Shadow Prey

games,” Elle said.
    Lily looked at Lucas, and Lucas explained, “We have a gaming group that meets once a week.”
    “That’s interesting,” Lily said, looking from one of them to the other. “Like Dungeons and Dragons?”
    “No, no role playing,” Elle said. “Historical reconstruction. Get Lucas to tell you about his Gettysburg. We played it three times last year and it always comes out wildly different. Last time, Bobby Lee almost got himself into Philadelphia.”
    “I’ve still got to do something about that damn Stuart,” Lucas said to the nun. “When he gets loose too early, he fouls up all the calculations. I’m thinking of . . .”
    “No game talk,” Elle said. “Let’s get some ice cream.”
    “Ice cream?” Lily said. She put her fingers over her mouth to cover a tiny burp. “Sounds good.”
    As they walked down the hall, Lily turned to Elle and asked, “What did you mean when you said, ‘his Gettysburg’? Did Lucas make the game or something?”
    Elle raised an eyebrow. “Our boy is a famous games inventor. Didn’t you know that?”
    “No, I didn’t,” Lily said, looking at Lucas.
    “He surely is,” Elle said. “That’s how he got rich.”
    “Are you rich?” Lily asked Lucas.
    “No,” Lucas said. He shook his head.
    “He is, take my word for it,” Elle said to Lily with a phony confidentiality. “He bought me a gold chain last year that has scandalized my entire wing of the residence.”
    “For a good German Catholic girl, I think the influence of the Irish is beginning to seep in,” Lucas said.
    “The Irish?”
    “The blarney.” Lucas turned to Lily and said in a stage whisper, “I’d never use a word like ‘bullshit’ around a nun.”
     
    They sat in a booth in the ice cream shop, Lucas and Lily side by side, Elle across the table. Elle ate a hot-fudgesundae while Lily worked on a banana split. Lucas blew into a cup of coffee and thought about Lily’s warm thigh next to his.
    “So you’re working on Andretti,” Elle prompted them.
    “There’s some kind of conspiracy,” Lily said.
    “The Indian man who killed the people in Minneapolis, and the Indian man who killed Andretti?”
    “Yeah,” said Lucas. “Except we think that two different guys killed the people in Minneapolis. And now the judge in Oklahoma City . . .”
    “I haven’t heard . . .”
    “Last night . . . I was wondering . . . what kind of group would we be dealing with? If there is a group.”
    “Religious,” Elle said promptly.
    “Religious?”
    “There are few things in the world that can hold together a murder conspiracy. Hate by itself is not enough, because it’s too unfocused and not intellectual enough. There has to be some positive energy, as it were. That usually comes from religion. It’s difficult to be intellectual and murderous at the same time, without some complicated rationale.”
    “How about these groups that develop in prison?” asked Lily. “You know, a group of guys gets together and they start holding up armored cars . . .”
    “ . . . raising money for a cause. Which usually has some kind of quasi-religious doctrine behind it. Save the white race from mongrelization by blacks, Arabs, Jews, whatever. You see the same thing in the leftist radical groups and even the groups or pairs of psychotic killers you get from time to time. There’s a religious aspect, there’s a group feeling of oppression. Usually there’s a messiah figure who tells the others that it’s all right to kill. That it’s necessary.”
    “One of my people in the Indian community said that Bluebird—”
    “That was the man killed in Minneapolis?” Elle interrupted.
    “Yeah. He said Bluebird was a man looking for religion.”
    “I’d say he found it,” Elle said. She had been saving the maraschino cherry for last, and finally she ate it, savoring the sweetness.
    “You know how they make maraschino cherries?” Lucas asked, covering his eyes with his hand as it disappeared.
    “I don’t want to hear,” Elle said. She pointed her long spoon at Lucas’ nose. “If there’s a group doing these killings, there probably aren’t more than a dozen people in it and that would be an extreme. More likely it’s five or six. At the most.”
    “Six? Jesus,” Lily blurted. “Excuse me, my language. But six?”
    “What are the chances that it’s three?” Lucas asked. “Bluebird and this guy in New York and the guy in Oklahoma?”
    Elle tipped her head