Stolen Prey

pretty sure, as the fish swam away, that it gave him the finger.
    T HE CAST was cut off, momentarily, at three months, and his wrist was x-rayed again, and the doc said it needed another month. A scum of dead skin covered his arm, and the muscles looked too thin—withered, Lucas thought. His arm reminded him of the tweeker’s too-thin forearm. The doc let him scrub the dead skin off before he put the new cast on. Under his arm hair, the new skin was as pink and soft as a baby’s butt. “Come back in a month,” the doc said. “In a month, you’re good. And lucky. Some people go six.”
    “That’s what the last guy said. But he said if I was lucky, I’d get out in three.”
    “That’s really lucky,” the doc said. “You’re only a little lucky.”
    T HE SUMMER of the cast and cell phones, though meteorologically excellent, was professionally slow. Lucas’s job at the BCA was mostly self-invented, and included politically sensitive cases,or cases that might attract a lot of media attention. That summer, the politicians stayed away from ostentatious felonies, as far as anyone knew—something could always pop up at a later date. (“I didn’t know she was fourteen. Honest to God, she said she was thirty-two.”)
    So Lucas focused on a self-invented, long-term, statewide intelligence project that involved finding, working, and filing police sources in Minnesota’s criminal underworld. The project was kept secret for fear that it would encounter media ridicule. Most people didn’t believe that there actually
was
a Minnesota criminal underworld, and those who did—the cops—often didn’t want to give up sources.
    Just as in any other state, Minnesota had plenty of crooks. Ten thousand people sat in prison, from a population a little short of six million, with a constant coming and going. Of those, quite a few were one-timers, or criminals of a kind that didn’t interest him: repeat drunk drivers, people convicted of manslaughter or negligent homicide, or white-collar crime. Those kinds of people were singletons, who generally acted alone, out of stupidity and greed, and, aside from the drunk drivers, were not given to repeated mayhem.
    He was interested in the repeaters, the professionals, the people who lived and worked in a criminal culture—bikers, gang members, burglars, robbers, pederasts, drug dealers. Lucas had a theory that every county, and every town, would have a “node” that pulled in criminals of that area—a bar, a bowling alley, a roadhouse.
    Furthermore, he thought that criminals in one area would know most of the nodes for the surrounding areas, no matterhow urban or rural the countryside might be, and would be attracted to those nodes when away from home.
    He wanted a thousand names of sources who’d talk to the cops, across that whole web of nodes; at least one or two sources for each.
    They would all know him by name, and there would be certain implicit guarantees in their transactions. Like no police comebacks.
    T O SET UP his system, he first had to learn about spreadsheets, and then a bit about computer secrecy: he had no interest in building a general criminal database, and needed a way to keep the work away from prying cop eyes. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to help other cops, it was just that as soon as more than one person began operating the database, it would stop functioning. Tipsters wanted a relationship: they didn’t want their names in a cop newspaper, and if they thought that was what was happening, they’d shut up or disappear.
    So Lucas had spent the summer talking on the phone, taking long rides out into the countryside to meet unusual men and women at sandwich shops and parks, filling out the database.
    H E REALIZED , at some point, what the computer had done for him. He’d been tempted, at one time or another, to move to a bigger police agency—one of the federal agencies, or to a really large city, like New York or Los Angeles. He’d not done that because he’d realized that the Minneapolis–St. Paul area was the largest size he could comprehend.
    In Los Angeles, a cop was caught in a blizzard of shit, and there was never any way to tell where the shit was coming from. You get three murdered in Venice, and the killer was almost as likely to come from Portland or St. Louis as from LA; was likely to be unknown to the local cops. Serial killers had operated for decades in the LA area, without the cops even knowing about it. Chaos ruled.
    That