Mind Prey (23 page)

Lucas explained the problem, and asked, "Have you got a key?"

"Sure." The manager had a thick German accent. He gave the box kite a final tweak, tightened a balsa-wood joint with a c-clamp, and said, "Gum dis vay." He didn't mention a warrant.

McPherson was waiting in the hall outside Gloria's room. "Could you take a cab?" Lucas asked.

"Well..."

"Here's twenty bucks; that's to cover the cab and buy you dinner," he said, handing her the bill. "And thanks. If you think of anything..."

"I've got your number," she nodded.

The manager let them into Gloria's apartment. They did a quick walk-through: something was bothering Lucas--he'd seen something, but he didn't know what. Something his eye had picked up. But when? During the talk with Crosby? No. It was just now... he looked around, couldn't think of it. Getting old , he thought.

"Do you know any of her friends?" Lucas asked the manager, with little hope.

The German went through an elaborate, Frenchlike shrug, and said, "Not me."

They knocked on every door in the building, with the manager trailing behind them. Few people were in their apartments, and nobody had seen her. Two patrol cops showed up and Lucas said, "Go with the manager. He has legal access, so you don't need a search warrant. Check every single apartment. Don't mess with anything, just check for the girl." As they were walking away, he called, "Look under the beds," and one of the cops said, with an edge, "Right, chief."

Lucas, scowling, turned and said to Sloan, "Find the best picture you can, get it back to the office, and get it out. Tell Rose Marie to hand it out to the press."

"What're you doing?" Sloan asked.

Lucas looked around. "I'm gonna tear the place to pieces, see what I can see. Oh. Get somebody to check the phone company, see if she just made a call."

"All right. And maybe I ought to get a search warrant."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah."

Sloan started looking, while Lucas did another walk-through. The apartment had only three rooms--a living room with a kitchenette at one end, a tiny bath, and a small bedroom.

A battered bureau, probably from the Salvation Army store, was pushed against one wall of the bedroom. Several drawers stood open. He'd danced in the bedroom during the original interview, and he didn't remember the drawers being open: so she'd taken some clothes. He lifted her mattress, looked under it. Nothing. He tossed the bureau drawers onto the mattress. Nothing. Rolled her shoes out of a closet, patted down her clothes. Nothing.

He walked back out to the kitchenette, looked in the refrigerator, pulled out the ice trays. He checked every scrap of paper within reach of the telephone. In ten minutes he had a dozen phone numbers, mostly scrawled on the backs of junk-mail envelopes, a few more on a phone book. He checked the exchanges: none was in Eagan, or Apple Valley, or down that way. He stacked the phone book on the counter with the envelopes, mentioned them to Sloan.

He went to the bathroom next and peered into the medicine cabinet. There were a dozen brown pill bottles on the top shelf, lined up like chessmen. "She's got some weird meds," Lucas called to Sloan. "Let's find out where she gets them and what they're for. Get somebody to check the local pharmacies and maybe the U clinic. This looks like serious shit, so she might need some more."

"Okay," Sloan called back. Lucas opened the door to a small linen closet--women hid things in linen closets, refrigerators, and bureau drawers. He found nothing useful.

Sloan stuck his head in. "She didn't like cameras," he said. He showed Lucas a handful of Polaroids and a couple of prints. She was always in black, almost always alone, standing against something. The few other people in the prints were women.

"So get them all out," Lucas said briefly. He slammed a drawer shut, and they heard glass breaking inside.

"All right," Sloan said. Then: "Chill out, man. We'll get her, sooner or later. You're freaking out."

"She knows him, goddamnit," Lucas said. He turned and kicked the bathroom wall, the toe of his shoe breaking through the drywall. They both stood and looked at the hole for a second. Then Lucas said, "She knows who the motherfucker is, and where the motherfucker is, and we let her go."

Chapter
17

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Anderson tracked Gloria Crosby through the state records, starting with a driver's license to get her exact age, then into the national crime computers--she'd been twice convicted of shoplifting from Walgreen's drug stores--and through the court records into the mental health system. Crosby had been in and out of treatment programs and hospitals since she was a young teenager; her home address was listed as North Oaks, a suburban bedroom north of St. Paul.

"We oughta get some people up there," Anderson said, leaning in the office door.

"I'm not doing anything except reading the book," Lucas said, taking his feet out of his desk drawer. "Is Sloan still wandering around?"

"He was drinking coffee down in Homicide."

They took Lucas's Porsche, Sloan driving it hard. Lucas said, "I hope Gloria doesn't set our guy off. If he gets the feeling that peopleknow ..."

Sloan, grunting as he shifted up and hammered the Porsche through the North Oaks entry, said, "If I was Gloria, I'd be very fucking careful. Very careful." The address came up, a small redwood rambler that looked out of place among the larger homes. The house was set into a low rise, with a split-rail fence defining the yard. Sloan asked, "Put it right in the driveway?"

"Yeah. I'll take the back."

"Sure."

Sloan squealed into the driveway, hit the brakes, and they were out, Lucas heading around the side of the house. The grass on the open parts of the yard had been thoroughly burned off, though the summer hadn't been especially hot or dry. In the shadier spots, it was long and ragged, untended.

Sloan walked up to the front door, passed a picture window with drawn curtains, stopped, peered through a crack in the curtains, saw nobody, and rang the doorbell.

Marilyn Crosby was a slight, gray-haired woman, stooped, suspicious, her face lined with worry. She stood in the doorway, one hand clutching her housecoat at the throat. "I haven't seen her or heard from her since last spring, some time. She wanted money. I gave her seventy-five dollars; but we're not close any more."

"We need to talk," Sloan said, low-keyed, relaxing. "She may be involved with the man who did the Manette kidnapping. We need to know as much about her as we can--who her friends are."

"Well..." She was reluctant, but finally pushed the door open and stepped back. Sloan followed her in.

"She's not here, is she?" Sloan asked.

"No. Of course not." Crosby frowned. "I wouldn't lie to the police."

Sloan looked at her, nodded. "All right. Where's your back door?"

"Through there, through the kitchen... What?"

Sloan walked through the kitchen with its odor of old coffee grounds and rancid potatoes and pushed open the back door.

"Lucas... yeah, c'mon."

"You had me surrounded?" Crosby seemed offended.

"We really need to find your daughter," Sloan said. Lucas came inside, and Sloan said, "So let's talk. Is your husband home?"

"He's dead," Crosby said. She turned and walked back into the house, Sloan and Lucas trailing behind. She led them to a darkened living room, with a shag carpet and drawn curtains. The television was tuned toWheel of Fortune . A green wine bottle sat next to a lamp on a corner table. Crosby dropped into an overstuffed chair and pulled up her feet.

"He was out cutting a limb off an apple tree, got dizzy, and went like that." She snapped her fingers. "He had seventy thousand in insurance. That was it. I can't get at his pension until I'm fifty-seven."

"That's a tragedy," Sloan said.

"Three years ago last month, it was," she said, looking up at Sloan with rheumy eyes. "You know what his last words to me were? He said, 'Boy, I feel like shit.' How's that for last words?"

"Honest," Lucas muttered.

"What?" She looked at him, the suspicion right at the surface. Sloan turned so Crosby couldn't see his face, and rolled his eyes. Lucas was stepping on his act.

"Have you seen this man? He might have been younger when he came around," Sloan said, turning back to Marilyn Crosby. He handed her the composite drawing. She studied it for a moment and then said, "Maybe. Oh, last winter, maybe, he might have come around once. But his hair was different."

"Were they with anyone else?"

"No, just the two of them," she said, passing the composite back. "They were only here for a minute. He was a big guy, though. Sort of mean-looking, like he could fight. Not the kind Gloria usually came back with."

"What type was that?"

"Bums, mostly," Crosby said flatly. "No-goods who never did anything." Then, confidentially, to Sloan: "You know, Gloria's crazy. She got it from her father's side of the family. Several crazy people there--though, of course, I didn't know it until it was too late."

"We need the names of all her friends," Lucas said. "Friends or relatives that she might turn to. Anybody. Doctors."

"I don't know anything like that. Well, I know a doctor."

"There's a reward for information leading to an arrest," Lucas said. "Fifty thousand."

"Oh, really?" Marilyn Crosby brightened. "Well, I could go get the things she left here. Or maybe you'd like to come up and look in her room. You'd know better than I do what you're looking for."

"That'd be good," Sloan said.

Gloria Crosby's bedroom was an eleven-foot-square cubicle with a window in one wall, a bed, and a small pine desk and matching dresser. The dresser was empty, but the desk was stuffed with school papers, music tapes, rubber bands, broken pencils, crayons, rock 'n' roll concert badges, drawings, calendars, pushpins.

"Usual stuff," Sloan said. He went through it all. Lucas helped for a few minutes, then found Marilyn Crosby in the kitchen, drinking from the wine bottle, and got the name of Gloria's last doctor. He looked the name up in the phone book, noted the address, and called Sherrill, who was doing phone work on the patients they'd uncovered at the university. "Anything you can get," Lucas said.

When he got back to the bedroom, he lay down on Gloria Crosby's bed, a narrow, sagging single-width that was too short by six inches. A Mr. Happy Tooth poster hung on the wall opposite the bed. "Hi! I'm Gloria!" was written in careful block letters on the cartoon molar. The molar was doing a root dance on a red line that might have been an infected gum.

"Three names so far," Sloan said, nodding at the pile of junk on the desk. He was halfway through it. "From high school."

"We've got a better shot at the pharmacy. She'll have to go in there sooner or later," Lucas said. He sat up. "We should check the places she was hospitalized and get the names of patients who overlapped with her, and run them against Manette's patient list."

"Anderson's already doing that," Sloan said.

"Yeah?" Lucas dropped back on the bed and closed his eyes.

After a minute, Sloan asked, "Taking a nap?"

"Thinking," Lucas said.

"What do you think?"

"I think we're wasting our time, Sloan."

"What else is there to do?"

"I don't know."

As they were leaving , Marilyn Crosby leaned in the kitchen doorway. She held a twelve-ounce tumbler of what looked like water, but she sipped like wine. "Find anything?"

"No."

"If, uh, my daughter got in touch--you know, if she wanted more money or something--and if I put you in touch with her, who'd get the reward?"

"If you put us in touch and we got the information from her, you'd get it," Lucas said. "We know she knows who it is. All we have to do is ask her."

"Leave a number where I can get you quick," Marilyn Crosby said. She took a sip from the glass. "If she calls, I'll get in touch. For her own good."

"Right," Lucas said.

Sloan took the wheel again, and Lucas slumped in the passenger seat and stared out the window as they dropped past the wooded lawns and headed toward the gate.

"Listen," he said finally, "have you met the new PR chick? I only talked to her a couple of times."

"Yeah. I met her," Sloan said.

"Is she decent?"

Sloan shrugged. "She's okay. Why?"

"I'd like to get a story written about my company, but I don't want to go around and ask somebody to do it. I'd like to get the PR chick to talk the idea around, and have the TV people come to me."

Sloan said doubtfully, "I don't know, it's a private business and all. What're you thinking?"

"This guy, whoever he is, is fairly intelligent, right?"

"Right."

"And he plays computer games. I'd be willing to bet that he's a computer freak. Ninety percent of male gamers are," Lucas said. He was staring sightlessly out the window, thinking of Ice, the programmer. "His girlfriend knows my computer games, 'cause she said they suck. So I'm wondering, if there were stories on TV and in the papers about how my computer guys were counter-gaming this asshole, I wonder if he'd take a look? You know, cruise the building. How about if we had a really... progressive-looking woman talking to him?"