Shadow Prey

"Look, I know the papers here. They'll need three meet- ings and eight consultations before they'll make the pictures," Lucas said. "That won't get done tonight. There's no way that we'll see the negatives."

"If we put on enough heat…"

"We're talking bureaucracy here, okay? We can't move it faster than it's willing to move. And if we go tonight, there's a good chance I'll burn my friend. The first thing they'll do is look at their files, and they'll find their record photo's gone. I don't want to do that. I want to get it back in the file."

"Jesus Christ, you fuckin'…" She snapped her mouth shut.

"Shitkickers?"

"I wasn't going to say that," she lied.

"Bullshit. I'll tell you what. I'll get as much done tonight as can get done. All the newspaper people will get called, it'll all be explained, they can have all their meetings, and we'll be over there at eight tomorrow morning, looking at prints."

Her eyes searched his face for a moment. "I don't know," she said finally.

"Look," said Lucas, trying to win her over. "Your killer is driving a junker. If he pushed it as hard as he could, he wouldn't get here until tomorrow night anyway. Not unless he's got a relief driver and they really hammered it out the whole way."

"He was alone in the motel…"

"So we don't lose anything," Lucas said. "And I save my friend's ass, which is a pretty high priority."

"Okay," Lily said. She nodded, her eyes on his face, then stepped past him toward the door. "I'll see you tomorrow, Harmon."

"Yeah." Anderson looked after her as she went through the door. When she was gone, he turned to Lucas, a small smile playing on his face.

"You got the look," he said.

"What's that?"

"Like a bunch of people look after they talk to her. Like you been hit on the forehead with a ball-peen hammer," Anderson said.

Daniel was eating di

"What happened?" he asked when Lucas identified himself.

"We came up with a photo from the StarTribune" Lucas said. He explained the rest of it.

"And Lillian thinks he might be the killer?" Daniel asked.

"Yeah."

"Damn, that's good. We can get some mileage out of this. I'll talk to the people at the Trib," Daniel said. "What do you think about the approach?"

"Tell them we need the rest of the negatives on that roll and any other rolls they have. Argue that the photos were taken at a public news event, that there is no secret film involved-nothing involving sources, nothing confidential. Tell them if they help catch Andretti's killer, we'll give them the story. And they'll already have the exclusive pictures that solved the assassination."

"You don't think they'll pull the confidentiality shit?" Daniel asked.

"I don't see why they should," Lucas said. "The pictures weren't confidential. And we're talking about serial assassination of major political figures, not some kind of horseshit inciting-to-riot thing."

"Okay. I'll call now."

"We need them as early as we can get them."

"Nine o'clock. We'll get them by nine," Daniel said.

Lucas hung up and dialed the StarTribune library. He gave his friend a summary of what had happened and arranged to meet her near the paper's offices.

"It's kind of exciting," she whispered as she leaned over his car. He handed her the manila envelope. "It's like being a mole, in John le Carre."

He left her in a glow and headed home.

Lucas lived in St. Paul. From his front-room window, he could see a line of trees along the Mississippi River gorge and the lights of Mi

Upstairs, the den was equipped with a deep leather chair for dreaming and watching basketball on television. One bedroom was for sleeping, another for guests. He'd converted a third bedroom into a workroom, with an oak drawing table and a bookcase full of references.

Lucas invented games. War games, fantasy games, role-playing games. Games paid for the house and the Porsche and a cabin on a lake in northern Wisconsin. For three months, he had been immersed in a game he called Drorg. "Drorg" was an invented word, inspired by cyborg, which itself was a contraction of the words cybernetics organism. Cyborgs were humans with artificial parts. A drorg, in Lucas' game, was a drug organism, a human altered and enhanced by designer drugs. To see in the dark, to navigate by sonar with enhanced hearing, to have the strength of a gorilla, the reflexes of a cat. The brain of a genius.

Not all at once, of course. That's where the game came in. And the drugs had penalties. Some lingered: Call for su-perstrength and it hung on when you needed superintelli-gence. Call for superintelligence and the drug pushed you to madness and suicide if you couldn't acquire the antidote. Take the pan-effects drug and it flat killed you, period; but not before you achieved superabilities and eventually intolerable pleasure.

It all took work. There was the basic plot to write-Drorg was essentially a quest, like most role-playing games. There were also scoring systems to build, opponents to create, boards to design. The publisher was excited about it and was pressing. He wanted to do a computer version of it.

So five or six nights a week, for three months, Lucas had been in the workroom, sitting in a pool of light, plotting his patterns. He listened to classic rock, drank an occasional beer, but mostly laid out a story of information bureaucracies, corporate warfare, 'luded-out underclasses and drorg warriors. Where the story came from, he didn't know; but every night the words were there.

When he got home, Lucas put the car in the garage, went inside and popped a frozen chicken di

She came out of nowhere: he hadn't been thinking about her, but suddenly she was there, like a photograph dropped on a table. A big woman, he thought. A little too heavy, and not his style; he liked the athletes, the small muscular gymnasts, the long sleek ru

Not his style at all.

Lily.

CHAPTER 6

Leo Clark was a drunk by the time he was fifteen. At forty, he had been twenty-two years on the street, begging nickels and dimes from the rich burghers of Mi

Then one bitterly cold night in St. Paul, he and another drunk, a white man, were turned out of the mission after an argument with a clerk. They stopped at a liquor store and bought two bottles of rye whiskey. After some argument, they walked down to the railroad tracks. An old tu

Late that night, Leo went out, found sticks of creosote-covered scrap lumber along the tracks, dragged it back to the tu

The white man had an idea. Up along the bluffs on the Mississippi, he said, were storm sewers that led into the tu