Mind Prey (21 page)

"It's something," Lester insisted. "He was smarter than we gave him credit for. Christ, another minute. One more minute and we've got him."

Lucas threw a paper coffee cup at a waste basket, the old coffee like acid in his mouth. "We gotta go for the full-court press. He'll be calling back. I'm surprised he hasn't already."

"We can do it with the next shift," Anderson says. "Right now, we'd be eighty percent. By tomorrow morning, we'll be at full strength."

"We gotta be ready to do it now," Lucas said.

"We are--just not a hundred percent. It's a matter of getting people through the shifts," Anderson said.

"We should flood the 494 strip, and extra people down I-35 all the way through Apple Valley," Lucas said.

"Smart little fuck," Lester said, staring moodily at the map.

Weather was asleep and moaned softly when he slipped into bed. He needed to wake her up to talk, but she would be cutting on someone in the morning, and he didn't dare do it. Instead, he lay awake for an hour, plotting the twists and turns of the day, feeling the warmth from Weather seeping over him. He finally slept, one arm at her waist, the smell of Chanel around him.

Weather was gone, and Lucas was just out of the shower when the cellular phone rang. He stopped, listening, then hurried into the living room, trailing streams of water. He'd left the phone on the dining room table, and now he picked it up and clicked it on.

"Lucas, how they hanging?" Mail sounded unnaturally cheerful.

"Are they still alive?" The squad cars should be rolling, Thirty seconds.

"Are you trying to trace me?"

Lucas hesitated, then repeated his original question: "Are they alive, or not?" Lucas asked.

"Yeah, they're alive," Mail said grudgingly. "In fact, I've got a message for you from Andi Manette."

"Let me get a pencil," Lucas said.

"Oh, horseshit, this is all recorded," Mail said impatiently. "Not that it's gonna do you any good. I'm using the cellular, but this time I'm riding around, a long way from anywhere."

Shit. "Go ahead: I've got a pencil."

"Here it is. I don't know how clear it'll be..."

George, Daddy, Genevieve, Aunt Lisa, this is Andi. We're okay, Grace and me, and we hope Genevieve is back and everything is fine with her. The man with us won't let us say anything about him, but he was good enough to let us send this. I hope we can talk to you again, and this man with us, please give him whatever he wants so we can come back safely. That's all I can say...

Andi Manette's voice was plaintive, fearful, trembling with hope; cut off with a click of a recorder button.

"That's all for now, sports fans," Mail said cheerfully. "I have to say, though, I liked the disk-jockey thing. It really woke me up. Tell the guy I'm gonna stop by his house and visit his family some day while he's gone. I'm gonna bring a pair of wire cutters with me. We're gonna have a lot of fun."

When Mail hung up, Lucas turned the phone off, laid it on the table, and stared at it like an ebony cockroach; fifteen seconds later, Martha Gresham called from the communications center and said, "We got it all."

"Excellent. Is Lester there?"

"No, but Donna's talking to him now, so he knows."

Lucas hurried back to the bedroom and dressed, waiting for the phone to ring. It rang as he was knotting the tie: "Yeah, Frank. Was it her?"

"It's her. And she's trying to tell us something, but we don't know what," Lester said.

"How do you know?"

"Because she said hello to her aunt Lisa."

"Yeah?"

"I talked to Tower Manette one minute ago," Lester said. "Her aunt Lisa's been dead for ten years."

"Get somebody going: we need everything we can get on the aunt."

"We're going, but I want you looking at it," Lester said. "Goddamnit, Lucas, we need somebody to pull a rabbit out of a hat."

Lucas said, "You gotta cover Milo, over at the station. And his family. He's got two kids himself."

"We're on the way. But what about Genevieve?"

"Genevieve's dead," Lucas said. "We know that, but Andi Manette doesn't."

They did a group therapy with Manette and Dunn, in Roux's office: why Aunt Lisa?

"Lisa Farmer was my first wife's sister," Manette said. "She had this big place out in the country, with horses, and when Andi was a kid she'd go out and ride. Maybe she's telling us that the guy's a farmer--or that he's a horse guy, or something. It's gotta be something like that."

"Unless she's just lost it," Dunn said quietly.

"My daughter..." Manette started.

"Hey." Dunn pointed a finger at Manette, his voice cold. "I know you love your daughter, Tower, but I do too, and frankly, I know her better. She is fucked up. Her voice has changed, her manner's changed, she is desperate and she's hurt. I want to think that she's sending a message, but I don't want to cut off everything and just concentrate on that one thing. Because it's possible that she's lost it."

Manette looked away, sideways at nothing, down at the floor.

Dunn, uncomfortable, patted him on the back, then looked across Manette at Lucas. "Genevieve's dead, isn't she?"

"You better be ready," Lucas said.

They would do a fast scan of farms and horses, running the Dakota County agricultural assessment rolls against sex crime records and other lists. Lucas got Anderson's running case log and carried it back to his office and read for a while. Nothing occurred to him. Restless, he wandered down to Homicide, and ran into Black and Sherrill.

"What's happening at the U?" he asked.

"We've got five more possibles, including one with fire and sex. We're looking for him now," Sherrill said. She held up a stack of files. "You want Xeroxes?"

"Yeah. Anderson said something about the one guy--Mail?--that he was a washout?"

"Yeah," Black said. "Really washed out. He washed out of the river. He's dead."

"Shit," Lucas said. "He sounded good."

Sherrill nodded. "They let him out of St. Peter and two months later he went off the Lake Street Bridge, middle of the night. They found him down by Fort Snelling. He'd been in the water for a week."

"How'd they ID him?" Lucas asked.

"They found a state ID card on the body," Sherrill said. "The ME went ahead and did a dental on him; it was him."

"All right," Lucas nodded. "Who's this other guy, the fire and sex guy?"

"Francis Xavier Peter, age--now--thirty-four. He set sixteen fires in ten days out in St. Louis Park, nobody hurt, several houses damaged. We talked to his parents, and they say he's out on the West Coast being an actor. They haven't heard from him lately, and he doesn't have a phone. Andi Manette treated him; he was a patient for two years. She didn't like him much. He came on to her during a couple of therapy sessions."

"An actor?"

"That's what they say," Sherrill said.

"This guy we're dealing with," Lucas said, "he could be an actor. He likes games..."

"One thing," Black said. "Francis Xavier Peter is a blond and wore his hair long."

"Jesus: could be the guy. Does he look anything like the composite?" Lucas asked.

"He has a round face, sort of German-country boy," Sherrill said.

"What you mean is, No," Lucas said. "He doesn't look like the composite."

"Not too much," she conceded.

"Well, push it," Lucas said.

Chapter
15

>

The voice was tense : "They're getting close to you. You've got to move on."

Mail, standing in the litter of two decapitated mini-tower systems--he was switching out hard drives--sneered at the phone, and the distant personality at the end of it. "Say what you mean. You don't mean,move on . You mean, kill them and dump them."

"I mean, get yourself out," the voice said. "I didn't think anything like this was going to happen..."

"Bullshit," Mail said. "You thought you were manipulating me. You were pushing my buttons."

He could hear the breathing on the other end--exasperation, desperation, anticipation? Mail would have enjoyed knowing. Someday, he thought, he'd figure the voice out. Then... "Besides, they're nowhere near as close as you think. You just want me to get rid of them."

"Did you know that Andi Manette sent a message with that tape recording you let her make? Her aunt is dead--she's been dead a long time. Her name was Lisa Farmer, and she lived on a farm. And they're looking in Dakota County, at farm houses, because that's where they put you with that little cellular phone trick. You don't have much time now."

Click.

Mail looked at the phone, then dropped it back on the hook and wandered around the living room, whistling, stepping over computer parts. The tune he whistled came from the bad old days at the hospital, when they piped Minnesota Public Radio into the cells. Simple Mozart: he'd probably heard it a hundred times. Mail had no time for Mozart. He wanted rhythm, not melody. He wanted sticks hammering out a blood-beat; he wanted drums, tambourines, maracas. He wanted timpani. He didn't want tinkly music.

But now he whistled it, a little Mozart two-finger melody, because he didn't want to think about Andi Manette tricking him, because he didn't want to kill her yet.

Had she done this? She had--he knew it in his heart. And it made him soangry . Because he'd trusted her. He'd given her an opportunity, and she'd betrayed him. Thisalways happened. He should haveknown it was going to happen again. He put his hands to his temples, he could feel the blood beating through them, the pain that was going to come. Christ, this was the story of his life: when he tried to do something, somebodyalways spoiled it.

He took several laps around the living room and the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, looked blindly inside, slammed it; the whistling began a humming noise deep in his throat, and the humming became a growl--still two-finger Mozart--and then he walked out the back door and cut across the lawn toward the pasture beyond, and the old house in the back.

He jumped the fallen-down fence, passed an antique iron disker half-buried in the bluestem and asters; halfway up the hill, he was running, his fists clenched, his eyes like frosted marbles.

They thought they were making progress, working on Mail: he hadn't become gentle, but Andi felt a relationship forming. If she didn't exactly have power, she had influence.

And they were still working on the nail. They couldn't move it, but a full inch of it was exposed. A few more hours, she thought, and they might pull it free.

Then Mail came.

They heard him running across the floor above them, pounding down the stairs. She and Grace looked at each other. Something was happening, and Grace, who'd been squatting in front of the game monitor, rocked uneasily.

Then the door opened, and Mail's face was a boiled-egg mask with the turned-in, frosted-marble eyes, his hair bushed like a frightened cat's. He said, "Get the fuck out here."

Grace could hear the beating.

She could feel it, even through the steel door. She stretched herself up the door and pounded on it and cried, "Mom, mama, mother. Mom..."

And after a while, she stopped and went back to the mattress and put her hands on her ears so she couldn't hear. A few minutes later, weeping, she closed her eyes and put her hands on her mouth like the speak-no-evil monkey and felt herself a traitor. She wanted the beating to stop, but she wouldn't cry out. She didn't want Mail to come forher .

An hour after he'd taken Andi, Mail brought her back. Always, in the past, her mother had been clothed when Mail put her back in the room: this time, she was nude, as was Mail himself.

Grace huddled back against the wall as he stood in the doorway, facing her, the hostile frontality frightening as nothing else ever had been. Finally, she bowed her head between her knees and closed her eyes and began to sing to herself, to close out the world. Mail listened to her for a moment, then a tiny, bitter smile crossed his face, and he shut the door with aclang .

Andi didn't move.

When the door closed, Grace was afraid to look up--afraid that Mail might be inside the room with her. But after a few seconds, when nothing moved, she peeked. He was gone.

Grace whispered, "Mother? Mom?"

Andi moaned and turned to look at her daughter, and blood ran out of her mouth.

Chapter
16

>

Lucas put down the file and picked up the phone. "Lucas Davenport."

"Yeah, um, I'm a game player?" The woman's voice was tentative, slightly unplugged. Her statements came as questions. "I was told I should talk to you?"

"Yes?"

He was impatient; he was waiting for the LA cops to get back with information on Francis Xavier Peter, the fire-starting actor.

"I think, um, I've seen the guy in the picture," the woman said. "I played D&D with him a couple of months ago, in this girl's house? In Dinkytown?"

Lucas sat up. "Do you know his name, or where he lives?"