Rules of Prey

mirror and stuck her tongue out. “If anybody at the station saw me like this, they’d freak out. Makeup all over my face. My hair looks like the Wolf Man’s. My ass hurts. I don’t know . . .”
    “Yeah, well, let me in there, I have to shave.”
    She lifted an arm and looked at the dark stubble in her armpit. “So do I,” she said morosely.
     
    Lucas was ten minutes late for the meeting. Daniel frowned when he walked in, and pointed at the empty chair. Frank Lester, the deputy chief for investigations, sat directly opposite him. The other six chairs were occupied by robbery-homicide detectives, including the overweight head of the homicide division, Lyle Wullfolk, and his rail-thin assistant, Harmon Anderson.
    “We’re working out a schedule,” Daniel said. “We figure at least one guy ought to know everything that’s going on. Lyle’s got his division to run, so it’s gonna be Harmon here.”
    Daniel nodded at the assistant chief of homicide. Anderson was picking his teeth with a red plastic toothpick. He stopped just long enough to nod back. “A pleasure,” he grunted.
    “He won’t be running you, Lucas, you’ll be on your own,”Daniel said. “If you need to know something, Harmon’ll tell you if we got it.”
    “How’d it go with the media this morning?” Lucas asked.
    “They’re all over the place. Like lice. They wanted me on the morning show but I told them I had this meeting. So then they wanted to shoot the meeting. I told them to go fuck themselves.”
    “The mayor was on,” said Wullfolk. “He said we had some leads we’re working on and he’d expect to get the guy in the next couple of weeks.”
    “Fuckin’ idiot,” said Anderson.
    “Easy for you to say,” Daniel said gloomily. “You’re civil service.”
    “You got some ink,” said Anderson, squinting at Lucas.
    Lucas nodded and changed the subject. “What about the weapon from the property room?”
    Anderson stopped picking his teeth. “We run a list,” he said. “We got thirty-four people, cops and civilians, who might of took it. There are probably a few more we don’t know about. Found out the fucking janitors go in there all the time. I think they’re smoking some of the evidence. Everybody says he’s clean, of course. We got IAD looking into it.”
    “I want to talk to them, the thirty-four people,” Lucas said. “All at once. In a group. Get the union guy in here too.”
    “For what?” Wullfolk asked.
    “I’ll tell them that I want to know what happened to the gun, and the guy that tells me, I won’t turn him in. And that the chief will call off the IAD investigation and nothing more’ll happen. I’m going to tell them that if nobody talks to me, we’ll go ahead with the shoo-flies and sooner or later we’ll find out who it is and then we’ll prosecute the son of a bitch on accessory-to-murder and throw his ass in Stillwater.”
    Anderson shook his head. “I wouldn’t buy it, if I was the guy.”
    “You got a convincer?” asked Daniel.
    Lucas nodded. “I think so. I’ll outline how the interrogation will go and I’ll tell them that I won’t read them their rights or anything else, so even if they are prosecuted, the whole thing would be entrapment and the case would be thrown out. I think we could build it so the guy would buy it.”
    Anderson and Daniel looked at each other, and Anderson shrugged. “It’s worth a try. It could get us something fast. I’ll set something up for late afternoon. Try to get as many as I can. Four o’clock?”
    “Good,” Lucas said.
    “We’ve set up a data base in my office, we got a girl typing everything in and printing it out. Everybody working it gets a notebook with every piece of paper we develop, every interview,” Anderson said. “We’ll go over everything we know about these people. If there’s a connection or a pattern, we’ll find it. Everybody’s supposed to read the files every night. When you see something, tell me. We’ll put it in the file.”
    “What do we have so far?” asked Lucas.
    Anderson shook his head. “Not much. Personal data, some loose patterns, that sorta shit. Number one was Lucy Bell, a waitress, nineteen years old. Number two was a housewife, Shirley Morris, thirty-six. Number three was the artist that fought him off, Carla Ruiz. She’s thirty-two. Number four was this real-estate woman Lewis, forty-six. One was married, the other three were not. One of the other three, the artist, is divorced.