Shadow Prey

Probst, where the power was. “All we want to do is look at the face of the man that Lily thinks might be the New York killer. And we want to look at the people around him, so we can question them. You might very well have run all of those pictures in the paper, for anyone to see. You promised confidentiality to nobody. In fact, they were soliciting attention by their very presence at this confrontation.”
    “Well, that’s right,” said Probst. A flash of irritation crossed Wink’s face. Probst had come up on the advertising side.
    “And you’ll get a tremendous story out of it,” Lucas put in. “You’ll stick it right up the Pioneer Press ’s ass.”
    Lawrence, the city editor, brightened, but Lily continued to stew. “And if you don’t we’ll go to court and drag it out of you anyway,” she snarled.
    “Hey . . .” Wink sat up.
    Daniel broke in before he could go any further. He pointed a finger at Lily’s face and said, “No, we won’t, Lieutenant. If they decide against us in this room, we’ll look for other pictures, but we won’t go to court. And if you keep this up, I’ll ship your ass back to New York faster than you can say ‘Avenue of the Americas.’ ”
    Lily opened her mouth and just as suddenly snapped it shut. “Okay,” she said. She glanced at Wink. “Sorry.”
    Daniel smiled his most charming smile at Wink and said, “ Please? ”
    “I think . . . we should get some prints in here,” Wink said. He nodded at Lawrence. “Get them.”
    They all sat silently until the city editor came back with three manila envelopes and handed them to Wink. Wink opened one, took out a set of eight-by-ten prints, looked at them, then passed them to Daniel. Daniel dealt them out across the table to Lily, who stood up, spread them out and began studying them.
    “It’s him,” she said after a moment. She tapped one of the faces. “That’s my man.”
     
    They got two sets of photos and stopped on the street corner before Daniel walked back to City Hall.
    “Larry Hart is coming over this afternoon. He had to get his case load closed out,” Daniel said to Lucas. “I’ll get him a set of photographs. He may know somebody.”
    “All right. And I’ll show my set around.”
    Daniel nodded and looked at Lily. “You should watch your temper. You almost lost it for us.”
    “Newsies piss me off,” she said. “You were getting pushed around.”
    “I wasn’t getting pushed. Everybody knew what would happen. We had to go through the ritual,” Daniel said mildly.
    “Okay. It’s your turf. I apologize,” she said.
    “You should apologize. Being a hell of guy, I accept,” Daniel said, and started off across the street.
    Lily looked after him. “He’s a piece of work,” she said after a moment.
    “He’s okay. He can be an asshole, but he isn’t stupid,” Lucas said.
    “So who’s this Larry Hart?” Lily asked.
    “He’s a Welfare guy, a Sioux. Good guy, knows the streets, probably knows a thousand Indians. He’s fairly large in Indian politics. He’s written some articles, goes out to all the powwows and so on.”
    “We need him. I spent six hours on the street yesterday and didn’t learn a thing. The guy I was with—”
    “Shearson?”
    “Yeah. He wouldn’t know an Indian from a fire hydrant. Christ, it was almost embarrassing,” she said, shaking her head.
    “You’re not going back out with him?”
    “No.” She looked at him without a sign of a smile. “Besides his woefully inadequate IQ, we had a little problem yesterday.”
    “Well . . .”
    “I thought I might ride along with you. You’re showing the pictures around, right?”
    “Yeah.” Lucas scratched his head. He didn’t like working with a partner: he sometimes made deals that were best kept private. But Lily was from New York and shouldn’t be a problem that way. “All right, I guess. I’m parked down this way.”
    “Everybody says you’ve got the best contacts in the Indian community,” Lily said as they walked along. Lucas kept looking at her and tripped on an uneven sidewalk slab. She grinned, still looking straight ahead.
    “I know about eight guys. Maybe ten. And not well,” Lucas said when he recovered.
    “You came up with the picture from the paper,” she pointed out.
    “I had a guy I could squeeze.” Lucas stepped off the curb and walked around the nose of his Porsche. Lily walked behind him.
    “Uh, around there,” he said, pointing back to the passenger-side