Shadow Prey

We’ve used him before . . . .”
    “Good.” Daniel snapped his fingers and pointed at Lester. “Call Welfare tomorrow and ask them if we can detach Hart as a resource guy. We’ll pick up his salary.”
    “What is he?” asked Sloan. “Chippewa?”
    “Sioux,” said Lucas.
    “He’s strange, is what he is,” said Anderson. “He’s got some genealogical stuff stored away in the city computers. The systems guys would shit if they knew about it.”
    Lucas shrugged. “He’s an okay guy.”
    “So let’s get him,” said Daniel. He stood up and paced slowly away from his desk, his hands in his pants pockets. “What else?”
    Bluebird’s funeral would be monitored. Intelligence would attempt to identify everyone who attended and run histories on them. Sloan would build a list of friends and relatives who might have known about Bluebird’s activities. They would be interviewed by selected Narcotics and Intelligence detectives. Anderson would press the Jersey cops for any available details on the killer’s appearance and his car and run them against known Indian felons from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Nebraska and the Dakotas.
    “It’ll be a fuckin’ circus, starting bright and early tomorrow morning,” said Daniel. “And I’ll tell you what: When this New York guy gets here, I want us on top of this thing. I want us to look good, not like a bunch of rube assholes.”
    Anderson cleared his throat. “I don’t think it’s a guy, chief. I think it’s a woman,” he said.
    Sloan and Lucas glanced at each other. “What are you talking about?” asked Sloan.
    “We told you, didn’t we? No? The goddamn Andretti family is putting the screws on the New York cops. They want to send somebody out here to observe our investigation,” said Daniel. He turned to Anderson. “You say it’s a woman?”
    “Yeah. That’s what I understood. Unless they got male cops named Lillian. She’s a lieutenant.”
    “Huh,” said Daniel. He stroked his chin, as though grooming a goatee. “Whoever it is, I can guarantee she’s heavy-duty.”
    “Where’ll we put her?” asked Lester.
    “Let her work with Sloan,” Daniel said. “That’ll give hersome time on the street. Give her the feeling she’s doing something.”
    He looked around the room. “Anything else? No? Let’s do it.”

CHAPTER
5
    The barbershop had one chair, a turn-of-the-century model with a cracked black leather seat. A mirror was mounted on the wall behind the chair. Below the mirror, on a shelf, stood a line of bottles with luminescent yellow lotions and ruby-red toilet waters. Sunlight played through them like a visual pipe organ.
    When Lucas walked in, William Dooley was pushing a flat broom around the floor, herding snips of black hair into a pile on the flaking brown linoleum.
    “Officer Davenport,” Dooley said gravely. Dooley was old and very thin. His temples looked papery, like eggshells.
    “Mr. Dooley.” Lucas nodded, matching the old man’s gravity. He climbed into the chair. Dooley moved behind him, tucked a slippery nylon bib into his collar and stood back.
    “Just a little around the ears?” he asked. Lucas didn’t need a haircut.
    “Around the ears and the back of the neck, Mr. Dooley,” Lucas said. The slanting October sunlight dappled the linoleum below his feet. A sugar wasp bounced against the dusty window.
    “Bad business about that Bluebird,” Lucas said after a bit.
    Dooley’s snipping scissors had been going chip-chip-chip. They paused just above Lucas’ ear, then resumed. “Bad business,” he agreed.
    He snipped for another few seconds before Lucas asked, “Did you know him?”
    “Nope,” Dooley said promptly. After another few snips, he added, “Knew his daddy, though. Back in the war. We was in the Pacific together. Not the same unit, but I seen him from time to time.”
    “Did Bluebird have any people besides his wife and kids?”
    “Huh.” Dooley stopped to think. He was halfbreed Sioux, with an Indian father and a Swedish mother. “He might have an aunt or an uncle or two out at Rosebud. That’s where they’d be, if there are any left. His ma died in the early fifties and his old man went four or five years back, must have been.”
    Dooley stared sightlessly through the sunny window. “No, by God,” he said in a creaking voice after a minute. “His old man died in the summer of ’seventy-eight, right between those two bad winters. Twelve years ago. Time passes, don’t it?”
    “It