Shadow Prey

Sarah to the changing table, pulled the tape-tabs loose from the diaper and tossed the diaper in a disposal can. He whistled while he worked, and the baby peered at him in fascination, once or twice pursing her lips as though she were about to start whistling herself. Lucas cleaned her bottom with wet-wipes, tossed the wipes after the diaper, powdered her and put a new diaper on her. By the time he finished, Sarah was bubbling with delight.
    “Jesus Christ, you are positively dangerous around anything female,” Jennifer said from the doorway.
    Lucas laughed, picked up Sarah and bounced her on the palm of one hand. The baby chortled and grabbed his nose with surprising power.
    “Whoa, whoa, wet go ub Daddy’s nose . . . .” Jennifer said he sounded like Elmer Fudd when he spoke in baby talk. Sarah whacked him in the eye with her other hand.
    “Jesus, I’m getting mugged,” Lucas said. “What do you think you’re doing, kid, whopping on your old man . . . ?”
    The phone rang. Lucas glanced at his wrist, but he’d taken his watch off. It was late, though, after midnight. Jennifer stepped down the hall to the phone. A second later, she was back.
    “It’s for you.”
    “Nobody knew I was here,” Lucas said, puzzled.
    “It’s the shift commander, what’s-his-name . . . Meany. Daniel told him to try here.”
    “I wonder what’s going on?” Lucas padded down the hall to the phone, picked it up and said, “Davenport.”
    “This is Harry Meany,” said an old man’s voice. “The chief said to track you down and get your ass in here. He’ll see you in his office in half an hour.”
    “What happened?”
    “I don’t know. Lester and Anderson are already here and Sloan’s on his way.”
    “You’ve got nothing going?” Lucas asked.
    “Not a thing,” Meany said. “A 7-Eleven got knocked off over on University, but that’s nothing new. Nobody hurt.”
    “Hmph.” Lucas scratched his chin, considering. “All right, I’ll be down.”
    Lucas hung up and stood with his hand on the phone, staring blankly at the picture hung above it, a hand-colored print of an English cottage. Jennifer said, “What?”
    “I don’t know. There’s a meeting. Daniel, Lester, Anderson, Sloan. Me.”
    “Huh.” She posed with her hands on her hips. “What are you working?”
    “Not much,” Lucas said. “We’re still getting rumors about guns going out of here, but nothing we can pin down. There’s been a lot of crack action. That’s about it.”
    Jennifer nodded. She had been TV3’s top street reporter for ten years. After Sarah had arrived, she’d taken a partial leave of absence and begun working as a producer. But the years on the street were still with her: she had both an eye and a taste for breaking news.
    “You know what it sounds like?” she asked, a calculating look on her face. “It sounds like the team Daniel set up last year. The Maddog group.”
    “But there’s nothing going on,” Lucas said. He shook his head again and walked to the bathroom.
    “You’ll let me know?” she called after him.
    “If I can.”
    • • •
    Lucas suspected that early city fathers had built the Minneapolis City Hall as an elaborate practical joke on their progeny. A liverish pile of granite, it managed to be both hot in the summer and cold in winter. In the spring and fall, in the basement, where his office was, the walls sweated a substance that looked like tree sap. Another detective, a lapsed Catholic like Lucas, had suggested that they wait for a good bout of sweating, carefully crack his office wall in a likeness of Jesus and claim a holy stigmata.
    “We could make a buck,” he said enthusiastically.
    “I’m not real big in the Church anymore,” Lucas said dryly, “But I’d just as soon not be excommunicated.”
    “Chickenshit.”
    Lucas circled the building, dumped the Porsche in a cops-only space. The chief’s corner office was lit. As he walked around the nose of the car and stepped onto the curb, a Chevy station wagon pulled up behind the Porsche and the driver tapped the horn. A moment later, Harrison Sloan climbed out of the wagon.
    “What’s happening?” Lucas asked.
    Sloan shrugged. He was a thin man with soft brown puppy eyes and a thin mustache. He might have played an RAF fighter pilot in a World War II movie, a pilot named Dicky. He was wearing a sweatsuit and tennis shoes. “I don’t know. I was asleep. Meany called and told me to get my ass down