Shadow Prey

the sound of computer printouts rustling. Anderson was excited; Lucas could picture him going through his notes. Anderson looked, talked and sometimes acted like an aging hillbilly. A few months earlier he had incorporated his private computer business and was, Lucas suspected, on his way to becoming rich with customized police software. “I went into Larry’s genealogical files for the Minnesota Sioux—you know how he had them stored in the city database?”
    “Yeah, I remember.”
    “I looked up all the Crows. They were all too old—not many Crows in Minnesota. So I got a typist and had her put all the names from Larry’s file into my machine in a sort routine . . . .”
    “What?”
    “Never mind. She put them in my machine in a list. Then I went over to State Vital Records and found all the women named Love who had babies between 1945 and 1965. Yousaid this Shadow Love dude looked like he was in his thirties . . . .”
    “Yeah.”
    “So I pulled all of those. There were a hell of a lot of them, more than four hundred. But I could eliminate all the girl babies. That got rid of all but a hundred and ninety-seven. Then I put the names of the fathers into my machine—”
    “So you could run them against the genealogy—”
    “Right. I got about halfway through and found a Rose E. Love. Mother of Baby Boy Love. No name for the kid, but that wasn’t uncommon. Get this. I don’t know how she did it, but she got them to list two names in the space for the father.”
    “Interesting . . .”
    “Aaron Sunders and Samuel Close.”
    “Shit, Aaron and Sam, it’s gotta be . . .”
    “Their race is listed as ‘other.’ This was back in the fifties, so it’s probably Indian. And they turn up on Larry’s genealogy. They are the grandsons of a guy named Richard Crow. Richard Crow had two daughters, and when they married, the Crow name ended. We got Sunders and Close—but I’d bet my left nut those are the real names for Aaron and Sam Crow.”
    “God damn, Harmon, that’s fuckin’ terrific. Have you run—”
    “They both had Minnesota driver’s licenses, but only way back, before the picture IDs. The last one for Sunders was in 1964. I called South Dakota, but they were shut down for the day. I asked for a special run and the duty guy told me to go shit in my hat. So then I rousted the feebs and they got on the line to the SoDak people. They got to the duty guy and now he’s shitting in his hat. Anyway, we got the special run. They’re checking the records now. I figure with everything that’s happened, that’s the most likely place . . . .”
    “How about NCIC?”
    “We’re running that now.”
    “We ought to check prison records for Minnesota and the Dakotas and the federal system. Be sure you check thefeds. The federal system gets the bad-asses off the reservations . . . .”
    “Yeah, I’ve got that going. If the Crows were inside in the last ten or fifteen years, it’ll show at the NCIC. The feebs said they’ll check with the Bureau of Prisons to see about their records before that.”
    “How about vehicles? Besides the truck?” Lucas asked.
    “We’re looking for registrations. I doubt they’d leave a car on the street, but who knows?”
    “Any chance that Rose Love is still alive?”
    “No. Since I was over there anyway, I went through the death certificates. She died in ‘seventy-eight in a fire. It was listed as an accident. It was a house in Uptown.”
    “Shit.” Lucas pulled at his lip and tried to think of other data-run possibilities.
    “I went through old city directories and followed her all the way back to the fifties,” Anderson continued. “She was in the ’fifty-one book, in an apartment. Then she missed a couple of years and was in ’fifty-four, in an apartment. Then in ’fifty-five she was in the Uptown house. She stayed there until she died.”
    “All right. This is great,” Lucas said. “Have you talked to Daniel?”
    “Nobody’s at his house, that’s why I called you. I had to tell somebody. It freaked me out, the way it all came out of the machines, boom-boom-boom. It was like a TV show.”
    “Get us some fuckin’ photos, Harmon. We’ll paper the streets with them.”
    Anderson’s discoveries brought a flush of energy. Lucas paced through the house, still naked, excited. If they could put the Crows’ faces on the street, they’d have them. They couldn’t hide out forever. Names were almost nothing.