Mind Prey (11 page)

"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 wantto 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, off-handedly. "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 her 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. Gainers use them," Lucas said. "I don't know about the Netha-whachamacallits."

"Sounds like some land 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-H-I-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 thePioneer Press around here somewhere, and all kinds ofStar-Tribunes, you could look--but I don't thinkso , 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.

"You want me to check out these Nethinims dudes?" Greave asked.

Lucas turned to him, nodded. Greave was okay with books. "Yeah. If you ask around, and nobody knows, check a couple of game stores and see if it's a new game character or set. Then check like, uh, Tolkien's Ring cycle--Lord of the Rings, all that. There're a couple of science fiction stores in town--call and talk to a clerk, see if anybody recognizes the name from a book series... a fantasy series probably."

"The guy sounds like a smart little wiseass," Lester said.

"Yeah." Lucas nodded. "And he can't help proving it. He'll last five days or a week--I just hope somebody's left alive when we get him."

Chapter
7

>

The rape had done something to her, beyond the obvious. Had damaged her.

When Mail had finished with her, she was panicked, injured, in pain--but generally coherent. When Mail had taken Genevieve, she'd argued with him, pleaded.

An hour after that, she began to drift.

She curled on the mattress, stopped talking to Grace, closed her eyes, trembled, shuddered, tightened into a ball. She lost the most elemental sense of what was going on--how much time was passing, where sounds came from, who was in the cell with her.

Grace came to her several times, gave her strawberry soda, tried to get her to eat, took off her own coat and gave it to her mother. This last, the coat, Andi found useful; she huddled under it, away from the naked lightbulb, the Porta-Potti, the stark gray walls. With the coat over her bead, she could almost believe she was at home, dreaming...

She seemed to wake a few times and she spoke with both Grace and Genevieve, and once with George. Sometimes she felt her mind drifting above herself, like a cloud: she watched her body huddled on the mattress, and wondered,why ?

But sometimes she felt needle-sharp: she opened her eyes and looked at her knees, pulled up tight to her chin, and felt herself clever not to come out from under the coat.

Beneath it all, she knew her mind simply wasn't functioning correctly. This, she thought during a passing moment of rationality, was insanity. She'd been outside of it for years: this was the first time she'd been inside.

Once she had a dream, or a vision: several men, friendly but hurried, wearing technicians' or scientists' coats, lowered her into a steel cylinder with an interior the size of a phone booth. When she was inside, a steel cap with interlocking flanges was lowered on top of the cylinder, to seal it off. One of the technicians, an intelligent, soft-spoken man with blond hair, glasses, and an easy German accent, said, "You'll only have to last through the heat. If you make it through the heat, you'll be all right..."

Some kind of protection dream, she thought, during one of the lucid moments. The blond man, she thought, she'd seen in a Mercedes-Benz commercial, or a BMW ad. But the man wasn't the thing. The cylinder was: nobody, nothing could get at her in the cylinder.

After a very long time of wandering in and out of consciousness, she closed in on herself. Found a ray of rationality, followed it to a kind of spark, and sat up. Grace was sitting on the concrete floor, facing the computer monitor. The screen was blank.

"Grace, are you all right?"

Andi was whispering. Grace reflexively looked up at the ceiling, as though the whisper might have come from the outside, from God. Then she looked over her shoulder at Andi: "Mom?"

"Yes." Andi rolled up to a sitting position.

"Mom, are you..."

"I'm getting better," Andi said, shaking.

Grace crawled toward her. Her slender daughter looked even thinner, like a winter-hungry fox: "Jeez, Mom, you were arguing with Daddv for a while..."

"John Mail beat me up; he raped me," Andi said. She simply let the word out. Grace had to know what was happening, had to help.

"I know." Grace looked away, tears trickling down her cheek. "But you're better?"

"I think so." Andi pushed herself up to her knees, then stepped off the mattress, shakily, one hand on the wall. Her legs felt like cheese, thick, soft, unreliable, until the blood began to flow again. She pulled her skirt up, pulled her blouse together. He'd taken her bra: she remembered that. The assault was coming back.

She turned her back to her daughter, pulled up her skirt, pulled down her underpants, looked inside: just a spot of blood. She wasn't badly torn.

"Are you okay?" Grace whispered.

"I think so."

"What are we going to do?" Grace asked. "What about Genevieve?"

"Genevieve?"My God. Genevieve . "We've got to think," Andi said, turning around to look at her daughter again. She knelt on the mattress, pulled Grace's head close to her lips and whispered, "The first thing we've got to do is find out if he's listening to us, or if we can talk. We have to keep talking, but I want you to get on my shoulders, and I'm going to try to stand up. Then I want you to look at the ceiling, see if there is anything that might be, you know, a microphone. It probably won't be very sophisticated--he'd just stick a tape recorder microphone in one of the airholes, or something."

Grace nodded, and Andi said, out loud, "I don't think I'm too hurt, but I need some sleep."

"Sojust lie down for a while," Grace said. Andi squatted, and Grace stepped over her shoulders. She probably weighed eighty pounds, Andi thought. She had to push herself up with help from the wall, but she got straight, and they walked back and forth through the room, Grace's head almost at the ceiling, the girl dragging her fingers across the dark wooden boards, probing into corners, poking her fingers into the airholes in the concrete walls. Finally she whispered, "Okay," and Andi squatted again and Grace got off, shook her head. She'd found nothing.

Andi put her lips close to Grace's ear again. "I'm going to say some things about John Mail. We want to see if he refers to what I say, when he comes down next time. Ask me a question about him. Ask me why he's doing this."

Grace nodded. "Mom, why is Mr. Mail doing this? Why is he hurting you?" The question sounded phony, artificial, but maybe on a crude tape it'd be okay.

Andi counted out a long, thoughtful pause. "I believe he's compensating for sexual problems he had when he was a child. His parents made it worse--he had a stepfather who'd beat him with a club..."