Rules of Prey

McGowanironing shirts or something. We’ll let them in the surveillance post for a few minutes. Just the once.”
    “And they hold the film until we catch him?”
    “That’s the deal.”
    “Not a bad deal,” Lucas said approvingly. “What did Jennifer have to say about it?”
    “She was unhappy, but she’ll go along. She’ll produce the McGowan interview. Some kid’s reporting it,” Daniel said. “To tell you the truth, I think she’s a little jealous. I think she wishes it were her, not McGowan.”
     
    “Do you remember that awful poem you wrote to me when we first started going out? About having my baby?”
    “That wasn’t so awful,” Lucas said, propping himself on one elbow. There was a little edge to his voice. “I thought it was rather intricate.”
    “Intricate? It sounded like a bad teenage rock-’n’-roll song from 1959.”
    “Look, I know you don’t particularly like my—”
    “No, no, no. I loved it. I kept it. I have it taped to the pull-out typewriter tray on my desk, and about once a week I open it and read it. I just read it today, and I was thinking: Well, I really am having his baby.”
    Lucas pressed his ear to Jennifer’s bare midriff.
    “Am I supposed to be hearing anything yet?”
    “Are you listening really closely?”
    “Yeah.” He pressed down harder.
    “Well, if you listen very closely . . .”
    “Yeah?”
    “You can probably hear that Budweiser I had before bed.”
     
    Lucas arrived at the lake in time to watch the sun go down Saturday evening. Carla was gone on the bike, but arrived a half-hour later with a small bag of groceries and a bottle of red wine. Lucas spent Saturday night and Sunday, and most of Sunday night at the cabin. At two in the morning he kissed Carla on the lips and drove back to the Cities, hitting his ownbed a little after five. He was late for the project meeting again.
     
    “Whatever happened to the list of people we got from the Rice woman?” Lucas asked. Monday morning in the chief’s office. Half the detectives looked out of focus, tired from another weekend’s overtime. “You know, when we were checking about the maddog’s gun and who bought it from her husband?”
    “Well, we checked everybody she could remember,” said Sloan, who had done the Rice interview.
    “Nothing?”
    “We didn’t actually interview everybody. We checked them. If they were way off the profile, we let it go. You know, women, old men, boys, we let them go. We did interviews with everybody that might come close to the profile, and came up dry. We were going to go back to the rest, but everything slowed down when Jimmy Smithe started to look good. Everything got thrown on that.”
    “We should go back for interviews with everybody,” Lucas said, turning to Daniel. “We know that goddamn gun is critical. Maybe somebody bought it and resold it. I say we check women, boys, old men, everybody.”
    “Get on it,” Daniel told Anderson. “I assumed it was done.”
    “Well . . .”
    “Just get it done.”
     
    Lucas sat on the attic floor.
    “Wednesday. I didn’t think we’d make it to Wednesday,” said the surveillance man. “He’s overdue.”
    “Cold in here,” Lucas said. “You can feel the wind coming through.”
    “Yeah. We keep the door open but there aren’t any heating vents. We’re thinking about bringing up a space heater.”
    “Good idea.”
    “Thing is, downtown doesn’t want to pay for it. And we don’t want to get stuck for the money.”
    “I’ll talk to Daniel,” Lucas said.
    “Car coming,” said the second surveillance man.
    The car rolled slowly down the street, paused beneath them, and then kept going, around the corner.
    “Get the plate?”
    “Guy at the end of the street’s doing that, one of the cars. He’s got a starlight scope.”
    A radio sitting beside the mattress suddenly burped.
    “Get him?” the surveillance man asked.
    “Yeah. Neighbor.”
    “He slowed down outside her house.”
    “Guy’s sixty-six, but I’ll note it,” said the radio voice.
    “How’s it going?”
    “Cold,” the car man said.
    They went back to waiting.
    “Action stations,” the surveillance man said twenty minutes later. “I get the scope.”
    Lucas watched through binoculars. McGowan was wearing a frothy pink negligee and tiny matching bikini pants. She moved back and forth behind the eight-inch gap in the curtain, more tantalizing than any professional stripper.
    “She’s gotta know,” the