"Why don't you give me that, first?" Lucas said. "Just in case I piss you off."
Mail laughed, and then said, "You're a funny guy. But listen, this is a real clue. Not sort of remote, like the first one."
"Tell me about the first one?"
"Fuck no." Mail was amused. "But I'll tell you-if you figure this one out, you'll get me fair and square. You ever watch Monty Python? It'd be like"-he lapsed into a bad British accent-"a fair cop."
"So what is it?"
"Just a minute, I got it written down. I've got to read it to you, to get it right. Okay, here it is…" He paused, then said, in a reading voice: "A little blank verse, one-twelve-ten, four-four, one-forty-seven-nine, and a long line; twenty-three-two, thirty-two-nine, sixty-nine-twenty-two."
"That's it?" Lucas asked.
"That's it. This is a very simple code, but I don't think you'll crack it. If you do, I'm done. Mrs. Manette bet me that you'd break it. And I'll tell you, I have to be honest about this, you sure don't want her to lose the bet, Lucas. Hey, did you say it was all right for me to call you Lucas?"
Lucas said, "Mrs. Manette's still okay? Can I talk to her?"
"After the stunt she pulled last time? Bullshit. We had a hard little talk about that. What do you cops call it? Tough love?"
"She's still alive?"
"Yeah. But I'm gonna have to go. I feel like a whole cloud of cops are closing in on me."
"No, no-listen to me," Lucas said urgently. "You don't feel it, but you're ill. I mean, you're gonna die from it. If you come in, I swear to God nothing will happen to you, except we'll try to fix things…"
Mail's voice turned to a growl. "Hey, I've been fixed. Best and the brightest tried to fix me, Davenport. They used to strap me to a table and fix the shit out of me. Sometimes I remember whole months that I'd forgotten because they fixed me so good. So don't give me any of that fixed shit. I been fixed. I'm what you get, when they fix somebody." His voice changed again, went Hollywood. "But, hey, dude, I gotta run. Got a little pussy lined up after dinner, know what I mean? Catch you later."
And he was gone.
Lucas ran down the hall and through the security doors on the 911 center. Lester was already there, with a man Lucas recognized as an FBI agent. They were looking over the shoulder of one of the operators, who was speaking into a microphone: "Dark Econo-line van or like that, probably no further west than Rice Street…" Lester said to Lucas, "Probably 694, east to west. We're flooding it right now. We're taking every van off the road."
They hung around Dispatch for fifteen minutes, listening as vans were pulled off the highway wholesale. After a while, they walked back to the Homicide Office together and found Sloan with his feet on his desk, looking at a printout.
"Da clue," he said, waving the printout at them.
"Already?" Lucas said. "What do you think?"
"Could be Bible verses," Sloan said. "They got that kind of numbers and he used the Bible last time."
"Unless he's cooked up something clever and he's fucking with us," Lester said. "Maybe it's got something to do with the numbers."
"Maybe it's his address," Sloan said. "And his driver's license number."
"And maybe it's the Bible," Lucas said. "I've got somebody who can look into that possibility."
"Elle," Sloan said, looking up from the list of clues. "Does a nunnery got a fax machine?"
"Yeah," Lucas said, vaguely. He read through a transcript of the tape. "Shit."
"What?"
"Don't go away," Lucas said. "Let me fax this to Elle."
When he came back, five minutes later, he glanced around the Homicide Office. A half-dozen detectives were sitting at desks, talking, looking at maps, eating. Two of them had found a Bible and were paging through it with some perplexity.
Lucas stepped close to Sloan's desk and crooked a finger at Lester. Lester stepped over and Lucas said, in a low voice, "There were two things he said. He was fixed-so our guy has been in a state hospital. We've gotta be sure that every state hospital employee and every long-term resident has seen the composite."
Lester nodded. "Why are we whispering?"
" 'Cause of the other thing," Lucas said. "Remember how he knew that we'd spotted his gamer's shirt? Now he knows that Andi Manette tried to send a message to us. He knows. He's gotta be getting information. He's gotta."
"From here?" Lester breathed, looking around.
"Probably not, but I don't know. I'd bet it comes out of the family briefings. Somebody out there has a motive to get rid of Manette. Whoever it is, is talking to this guy."
Lester scratched his nose, nervous, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down. "The chief is gonna be delighted," he said.
"Maybe we shouldn't tell her," Lucas said. "I mean, for her own good."
"What're you thinking about?" Lester said.
"I'm thinking that we ought to come up with a bunch of little nuggets, different nuggets, bullshit, that we feed through all the different family members-and then we wait to see if anything comes out the other side. Stuff that our guy would react to. If we can find who's feeding him, we can crack him. Or her."
"Christ." Lester scratched his nose, then his head. Then, "We gotta tell Roux. That's what she's paid for."
Roux said, "I wish you hadn't told me."
"That's what you're paid for," Lucas said, straight-faced.
Roux sighed and said, "Right. So. Anything critical, we keep to ourselves, though I don't see how we could keep Manette's message to ourselves. We wouldn't have known what it meant."
Lester explained Lucas's idea about feeding false information through the family: Roux grudgingly approved but rolled her eyes to the ceiling and said, "Please, God, don't let it be Tower."
"One other thing," Lucas said. "We've got recorders on everybody's listed numbers, because we were only looking for incoming calls from a stranger. We should start looking at the private phones, too, the unlisted numbers, the outgoing calls. And we need to be quiet about it."
Roux looked at Lester, who nodded and said, "I agree," and then closed her eyes and said, "They'll be pissed when they find out."
"When they find out, we can explain it," Lucas said. "But we need to get on this right now. I mean, right note. We're running out of time."
"But I really don't think whoever it is would call from his own phone."
"They might, if they think they know what's being monitored," Lucas said. "And when the asshole needs to get in touch with them, he's got to call. We need to know about anything anomalous-odd rings, cryptic phone calls, funny-sounding wrong numbers, anything."
Roux sighed, spread her hands on her desk, looked at them. "I knew there'd be days like this," she said.
"You gotta do it," Lucas said.
"All right," Roux said. "I'll call Larry Baxter-he'd sign a warrant on the Little Old Lady Who Lived in a Shoe."
"Tonight," Lucas said. "Get Anderson to call the phone company and get a list of all their numbers, on every single one of the family members. Then get a guy over to the phone company and have him sit there and listen."
"We're running out of guys," Lester said.
"Pull some uniforms," Lucas said. "We don't need Einstein over there."
One hundred and forty-four vans were stopped along I-694 after Mail's call to Lucas. Two men were held briefly while checks were run on them, and then they were released.
"You know what he was doing?" Lucas said, looking up at a wall map in the Homicide Office. He pointed at the top of the map, at the belt highway. "I bet he's on a secondary road driving parallel to the highway. I bet he was on County Road C, knowing that if we're tracking him, we'd be looking on 694."