John Sandford - Shadow Prey

She looked up, a guilty expression on her face. "I hadn't thought of that. The first… encounter."

"You know when you bust a kid for something, a teenager, and you're not sure that they did it? And they get that look on their face when you tell them you're a cop? And then you knowl If you're not careful, you'll look like that."

"Ah, Jesus," she said.

"But if you can get through the first ten minutes, just keep bullshitting along, you'll stop feeling guilty and it'll go away."

"The voice of experience," she said, with the tiniest stain of bitterness in her voice.

"I'm afraid so," he said, a little despondently. "I don't know. I love women. But I look at Sloan. You know, Sloan's wife calls him Sloan? And they're always laughing and talking. It makes me jealous."

Lily dropped onto the foot of the bed. "Let's not talk about this," she said. "It'll put me in an early grave. Like Larry."

"Poor old Larry," Lucas said. "I feel for the sonofa-bitch."

The next day was sunny. Lucas had on his best blue suit with a black wool dress coat. Lily wore a dark suit with a blue blouse and a tweed overcoat. Just before they left Lily's hotel room, TV3 had begun live coverage of Larry Hart's funeral. The coverage opened with a shot of Lawrence Du-berville Clay arriving at the funeral. Clay spoke a few cliches into a microphone and went inside.

"He thinks he's the fuckin' president," Lucas said.

"He might be, in six more years," Lily said.

The Episcopalian church was crowded with welfare workers and clients, cops and Indian friends and family. Daniel spoke a few words, and Hart's oldest friend, whom he'd called brother, spoke a few more. The casket was closed.

The cortege to the cemetery shut down traffic in central Minneapolis for five minutes. The line of funeral cars ran bumper to bumper through the Loop, escorted by cops on motorcycles.

"It's better out here," Lily said as they walked into the cemetery. "Churches make me nervous."

"This is the first place 1 ever saw you," Lucas said. "Bluebird's buried here."

"Yup. Weird."

Gravestones were scattered over twelve acres of slightly shaggy grounds, beneath burr oaks. Lucas supposed it would be a spooky place on moonlit nights, the oaks looming like shadows cast by the Headless Horseman. Anderson, stiff in a black suit, looking more like an undertaker than the undertaker, wandered over to stand beside them.

"This is where Rose E. Love is buried," he said after a while.

"Oh, yeah? Where'd you find that out?" Lucas said.

"I found it in some notes with the old coroner's files. There weren't any relatives handy when she died, so they made a note on the death certificate about the funeral home and cemetery, in case somebody came looking for her."

"Hmph."

"Bluebird too," Lily said.

"Mmm."

After a while, Anderson wandered away, edging around the accumulation of funeralgoers. Film crews from all the local television stations and several foreign and national news services stood as close as seemed circumspect, as the cops rolled out their most martial ceremony. When it was over, they passed a folded flag to Hart's mother and fired a military salute.

When the service ended, Anderson strolled up again.

"She's right along here," he said.

"Who?"

"Rose E. Love. I had them look up the gravesite in the cemetery office."

Lucas and Lily, pulled along by Anderson's interest, followed him a hundred yards to a gravesite under the boughs of an aging oak, a dozen feet from the wrought-iron fence surrounding the cemetery.

"Nice spot," Anderson said, looking up into the spreading oak tree with its hand-size leaves still clinging to the branches.

"Yeah." The grave had been kept up spotlessly; on the oblong pink granite stone was inscribed ROSE E. LOVE, in large letters, and below that MOTHER, in smaller script. Lucas looked around. "The grave looks a lot better than the other ones around here. You don't think maybe Shadow Love stops by and works on it?"

Anderson shook his head. "Naw. The cemeteries don't allow that. They'd get all kinds of shit going on. Me and my old lady bought our plots, you know, a couple of years back. They had all these care plans you could sign up for. Give them two thousand bucks now and they'll take care of your grave in perpetuity. It's called Plan Perpetual. You can put it right in your will."

"That's a little steep, isn't it?" Lily asked. "Two thousand bucks?"

"Well, I mean, its forever," Anderson said. "When the next ice age comes through, they'll have a guy out here with a heater…"

"Still a little steep."

"If you can't afford it all at once, you can pay by the year. You know, like seventy-five, a hundred bucks."

"Gives me the creeps thinking about it," Lucas said.

"He doesn't plan to die," Lily confided to Anderson.

"I hate to tell you this," Anderson said as they wandered away from Rose Love's grave, "but there comes a time in every man's life…"

Lucas thought of a question for Anderson. As he opened his mouth to speak, the cold steel of a gun barrel touched him behind the ear. He jerked to a halt, staggered, closed his eyes, slapped his neck and let out a deep breath.

"Lucas?" asked Lily. She had stopped and was looking up at him. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," he said after a moment. "I was just daydreaming."

"Jesus, I thought you had a heart attack or something." Anderson was looking at him curiously, but Lucas shook his head and took Lily's arm. Anderson broke offjust before they got to the fence, and headed across the slope toward the cemetery road. Lily and Lucas strolled out of. the ceme- tery through a side exit, away from the remnants of the somber crowd.

The question was lost.

"What do you want to do?" Lily asked.

"I think I might go back out on my regular net," Lucas said. He had been thinking about his lie of the day before, and decided that talking to his regulars might be a good idea.

"Okay. You can drop me at the hotel," Lily said. "I'm going to sit around and read Anderson's notebooks for a while. Maybe go for a run before dinner."

"I told you. There's nothing in it-Anderson's stuff," Lucas said. "We won't find them on paper. If the Crows are lying low, we need somebody to talk to us."

"Yeah. But somewhere, there's something. A name. Something. Maybe somebody from their prison days…"

The day was chilly, but the bright sunlight felt fine on Lily's face. She walked with her head tilted back as they crossed the street, taking in the rays, and Lucas' heart thumped as he walked behind her, marveling. Shadow Love was parked a block away, watching them.

Shadow Love stole a Volvo station wagon from the reserved floor of an all-day parking ramp. He drove it to the cemetery and waited a half-block from the hillside where they'd bury Hart.

The wait was a short one: Hart's funeral moved like clockwork. The funeral cortege came in from the other side of the graveyard, but Davenport and the New York woman came in from his side. They all gathered on the hillside and prayed, and Shadow Love watched, slipping back to the warm moment when he slashed Hart, feeling the power of the knife… The knife was in his pocket, and he touched it, tingling. No gun had ever affected him the same way, nor had the knife, before the Hart killing.

Blood made the stone holy…

When the funeral ended, Davenport and the New York cop walked away from the crowd with another man, down the hill toward his mother's grave. When they stopped, Shadow Love's forehead wrinkled: They were at his mother's grave. What for? What did they want?

Then they split up. The other man wandered away, and Davenport and the woman continued on until they crossed through the wrought-iron fence onto the sidewalk. The woman tilted her head back, smiling, the sunlight playing across her face. Davenport caught her arm as they got to the car and bumped his hip against hers. Lovers.