Rules of Prey

piece of shit.”
    “Yeah, it’s a bummer. It won’t go any further than this table, though I suppose if we ever need Mrs. Rice to testify, somebody could figure it out. But it won’t come to anything.”
    “Thanks, man. I owe you.”
     
    Roe left first, relieved to get away. Lucas watched his car pull out of the parking lot, then got up and strolled past the counter.
    “You mind if I make a comment?” he asked the countergirl.
    “No, go ahead.” She smiled politely.
    “You’re too pretty to be working in this place. I’m not hustling you, I’m just telling you. You’re an attraction. If you stay here, sooner or later you’re going to catch some bad news.”
    “I need the money,” she said, her face tense and serious.
    “You don’t need it that bad,” he said.
    “I have two more years at the university, one year for my bachelor’s and nine more months for my master’s.”
    Lucas shook his head. “If I knew your parents, I’d call them. But I don’t. So I’m just telling you. Get out of here. Or get on the day shift.”
    He turned and started away.
    “Thanks,” she called after him. But he knew she wouldn’tdo anything about it. He stepped outside, considered the problem for a minute, and went back in.
    “How many tacos could you rip off without anyone knowing about it? I mean, every night. A couple of dozen?”
    “Why?”
    “If you gave a cup of coffee and a free taco to every patrol cop who came in, say, from ten o’clock at night to six in the morning, you’d have cops around, or arriving or leaving, most of the night. It’d give you some cover.”
    She looked interested. “We wouldn’t have hundreds of cops or anything, would we?”
    “No. On a heavy night, maybe twenty or thirty.”
    “Shoot,” she said cheerfully. “The owner has trouble keeping people working here. He’s kind of desperate. I don’t think I’d have to steal them. I think he’d say okay.”
    Lucas took out a business card and handed it to her. “This is my office phone. Call me tomorrow. If the boss says okay, I’ll get the word out about the free coffee and tacos. I’ll tell both towns, you’ll have cops coming in from all over the place.”
    “I’ll call tomorrow,” she said. “Thanks really a lot.”
    Lucas nodded and turned away. If it worked out, he’d have another source on the street.
     
    When Lucas designed his games, he laid them out on sheets of heavy white drawing paper, twenty-two by thirty inches, so he could draw the logical connections between the elements. The visual representation helped him to avoid the inconsistencies that drew sophomorically scathing letters from teenage gamers.
    Back at the house, he got four sheets of paper, carried them to the spare bedroom, and pinned them to the wall with push-pins. With a wide-tip felt pen he wrote the name of one victim at the top of each sheet: Bell, Morris, Ruiz, Lewis. Beneath the names, he wrote the dates, and under the dates, what he hoped were relevant personal characteristics of the victims.
    When he finished, he lay back on the bed, propped hishead on a pillow, and looked at the wall charts. Nothing came. He got up, put up a fifth one, and wrote “Maddog” at the top of it. Under that he wrote:
Well-off: Wears Nike Airs. Clean clothes. Cologne. Convinced real-estate saleswoman that he could afford expensive home.
    May be new to area: Has accent, wore T-shirt on August night.
    May be from Southwest: Ruiz recognized accent.
    Office job: Soft hands & body, arms white. Not a fighter.
    Fair skin: Arms very pale. Probably blond.
    Sex freak? Game player? Both? Neither?
    Intelligent. Leaves no clues. Wears gloves even when preparing notes, loading shells in pistol.
    He thought a moment and added. “Knew Larry Rice?”
    He peered at the list, and reached out and underlined “real-estate saleswoman” and “Knew Larry Rice?”
    If he was new to the area, maybe he really was looking for a house, and met Lewis that way. It would be worth checking area real-estate offices.
    And he might have known Larry Rice. But that worked against the proposition that he was new to the area—if Rice had been dying of cancer, that would presumably take some time, and he wouldn’t be making many friends along the way.
    A hospital? A doctor in a hospital? It was a possibility. It would account for the maddog’s delicate touch with the knife. And a doctor would have the soft hands and body, and would be well-off. And doctors, especially new ones,