Secret Prey

hostage by a killer looking for revenge against Lucas. Weather had managed her attacker: she’d talked him into surrender. She’d given him guarantees. But nobody on the outside knew.
    When Lucas closed his eyes at night, he could see the two of them walking down the narrow hospital corridor toward him, Weather in front, Dick LaChaise using her as a shield, with a pistol to her head. He could also feel the pressure at his back, where a hidden police sniper, a kid from Iowa, was looking at LaChaise through a rifle scope.
    Lucas’s job was to talk the gun away from Weather’s head, if only for half a second. If he could just get LaChaise to move the muzzle . . . And he did. The Iowa kid was cold as ice: Dick LaChaise’s head had been pulped by the mushrooming .243 slug.
    Weather, whose face was only inches away from La-Chaise, had been showered with bone, brain, and blood. She had recovered, in most ways. She could work; she could even forget about it, most of the time. Unless she saw Lucas. They tried to pull the relationship back together, but three months after Dick LaChaise died in a hospital hallway, she was gone.
    Gone for good, he believed.
    And Lucas was staring into the darkness again.
    ‘‘Hey, Lucas?’’
    Lucy Ghent, a secretary, was calling down the hall from the chief’s office door. She was one of the older women in the office, who competed with her peers on hairdos. ‘‘Chief Roux is down in Identification. She wants to see you right away.’’
    ‘‘Trouble?’’
    Ghent flopped a hand, dismissively. ‘‘Just . . . weirdness.’’
    Rose Marie Roux was sitting at a cluttered desk in Identification, chewing Nicorette, paging through a document Lucas recognized as the departmental budget. She looked up when Lucas came in and said, ‘‘I swear to God, if you killed the smartest guy on the city council, the average IQ in Minneapolis would go up two points. Don’t quote me.’’
    ‘‘What happened?’’
    ‘‘The York case.’’
    ‘‘Yeah?’’
    Morris York, two years on the force, found with a halfounce of Mexican bud in a Marlboro box behind his patrol car visor. His marijuana habit had been detected by a departmental mechanic who claimed he was getting a contact high off the car’s upholstery. Internal Affairs made movies of York getting mellow on the job.
    ‘‘Tommy Gedja says this morning, at the council meeting, if that’s all we’re doing in our cars, why do we need new cars? I think he was serious. I think they’re gonna try to pull twelve cars out from under us.’’
    Lucas shrugged: ‘‘Life sucks and then they cut your budget. What’re you doing down here?’’
    ‘‘More budget problems.’’ A piece of white paper, wrapped in a plastic folder, lay on the desk’s otherwise empty typewriter tray. She picked it up and handed it to him. ‘‘Came in the mail, first thing this morning.’’
    Dear Chief of Police Roux:
    One week ago, Mr. Kresge sent a memo to Susan O’Dell which said that her department would not be allowed to continue with a planned expansion because of budget constraints. Mrs. O’Dell has worked on the expansion for a long time and when she got the memo, her quote was, ‘‘God Damn him, I’m going to kill him.’’ There were three people in the room at the time: Sharon Allen (assistant to the vice president), Michelle Stephens (executive secretary), and Randall Moss ( assistant head cashier). I can’t tell you my name, but I thought you should know.
    ‘‘Not much here,’’ Lucas said. He snapped the paper with his index finger. ‘‘We could interview Stephens to see how serious she thinks it is. Or if she’s just trying to torpedo O’Dell.’’
    ‘‘Stephens?’’ Roux had the gene that allowed her to lift one eyebrow at a time, and her left brow went up.
    Lucas nodded. ‘‘She’s probably the one who sent it— sounds like somebody who actually heard O’Dell say it, but she misuses the word ‘quote,’ which means not a lot of education. On the other hand, everything is spelled right, and secretaries spell things right. She’s very aware of titles and refers to Kresge as ‘mister,’ which means she saw him as somebody with a lot more status than she has: not an associate. She wouldn’t put herself first on the list, because that would make her nervous. And an assistant head cashier probably has a college education.’’
    ‘‘So how’s she dressed, Sherlock?’’
    Lucas smiled, but a droopy, tired smile: