Shadow Prey

back and peered at the ceiling, calculating. “No. I don’t think so, but then, who knows? But I have the sense . . . these men in New York and Oklahoma, they traveled some way to do the killings, if they came from here. If they know Bluebird. I have a sense that they were sent out . . . that they are on missions. Bluebird was apparently ready to die. That would be more typical of people who saw themselves as part of a process, rather than as a last chance to strike back.”
    “So there’ll be more?”
    “Yes. But there is a limit on size. There really is no such thing as a grand criminal conspiracy. Or at least no such thing as a secret one. I suppose Adolf Hitler and his henchmen were a grand criminal conspiracy, but they needed the collaboration of a nation to pull it off.”
    “So there’d probably be at least two or three more, and maybe six or eight,” Lucas said. “Probably held together by some sort of religious mania.”
    “That’s right,” Elle said. “If you want to stop it, look for the preacher.”
    In the car going back to Lucas’ office, Lily looked him over.
    “I have the feeling I’m being looked over,” Lucas said.
    “You have interesting friends,” Lily said.
    He shrugged. “I’m a cop.”
    “You invent games and play them with nuns?”
    “Hey, I’m a wild kind of guy.” He looked at her over the top of his sunglasses, winked and turned back to the traffic.
    “Oooh, Mr. Cool,” she said. “It makes my thighs hot.”
    Lucas thought, Mine too. He glanced quickly at her and she turned away, a blush creeping up her neck. She knew what he was thinking, and she had been aware of him in the booth . . . .
     
    At home, Larry Hart wore cowboy boots, blue jeans and work shirts with string ties. The string ties always had a chunk of turquoise buried in a silver slide. He could have worn that outfit to work, with a jacket to complete it, but he never did. He wore brown suits, with neckties in shades of brown and gold, and brown wingtip shoes. In the dead of summer, with the temperatures climbing into the nineties, Hart would sweat through the tiny tinderbox apartments of his welfare clientele, always in a brown suit.
    Lucas had once asked him why. Hart shrugged and said, “I like it.” What he meant was, I have to.
    Hart jammed himself into the cookie-cutter frame of a municipal executive. It never worked, as hard as he tried. There was no way a brown suit could disguise his heritage. He was broad-shouldered and powerfully built, with black eyes and gray-shot hair. He was Sioux. Hart had the biggest case load in Welfare. Some of his clients refused to talk to anyone else.
    “Lucas, what’s happenin’, babe?” Hart asked. Lucas lounged in his office chair with his feet on the rim of a wastebasket, while Lily rolled back and forth, a few inches one way and then a few inches the other, in an office chair on casters. Hart stepped inside the tiny office and dropped his bulk on a corner of Lucas’ desk.
    “Larry Hart, Lily Rothenburg, NYPD,” Lucas said, gesturing between them.
    “Nice to meet you,” Lily said, taking Hart in. “You’ve been out?”
    “Yup. Down on Franklin . . .”
    Hart had been working through Indian Country with the photos. He knew two of the men himself.
    “Bear is down at Rosebud and so is Elk Walking,” Hart said. “They’re pretty tough, but they ain’t crazy. I can’t see them getting involved in anything like this.”
    “You didn’t know anybody else in the pictures?” Lily asked.
    “Not names, but I know some of the faces. There are a couple of guys I see down at the Indian Center. You were asking Anderson about one of them. I played basketball against him last year.”
    “Could we get the team rosters?”
    “They’re mostly pickup games,” Hart said. “But if I ask around enough, I could probably find out who he is. There are a couple more faces I’ve seen at powwows, at Upper Sioux and Flandreau, Sisseton, Rosebud, all over the landscape.”
    “All Sioux?” asked Lucas.
    “I think all but one. Give me the pictures again, let’s see . . . .” Hart thumbed through the stack of photographs until he found the one he wanted. He poked a finger at a man’s face. “This guy’s Chippewa. I don’t know his name, it’s Jack something, maybe like Jack Bordeaux. I think he’s from White Earth, but I’m not sure.”
    “So how do we find out about Lily’s man?” Lucas asked.
    “There’re a couple of guys out in