Rules of Prey

entering a convent.
    “Are you sure?”
    “Yes. I have a vocation.”
     
    Years later, and two days after Lucas had killed his first man as a police officer, she called him. She was a shrink of sorts, she said. Could she help? No, not really, but he would like to see her. He took her to the ice-cream shop. Professor of psychology, she said. Fascinating. Watching minds work.
    Did she have a vocation? Lucas wondered. Or was it her face, the cross that she bore? He couldn’t ask, but when they left the shop she took his arm and smiled and said, “I have a vocation, Lucas.”
    A year later, he sold his first game and it was a hit. The Star-Tribune did a feature story about it and she called himagain. She was a game player, she said. There was a games group at the college that regularly got together . . .
    After that, he saw her virtually every week. Elle and another nun, a grocer and a bookie, both from St. Paul, a defense attorney from Minneapolis, and a student or two from St. Anne’s or the University of Minnesota made up a regular war-gaming group. They met in the gym, played-in an old unused room off what had been a girls’ locker room. They furnished the room with a half-dozen chairs, a Ping-Pong table for the gaming maps, a used overhead light donated by a pool parlor, and a bad stereo that Lucas got on the street.
    They met on Thursdays. They were currently working through Lucas’ grandest creation, a replay of the Battle of Gettysburg that he would never be able to sell commercially. It was simply too complex. He’d had to program a portable computer to figure results.
    Elle was General Lee.
    Lucas parked the Porsche just down the hill from Albertus Magnus Hall and walked through the falling leaves up the hill toward the entrance. As he reached the bottom of the steps, she came out. The face was the same; so were the eyes, grave and gray, but always with a spark of humor.
    “He can’t stop,” she told him as they strolled down the sidewalk. “The maddog falls into a category that cop shrinks call the sadistic killer. He’s doing it for the pleasure of it. He’s not hearing commands from God, he’s not being ordered by voices. He’s driven, all right, but he’s not insane in the sense that he’s out of control. He is very much in control, in the conventional sense of the word. He is aware of what he’s doing and what the penalties are. He makes plans and provides for contingencies. He may be quite intelligent.”
    “How does he pick his victims?”
    She shrugged. “Could be a completely adventitious encounter. Maybe he uses the phone book. But most likely he sees them personally, and whether he realizes it or not, he’s probably picking a type. There may well have been an encounter of some kind when he was young, with his mother,with a female friend of his mother’s . . . somebody whose sexual identity has become fixed in his mind.”
    “These women are small and dark—dark hair, dark eyes. One is a Mexican-American . . .”
    “Exactly. So when he encounters one of these types, she somehow becomes fixed in his mind. Why it’s that particular one, when there are so many possibilities, I just don’t know. In any case, after he’s chosen her, he can’t escape her. His fantasies are built around her. He becomes obsessive. Eventually . . . he goes after her. Acts out the fantasies.”
    At the ice-cream parlor, she ordered her usual, a hot-fudge with a maraschino cherry. A few of the customers glanced curiously at them, the nun in her black habit, the tall, well-dressed male who was so obviously her friend. They ignored the passing attention.
    “How long would it take him to fix on a particular woman? Would it be an instantaneous thing?”
    “Could be. More likely, though, it would be some kind of encounter. An exposure, a conversation. He might make some kind of assessment of her vulnerability. Remember, this may be a very intelligent man. Eventually, though, it goes beyond his control. She becomes fixed in his mind, and he can no more escape her image than she can escape his attack.”
    “Jesus. Uh, sorry.”
    She smiled at him. “You just didn’t get enough of it, you know? If you’d stayed at St. Agnes for another two, three years, who knows? Maybe it’d be Father Davenport.”
    Lucas laughed. “That’s a hair-raising thought,” he said. “Can you see me running the little ankle-biters through First Communion?”
    “Yes,” she said. “In fact, I