"You gonna ask her, or what?"
"Every time I go home, she's asleep," Lucas said. "When I get up, she's gone."
"You're a cop; that's the way it goes. She's smart enough to know that," Sloan said. "At least you're not doing shift work."
"Yeah, it's just this fuckin' case," Lucas said, holding the ring up to the windshield, peering through the rock. "After this case, we can get back on some kind of schedule."
Lucas cleared the idea with the chief, then talked to Anita Segundo, the press liaison.
"I don't know whether we should tell them it's bullshit, and that they're helping catch the kidnapper, or just feed them the story," Lucas said.
"It wouldn't be honest to just feed them the story-but that's the way I'd do it," Segundo said. She was dark-haired, with a smooth, olive complexion and large black eyes. She spoke with a slight West Texas accent, biting off her words like a TV cowgirl.
"How fast could we get it done?" Lucas asked.
"I could tip the TV stations to what might make a good story-and they'd jump all over it. Anything to do with Manette is hot stuff. Of course, the papers'll bite if TV does."
"Give me an hour," Lucas said. "Then put it through."
Lucas found Barry Hunt in a huddle with salesmen, pulled him out, and outlined the story idea. Hunt thought about it for fifteen seconds, then nodded. "I don't see a downside, as long as we have enough cops around for protection."
"You'll have the cops. But the downside is, it might not work," Lucas said.
"That's not what I meant," Hunt said. "I meant, there's no downside for us. Whether or not we catch the guy, we can use the stories-video and print-in our PR. You know, tracking a vicious nut kidnapper blah blah blah."
"Oh." Lucas scratched his head. He'd hired the guy to think like this. "Yeah. Listen, then, I'd like Ice to make the presentation to the TV people."
Hunt studied him for a moment and then said, "You're going a little deeper than I expected. But you're right-if we have the protection."
The programmers thought the idea was great: Ice-almost hopped up and down when Hunt said she'd lead the presentation of the story. The idea fit with her sense of humor.
"Listen, you guys," Lucas said anxiously, "if you pull their weenies too hard, they're gonna know. Then they're gonna screw us, because the press don't like to get their weenies pulled. Worse than that, this guy, this asshole, he might know. He's no dummy. We gotta play this straight: or mostly straight. We gotta look good. So let's, like, you know, try not to…" He trailed off.
"What?" somebody asked.
"Geek out," Lucas said.
"One thing we could do," said Ice, "is we could take that composite you've been passing around, and make up a hundred different variations of what he looks like. We could do that in an hour with one of the landscape programs. Then we could call them up for the TV people. It'd be very visual…"
"Do that," Lucas said, jabbing a finger at her. "Now, I was thinking-when we tried to grab him by tracing the phone call…" He explained the FBI's cellular phone direction-finding gear. "That's really high tech. I thought there might be something in it."
"All right, how about this," said another programmer, a short redhead with a yellow pencil behind each ear. "We scan in a map of Dakota County, do some lift-up 3-D shit, then program where the helicopters were and do some graphic overlays on the signal strengths, like we're trying to refine where on the map the signals came from…"
"Can you do that?" Lucas asked. "I mean, really?"
The programmer shrugged: "Beats the shit outa me. Maybe, if we had the data. But I was thinking more like, you know, making a cartoon for the TV people."
"Jesus, I can see it. We'd do the whole screen in blood red," Ice said. She looked at Lucas. "It'd look great: they'd eat the whole thing."
"That's what we want," Lucas said. "It's only gotta hold water for a couple of days."
The receptionist stepped into the doorway of the work room, looked around for Hunt, saw him perched on the end of a work bench. "Barry? We've got Channel Three on the phone. They want to do a story."
Hunt hopped off the bench. "How long do you guys need?"
Ice looked around the room, said, "We'll need a few hours to set up, get everything together."
"Could you do it tomorrow morning?"
"No problem," Ice said.
"Excellent," said Lucas.
CHAPTER 18
Gloria was walking up to Mail's front porch when the sheriff's car pulled into the driveway. She turned, smiling, and waited. The cop wrote something on a clipboard on the passenger seat, then got out of the car, smiled, nodded politely.
"Ma'am? Are you the owner?"
"Yes? Is there a problem?"
"Well, we're just checking ownership records of houses down here," the police officer said. "You're…" He looked at his clipboard and waited.
"Gloria LaDoux," Gloria said. "My husband is Martin, but he's not home yet."
"He works up in the Cities?"
"Yup." She thought quickly, picking out the most boring job she could think of. "He's at the Mall of America? At Brothers Shoes?"
The cop nodded, made a mark on the board. "Have you seen anything that would be, like, unusual along the road here? We're looking for a man in a van…"
Mail was a half-mile from the house, the passenger seat full of groceries, when he saw the car in the driveway.
He stopped on the side of the road and closed his eyes for a moment. He knew the car, a rusty brown Chevy Cavalier. It belonged to a guy named Bob Something, who had a ponytail and a nose ring and bit his fingernails down to the quick. Bob didn't know where he lived, but Gloria did-and Gloria drove Bob's car when she needed one.
Gloria.
She'd been a good contact at the hospital. She worked in the clinic. She could steal cigarettes, small change, candy, and sometimes a few painkillers. Outside, she'd been trouble. She'd helped him with the Marty LaDoux thing, she'd switched the dental records, she'd collected John Mail's life insurance when the body was found in the river. Then she started going on about their relationship. And though she'd never made any direct threats, she'd hinted that her knowledge of Martin LaDoux made her special.
He'd worried about that. He hadn't done anything, because she was as implicated as he was, and she was smart enough to know it. On the other hand, she had liked it inside. She'd told him that when she was inside, she felt secure.
And she loved to talk.
If she'd figured out the Manette kidnapping, she wouldn't leave it alone. Eventually she'd tell someone. Gloria was always in therapy. She'd never get enough of talking about her problems, of hearing someone else analyze them.
Shit. Gloria…
Mail pulled the van off the shoulder and went down the road to the house.
Gloria Crosby felt expansive. For weeks, she'd felt as though she were living in a box. One day was much like the next as she waited for something to happen, for a direction to emerge. Now it was happening. John had Andi Manette and the lads, she was sure of that: and he must have a plan to get at the Manette money. When they had it, they'd have to leave. Go south, maybe. He was smart, he had ideas, but he wasn't good at details. She could do the detail work, just like she had with Martin LaDoux.
Martin LaDoux had been a robo-geek, the worst of the worst, frightened by everybody, allergic to everything, crowded by Others who'd keep him up all night, talking to him. Her mental picture of Martin was of a tall, thin, pimply teenager with a handkerchief, rubbing his Rudolph-red nose while his eyes watered, trying to smile…