Stolen Prey

here. They’re from someplace else. Mexico, Central America. Could be Russia.”
    “Good thought,” Lucas said.
    Shaffer called from the next room: “Hey, Lucas, Rose Marie’s here.”
    “Got it,” Lucas said.
    R OSE M ARIE R OUX , the commissioner of public safety, once state senator, once Minneapolis chief of police, once—for a short time—a street cop, was coming up the sidewalk. She was a stocky woman in a blue dress who looked a lot like somebody’s beloved silver-haired mother, except for the cigarette that dangled from her lower lip. She was a quick study, and a longtime winner in the backroom battles at the Capitol.
    She shook her head at Lucas: “I’m not going in there. I don’t want to see it,” she said. “I do need something to tell the media.”
    “They’re all four dead,” Lucas said. “Patrick Brooks, his wife, son, and daughter. Tortured, the females raped. I wouldn’t give them any detail—just, brutally murdered.”
    “Is there anything … promising?” Roux asked.
    “No, not that I’ve seen,” Lucas said. “It looks professional. Brutal, impersonal. Meant to send a message. We might never find them, truth to tell.”
    “I don’t want to tell three million people that we’re not going to catch them,” Roux said.
    “So, say that we’re looking at some leads, that we have some definite areas of interest that we can’t talk about, and that we’ll be doing DNA analysis,” Lucas said.
    “Do we actually have any possibilities? Or am I tap-dancing?”
    “One,” Lucas said. “They wrote on the wall, ‘Were coming,’ no apostrophe in the
were
. But that suggests … suggests … that they may be looking for somebody else. The way they did this, looks like there may have been an interrogation. Like they were questioning Brooks, trying to get something out of him, and he didn’t have it.”
    She mulled that over for a few seconds, then said, “Excuse me, but did you just tell me that they might do this again? To somebody else?”
    “Can’t rule it out,” Lucas said.
    “That’s bad. That’s really bad,” she said.
    “Gives us another shot at them,” Lucas said, looking on the bright side.
    “Ah, jeez … Who’s got the detail?”
    “Shaffer.”
    “Okay.” She mulled that over for a minute, then said, “He’s competent. But keep talking to him. Keep talking to him, Lucas.”
    “What are you doing out here?” Lucas asked. “Is there some kind of … involvement?” He meant political involvement.
    “Yeah, some marginal engagement,” she said. “Candace Brooks was going to run for something, sooner or later. Probably the state senate, next year, if Hoffman retires. The Brookses maxed out contributions for the major offices last few elections, and they’re strong out here in the local party … but, it’s not any big political thing.”
    “So it won’t make any difference if we find out that they were running a drug-money laundry, and giving cash to the local Democrats?”
    She shrugged, a political sophisticate: “It’d hurt for about four minutes. Then, not. But, you know, they were our people.” She meant Democrats.
    Del asked, “So what are you going to tell the media?”
    She looked him up and down, raised her eyebrows, and said, “Jesus, Del, you look like you just fell out of a boxcar.”
    “Professional dress,” Del said. “Around home, I wear Ralph Lauren chinos and Tiger Woods golf shirts.”
    She made a rude noise and turned to look down toward the end of the street, where the media was stacked up, out of sight. “I’ll tell them the truth, just not all of it—four brutal murders, motive unknown. That we’ve got lots of leads and expect to make an arrest fairly quickly.”
    “That’d scare the shit out of me, that promise, if anybody had an attention span longer than two seconds,” Lucas said.
    “That’s what we’re working with,” Roux said. “Though I have to say as the state’s chief law enforcement official, I do expect you to catch them.” She poked Lucas in the chest.
“You.”
    L UCAS WALKED halfway down the block and watched from a distance as Rose Marie spoke to the media. She gave them the basics, and nothing more. She stood in a neighbor’s lush green yard, a mansion in the background, with the media in the street. She used the word
brutal
, and refused to enlarge upon that.
    That was accurate but, in the eyes of the reporters, inadequate.
    One of them knew a cop who was working the roadblock, and