Mind Prey (24 page)

"Sounds a little thin," Sloan said. "He'll be suspicious after that radio gag. But he might."

"I'll talk to the PR chick," Lucas said. "See if we can get something going."

"Don't call her a chick, huh? You make me nervous when you talk that way. She carries a can opener in her purse," Sloan said.

"Okay."

Sloan was driving too fast through traffic, and when Lucas tilted his head back, he punched the radio up, a country station, and they listened to Hank Williams, Jr., until Lucas said, "I feel like my head's stuffed with cotton."

"What?"

"Nothing's going through it at all." He was fumbling with his hand and looked down and saw the ring on his thumb at the same moment that Sloan saw it.

"You gonna ask her, or what?"

"Every time I go home, she's asleep," Lucas said. "When I get up, she's gone."

"You're a cop; that's the way it goes. She's smart enough to know that," Sloan said. "At least you're not doing shift work."

"Yeah, it's just this fuckin' case," Lucas said, holding the ring up to the windshield, peering through the rock. "After this case, we can get back on some kind of schedule."

Lucas cleared the idea with the chief, then talked to Anita Segundo, the press liaison.

"I don't know whether we should tell them it's bullshit, and that they're helping catch the kidnapper, or just feed them the story," Lucas said.

"It wouldn't be honest to just feed them the story--but that's the way I'd do it," Segundo said. She was dark-haired, with a smooth, olive complexion and large black eyes. She spoke with a slight West Texas accent, biting off her words like a TV cowgirl.

"How fast could we get it done?" Lucas asked.

"I could tip the TV stations to what might make a good story--and they'd jump all over it. Anything to do with Manette is hot stuff. Of course, the papers'll bite if TV does."

"Give me an hour," Lucas said. "Then put it through."

Lucas found Barry Hunt in a huddle with salesmen, pulled him out, and outlined the story idea. Hunt thought about it for fifteen seconds, then nodded. "I don't see a downside, as long as we have enough cops around for protection."

"You'll have the cops. But the downside is, it might not work," Lucas said.

"That's not what I meant," Hunt said. "I meant, there's no downside forus . Whether or not we catch the guy, we can use the stories--video and print--in our PR. You know, tracking a vicious nut kidnapper blah blah blah."

"Oh." Lucas scratched his head. He'd hired the guy to think like this. "Yeah. Listen, then, I'd like Ice to make the presentation to the TV people."

Hunt studied him for a moment and then said, "You're going a little deeper than I expected. But you're right--if we have the protection."

The programmers thought the idea was great: Ice-almost hopped up and down when Hunt said she'd lead the presentation of the story. The idea fit with her sense of humor.

"Listen, you guys," Lucas said anxiously, "if you pull their weenies too hard, they're gonnaknow . Then they're gonna screw us, because the press don't like to get their weenies pulled. Worse than that, this guy, this asshole,he might know. He's no dummy. We gotta play this straight: or mostly straight. We gotta look good. So let's, like, you know, try not to..." He trailed off.

"What?" somebody asked.

"Geek out," Lucas said.

"One thing we could do," said Ice, "is we could take that composite you've been passing around, and make up a hundred different variations of what he looks like. We could do that in an hour with one of the landscape programs. Then we could call them up for the TV people. It'd be very visual..."

"Do that," Lucas said, jabbing a finger at her. "Now, I was thinking--when we tried to grab him by tracing the phone call..." He explained the FBI's cellular phone direction-finding gear. "That's really high tech. I thought there might be something in it."

"All right, how about this," said another programmer, a short redhead with a yellow pencil behind each ear. "We scan in a map of Dakota County, do some lift-up 3-D shit, then program where the helicopters were and do some graphic overlays on the signal strengths, like we're trying to refine where on the map the signals came from..."

"Can you do that?" Lucas asked. "I mean, really?"

The programmer shrugged: "Beats the shit outa me. Maybe, if we had the data. But I was thinking more like, you know, making a cartoon for the TV people."

"Jesus, I can see it. We'd do the whole screen in blood red," Ice said. She looked at Lucas. "It'd look great: they'd eat the whole thing."

"That's what we want," Lucas said. "It's only gotta hold water for a couple of days."

The receptionist stepped into the doorway of the work room, looked around for Hunt, saw him perched on the end of a work bench. "Barry? We've got Channel Three on the phone. They want to do a story."

Hunt hopped off the bench. "How long do you guys need?"

Ice looked around the room, said, "We'll need a few hours to set up, get everything together."

"Could you do it tomorrow morning?"

"No problem," Ice said.

"Excellent," said Lucas.

Chapter
18

>

Gloria was walking up to Mail's front porch when the sheriff's car pulled into the driveway. She turned, smiling, and waited. The cop wrote something on a clipboard on the passenger seat, then got out of the car, smiled, nodded politely.

"Ma'am? Are you the owner?"

"Yes? Is there a problem?"

"Well, we're just checking ownership records of houses down here," the police officer said. "You're..." He looked at his clipboard and waited.

"Gloria LaDoux," Gloria said. "My husband is Martin, but he's not home yet."

"He works up in the Cities?"

"Yup." She thought quickly, picking out the most boring job she could think of. "He's at the Mall of America? At Brothers Shoes?"

The cop nodded, made a mark on the board. "Have you seen anything that would be, like, unusual along the road here? We're looking for a man in a van..."

Mail was a half-mile from the house, the passenger seat full of groceries, when he saw the car in the driveway.

He stopped on the side of the road and closed his eyes for a moment. He knew the car, a rusty brown Chevy Cavalier. It belonged to a guy named Bob Something, who had a ponytail and a nose ring and bit his fingernails down to the quick. Bob didn't know where he lived, but Gloria did--and Gloria drove Bob's car when she needed one.

Gloria.

She'd been a good contact at the hospital. She worked in the clinic. She could steal cigarettes, small change, candy, and sometimes a few painkillers. Outside, she'd been trouble. She'd helped him with the Marty LaDoux thing, she'd switched the dental records, she'd collected John Mail's life insurance when the body was found in the river. Then she started going on about theirrelationship . And though she'd never made any direct threats, she'd hinted that her knowledge of Martin LaDoux made her special.

He'd worried about that. He hadn't done anything, because she was as implicated as he was, and she was smart enough to know it. On the other hand, she hadliked it inside. She'd told him that when she was inside, she felt secure.

And she loved to talk.

If she'd figured out the Manette kidnapping, she wouldn't leave it alone. Eventually she'd tell someone. Gloria was always in therapy. She'd never get enough of talking about her problems, of hearing someone else analyze them.

Shit. Gloria ...

Mail pulled the van off the shoulder and went down the road to the house.

Gloria Crosby feltexpansive . For weeks, she'd felt as though she were living in a box. One day was much like the next as she waited for something to happen, for a direction to emerge. Now it was happening. John had Andi Manette and the lads, she was sure of that: and he must have a plan to get at the Manette money. When they had it, they'd have to leave. Go south, maybe. He was smart, he had ideas, but he wasn't good at details. She could do the detail work, just like she had with Martin LaDoux.

Martin LaDoux had been a robo-geek, the worst of the worst, frightened by everybody, allergic to everything, crowded by Others who'd keep him up all night, talking to him. Her mental picture of Martin was of a tall, thin, pimply teenager with a handkerchief, rubbing his Rudolph-red nose while his eyes watered, trying to smile...

He was useless until the state swept them all out of the hospital and gave them, in a ludicrous gesture at their presumed normalcy, both medical and life insurance, along with their places in a halfway house. The life insurance had doomed Martin LaDoux.

Gloria was sitting on Mail's front porch, waiting, not at all impatient. The house was locked, but John was around--through the front window, she could see the pieces of a microwave meal sitting on a TV tray in the living room.

The question was, where was he keeping Manette and the kids? The house felt empty. There was nothing living inside. A feather of unease touched Gloria's heart. Could he have gotten rid of them already?

No. She knew about John and Manette. He'd keep her for a while, she was sure of that.

Gloria was sitting on the front steps, chewing on a grass stem. When Mail pulled the van into the yard, she stood up--dressed all in black, she looked like the wicked witch's apprentice--and sauntered down to meet him.

"John," she said. Her face was pallid, soft, an indoor face, an institutional face. "How are you?"

"Okay," he said, shortly. "What's going on?"

"I came out to see how you're doing? Got a beer?"

He looked at her for a moment, and her face shone with knowledge and expectation. She knew . He nodded to the question. "Yeah, sure. Come on in."

She followed him inside, looked around. "Same old place," she said. She plunked down on his computer chair and looked at the blind eyes of the computer monitors. "Got some new ones," she said. "Any new games?"

"I've been off games," he said.

He got two beers from the refrigerator and handed one to the woman, and she twisted the top off, watching him.

"You've got a Davenport game," she said, picking up a software box. There was a pamphlet inside, and three loose discs.

"Yeah." He took a hit of the beer. "How's your head?" he asked.

"Been okay." She thumbed through the game pamphlet.

"Still on your meds?"

"Ehh, sometimes." She frowned. "But I left them back at my apartment."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. I don't think I can go back there." She said it as a teaser. She wanted him to ask why not. She tossed the pamphlet back in the software box and looked up at him.

"Why not?"

"The cops were there," she said. She took a drink from the bottle, eyes fixed on him. "Looking for you."

"For me?"

"Yup. They had a picture. I don't know who told them that I know you, but they knew. I managed to put them off and slid out of there."

"Jesus, are you sure? That they didn't follow..." He looked at the front window, half-expecting squad cars.

"Yeah. They were stupid; it was easy. Hey, you know who one of them was?"

"Davenport."

She nodded. "Yeah."

"Goddamnit, Gloria."

"I jumped a bus, rode it eight blocks, hopped off, walked through Janis's apartment building, and took the walkway to Bob's, borrowed the car key from Bob..."

"Did you tell him you were coming to see me?"

"Nope." She was proud of herself. "I told him I had to bring some school stuff home. Anyway, I got the key, went down into the parking garage, and got his car. There was nobody around when I left."

He watched her as she talked, and when she finished, he nodded. "All right. I've been having some trouble with the cops."

"I know," she said. And she popped it out, a surprise: "They were here, too."

"Here?" Now hewas worried.

"A cop pulled in just after I got here--they're checking all the farmhouses. I don't think he was too interested after I told him I was your wife, and we lived here together."

Mail looked at her for a moment, and then said, "You did."

"I did," she said. "And he left."

"All right," he said, his voice flat.

She caught the hems of her dress and did a mock curtsey, oddly crowlike in its bobbing dip. "You took the Manette lady and her kids."

He was dumbstruck by the baldness of it. He tried to recover: "What?"

"Come on, John," she said. "This is Gloria. You can't lie to me. Where've you got them?"

"Gloria..."

But she was shaking her head. "We took down fifteen thousand, remember?"

"Yeah."

"That was sweet," she said. "I'd like to help you collect on Manette... if you'll let me."

"Jesus." He looked at her and scratched his head.

"Can I see them? I mean, you know, put a stocking over my head or something? I assume they haven't seen your face or anything."