Mind prey

But in the gloom above them, something moved. They all saw it at once, and Lucas and the fed pressed back against the walls, their guns up.

"What is it?"

"Aw, Jesus," Du

Then Lucas could see it, the body in black, the feet below it, twisting from a yellow rope at the top of the shaft. The door they had not yet tried went into the receiving dock and the main part of the shaft itself. Du

"Wait, wait," Lucas screamed. He launched himself cross the room in a body block, caught Du

"That's Andi," Du

"That's not your wife," Lucas said. "That's a woman named Crosby."

"Crosby? Who's Crosby?"

"A friend of Mail's," Lucas said shortly. "We've been trying to track her, but he got to her first."

Lucas, back on his feet, holstered his pistol and went to the partially open door to the shaft. There was a slight draft through the doorway, but nothing else. Lucas reached through, found another light switch, hesitated, then flipped it on. Again, the lights worked. He looked through the crack in the door, saw nothing. No wires, nothing that might be a bomb. He gave the door a push and was ready to step through.

But the door seemed to resist for a split second, just a hair-trigger hold, and then a break, almost imperceptible, but enough that Lucas jumped back.

"What?" The FBI man was gri

"I thought I felt…" Lucas started. He put his hand out toward the door and took a step.

And was nearly knocked off his feet as the door seemed to explode a foot from his face.

Can see, he thought, his hands up in front of his face. Nothing hurts…

"What?" the fed was shouting, his gun out again, pointing at the shattered wooden door. "What? What? What was that?"

Dust filtered down on them and rolled out of the back room like smoke. Lucas could taste dirt in his mouth, feel the grit in his eyes. Du

"What was that?"

Lucas stepped back to the door, pushed it, pushed it again, pushed hard. It opened a foot and he looked through. On the other side, the floor was littered with river rocks, granite cobblestones the size of pumpkins, fifteen or twenty of them.

"Trap," Lucas said. He pushed the door again and a rock rolled away from it. Lucas stepped through and saw the rope from the top of the door leading up into the darkness. "They fell a long way. If one of them hit you, it'd be like getting hit by a ca

"But that's not Andi?" Du

"No. That's just bait," Lucas said. "That was to get us to run through the door without thinking about it."

"Asshole," said the fed. He was dusting himself off. "Somebody could have got hurt."

CHAPTER 23

Mail's trap had snapped, but it had come up empty. Still, it had excited him: figuring it out, setting it up. He hadn't pla

And it must've been close, because they'd tripped it. He could tell by the way they were acting.

"We knew there'd be a booby trap, that there'd be something," Davenport said. He seemed to find the situation almost fu

"You're lying, asshole," Mail shouted at the television screen. Then he laughed, pointed at the screen with a beer bottle. "You got lucky, motherfucker."

Davenport looked out at him, unblinking. Behind Davenport, cops swarmed over the Bit amp; Bridle storefront. He missed some of what Davenport had said, and picked up on, "… we'll have to wait for the Medical Examiner's report on Gloria Crosby. She may have been up there for quite a while. We don't think he'd risk confronting us."

"You're fuckin' lying," Mail shouted. He jumped out of the chair and punched the TV off, sat down, bounced twice, picked up the remote, and punched it back on.

This was not right: he'd pulled them into Stillwater with the phony verses-he'd known that they'd look at Stillwater, but they wouldn't have gone into the city when Du

But he worried about his plates; were they on a list somewhere?

The talking head had moved on: Davenport was gone, and the news program had gone to a room full of computer cubicles, and a group of young people gathered around a monitor. There was an air of urgency among them, like a war room.

The reporter was saying, "… is also the owner of a company that makes police and security-oriented computer training software. He has placed those resources at the command of the department, for the duration of the hunt for Andi Manette and her children. A working group of gaming and software experts anticipated the kidnapper's moves, including the possibility of a booby trap…"

What?

"… believe they are closing in on the kidnapper or kidnappers…"

"That's bullshit," Mail said. But as he watched the video of the group crouched over their screens, he envied them. Good equipment, good group. They were all dressed informally, and two of the men were holding oversized coffee mugs. They probably all went out at night for pizza and beer and laughed.

The reporter was saying, "… but everybody just calls her by her last name, Ice." A startlingly attractive young woman with a punk haircut and a nose ring gri

"Do you think you'll get him?" the reporter asked.

Ice nodded. "Oh, yeah, if the cops don't get him first 'cause of some routine f-mistake." She'd been about to say fuck-up, Mail thought. And he liked her. "Right now, over there"-she pointed at two women huddled over keyboards-"we're keying in everything we know about the guy, and we know quite a bit. We include a list of all the possible suspects, you know, like profiles of previous offenders from the police department, Andi Manette's patients, and so on. Not too long from now, we'll push a button and some names'll come out, cross-referenced by the other things we know. I'd bet my [beep] that our guy's name's like totally on the list."

When the story ended, Mail went into the kitchen and pulled out a phone book, looked up Davenport's company. He found it on University Avenue, in Mi

Back in the front room, a different talking head was going on about a troop movement in the Middle East, and Mail picked up the remote and surfed.