Broken Prey

ELLE CAME IN LATE in the afternoon, to look, at the process, at the three BCA staffers with telephone headsets, sitting in front of computers, looking for all the world like a political boiler room.

"The quality of information you're getting is not the right kind to pull him up," she said. "You would have to be lucky to find him. What we need to do is to set up a whole series of interviews and ask each per-son to nominate his or her top suspect out of a list of suspects."

"The list would include them?"

"Yes. It would work like one of those market polls, where people make bets on the wi

"You might just wind up electing the ten most unpopular people," Lucas said.

"Not really-you'd just tell them not to judge on the basis of popularity. Some people would anyway, but you'd get enough hard, honest opinions that it might be very valuable. How many people are you looking at now?"

"About eighty."

"If you were to give questio

Lucas scratched his chin. "If we go another day or two without a break, I might do that. Why don't you put together the questio

"Why wait a day or two? If you think this man is really on the staff, and he's still out there…"

"Because we'd have all kinds of legal and labor problems," Lucas said. "We're already working through some pretty questionable territory, calling up friends and relatives and asking about these people. We're go

"If he kills somebody else…"

"That's why I say I'll do it if we don't get anything in the next day or two," Lucas said. "Right now, I think he's hunkered down. He'll start moving again, if he's like you say, if he doesn't have any choice…"

"There's something else. If you let me do this market thing… it would be a wonderful paper. The Journal of ForensicPsychology would be all over it."

The problems of a survey and the labor unions became moot the next day.

THE CO-OP CENTER had pretty much closed down by seven o'clock in the evening. Lucas took home a stack of notes the staff had made on anomalies they'd seen in the incoming data. He read through the notes, sitting in a leather chair in his small library. The anomalies were slight: discrepancies in dates, times, schools; and a few comments by former employers that suggested that this staff member, or that one, hadn't done well at a previous job.

Lucas became interested in a staff member named Herman Clousy. He'd been hired as a medical technician, doing routine lab work, including blood tests on Charlie Pope. To get the job, he'd provided a transcript from a "Lakewood Community College" in White Bear Lake, Mi

The next morning, Clousy was at the top of Lucas's list for almost fifteen minutes. After the daily chat with Weather, he called Dr. Cale, who said that Clousy was an average performer, one of the shadow peo-ple whom nobody paid much attention to. He was married, Cale knew, and lived in Mankato. Was there any special reason why Lucas was interested?

"He says he graduated from a Lakewood Community College in White Bear Lake, and there isn't one."

"Really? That would have been checked… let me ask my secretary, she used to work for the community college down here."

Cale went away for a minute, then came back and said, "Sandy says there used to be a Lakewood," he said. "She says it's called Century Gol-lege now."

"Ah… poop. Let me check that."

He gave it to one of the co-op staff, who checked and came back five minutes later: "There was a name change, all right. Still can't find the references…"

"Take the most uncommon-looking last name in the references and start calling around to all of them you can find," Lucas suggested.

THEY SPENT THE REST of the morning tracking more dead ends: the work was tedious and left Lucas feeling stupid. At lunchtime, he went out for a BLT, then returned to his office and told Carol not to let anyone in, short of an emergency.

He closed the door, put his feet up on his desk, and thought about all the activity in the co-op room. Elle might be right: the kind of information they were getting wouldn't really pinpoint anyone. The other problem was, when you were dealing with so many possibilities, you tended to forget about the facts you already had. For instance, he thought, somebody had passed the information about Peterson to the Big Three. That was a fact, and they hadn't emphasized it enough. It had to be one of fewer then a dozen people. They were all on tape.

Did O'Do

Lucas couldn't stand going down to the co-op room again, so he dragged out the tapes of the St. John's isolation wing. He ran through them at high speed, the people coming and going in their silent-movie way.

HERE CAME O'DONNELL…Here was the food. He says something to Lighter, and the food goes in. Didn't touch anything that time. He talks to Chase. Food goes in…

He couldn't see it. Maybe O'Do

He ran back and forth through the tapes, watching people come and go, staffers talking to prisoners, interacting with other staffers. Here's Beloit, here's Grant, here's Hart, here's O'Do

"WHAT'S HE DOING?" Lucas asked himself.

He was watching Leo Grant. Hard to pick up, if you weren't run-ning the tapes at high speed.

Okay: Grant walks down the corridor, dressed in slacks and a sport coat, hands in his pockets. He's with Se

Lucas couldn't make out what the conversation was about, but watched as Grant turned his back to the window where Lighter was standing. Grant was facing both the camera and Se

Se