John Sandford - Rules of Prey

"And maybe call an alert for next week," Lucas suggested. "Put a lot of extra cops on the street. Let the media know about it, but ask them not to publish. They won't, and it'll make them feel like they're in on something."

"Not bad," Daniel admitted with a wintry smile. "And after it's over, we can all go on television and debate media ethics, whether they should have cooperated with the cops."

"You got it," said Lucas. "They love that shit."

Lucas called her from a street phone.

"Red Horse?"

"Listen, Annie, Daniel has ordered Anderson-you know, from robbery-homicide?-he's ordered him to make up a list of characteristics for both the victims and the maddog killer and release it to the media. Probably sometime this afternoon. Some of them are already well-known, but some of them were confidential up to this time."

"If I can get it in ten minutes, I can make the noon report."

"I can't give you all of it, but we think he's fairly new to the area. We don't think he's been here more than a few years and that he moved in from the Southwest."

"You mean like Worthington, Marshall, down there?"

"No, no, not southwest Minnesota, the southwestern United States. Texas, probably. Maybe New Mexico. Like that. Daniel will make it official that he was seen in farmer clothes, just like you had it. But now they think it might be a disguise and that he's really white-collar."

"Great. Really great, Red Horse. What else?"

"There'll be more on the list, but that's the best stuff. And listen, before you put it on the air, call Anderson and ask him about it. He'll tell you. He's in his office now." He gave her Anderson's direct line. "Thanks. I'll see you on the air in fifteen minutes."

Midafternoon. Lucas was suffering post-luncheon tristesse, and sluggishly picked up the phone.

"Lucas?"

"How're you feeling, Jennifer?"

"What's going on with McGowan?"

"Jennifer, goddammit-"

"No, no, no. I'm not asking you if you screwed her. You already gave me Boy Scout's honor on that. What I want to know is, what's going on with McGowan and the surveillance? Why are the cops watching her?"

Lucas hesitated before answering, and instantly knew he had made a mistake.

"Ah. You are watching her," Jennifer crowed.

"Jennifer, remember when I asked you to talk to the chief before you did anything on Carla Ruiz? I'm asking you to talk to him again."

Evening. The sun went down noticeably early now. The summer was gone. Lucas waited outside the door of Daniel's office. He had been waiting fifteen minutes when Daniel came in from the outside.

"Come in," he said. He pulled off his topcoat and tossed it on the couch. "I'm asking you straight out. Did you tip Jennifer Carey on the surveillance?"

"Absolutely not. She's got her own sources. She called me and I sent her to you."

Daniel poked a finger at him. "If I find out otherwise, I'll kick your ass."

"It wasn't me. What happened when she called?"

"I called the station manager, got him with Carey in a meeting, and read them the riot act. Carey started on this media-ethics trip and the station manager told her to shut up. Said he wasn't going to have his station blamed if a star from another station was murdered by the maddog."

"So that's it?"

"They wanted equal access with Channel Eight. They're going to take a camera into her house over the weekend, when nothing's happening, shoot some film of McGowan ironing shirts or something. We'll let them in the surveillance post for a few minutes. Just the once."

"And they hold the film until we catch him?"

"That's the deal."

"Not a bad deal," Lucas said approvingly. "What did Jennifer have to say about it?"

"She was unhappy, but she'll go along. She'll produce the McGowan interview. Some kid's reporting it," Daniel said. "To tell you the truth, I think she's a little jealous. I think she wishes it were her, not McGowan."

"Do you remember that awful poem you wrote to me when we first started going out? About having my baby?"

"That wasn't so awful," Lucas said, propping himself on one elbow. There was a little edge to his voice. "I thought it was rather intricate."

"Intricate? It sounded like a bad teenage rock-'n'-roll song from 1959."

"Look, I know you don't particularly like my-"

"No, no, no. I loved it. I kept it. I have it taped to the pull-out typewriter tray on my desk, and about once a week I open it and read it. I just read it today, and I was thinking: Well, I really am having his baby."

Lucas pressed his ear to Jennifer's bare midriff.

"Am I supposed to be hearing anything yet?"

"Are you listening really closely?"

"Yeah." He pressed down harder.

"Well, if you listen very closely…"

"Yeah?"

"You can probably hear that Budweiser I had before bed."

Lucas arrived at the lake in time to watch the sun go down Saturday evening. Carla was gone on the bike, but arrived a half-hour later with a small bag of groceries and a bottle of red wine. Lucas spent Saturday night and Sunday, and most of Sunday night at the cabin. At two in the morning he kissed Carla on the lips and drove back to the Cities, hitting his own bed a little after five. He was late for the project meeting again.

"Whatever happened to the list of people we got from the Rice woman?" Lucas asked. Monday morning in the chief's office. Half the detectives looked out of focus, tired from another weekend's overtime. "You know, when we were checking about the maddog's gun and who bought it from her husband?"

"Well, we checked everybody she could remember," said Sloan, who had done the Rice interview.

"Nothing?"

"We didn't actually interview everybody. We checked them. If they were way off the profile, we let it go. You know, women, old men, boys, we let them go. We did interviews with everybody that might come close to the profile, and came up dry. We were going to go back to the rest, but everything slowed down when Jimmy Smithe started to look good. Everything got thrown on that."

"We should go back for interviews with everybody," Lucas said, turning to Daniel. "We know that goddamn gun is critical. Maybe somebody bought it and resold it. I say we check women, boys, old men, everybody."

"Get on it," Daniel told Anderson. "I assumed it was done."

"Well…"

"Just get it done."

Lucas sat on the attic floor.

"Wednesday. I didn't think we'd make it to Wednesday," said the surveillance man. "He's overdue."

"Cold in here," Lucas said. "You can feel the wind coming through."

"Yeah. We keep the door open but there aren't any heating vents. We're thinking about bringing up a space heater."

"Good idea."

"Thing is, downtown doesn't want to pay for it. And we don't want to get stuck for the money."

"I'll talk to Daniel," Lucas said.

"Car coming," said the second surveillance man.

The car rolled slowly down the street, paused beneath them, and then kept going, around the corner.

"Get the plate?"

"Guy at the end of the street's doing that, one of the cars. He's got a starlight scope."

A radio sitting beside the mattress suddenly burped.

"Get him?" the surveillance man asked.

"Yeah. Neighbor."

"He slowed down outside her house."

"Guy's sixty-six, but I'll note it," said the radio voice.

"How's it going?"

"Cold," the car man said.

They went back to waiting.

"Action stations," the surveillance man said twenty minutes later. "I get the scope."

Lucas watched through binoculars. McGowan was wearing a frothy pink negligee and tiny matching bikini pants. She moved back and forth behind the eight-inch gap in the curtain, more tantalizing than any professional stripper.