Wicked Prey

They shuffled out, Cruz ru

Saturday on the sloping front lawn of the state Capitol, in St. Paul.

Letty strolled through the crowd, protesters, rubberneckers, street people, vendors, cops, taking it all in. She was a teenager, one toe in senior high, but for two years she'd worked unofficially for Cha

Letty occasionally thought about how tangled it all was-women having children with two different men, men having children with several different women, and she was about to become the official daughter of the only husband and wife who'd ever behaved like parents with her '

Letty had been born in the bleakest part of northwest Mi

When she got into school, she'd encountered a man who made his living wandering through the local marshlands in the late fall and winter, trapping fur. He'd taught her how to do it-not much to learn, you could get most of it in a few days of observation-and she'd become a trapper, taking muskrats out of the marshes and raccoons out of the county landfill. That had gone on for most of her elementary school days; she'd taught herself to drive at the same time, and how to avoid the local highway patrolmen. The money from the trapping had become the family's main source of income.

A tough kid.

A series of murders had torn up her life: had resulted in her mother's death, and had brought Lucas Davenport and Del Capslock into town. She and Lucas had hit it off almost immediately, and he'd brought her home as his legal ward.

Cinderella.

Her job with Cha

A woman with a baby, sitting outside a tiny orange nylon tent, smiled at her and Letty smiled back and said, "Hello, there."

"You can't really be a TV person," the woman said, looking at the credential tags around Letty's neck.

"But I am," Letty said happily.

Across the park, in the street, a white van cruised by, the side door open, and a man in a wheelchair looking out at the park-and at her, Letty thought. Just a spark, an impression, their eyes clicking, and then he was gone.

"How old are you?" the woman asked.

"Almost fifteen."

"And you work for a TV station?" She was both amused and skeptical.

"I've got an in," Letty said. "See, my dad had a baby with this woman'"

Lucas wore faded jeans and a khaki military-style shirt rolled up to the elbows. He had a plastic credentials case strung around his neck like a baggage tag, one side with a yellow Session 1 Limited Access tag, the other side with a BCA identification card. Though he was still self-conscious about the camera resting against his chest, and the second one hanging off his shoulder, and the beat-up Domke bag, nobody was giving him a second look. He took a couple of crowd shots, trying to look bored.

And he was bored. The convention was the biggest single cop-action in the Twin Cities' history, and he was out of it, part of the crowd, and the crowd wasn't doing much. Letty was supposed to be around here somewhere '

"Hey, Dad! Dad!"

Letty was there, under a spreading elm tree, waving. He smiled and headed over. She had a couple of credentials hung on an elastic string around her neck, like his. She was standing next to an orange nylon tent, where a young woman in a tired blue blouse and blue-jean shorts sat on a blanket next to a baby in a papoose sling.

The woman went straight for his liver: "Are you a cop?"

He tried for a wry smile: "Do I look like a cop?"

"Yup." She wrinkled her nose, being fu

"What are they doing here?" Lucas asked.

"Just looking around. They got a car…"

"Letty…"

"I know, I know. They're okay," she said.

"I know exactly what they're like, because they're exactly like I was," Lucas said.

"Dad, I can handle them, all right?" Fists on her hips.

"All right. Be careful," he said. He looked around. "Wasn't a march supposed to go off five minutes ago? I need some street stuff."

The woman with the baby now had bought the cameras. She said, "Nothing is on time. These people couldn't organize a phone call. My husband said he'd be back in five minutes and he's been gone two hours."

"Yeah? He's a marcher?" Lucas asked.

"Anarchist," she said. "Or anti-Christ. One of the two. I can't keep them straight."

Letty laughed and said, "I gotta get a camera in here ' Hey, there they are." She waved across the hillside at two gangling teenage boys, brothers, both with braces on their teeth. One of them, the older one, was a wicked street basketball player, and had nearly taken it to Lucas at the hoop mounted on Lucas's own garage. Lucas generally approved of them, but they were looking. He knew it, and they knew he knew it, and so were careful. "Take it easy," he said.

"Yeah ' could I get ten dollars?" Letty asked.

"I suppose…"

She said quickly, "Twenty would be better."

He gave her a twenty and she was gone.

"Nice girl," said the woman with the baby.

"That sun is nasty," Lucas said. "Is the kid okay?"

"The kid's fine, but he's sucking the life out of me," she said. "I desperately need a cheeseburger and Mark's got the money."

"I could float you a cheeseburger loan," Lucas offered.

She stood up and dusted off the seat of her shorts: "I accept. I'm really starving. Who do you shoot for?"

"BCA," he said, and she nodded, and Lucas asked, "Too quiet. I'd like to see a little life in the crowd."

"Too hot," she said. Speaking as an old riot professional: "Basic rule of riots: you don't have riots when it's too hot. People get all pukey. Gotta wait until the evening, when things cool off. The best riots are when you have a long summer day, with a long evening where it cools off a little."

"I don't know all that technical stuff," Lucas said with a smile.

They stepped around legs and bikes and clumps of people with signs and got to a street grill-the woman and the kid were convenient cover-and he bought her a cheeseburger and fries and a Coke, and got a Diet Coke for himself, and twiddled his fingers at the baby, and then took the baby while the woman, whose name was Lucy, ate the cheeseburger and they walked back to the tent. The baby had quiet blue eyes, observant and contained, and seemed interested in Lucas's nose.

A passing stoner, with a sun-bleached ponytail, hazy blue eyes, and a lute in his hand, looked at Lucy, and then Lucas and the baby, and said, "Got that May and December shit going, huh? Good one."

Lucy said, "Well, the sex is terrific."

Lucas said, "More like May and August."

The stoner tapped Lucas on the chest and said, "Good one, man. I mean, you know? Keep it going, you know? Long as you can."