five of the last six senators. With a long and anonymous chain of faces that all looked vaguely the same, faces that took up space at chicken dinners for major politicians. Directly behind the chief was the shield of the Minneapolis Police Departmentand a plaque honoring cops who had been killed in the line of duty.
    Lucas sprawled in the leather chair that sat squarely in front of the chief’s desk. He was surprised, though he tried not to show it. It had been a while since anything surprised him, other than women.
    “Pissed off?” Quentin Daniel leaned over his glass desktop, watching Lucas. Daniel looked so much like a police chief that a number of former political enemies, who were now doing something else, made the mistake of thinking he got the job on his face. They were wrong.
    “Yeah. Pissed off. Mostly just surprised.” Lucas did not particularly like Daniel, but thought he might be the smartest man on the force. He would have been surprised—again—to know that the chief thought precisely the same about him.
    Daniel half-turned toward the windows, his head cocked, still watching.
    “You can see why,” he said.
    “You thought I did it?”
    “A couple of people in homicide thought you were worth looking at,” said Daniel.
    “You better start at the beginning,” Lucas said.
    Daniel nodded, pushed his chair away from his desk, stood up, and wandered to a wall of photographs. He inspected the face of Hubert Humphrey as though he were looking for new blemishes.
    “Two weeks ago, our man made a run at a St. Paul woman, an artist named Carla Ruiz,” he said as he continued his inspection of Humphrey’s face. “She managed to fight him off. When St. Paul got there, the sergeant in charge found her looking at a note. It was one of these rules he’s leaving behind.”
    “I haven’t heard a thing about this Ruiz,” Lucas said.
    The chief turned and drifted back to his chair, no hurry, his hands in his pockets. “Yeah. Well,