Stolen Prey

doing much, we could probably get her for two hundred.”
    “If you guys say she’s good, I think the federal government could come up with a couple hundred bucks,” O’Brien said.
    Lucas said, “Ah, that’d be two hundred bucks
an hour
. Sometimes she works sixteen or eighteen hours straight … so it could be like three grand a day. Or four. If she’s available and if she likes the idea.”
    O’Brien’s eyebrows went up: “That, I’d have to get approved,”he said. “I can probably do it, for a couple days, anyway, if you guys say she’s really good.”
    “She’s really good,” Shaffer said, and Lucas added, “She’s as good as they get.”
    “So I’ll make a call,” O’Brien said. “Why don’t you guys line her up?”
    T HE REST of the meeting was a review of crime-scene evidence; one of the BCA cops passed Lucas a file of printouts of all the reports made so far. “We’ve got some prints, and we’ve got DNA, so … if we can find them, we’ve got them,” Shaffer said, summing up.
    “But, you don’t really have them,” Rivera said. “You have the instruments, but you don’t have the men who ordered this done.”
    “Just for the time being, I’ll take the instruments,” Shaffer snapped. “I’ll worry about the big chief after I get the guys I know about.”
    Rivera shrugged and muttered something to Martínez in Spanish. Whatever it was, it made a couple of the DEA guys swallow smiles.
    O UT IN THE HALLWAY , after the meeting, Rivera caught up with Lucas, who’d been the first man out the door. He said, quietly, “This Shaffer. He’s not so smart. I was hoping for somebody smarter.”
    “He’s … effective,” Lucas said. “When he gets done, there’ll be no stone unturned.”
    “Do you think he’ll catch these killers, or the people who ordered this done?”
    “I don’t know,” Lucas said. He added, “The meeting seemed a little tense. What happened?”
    Rivera stopped in the hallway and did some straightening-out motions, shooting out his shirtsleeves, pulling his suit together. “When I came up here, I was told by your Justice Department that I could be involved in the investigation. Otherwise, what’s the point for me to come? But Shaffer will not give me copies of your reports. He says it’s for your agency only, that he has no authority to give them to me. So we sit here and tickle our thumbs. Is that right? Tickle? It makes no sense.”
    “Twiddle your thumbs,” Lucas said. “That makes no sense either, but it means this.” He put the report file under one arm and twiddled his thumbs for a few seconds; the cast made it difficult, since his left thumb was immobilized, but he got the idea across.
    “Exactly,” Rivera said. “I had the right idea, but not the word. Twiddle?”
    Lucas looked back down the hall. Shaffer and another agent were just turning the corner, and Lucas said to Rivera, “Listen, I can’t give you the report if Shaffer thinks it’d be improper. But if you want to sit in my office for a while, I’d let you read it. If you keep it under your hat…. I mean, don’t talk about it.”
    “I knew you were the bright one,” Rivera said. “Lead us to your office.”
    S O THEY sat in Lucas’s office for an hour, passing reports back and forth, and Lucas went out once to buy Cokes, which wouldgive Rivera a chance to make a few notes if he needed to. When he returned, he noticed a book with a foiled cover, that had slid, facedown, out of Rivera’s briefcase.
    “What’re you reading? The novel?” Lucas asked.
    Rivera looked down, saw the book, and said, “Ah. Yes. It’s bullshit. In English, I only read bullshit. I got it at the airport in San Diego.”
    Lucas couldn’t help but smile. “What kind of bullshit?”
    Rivera reached down and picked up the novel and turned it faceup. “In this one, the angels of the Lord and the devils of Hell—the fallen angels—are fighting each other, to control the future of humanity. The key to this struggle is an American CIA agent and this beautiful woman—”
    “Of course.”
    “Of course, and the agents save the world at the last minute, and we don’t all fall in the pit. It’s all bullshit. But I finish it and I think, ‘Okay, the good guys win.’ That’s wonderful. That’s why I read it. The good guys win.”
    “You don’t think the good guys are going to win?”
    “I see no evidence of it. Even worse, I don’t know who the good guys are,” Rivera said. Lucas sat down