John Sandford - Mind prey

Harmon Anderson wandered over to Greave's desk, eating a chicken-salad sandwich. A glob of mayonnaise was stuck to his upper lip. "Anything for a buck," he said between chews. Anderson was a hillbilly and a computer expert. "Girdler is not a doctor. He has a B.A. in psychology from some redneck college in North Carolina."

Sherrill, still damp, strolled in, pulled off the tennis hat, slapped it against her coat, then took off her coat and hung it up. She nodded at Lucas, tipped her head at the radio, and said, "Have you been listening?"

Lucas said, "Just now," and to Greave, "Did you ask him not to?"

Greave nodded. "The standard line. I said we should keep it to ourselves so the perpetrators don't know exactly what we have, and so we can present a better image if we get to court."

"Did you say perpetrator?" Lucas asked.

"Yeah. So shoot me."

"I'd say he didn't give a fuck," Sherrill said, fluffing her hair. "I was listening on the way over. He's remembering stuff he didn't give to us…"

"Making it up," Lucas said.

"Everybody's gotta, be a movie star," Greave said. And they paused for a moment to listen:

Dr. Girdler, you know, the police don't stop crime; they simply record it, and sometimes they catch the people who do it. But by then, it's too late. This kidnapping is a perfect example. If Mrs. Manette had been carrying even a simple handgun, or if you had been carrying a handgun., you could've stopped this thug in his tracks. Instead, you were left standing there in the hallway and you couldn't do anything. I'll tell you, the criminals have guns; it's time we honest citizens took advantage of our Second Amendment rights…

"Damnit," Sherrill said. "It's gonna turn into a circus."

"Already has." They all turned toward the door. Frank Lester, deputy chief for investigation, stepped inside with a handful of papers. He was tired, his face drawn. Too many years. "Anything more?"

Lucas shook his head. "I talked to Dunn. He seems pretty straight."

"He's a candidate, though," Greave said.

"Yeah, he's a candidate," Lucas said. To Lester, "Have the Feds come in yet?"

"They're about to," Lester said. "They can't avoid it much longer."

Lucas twisted the engagement ring around the end of his forefinger, saw Lester looking at it, and pushed it down in his pocket. Lester continued, "Even if the Feds come in, Manette wants us working it, too. The chief agrees."

"Jesus, I wish this shit would stop," Greave said, rubbing his forehead.

"Been doing it since Cain and Abel," said Anderson.

Greave stopped nibbing: "I didn't mean crime. I meant politics. If crime stopped, I'd have to get a job."

"You could probably get on the fuckin' radio with that suit," Sherrill said.

Lester waved them silent, held up a yellow legal pad on which he'd scribbled notes. "Listen up, everybody."

The talk died as the cops arranged themselves around Lester. "Harmon Anderson will be passing out assignments, but I want to outline what we're looking at and get ideas on anything we're missing."

"What's the overtime situation?" somebody called from the back.

"We're clear for whatever it takes," Lester said. He looked at one of the papers in his hand. "Okay. Most of you guys are gonna be doing house-to-house…"

Lester dipped his head into a chorus of groans-it was still raining outside-and then said, "And there's a lot of small stuff we've got to get quick. We need to know about the paint in the parking lot, by morning. And we need to check the school, for that color or type of paint. Jim Hill here"-he nodded at one of the detectives-"points out that you hardly ever see poster paint outside a school, so maybe the school is somehow involved."

"Her old man did it," somebody said.

"We're checking that," Lester said. "In the meantime, we got the blood on that shoe, and we need somebody to walk the blood tests around, 'cause we need to know quick if the blood's Manette's or one of the kids'. If it's not-if it's somebody else's-we'll run it through the state's DNA offender bank. And we need to talk to the University medical school, get Manette's blood type. I'm told she occasionally volunteered for medical studies, so they may even have a DNA on her, and if the blood on the shoe belongs to one of the kids, a DNA might tell us that…"

"DNA takes a while," said a short, pink cop who wore a snap-brim hat with a feather in the hatband.

"Not this one," Lester said. He looked at the paper again. "We need Ford Econolines checked against all her patients, against the school staff, all relatives, and against whatever data base we can find on felony convictions, Minnesota and however much of Wisconsin we can get. We need to see if any Manette- or Dunn-related companies own Econolines. Go to Ford, see if we can get a list of Econolines from their warranty program-they said it was an older one, so go back as far as you can. We need to run the registration lists for Econolines against her patient list, which we're trying to get…"

Anderson broke in. "I'm setting up a data base of patient names. Any name that pops up in the investigation, we can run against the list-so get all the names you can. All the teachers at the school, her phone records, anything."

Lester nodded and continued. "We need to check Manette's and Dunn's credit ratings, see if anybody's got money problems. Check insurance policies. What else?"

"Manette's putting together an enemies list," Lucas said.

"Run that, too," Lester told Anderson. "What are we missing?"

"Public appeals," said a black cop in a pearl-gray suit. "Pictures of Manette and the kids."

"All the news outlets already have some kind of pictures, but we're putting out some high-quality stuff in the next couple of hours," Lester said. "There's some talk of a reward for information. We'll get back to you on that. And I want to say now, all the news contacts should go through the Public Affairs Department. I don't want anybody talking to the press. Everybody clear on that?"

Everybody was. Lester turned to Sherrill. "How's the house-to-house going?"

"We've hit all the houses where the residents could see the school, except for two, where there's nobody home, and we're looking for those people in case they were there during the kidnapping," Sherrill said. "The only thing we have so far is one woman who saw the van, and she picked out Econoline taillights as the lights she saw. So we think that ID is solid. Now we're going back for a second round, to talk about what people might've seen in the past couple of days-and we're doing the same thing in Manette's neighborhood. If this was planned out, he must've been scouting her. So, that's about it."

"Okay," Lester said. He looked around the room. "You all know the general picture. Get your assignments from Anderson and let's get it on the road. I want everybody breaking their balls on this one. This one's gonna be tough, and we need to look good."

As the other detectives gathered around Anderson, Lucas leaned toward Greave and asked, "Did the kid, the witness kid, did she see anything different from what Girdler gave us?"

Greave scratched the back of his head, and his eyes defocused. "Ah, the kid, I don't know, I didn't get much from her. She was fairly freaked out. Didn't seem like much."

"You got her phone number?" Lucas asked.

"Sure. You want it?"

"Doesn't she live over in St. Paul? Highland Park?"

"Someplace around there…"

Lester caught Lucas outside his office as Lucas was locking the door.

"Any ideas?" he asked.

"What everybody else says-money or a nut," Lucas said. "If we don't get a ransom call, we'll find him in her files or in her family."

"There could be a problem with the files," Lester said. "Manette talked to the Wolfe woman and she hit the roof. I guess there was a hell of an argument. Medical privilege."