Shadow Prey

press conference was almost over. Lucas watched from the back as Daniel went through his routine. The television reporters were looking at their watches, ready to break away, while they listened to the the newspaper people ask a few final questions.
    As he turned to leave, Jennifer stepped into the room and bumped him with an elbow.
    “Thanks again. We were on the air an hour ago,” she said quietly. “Look at Shelly . . . .”
    Shelly Breedlove, a reporter for Channel 8, was staring spitefully at them from across the room. She’d made the connection on TV3’s exclusive break on Larry Hart’s murder.
    Jennifer smiled pleasantly back and said, “Fuck you, bitch,” under her breath. To Lucas she said, “Are you on your way home?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I’ve got a baby-sitter . . . .”
     
    Lucas slept poorly, his legs twitching, curling, uncurling. Jennifer curled against his bare back, her forehead against the nape of his neck, tears trickling down her cheeks. She could smell the perfume on him. It wasn’t hers and it wasn’t something he’d picked up sitting next to another woman. There’d been contact. A lot of contact. She lay awake, with the tears, and Lucas dreamed of a cold round circle of a shotgun pressed against his head, and of Larry Hart tumbling down the hillside above the Mississippi, the barges curling away, rolling down the river, their pilots unaware of the light going out on the hill above them . . . .

CHAPTER
22
    Sam Crow raged through the house while Aaron sat silently in the La-Z-Boy, bathed in flickering light from the television set. Shadow Love’s picture was everywhere, views from the front and both sides, close-ups of his tattooed arms.
    “That fuckin’ kid is ruinin’ us,” Sam shouted. He crowded against Barbara, who, frightened by his anger, wrapped and rewrapped her hands with a damp dish towel and pretended to do dishes between bouts of weeping. “How could you fuckin’ go along?”
    “I didn’t want to,” she cried, “I didn’t know . . .”
    “You knew.” Sam spat. “For Christ’s sakes, did you think he was delivering a fuckin’ Christmas card?”
    “I didn’t know . . .”
    “Where’d you leave him?”
    “He got out by Loring Park . . . .”
    “Where was he going?”
    “I don’t know . . . . He said you wouldn’t want him here. He said he had to work alone . . . .”
    “Fuck meee,” Sam called out. “Fuck meee . . . .”
    Aaron appeared in the doorway. “C’mere, look at this.”
    Sam followed him back to the living room. For the past half-hour, they’d seen report after report from Minneapolis: from the hillside where Hart’s body had been found, fromthe chief’s office, from Indian Country. Man-in-the-street interviews. Lily, working the crowd, an NYPD badge pinned to her coat. People talking to her, thrusting their faces in front of the camera.
    Now that had changed. A room with light blue walls. An American flag. A podium with a circular American-eagle seal under a battery of microphones, and a man in a gray double-breasted suit with a handkerchief in his breast pocket.
    “It’s Clay,” Aaron said.
    “ . . . terrorist group has now begun striking at its own people. That doesn’t make them any less dangerous but will, I hope, make it obvious to the Indian people that these killers don’t care any more about Indians than they do about whites . . . .”
    And later:
    “ . . . worked with Indian people during my entire career, and I’m asking my old friends of all Indian nations to call us at the FBI with any information about this group . . .”
    And more:
    “ . . . I will be accompanied by a task force of forty specialists, men and women from around the nation who will be brought in to break this ring. We are prepared to stay in Minnesota until we are successful in this endeavor. We will remain in full and immediate contact with the Washington center . . . .”
    “Lawrence Duberville Clay,” Sam said, almost reverently, as he stared at the man on the TV screen. “Hurry up, motherfucker . . . .”
    “There’s somebody here,” Barbara called from the kitchen, fear thick in her voice. “Somebody on the porch.”
    The doorbell rang as Aaron hurried into the back bedroom, where he had been sleeping, and returned with an old blue .45. The bell rang again and then the front door pushed open. A dark figure, short hair, black eyes; Aaron, flattened against the hallway wall,