Sudden Prey

Couldn’t tell about the other end.”
    “Okay. Did you hear anything before what was on the tape?”
    “Well, yeah. Something about how your girlfriend wasn’t on the insurance.”
    “What?”
    “That’s what they said . . .”
    “I’m sending a squad over,” Lucas said. “They’ll bring you down here. I need to talk to you, face-to-face. Bring the tape with you. There’ll be a payday in it.”
    “You bet, chief,” Buster said.
    He hung up, thought a moment.
    Had to be a cop. Or a civilian employee. If they’d gotten their information from insurance forms, they had to have access to inside computers. And the insurance did make sense: it would explain how they had located the spouses, which had been hard to figure.
    He picked up the phone and called Roux.
    “I understand you’re on the way down here. Something good?” she asked.
    “Not exactly. You might want to bring in the mayor.”
    He called Dispatch: “What happened?”
    “We’ve got two squads at Snyder’s. Nobody there. They remember her, though. They just missed them.”
    “Anybody get their vehicle?”
    “No. We just got there, the guys are checking around . . .”
     
     
     
    MARTIN AND SANDY got back in the Continental and Martin said, “What’d Dick have to say?”
    “He hasn’t seen anything on the TV. He said he’s going to take a nap.”
    “Getting shot can take it out of you,” Martin said, as he eased the car into the street.
     
     
     
    THE MAYOR LEANED on the windowsill, hands in the pockets of his sport jacket, fists clenched, head down. Lester lounged in a side chair, looking almost as though he were sleeping. Roux turned back and forth in her swivel chair, her eyes on Lucas.
    “Does anybody else know?” the mayor asked.
    “Just Anderson. I told him the whole story, and asked him to check the computers, see if he could tell if anybody was messing with the insurance records. And he’s running this Bill Martin name, to see if it pans out.”
    “We gotta keep this one thing quiet, this insurance thing,” the mayor said, shaking his finger at Roux and Lucas. “We gotta find this guy, if he exists, and nail him, before anybody else knows.”
    “Man, I can hardly believe it,” Roux said. “Maybe it’s bullshit.”
    “It’s got a bad feel,” Lucas said. “We’ve got one source who thought she saw a cop. Then Darling calls, and she says cop.”
    Roux held up a finger and punched a number into her phone. She said, “This is Roux. Anything?” She listened for a moment, then said, “Damnit. If anything happens, get back.”
    She hung up and said, “Still nothing at the Snyders. We’re sending some guys down to print the phone, make sure it was Darling. I can’t imagine that . . .”
    She was cut off by a knock at the door, and a half-second later, Anderson stuck his head in: “Lucas said if I got anything . . .”
    “Yeah, come on in,” Lucas said. “What’d you get?”
    “Two things. You want the good news, or the bad news?”
    “Good news,” the mayor said. “We haven’t had much.”
    “We ran Bill Martin, conventional spelling, against Dick LaChaise, the Seed, Wisconsin and Michigan. We got a bunch of hits—he’s pretty well known with the gang. He’s a gun dealer, by the way. We’re sending all the prints we took out of the house to the FBI, and they’ll run them. We should know in ten minutes if we’ve got a match.”
    “Excellent,” Lucas said. To the mayor: “That’d be the third guy.”
    “And it’d prove that you were talking to Sandy Darling,” Anderson pointed out. “Not just some bullshit artist.”
    “The bad news,” Lucas said.
    Anderson had a half-dozen sheets of paper in his hands, and he shuffled them nervously. “When did your source see the cop with LaChaise? In the laundromat?”
    “Must’ve been . . . yesterday? In the early morning.”
    “Oh, God.” He shuffled the paper some more, his mouth working. “Yesterday, somebody accessed the insurance files on everybody in your task force.”
    “Who was it?” asked Roux.
    “We don’t know,” Anderson said. “They were accessed and printed out through Personnel, at six o’clock in the morning. There’s nobody in Personnel at six o’clock.”
    “From what O’Donald said, the guy she saw was a street cop—not somebody from Personnel,” said Lucas.
    “So we got a cop with a source in Personnel,” Roux said.
    Lucas shook his head: “Something like this, you might get one bad guy, but not two.