Secret Prey

first he picked up the phone book and looked up Helen Bell, Audrey’s sister. She was listed in South Minneapolis. Not expecting too much, he punched in her phone number. She answered on the second ring.
    ‘‘I’d like to come talk to you about the whole case,’’ he said, after he introduced himself.
    ‘‘I . . . thought it was just about done,’’ Bell said. He noticed her voice immediately: she sounded like Audrey, who sounded like the woman who’d called him to press him on McDonald.
    ‘‘Well, we haven’t settled the Kresge thing,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘I just want to come over and chat. Get some opinions.’’
    ‘‘Okay. I’ll be here the rest of the day.’’
    THREE NUNS, ALL IN TRADITIONAL DRESS, WERE perched on chairs in Elle’s room, watching a young nurse change a saline drip. When Lucas stepped in, easing the door closed, one of them chirped, ‘‘Hi, Lucas. She’s awake.’’
    Lucas stepped around the beige curtain that masked Elle’s bed from the outside, and looked down at his oldest friend. They’d gone to Catholic grade school together, goofing along the sidewalk, her long golden hair shimmering in the autumn sunlight, her blue eyes happy, smiling at him . . . His first clear memory of a female other than his mother. Now, her head was swathed with bandages, her face bruised, showing yellow disinfectant, her eyelids drooping over blue eyes that seemed more hazy than happy. She smiled weakly and he thought she looked wonderful.
    ‘‘You look terrible,’’ he said. ‘‘Like somebody beat the daylights out of you.’’
    ‘‘That’s funny,’’ she mumbled. ‘‘I sort of feel that way too.’’
    He touched her foot. ‘‘You’re gonna make it.’’
    ‘‘Yes, probably. Do you know what happened?’’
    ‘‘Pretty much. You got a phony phone call. Somebody pulled you out of the building, and ambushed you.’’
    ‘‘I don’t know,’’ she said. ‘‘I can’t remember much after about six o’clock, but that’s what I’ve been told.’’
    ‘‘How bad is the memory thing?’’ He swallowed as he said it: he didn’t need bad news, not about Elle.
    Again she smiled weakly: ‘‘Just a couple hours of amnesia nothing unusual. I’ve taken a few tests: there’s no impairment. Permanent impairment.’’
    ‘‘All right,’’ he said. ‘‘All right.’’
    ‘‘The girl . . .’’
    The girl would live. She smelled vanilla when a nurse wiped her arm with an alcohol swab; smelled fried eggs in a glass of apple juice, celery in oatmeal. When asked to read aloud from a chart, she’d read quite well—except that she’d read some words backward, pronouncing them correctly in their backward form.
    ‘‘She could recover,’’ Elle said. ‘‘I feel so bad that she was running after me . . .’’
    ‘‘Nothing you could do,’’ Lucas said.
    ‘‘Does anybody have any idea who might’ve done it?’’ A shadow of fear in her eyes, something he’d never seen before.
    He shook his head. ‘‘Not yet.’’
    They talked for ten minutes before Elle’s eyelids grew heavy; Lucas kissed her on the cheek, with much approval from the squad of nuns who perched like blackbirds on their row of red leatherette chairs. Before he left the hospital, he talked to her doctor for a minute, picked up a pack of X rays and some preoperative photos at the radiology department.
    THE HENNEPIN COUNTY MEDICAL EXAMINER’S OFFICE was just down the street from police headquarters, connected by what the cops half seriously referred to as the secret tunnel. Lucas dumped his car in one of the cop slots on the street and then took the tunnel to the ME’s office. He showed the photos and films to one of the forensic pathologists.
    ‘‘Probably right-handed, and probably not too tall,’’ the ME said, sucking on an illegal Winston. ‘‘The blows all hit on the side and back of her head, rather than coming down on top. But if it were a man, swinging flat, like a baseball bat, he would’ve knocked her head off. This looks more like somebody coming down, but from a relatively low swinging position.’’
    ‘‘Possibly a woman?’’
    The ME pushed his lips out and blew a capital O. ‘‘Could be. Whoever it was, wasn’t all that strong. Jumping somebody from behind, with a club—a strong guy would have killed her, hitting her like that.’’
    ‘‘Huh.’’
    LUCAS HAD SEEN HELEN BELL AT THE ARRAIGNMENT of her sister, and had been struck by how little they