Rules of Prey

Whatever. The maddog gets his hands on it. We’re looking for the connection.
    “Now, the chief is going to put IAD on it and they’re going to be talking to every one of you. They’re not going to do anything else until they find out what happened.”
    Lucas paused and looked around the room again.
    “ Unless, ” he said. “Unless somebody comes forward and tells me what happened. I give you these guarantees. First, I don’t tell anybody else. I don’t cooperate with IAD. And once we know, well, the chief admits there’d be no reason to really push the investigation. We got better things to do than chase some guy who took a gun.”
    Lucas pointed at the assistant city attorney. “Tell them about the punishment ruling.”
    The attorney stepped toward the center of the room and cleared his throat. “Before the chief can discipline a man, he has to give specific cause. We’ve ruled if the cause is alleged criminal wrongdoing, he has to provide the same proof as he would in court. He is not allowed to punish on a lesser standard. In other words, he can’t say, ‘Joe Smith, you’re demoted because you committed theft.’ He has to prove the theft to the same standards as he would in court—actually, for practical purposes, he has to get a conviction.”
    Lucas took over again.
    “What I’m saying is, you call me, tell me where to meet you. Bring a lawyer if you want. I’ll refuse to read you your rights. I’ll admit to entrapment. I’ll do anything reasonable that would kill my testimony in court. That way, even if I talked, you couldn’t be punished. And I won’t talk.
    “You guys know me. I won’t burn you. And we’ve got to catch this guy. I’m passing out my card, I’ve written my home phone number on the back. I want everyone to put the card in his pocket, so the guy who needs it won’t be out there by himself. I’ll be home all night.” He handed a stack ofbusiness cards to a cop in the front row, who took one, divided the rest in half, and passed them in two directions.
    “Tell them the rest of it, Davenport,” said the union man.
    “Yeah, the rest of it,” said Lucas. “If nobody talks to me, we push the IAD investigation and we push the murder investigation. Sooner or later we’ll identify the guy who took the gun. And if we have to do it that way . . .”
    He tried to pick out each face in the room before he said it: “ . . . we’ll find a felony to hang on it. We’ll put somebody in Stillwater.”
    An angry buzz spread through the group.
    “Hey, fuck it,” Lucas said, raising his voice over the noise. “This guy’s butchered three women in the worst way you could do it. Go ask homicide if you want the details. But don’t give me any brotherhood shit. I don’t like this any better than you guys. But I need to know about that piece.”
     
    Anderson caught him in the hall after the meeting.
    “What do you think?”
    Lucas nodded down the hallway, where a half-dozen of his cards littered the floor.
    “Most of them kept the cards. I’ve got nothing to do but go home and wait.”

CHAPTER
6
    Bats flicked through his head, bats with razor-edged wings that cut like fire. Monsters. Kill factor low, but they were virtually transparent, like sheets of broken glass, and almost impossible to see at night in the thorn brush outside the dark castle . . .
    Lucas looked up at the clock. Eleven-forty. Damn. If the cop who took the gun was planning to call, he should have done it. Lucas looked at the phone, willing it to ring.
    It rang. He nearly fell off his drawing stool in surprise.
    “Yes?”
    “Lucas? This is Jennifer.”
    “Hey. I’m expecting a call. I need the line open.”
    “I got a tip from a friend,” Jennifer said. “He says there was a survivor. Somebody who fought off the killer. I want to know who it was.”
    “Who told you this bullshit?”
    “Don’t play with me, Lucas. I got it solid. She’s some kind of Chicana or something.”
    Lucas hesitated and realized a split second later that his hesitation had given it away. “Listen, Jennifer, you got it, but I’m asking you not to use it. Talk to the chief first.”
    “Look. It’s a hell of a story. If somebody else gets onto it and breaks it, I’d feel like an idiot.”
    “It’s yours, okay? If we have to break her out, we’ll get you in first. But the thing is, we don’t want the killer to start thinking about her again. We don’t want to challenge him.”
    “C’mon,