Mind Prey (19 page)

Lucas, Lester, and an anonymous FBI tech sat in Haward's office underlooking the Minneapolis skyline. Haward interlaced his fingers in the middle of his leatherette desk pad and said, "It's all on the way, with the techs to operate it. The Chicago flight lands in an hour; the LA flight is still three hours out. The Dallas stuff, I don't know if we'll get that tonight. We'll go ahead in any case. Time is too much of a problem. In sixty-five percent of the cases, the victims have been terminated at this point on the time line."

"I just hope he's got that fucking phone," Lester said.

"He plays computer games--he won't throw out a piece of technology like a new flip phone," Lucas said.

The FBI tech, an older man with a silvery crewcut and striped clip-on tie, said, "The big question is, how do we hold him on the phone, if he answers it?"

"We're working on it," Lucas said, leaning forward in his chair. "We talked to one of the local rock-radio stations--the general manager is a friend of mine, and the only people who'd know about this would be him, one DJ, and an engineer. We're gonna have the DJ call, with a contest they've been running. It's a real contest, real prizes, and it'll really go out over the air. The only difference being that we'll feed them the phone number. If he doesn't answer the first time, we'll try again in a few hours. If he answers--whenever he answers--we'll have the DJ ready to go. The typical air time, for one of these contest things, is only about a minute or a little more. We're working out credible ways to stretch it."

"Unless we're lucky, we'll need at least two or three minutes to get a really good fix," the tech said. "You gotta hold him on there."

"He's a gamer--we're gonna appeal to his vanity," Lucas said. "He'll stay on long enough to deal with the question. And when he answers, if he's right, the DJ's gonna say, 'Hang on while I do an intro to the next song.' Then he'll do it--take his time, maybe do a little ad--and then come back for a mailing address."

"We'll never get an address," Lester said. He grinned. "But wouldn't that be something?"

Lucas shook his head. "He'd just give us some bullshit. But if we can hold him on that long, we ought to get the fix."

"When you say, 'Really good fix,' what does that mean?" Lester asked the tech. Dumbo frowned. The conversation seemed to be flowing around him. "A half-mile, a block, six inches, what?"

"If we could risk riding the signal in, we could get it right down to the house," the tech said. "As it is, we'll be able to put you on the right block."

"Why not go closer?" Dumbo asked.

"Because if he's really nuts, he might slit their throats and run for it," the tech said, turning to his boss. "He'd hear the choppers coming when they were six blocks away."

Lucas said, "You set us to the block, we'll have him out of there in an hour, guaranteed."

"If you can get us the air time, we'll put you on the block," the tech said.

On the way out of the building, Lester said, "Do you believe them?"

Lucas nodded. "Yeah. This is what the feebs are good at--technology. If he answers the phone, and we can keep him on, they'll track him."

"Dumbo was right about one thing--it's getting long," Lester said. He glanced at his watch as if to check the date. "The asshole won't keep them much more than four or five days at the outside. The pressure'llget to him."

"How about the full-court-press idea?" Lucas asked.

"Anderson's trying to set it up, but it'll be tomorrow before we're ready. It's a goddamned administrative nightmare. Even then... I don't know. There are too many people involved. Somebody will fuck it up."

"It's a shot," Lucas said. "What about that guy Black and Sherrill were tracking? The kid who liked sex and fire?"

"John Mail," Lester said. "That's a definite washout. I don't know why, but Black left a note for me. They're looking into three other possibilities."

"Shit," Lucas said. "The guy sounded good."

With two sets of cellular tracking equipment, they would need six helicopters, one flying high and two flying low in each of two groups. The gear from Chicago arrived first, along with three techs, and they busied themselves fixing odd-looking globe antennas to the support struts on the choppers. The gear from Los Angeles arrived two hours later, and the other group was put together. When the choppers were ready, and the equipment checked, they assembled on a landing pad at the airport.

"All you have to do," one of the techs told the assembled pilots, "is generally face in the direction we tell you, and hold it there. The instruments will do the fine tuning. And keep track of what you're doing: I don't want to get hit by a goddamned jumbo jet because you get interested in whatwe're doing, and I don't want anybody running into anybody else."

"Glad he said that," Lucas muttered to Sloan, who was riding with the second group.

"You ready?" Sloan asked. Lucas feared airplanes in a way that amused other cops. Sloan no longer thought it was very funny.

"Yeah."

"They're pretty safe..."

"Helicopters don't bother me the way planes do," Lucas said. He grinned briefly and looked up at the chopper. "I don't know why, but I can ride a chopper."

At eight forty-five they were in the air, lifting out of the airport landing zone, Lucas's group of choppers fixing themselves over I-494 south of Minneapolis, while Sloan's group hovered south of St. Paul. Below them, the lights in the cars on I-494 went by like streams of luminescent salmon, and the street and house lights stretched into the distance in a psychedelic chessboard. At nine-twenty, the techs were happy: "Let's do it," said the tech in Lucas's chopper.

And at the radio station, the DJ picked up a phone, said, "OK," looked through the glass of the broadcast booth at the engineer and the general manager behind him, and nodded.

... wrapping up with "Bohemian Rhapsody" from Queen. Tell you what, sports fans, it's time to play a little squeeze. Here, I'll stick my hand in the fifty-five-gallon drum... (There was a deep thumping, a man trapped inside an oil drum)... and pull out one of these telephone numbers. We'll give it ten rings. If we don't get it in ten, then we push the prize up by ninety-three dollars and try again. So...

John Mail listened with half an ear; he was playing one of Davenport's fantasy games on a Gateway P5-90. He was in trouble: all of Davenport's games were full of traps and reversals. When you were killed, you could restart the game, carefully edge up to the point when you were killed--and get killed by something that passed you through the first time. A back-trail trap, a switchback ambush; must be some kind of circular counting mechanism in the program, Mail thought. He felt he was learning something about the opposition.

On the tuner, the DJ's voice followed a nice set of Queen. His phony bubble-gum rap was a subliminal annoyance, but not worth changing. Mail heard thebeep-beep-boop of the phone dialing. And when the phone rang on the radio--at that very instant--the phone rang in Andi Manette's purse.

Mail sat up, pushed away from the game with a spasm of fear. What was that? Something outside? The cops ?

When he'd finished with Andi Manette the first night, he'd gone to the store for groceries and beer. Andi's purse was on the front seat of the van, where he'd thrown it after the attack. He opened it as he drove and pawed through it. He found her billfold, took out almost six hundred dollars, a pleasant surprise. He found her appointment book, a calculator, miscellaneous makeup, and the two pounds of junk that women seem to accumulate. He'd pushed it all back in the purse.

Later, a little drunk, and preoccupied with the question of Genevieve--the presence of the too-young girl bothered him; a kind of psychological thorn, for no reason that he understood--he dropped the purse on the floor near the kitchen door, intending to get rid of it later.

Now he stood, tense, up on the balls of his feet. Gun , he thought. The .45 was on a bookcase, and in two steps, he had it. Lights? No, if he turned them off, they'd know he'd heard them.

The buzzing continued. Nothing furtive about it. The fear recoiled a notch, but he kept the gun. Somebody outside? Or the stove clock? A broken smoke alarm? He moved quickly toward the kitchen, looked around--and saw the purse. In the background, the phone was ringing on the radio, the DJ said, "That's four..." and Mail's ear picked up the synchronized ringing between the radio and the purse.

He dumped the purse on the table. No phone, but the purse still rang at him, and was too heavy in his hand. He pulled open the front pocket and found it, a portable phone. As he looked at it, the DJ was saying, "That's six... and that's seven. George Dunn, if you're on the pot you better get off, 'cause... that's eight..."

Mail turned the phone in his hands, flipped it open, saw the phone switch. He looked out the window--nothing. If it was the cops calling, they didn't know where he was.

"He's not gonna answer," the tech said. "That's nine."

Mail answered on the tenth ring. "Hello?" And Lucas jabbed a finger at the tech: "That's him."

At the radio station, the DJ leaned into it. "George Dunn? Damn, boy, you almost missed the call of your life, of the week, anyway."

And Mail could hear it all on the radio.

"This is Milo Weet at K-LIK with a We-Squeeze-It, You-Suck-It-Up; one thousand, two hundred and nine dollars on the line. You know how we play--we squeeze out a classic rock song in five seconds, the whole song, and you have ten seconds to tell us what it is. Are you ready?"

Mail knew the game. They thought his name was George Dunn, that was Manette's husband, but Weet was asking again, "Uh, George, excuse me, this is where you're supposed to say, 'Go ahead, dude,' unless you been into the vegetable matter again, in which case, give me your address and I'll be right out."

"Uh, go ahead, dude," Mail said. He'd never been on the radio. He could hear himself with his other ear, a strange, electronic echo.

"Here it comes, then, Georgie." There was a second of dead air, and then a nearly incomprehensible packet of noise with a vague rhythm to it, almost recognizable. What was it ? Da-duh-da-Duh-da-Duh...Let's see .

The tech was working what looked like a television set, shouting at the pilot, "Hold it there, hold it, hold it..." while yellow numbers scrambled across the screen, and then, "Go 160, go, go..." and they took off, southeast.

"George? You there, boy? You got it? Tell you what, buddy, this is getting old. I'll give you another five seconds, another song by the same group. Not the same song, the same group..."

The tech was saying, "We've got him on, goddamn, he's right between us." He clicked on his microphone. "Frank, you got him?"

From the radio: "We got him, we're heading out at 195, but we're getting some shake in the reception..."

The second squirt of sound ended, and Mail said to Weet, "'All Night Long, by AC/DC."

He added, on the air, "Davenport, you cocksucker."

And he was gone.

Chapter
13

>

Mail punched the Off button and with the phone still in his hand, ran outside. Overhead, a jetliner passed in-bound for Minneapolis-St. Paul. That's how they'd come , he thought, looking into the sky for lights, red or white, blinking, swooping, focusing on him. Choppers. An envelopment.

He ran down to the drive and piled into the van, fumbled the keys out of his jeans pocket, roared backwards out of the driveway onto the gravel road. If they were coming, and if he could get just a little bit north, maybe he could lose himself in the suburban traffic...

Mail wasn't frightened as much as he was excited. And angry. They'd played him for a sucker. He'd bet a hundred-to-one that Davenport was behind the call. Hell, he'd go a thousand-to-one. It was all very slick. So slick that he found himself grinning in the night, then sliding into an angry sulk, then grinning again, despite himself. Slick.

But not quite slick enough, he thought.

From a mile away, atop a hill, Mail looked back at his house. He couldn't really see it, but he could see the lighted kitchen door, which he'd left open, a thin candlestick against the dark fields. There was nothing near him--nothing coming. He shifted into park, and let the engine idle. Nothing at all.

After a moment, he turned off the engine and got out to listen: nothing but a thin breeze blowing through the goldenrod in his headlights ...

Andi and Grace had nearly given up on the weapon idea. The only thing they could find, that might be anything at all, was a large nail that had bent over when it was being driven into the rafters above them. If they could pull it free, Andi thought, they might be able to hone it on the granite fieldstone in the walls.

"ltd be like a short ice pick, I guess," Andi said. They had nothing to work with, except the aluminum cans that the strawberry soda came in. While they were trying to figure out how to use the cans to pull the nail free, they began experimenting with the cans themselves. They could pull the tops and bottoms off without too much trouble--Andi wrapped her fingers in her shirt, and literally tore the aluminum free. They then had a thin, flexible sheet of aluminum. They tried folding it and flattening it, with the idea of sharpening the point and using it like a knife blade.

They could get a point, but not with enough stiffness to penetrate skin and muscle deeply enough to do damage. They might get an eye.