John Mail was sitting in a folding chair, looking through a cardboard box of used D&D modules. He glanced down the store at Lucas, and then looked back into the box. Two other gamers, one of each sex, looked up when Paloma shouted at Lucas.
“A feminist role-playing game, modelled on Dungeons and Dragons,” Paloma said, gradually moderating his voice as he walked toward Lucas. “Set in prehistoric times, but dealing with problems like heterosexual mating and childbirth in an essentially lesbian-oriented setting. I’m calling it The Nest.”
Lucas laughed. “Marcus, everything you know about feminism, you could write on the back of a fuckin’ postage stamp with a laundry pen,” he said.
The female gamer said, “Profanity is a sign of ignorance,” and faced him, waiting to be challenged.
Marcus, coming up the store, said, “That was an obscenity, sweetheart, not a profanity. Get your shit straight. That’s a vulgarity, by the way—shit is.” To Lucas, he said, “How you been? Shoot anybody lately?”
“Not for several days,” Lucas said. They shook, and Lucas added, “You’re looking good.”
“Thanks.” Marcus’s face was its usual dusty gray. “I’m watching my diet. I’ve eliminated all fats except a tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil, on salad, at noon.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Could you sign some stock since you’re here?”
“Sure.”
“Hey, are you Davenport?” the female gamer asked. She was a dark-haired high school senior, quivering with caffeine.
“Yes.”
“I’ve got Blades at home, I’d love you to sign it.”
“You still got the book on that?” Marcus asked the girl.
“Sure,” the girl said.
“I’ll get him to sign a book on a used one, and you bring yours in, and we’ll trade,” Marcus said.
“Dude,” said the girl.
“Marcus, we gotta go in the back,” Lucas said. “I need to talk for a minute.”
“All right, let me get those games.” He stepped over to the cash register stand, took a half-dozen boxes off a rack, walked to the used bin and picked up two more, and led Lucas down the length of the store into the back. Just before ducking through a gray curtain into his office, he called back to the girl, “Keep an eye on the desk, will you, Carol?”
The office was filled with cardboard shipping boxes. A rolltop desk was shoved into a corner, buried under ten pounds of unopened junk mail. There were three chairs, one overstuffed and comfortable, two folding, covered with green vinyl. The room smelled of old newsprint and slightly stale cat food. A fat red tabby was lying on the back ledge of the rolltop. The cat looked at Lucas, and Lucas’s gray silk suit, and seemed to think about it.
“Sit down,” Paloma said, waving one hand expansively. “Damn cat is sitting on my orders. Get off of there, Bennie.”
They talked the games business for a minute or two—who was winning, who was losing, the sales wars. “Listen, Marcus, something’s up,” Lucas said. He leaned forward and tapped Paloma on the knee.
“Sure. Cop business?” Paloma had done a little snitching for Lucas.
“Yeah. You heard about that shrink getting snatched? And her kids? Big news in the Strib this morning?”
“Yeah, I saw that,” Paloma said, amazed. “Took her right out of the parking lot.”
“The guy who did it might be a gamer,” Lucas said.
“A gamer?” Paloma asked doubtfully. Another cat came out of the back, a gray one, a solemn female. Marcus picked her up and scratched her ears, and she stared at Lucas with her yellow eyes.
“Yeah. Big guy, wearing a GenCon T-shirt, middle twenties. Probably strong, like a bodybuilder. Has a violent streak. Blond, shoulder-length hair.”
“Nice Dexie,” Paloma said to the cat. Then he shook his head, slowly, thinking. “Not really. Big and tough, huh? That doesn’t sound like too many gamers.” He scratched his nose, thinking. “Except…”
“Who?”
“The guy out there now—he’s a big guy.” Paloma nodded toward the door to the front. “Pretty tough-looking. And I think I’ve seen him in a GenCon shirt.”
“Where? Sitting down? He was kinda short.” Lucas looked toward the curtain that separated the office from the sales floor.
“He was sitting in an old folding chair. He’s probably six-four, maybe two-twenty. Strong as a bull,” Paloma said.
Lucas stepped toward the door. “What’s his name?”
“I don’t know. I’ve seen him two or three times before. Never said much to me.”
“Have you ever seen his car?”
“No. Not that I know of,” Paloma said.
“Huh,” Lucas said. He went back through the door in a hurry, but the dark-haired man was no longer sitting in the chair. To the girl he said, “Where did that guy go? The guy who was sitting over there…”
She shook her head. “He left. You gonna sign a book for me?”
“Who is he? You know him?” Lucas hurried toward the street door.
“Nope. Never saw him before,” she said. “Why?”
“How about you?” he called back to the male gamer. “You know him?”
“Nope. I’m with her.”
Out on the sidewalk, Lucas went to the corner and looked all four ways down the intersecting streets. No van in sight. Nothing but a green Mazda, driven by a redheaded woman in a green dress, who seemed to be lost.
How long had they been talking in the back? Four or five minutes, no more.
And the guy had gone, disappeared, in that time.
Lucas stood on the street corner, wondering.
THE PARKING GARAGE that had once faced the back entrance to City Hall had been razed, and Lucas left the Porsche on the street. Paloma, who’d been following in a Studebaker Golden Hawk, found another space a half-block farther on. As they walked back toward City Hall, they could hear the City Hall bell ringer playing “You Are My Sunshine,” the tune clanging out above police headquarters.
A thin man fell in step with them. As Lucas turned to him, Sloan said, looking up at the bell tower, “Hope there are no fuckin’ acid-heads around right now.”
Lucas grinned: “That would be hard to explain to yourself—‘You Are My Sunshine’ banging around your brain.”
“Makes me want to jump off the tower. And I’m not even high,” Paloma said.
SHERRILL CAUGHT THEM in the hallway outside Lucas’s office. She was carrying a manila file: “We’ve got a problem.” She glanced at Paloma, then turned back to Lucas. “We need to talk. Now.”
“What? They got a court order?” Lucas asked.
“No. But you’re not gonna like it.”
Lucas turned to Sloan: “Marcus is here to look at the composite on the Manette kidnapper. He might want to add some stuff. Could you get him down there?”
“Sure,” Sloan said. And to Marcus: “Let’s go.”
Lucas opened his office, nodded Sherrill into a chair, and hung his coat and jacket on an old-fashioned oak coat rack. “Tell me,” he said. And he decided that he liked the tomboy-with-great-breasts look. He’d never hit on Sherrill, and now couldn’t think how he’d missed her.
“There’s a guy named Darrell Aldhus, a senior vice president at Jodrell National,” Sherrill said. “He’s been diddling little boys in his Scout troop.”
Lucas frowned. “Does this have anything…”
“No. Nothing to do with Andi Manette, except that she hasn’t reported the guy. And that’s a felony. What’s happening is, is what everybody was afraid was gonna happen. Aldhus admits in here—” Sherrill slapped the file—“that he’s had several sexual contacts with boys, and he’s trying to get himself cured. If we go after him, a defense attorney is gonna tell him to get the hell out of therapy and don’t say shit to anybody. Since all we’ve got is her notes, nothing on tape, we really don’t have that strong a case—not without her to back them up. We could put the sex guys on it, have them start talking to kids…”
/>
“Do we have any of the kids’ names?” Lucas asked.
“No, but if we went in hard, I’m sure we could find some,” she said.
“Goddamnit.” Lucas opened a desk drawer and put his feet on it. “I didn’t want this.”
“The press is gonna be on us like a hot sweat,” Sherrill said. “This guy is big enough that if we bust him, it’ll be front-page stuff.”
“In that case, we oughta do the right thing.”
“Yeah? And what’s that?” Sherrill asked.
“Beats the shit out of me,” Lucas said.
“You figure it out,” she said. She handed him the file. “I’m gonna go back and look at the rest of it. I wouldn’t be surprised if Black hasn’t already found more of these things…this was like the fourth file I looked at.”
“But nothing on Manette?”
“So far, no—but Nancy Wolfe…”
“Yeah?”
“She says you’re a bully,” Sherrill said.
LUCAS UNLOADED THE Aldhus file on the chief, who treated it like a live rattlesnake.
“Give me a couple of suggestions,” Roux said.
“Sit on it.”
“While this guy is diddling little boys?”
“He hasn’t done any diddling lately. And I don’t want to start a fuckin’ pie fight right in the middle of the Manette thing.”
“All right.” She looked at the file, half-closed her eyes. “I’ll confer with Frank Lester and he can assign it to an appropriate officer for preliminary assessments of the veracity of the material.”
“Exactly,” Lucas said. “Under the rug, at least for now. How are the politics shaking out?”
“I briefed the family again, me and Lester, on the overnights. Manette looked like death had kissed him on the lips.”
SLOAN CAUGHT LUCAS in the corridor.
“Your friend the doper looked at the composite: he says it could be our guy.”
“Sonofabitch,” Lucas said. He put his hands over his eyes, as if shielding them from a bright light. “He was right there. I didn’t even see his face.”
GREAVE HAD ON a fresh, bluish suit; Lester’s eyes were red-rimmed from lack of sleep.
“They giving you shit?” Lucas asked, stepping into Homicide.
“Yeah,” Lester said, straightening up. “Whataya got?”
Lucas gave him a one-minute run-down: “It coulda been him.”
“And it coulda been Lawrence of Iowa,” Greave said.
Lester handed over the composite sketch based on information from Girdler and the girl. “Had a hell of a time getting them to agree on anything,” Lester said. “I have a feeling that our eyewitnesses…Mmmm, what’s the word I’m looking for?”
“Suck,” said Greave.
“That’s it,” Lester said. “Our eyewitnesses suck.”
“Maybe my guy can add something,” Lucas said. The face in the composite was tough, and carried a blankness that might have reflected a lack of information, or a stone-craziness. “Did Anderson tell you about the GenCon shirt?”
“Yeah,” Lester nodded. He stretched, yawned, and said, “We’re trying to get a list of people who registered for the convention the past couple of years, hotel registrations…did you see the Star-Tribune this morning?”
“Yeah, but I missed the television last night,” Lucas said. “I understand they got a little exercised.”
Lester snorted. “They were hysterical.”
Lucas shrugged. “She’s a white, professional, upper-middle-class woman from a moneyed family. That’s the hysteria button. If it was a black woman, there’d be one scratch-ass guy with a pencil.”
A phone rang in the empty lieutenant’s office, and Greave got up and wandered over, picked it up on the fourth ring, looked back toward Lucas.
“Hey, Lucas—you’ve got a call. The guy says it’s an emergency. A Doctor Morton.”
Lucas, puzzled, shook his head and said, “Never heard of him.”
Greave shrugged, waved the phone. “Well?”
Lucas said, “Jesus, Weather?” He took the phone from Greave. “Davenport.”
“Lucas Davenport?” A man’s voice, young, but with back gravel in it, like a pot smoker’s rasp.
“Yes?” There was silence, and Lucas said, “Dr. Morton?”
“No, not really. I just told them that so you’d answer the phone.” The man stopped talking, waiting for a question.
Lucas felt a small tingle at the back of his throat. “Well?”
“Well, I got those people, Andi Manette and her kids, and I saw in the paper that you’re investigating, and I thought I ought to call you ’cause I’m one of your fans. Like, I play your games.”
“You took them? Mrs. Manette and her daughters? Who the hell is this?” Lucas dosed his voice with impatience, while frantically waving at the other two. Lester grabbed a phone; Greave looked this way and that, not sure of what to do, then hurried to his cubicle and a second later came back with a tape recorder with a suction-cup pickup. Lucas nodded, and while Mail talked, Greave licked the suction cup, stuck it on the earpiece of the phone, and started the recorder.
“I’m sorta the Dungeon Master in this little game.” John Mail was saying. “I thought maybe you’d like to roll the dice and get started.”
“This is bullshit,” Lucas said, stretching for time. Lester was talking urgently into his telephone. “We run into you assholes every time something like this gets in the paper. So listen to this, pal: you want to get your face on TV, you’re gonna have to do it on your own. I’m not gonna help.”
“You don’t believe me?” Mail was perplexed.
Lucas said, “I’ll believe you if you can tell me one thing about the Manettes that’s not in the newspaper or on television.”
“Andi’s got a scar like a rocket ship,” Mail said.
“A rocket ship?”
“That’s what I said. An old German V-2 with a flame coming out of the ass-end. You can ask her old man where it is.”
Lucas closed his eyes. “Are they all right?”
“We’ve had a casualty,” John Mail said, offhandedly. “Anyway, I gotta go before you trace this and send a cop car. But I’ll call back, to see how you’re doing. Do you have a cellular phone?”
“Yes.”
“Give me the number.”
Lucas recited the number, and Mail repeated it. “You better carry it with you,” he said. Then, “This really turns my crank, Davenport. OK, so roll a D20.”
“What?”
“On your Zen dice.”
“Uh, okay…just a minute.” In the office, Lester was bent over the desk, talking urgently into the phone. Lucas said, “I’m rolling…I get a four.”
“Ah, that’s a good roll: Here’s the clue: Go ye to the Nethinims and check ’em out. Got that?”
“No.”
“Well, then, tough shit,” Mail said. “Doesn’t look like you’re gonna do too well.”
“We’re already doing well. We knew you were a gamer,” Lucas said. “We’ve been on your ass since last night.”
Mail exhaled impatiently, then said, “You got lucky, that’s all…”
“Not luck: you’re fuckin’ up on the details, pal. You’d be a hell of a lot better off…”
“Don’t tell me how I’d be better off. Not one fuckin’ guy in a million would’ve recognized that shirt. Blind fuckin’ luck.”
And he was gone. Lucas turned to Lester, who was working two phones at once. After a moment, he put one down, then the other, looked up at Lucas, shook his head. “Not enough time.”
“Jesus, half the people in town have Caller ID. And we’re still calling up the company for traces?” Lucas said. “Why don’t we get a goddamn Caller ID like half the civilians in the state?”
“Well,” Lester said. He shrugged: he didn’t know why. “Was it him?”
“I’d bet on it,” Lucas said. He told Lester about the scar like a rocket ship.
“What—you think it’s on h
er ass or something?”
“That’s what I think,” Lucas said. “We better check with Dunn. But the way he said it, that’s what I think…And he said they’d had a casualty. I think somebody’s dead.”
“Aw, shit,” Lester said.
THEY WENT OVER Greave’s tape together, three or four other cops gathering around to listen. They played it through once without interruption, then went back and listened to pieces. They could hear cars in the background. “Pay phone at a busy intersection. Big fuckin’ help,” Lester said. “And what’s a D20? And who are the Nethinims?”
“D20s are twenty-sided dice. Gamers use them,” Lucas said. “I don’t know about the Netha-whachamacallits.”
“Sounds like some kind of street gang, but I never heard of them,” Greave said. “Play it again.”
As they rewound the tape, Lucas said, “He knew about the shirt. Who’d we tell?”
“Nobody. I mean, the family, maybe. And the kid knows…”
“And probably that fuckin’ Girdler. We better see if we can get a tape of that radio show, see if what all he talked about…”
“And maybe that goddamn kid is talking to the press—everybody else is blabbing.”
Greave punched the tape, and they listened to it again and Greave said, “Yeah, he said Nethinims. N-E-T-HI-N-I-M-S or N-E-T-H-A-N-I-M-S.”
Lucas looked in the phone book, Lester tried directory assistance. “Nothing.”
Lucas, walking around, staring at the ceiling, came back to Lester. “Was I on the news? In the paper, about being on the case?”
Lester showed a thin grin: Lucas attracted a lot of publicity over the years. Sometimes it chafed. “No.”
“This guy said he knew I was investigating, because he’d seen it in the paper…”
“Well, we got the Pioneer Press around here somewhere, and all kinds of Star-Tribunes, you could look—but I don’t think so. I read the stories.”
“TV or radio?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. They know you by sight—they know your car. There were all kinds of reporters around that school. Or maybe somebody interviewed Manette or Dunn and they mentioned something. Or that guy on the radio last night…”
“Huh.” And he thought about the kid he’d seen in the game store that morning, sitting down. The kid who’d left so quickly, who looked like the right guy.