Stolen Prey

thing.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yeah. If a terrorist ever wants to blow up New York, he can’t just build a time bomb and put it in a railway car ’cause nobody would have any idea of exactly when it’d get to New York, or how it’d get there,” Del said. “More likely to blow up a cornfield than a city.”
    “Or a riding stable,” Lucas said.
    “What?”
    Lucas told him about the Northfield robbery, and Del said, “Well, you can’t say it’s a horseshit clue.”
    “I thought of that joke about fifteen seconds after the guy called me,” Lucas said. “I was embarrassed just thinking of it, and I never said it out loud.”
    “You’re not going to ask me to look into it, are you? I mean, I got enough boring horseshit—”
    “No, I’m just making phone calls to these county agent guys. See what turns up.”
    “Might be better than watching Anderson,” Del said. “The guy is a slug. Never does anything, goes anywhere. I was sitting out there so long my ass got sore. But then, I read another hundred pages in the Deon Meyer, had four ideas for new iPhone apps, realized I could have had a career in Hollywood as a character actor, and tried to remember all the names of the women I could have slept with but didn’t. How about you?”
    “I slept with all the women I could have slept with,” Lucas said. “Not being a complete fool. You think about the Brooks family?”
    “I tried not to.”
    Lucas filled him in on the investigation, and finished with “… so it’s gonna be slow and methodical. Lots of paperwork.”
    “But a big deal—unlike Anderson and his statue.”
    “Mmm. I called some of the people on my list, put out some lines in the Latino community,” Lucas said. “Haven’t gotten anything back yet. We need to be careful not to step on Shaffer’s toes. We’ll all be talking to the DEA tomorrow, we can figure out who’s doing what.”
    Del stood up and stretched: “So, we go home and eat dinner with the kids?”
    “Nothing wrong with that,” Lucas said. He thought about the bodies in the Brooks house.
    L UCAS WENT HOME , watched the Brooks murder coverage on Channel Three; played with his son, Sam, throwing a Nerf ball at a basket; got a smile from his infant daughter, Gabrielle, who was now almost a toddler; and had a long, complicated discussion with his daughter Letty about television news.
    Letty was between her junior and senior years in high school and had worked part-time at a TV station for three years. She’d met a politician that day, in the green room off the studio, who shook her hand and asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up. She said she was thinking about being a TV reporter, and the politician shook his head and said, “The thing about TV is, every single story is wrong. Nothing is ever quite right. If you go into TV work, you’ll spend your life telling lies.”
    “Then what are
you
doing here?” she’d asked.
    “I’m selling my side,” he’d said. “Television isn’t news—it’s
sales
. I’m selling my ideas.”
    The conversation had troubled her and she’d expected some reassurance from Lucas. He failed to give it to her. So they talkedabout that for a while, and then she said, “I dunno. I like it, TV. But…”
    “Don’t tell me you want to be a lawyer,” Lucas said. “And not a cop.”
    “This politician guy, when he came back out, I asked him what I should be. He said, ‘If I were a kid, about to go to college, and was smart, and knew what I know now … I’d study economics.’”
    “I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Lucas confessed. “Sounds kinda … dry. Maybe you oughta talk to your mom.”
    “You know what she thinks,” Letty said. “She’s already writing my essay for medical school. She wants me to take some surgical assistant classes at the VoTech and assist her in some surgeries next summer. She says she can fix it. But I just, uh, I like getting in the truck and running around town.”
    “You like watching surgery.”
    “Yeah, but in a
news
way,” she said. “I’m not sure I’d be interested in doing it,” she said. “Mom says every case is different, but to me, they all look a lot alike. I can’t see myself doing that for forty years.”
    “So talk to your pals at Channel Three,” Lucas said. “My feeling is, TV’s like the cops: it’s interesting, but it can get old, and pretty quick.”
    “Maybe I could be an actress,” she suggested.
    “Ohhh … shit.”
    A T TEN O’CLOCK that