Rules of Prey

Lucas . . .”
    “Listen, Jennifer. You listening?”
    “Yeah.”
    “If you use this before you talk to the chief, I’ll find some way to fuck with you. I’ll tell every TV station in the world how you fed the name and address of an innocent woman to a maddog killer and made her a target for murder and rape. I’ll put you right in the middle of the controversy, and that means you’ll lose your piece of it. You’ll be doing dog-sled stories out of Brainerd.”
    “I heard he hit her in her apartment, so he already knows—”
    “Sure. And after about a week of argument, that’d probably come out too. In the meantime, the local feminists would be doing a tap dance on your face and you wouldn’t be able to get a job anywhere east of the Soviet Union.”
    “So fuck you, Lucas. When can I talk to Daniel?”
    “What time you want him?”
    “Nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”
    “I’ll call him right now. You be down there at nine.”
     
    He dropped the phone in its cradle, looked at it for a second, picked it up, and dialed Daniel’s home phone. The chief’s wife answered and a moment later put Daniel on the phone.
    “You got him?” He sounded like he was talking around a bagel.
    “Yeah, right,” Lucas said dryly. “Go stand on the curb in front of your office and I’ll drop him off in twenty minutes. If I’m late, don’t worry, I’ll be along. Just wait there on the curb.”
    The chief chewed for a minute, then said, “Pretty fuckin’ funny, Davenport. What do you want?”
    “Jennifer Carey just called. Somebody told her about Ruiz.”
    “Shit. Wasn’t you, was it?”
    “No.”
    “Somebody told me you were puttin’ the pork to the young lady.”
    “Jesus Christ . . .”
    “Okay, okay. Sorry. So what do you think?”
    “I shut her mouth for the time being. She’s coming down to your office to see you tomorrow. Nine o’clock. I’d like to hold her off Ruiz for at least a couple of days. But if somebody tipped her, it’s going to get out.”
    “So?”
    “So when she sees you tomorrow, tell her to hold off a couple of days and then we’ll set up an interview for her, if Ruiz will go along. Then, if Ruiz is willing to go along, we’ll set up an interview for six o’clock in the evening and let Jennifer tape it for the late news. While I’m over there with her, you can call a press conference for eight o’clock or eight-thirty. Then I bring Ruiz over, we let the press yell at her for twenty minutes or so, and they get tape for ten o’clock.”
    “Carey’ll be pissed if we burn her.”
    “I’ll handle that. I’ll tell her that you wouldn’t go for an exclusive break, but she’s the only TV station with a personal interview. The other stations will have nothing but press-conference stuff. Then we’ll tell the other stations that Carey had a clean tip, had us against the wall, but because you’re their friend, you decided to go with a press conference. That way, everybody owes us.”
    “How about the papers? They’re out of it.”
    “We let them sit in on the interview with Carey so they can drop in long profiles. They won’t publish until the next morning anyway, so Jennifer still gets the break. I’ll feed it to the two papers as special treatment from you. I’ll let them know that the even-handedness could change if we start having trouble with them.”
    “Okay. So tomorrow morning I’ll see Carey at nine o’clock, put her off, maybe feed her a tidbit. We can work all the rest out later, in detail.”
    “See you tomorrow.”
    “Don’t forget the meeting.”
     
    When he got off the phone, Lucas rubbed his eyes and bent over the drawing table again. He read penciled numbers from a list on a yellow legal pad, cranking them through anelectronic desk calculator. A near-empty coffee cup sat at the top of the table. He took a sip of the oily remnant and grimaced.
    Lucas wrote games. Role-playing fantasies, Civil War historical reconstructions, combat simulations from World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Stalingrad, Battle of the Bulge, Taipan, the Punch Bowl, Bloody Ridge, Dien Bien Phu, Tet.
    The games were marketed through a New York publisher who would take all he could create, usually two a year. His latest was a role-playing fantasy adventure. They were the best moneymakers but the least intrinsically interesting.
    He looked at the clock again. Twelve-ten. He walked over to the sound system, picked out a compact disc, slipped it in the player, and went back