Stolen Prey

find them. I’ve been hung up on the horse shit gang. I wanted to get them, so I let him go. Now he’s dead.”
    “You think you can know everything, but you can’t. You think you can anticipate everything, but you can’t,” Weather said. “I didn’t tell you my John Greene story, did I? What happened yesterday?”
    “No.” Greene was a friend of theirs, a cardiac surgeon.
    “Yesterday morning, he takes a sixty-five-year-old guy into bypass surgery. Vietnam vet, this is down at the VA hospital. They’ve done a huge workup on the guy, everything is perfect, he’s an excellent candidate, hasn’t smoked in thirty years, a little overweight but not terrible, always had high cholesterol but he’s gone on the reversal diet and he’s bringing it down…. But he’s having trouble breathing from all those years of eating pork chops. So itlooks like if they do the operation, he’s good for twenty or thirty years. They do the work, the op is fine … but his heart won’t start. Nothing they can do—they try everything. Guy’s dead.”
    “Jeez,” Letty said, her face going white.
    “Bad day,” Lucas said, “But that doesn’t have—”
    “Sure it does,” Weather said. “You can’t know everything. You’re walking through a fog, all the time. Even in situations where you think you know just about everything, like with John, something can go wrong. He’s devastated, because he’s the same kind of guy you are, a control freak. The patient had a nice wife and four kids, couple grandchildren … and he’s dead. But it’s not John’s fault. Same with this Rivera. Shit happens. That’s what everybody was telling John. He
knows
that, but he doesn’t
feel
like that. You’ve got the same problem.”
    S O HE THOUGHT about it, and didn’t sleep well. Weather had planned a morning at the Minneapolis Institute of Art with Letty and Sam, and Lucas was invited, though he told them not to count on it. He slept through the phone when it rang early the next morning, but Weather, who was used to getting up early, picked it up, and then woke him by pulling on his big toe.
    “What?” He was groggy, and pushed himself up.
    She was still in her pajamas. “Your phone was buzzing, so I looked at it. It’s Ingrid. She says she needs to talk to you.” Weather held out his phone.
    “Uhh…”
    “Man, you sound like you’re dead,” ICE said.
    “Just asleep. What happened?”
    “You better come over here and interview a couple guys,” ICE said.
    “You figure it out?” Lucas asked.
    “I’m still working through the software,” ICE said. “This, I got with chitchat. Come over here and talk with these guys.”
    “Who?”
    “The pizza guy and one of the computer security guys. I’m serious, you need to talk to them. They’re waiting for you.”
    “Ah, Jesus.”
    “C’mon. Skip the mascara, just rinse off your face and run on over here,” ICE said.
    H E TOOK the time to stand in the shower for three minutes, put on jeans and a T-shirt and a jacket to cover the Beretta, headed downstairs, unshaven. Weather got some coffee going, and Lucas made himself an egg sandwich, two eggs fried hard inside two slices of white Wonder bread. He borrowed one of Weather’s travel cups for the coffee, and was out of the house five minutes later.
    The day was cool, though the cold front that had come with the initial killings had blown through, and it looked like the day would be sunny and reasonably warm. He took Mississippi River Boulevard north to the point where it leaked onto Cretin Avenue, by the St. Thomas University stadium, took Cretin to I-94, drove across the river and into downtown Minneapolis.
    ICE was sitting on a granite post outside the bank, smoking a cigarette. When she saw him coming, she flagged him down, walked around to the passenger side, and got in the Porsche. “This is pure detective work on my part,” she said. “What happened was, it’s six o’clock and I’m stoned on speed and caffeine and I’m starving to death, so we order out for pizzas at the bank guys’ regular place, and the pizza guy comes by.”
    “The bank guys work on Sunday morning?”
    “This Sunday they do. Anyway…”
    The pizza guy brought in a load of pies, she said as Lucas parked the Porsche, and she and the pizza guy and one of the computer guys started chatting, and the computer guy said that he hardly saw the pizza guys anymore after this guy named Jacob quit. And they said, yeah, he was more of a pizza