Sudden Prey

were out of luck.”
    “The TV people are wondering why there weren’t enough people out there in the first place. Enough to take him as soon as he showed,” the mayor said.
    “Normally, it would have been plenty. Except that he saw us coming and he had a machine gun. And he didn’t care if he died. All that—that changes everything. We’re lucky only one guy got killed; it could have been three or four. If he’d had some combat experience, he might’ve waited until the entry team was halfway into the house, and then took them on at close range.”
    “Anyway, that’s all St. Paul’s problem,” Roux said. “And as far as Lucas is concerned, the laughing thing, I think I can clear it out.”
    The mayor’s eyebrows went up. “How?”
    Roux said, “You know Richard Small—TV3? He was on the stakeout last night. He wouldn’t leave, and Lucas let him keep his shotgun. I talked to him this morning and he figures Lucas and Del are his war buddies now. I’ll call him about the laughing incident, and why they were doing it—out of relief, or hysteria, and how unfair this is, some horseshit like that. He just about runs TV3. If he goes on the air with another perspective, we can turn it around. And he’ll do it. When I talked to him this morning, he was still jacking shells in and out of the shotgun.”
    The mayor looked from Lucas to Roux. “Do it,” he said, nodding. “Emphasize the fairness thing, and how he’d be setting the record straight on his combat buddy.”
    And to Lucas: “You gotta keep your ass down and out of sight.”
    “I’m trying,” Lucas said.
     
     
     
    HOMICIDE HAD BEEN turned into a war plans room: file cabinets and desks pushed into corners, two tables shoved together with a six-foot plastic map of the Twin Cities spread across it. Sherrill was there, wearing her .357 in a belt clip.
    “You okay?” Lucas asked.
    “Yeah. We got the arrangements going on Mike. I’m all cried out.”
    “We got one of them,” Lucas said.
    “Not the one I want, not yet,” Sherrill said, shaking her head. “We got Kupicek’s guy. I want the third man, the one we don’t know yet.”
    Anderson wandered in, spotted Lucas, and stepped over: “I got a lot of new paper, if you want it.”
    They talked about the paper for fifteen minutes, what the Tennessee cops were doing, the Wisconsin cops, about the death of Elmore Darling. “We’ve got more pictures of Sandra Darling, we’ll put those out. But I don’t know, I don’t know if she’s with this LaChaise, or we’re gonna find her dead in a ditch somewhere.”
    “She’s with him,” Sherrill said.
    “Why do you think that?” Lucas asked.
    “I don’t know. I just think she’s with them. If they were going to kill them, why not kill both of them? I bet she’s screwing LaChaise. Or maybe the second guy. I bet she helped set up the funeral home thing with the second guy . . .”
    “Bonnie and Clyde,” Lucas said.
    “More like Dumber and Dumbest,” said Sherrill.
    LA CHAISE, MARTIN AND Sandy Darling were riveted by the images on the television. The pictures came up from a winter street, with a woman in a long wool coat and fur hat talking into a microphone.
    “. . . rushed the wounded officer to the hospital, but he died seconds after arrival. As that was going on, Chief Davenport and Lieutenant Selle were seen laughing as they stood over the body of the attacker . . .”
    Her voice rolled on over a videotape, taken from a high angle, a uniformed cop and a guy in street clothes, standing over what looked like a pile of clothes in the street. Had to be Butters. And the cops were laughing, no doubt about it.
    “. . . police were refusing to disclose the identity of the officer or officers who actually shot Butters, saying that information would be available after LaChaise and his gang members are caught, but nobody has denied that Deputy Chief Lucas Davenport took part in the gunfight and was himself wounded. At the moment, a police spokeswoman said, the threat to the officers’ families will not allow full disclosure . . .”
    “Look at the fuckers,” LaChaise said.
    Martin frowned as the tape of Davenport and Selle was run again. The picture seemed wrong. “They don’t look too happy,” he said.
    “They’re laughing,” LaChaise shouted at him. “They’re laughing.”
    LaChaise paced in front of the TV, snarling at it, beating his hands together, palms open, the angry claps snapping into the room. He went to the