Broken Prey

"I feel like I'd be ditching you," she said.

"No, no… I'm go

She started giving him more trouble about lying to her- although the night before, she'd settled most of his sexual problems, and he might have developed over the coming six or eight weeks.

Then the phone rang, and he snatched it up to get away from her eyes. Beloit, the doc from St. John's, said, "I've got to talk with you. Privately. Secretly. May I come up?"

BELOIT CAME UP, and she and Weather sniffed each other's credentials for a few minutes, then Weather went away and Beloit perched on a chair in the den and said, "I think I know why Sam withdrew money from the bank the day he disappeared."

"I'd be interested," Lucas said.

"I don't know how to do this," she said. "I don't want anyone to hear it from me. I don't want to testify. I'd lose my job and so would other people. But I need to get it off my chest…"

"So, we'll call you a confidential source," Lucas said. "If there's no way to prove it, we'll just pretend nobody said anything."

She looked at him for a minute, then away, and finally her eyes came back: "We sort of had a social group in the hospital. The longhairs. We occasionally smoked a little dope."

Ah. So that was it. He knew then what she was going to say but let her say it.

"Leo had the co

"So Leo could have told him the guy was coming through…"

"And it was time. We'd been low, or out, for a while," she said. "People had started asking when the guy from Canada was coming."

"Okay. Would you happen to know the Canadian guy's name?"

"Um, Ma

Lucas smiled. "It's always Somebody Sunshine."

"You can get this out, without my name?" she asked.

"I'll have our dope guys look into Ma

"Please, please, keep my name out of it."

"I will." He liked her, even if she was a doper. He remembered seeing her kneeling over the woman in the cage, saving a life, as the shooting was going on around her.

"Do you think we'll ever find Sam?" she asked.

"I don't know," Lucas said. "We shouldn't have found Charlie Pope, but we did. So… I don't know."

THREE DAYS AFTER Lucas's truth appeared in the Star-Tribune, DHS officials, seeing how the wind was blowing, decided to preempt any chance of higher-level hangings by doing a few of their own. Cale and four other administrators were put on administrative leave from the hospital. The word was, they'd never be back, and there might be more heads to roll.

Lucas, Jenkins, Shrake, Sloan, and the wildlife officer were given citations by their various departments, a signal that the departments had decided they were clean.

THE LEGISLATURE SCHEDULED hearings,and a group of Mankato residents demanded that a monument be built, with the names of the victims inscribed on it, in a plaza, or perhaps a new park. Rose Marie, reading the story, said to Lucas, "You know, it never occurred to me."

"What?"

"That somebody; might make a buck on this," she said, as she turned the page.

A WEEK AFTER the shootings, Sloan was gone. He had a lot of accumulated vacation, which he took as a lead-in to actual retirement. His vacation check also helped on the down payment on the bar; he assumed ten years of a fifteen-year mortgage, renamed the place Shooters, and, his wife told Lucas, "The first person he hired is nineteen years old and has tits out to here."

Lucas said, "Huh. He's smarter than I thought."

WEATHER CAME BACK from London with the kids and the house keeper. The orthopod took the steel rods out of Lucas's arm but left two titanium screws, which would be permanent. The arm ached, and the cast drove him crazy. He found he could scratch his arm with an in-geniously bent clothes hanger.

Letty, his ward, said, "You know, every time you scratch, there's a bad smell."

"Thank you.You do so much to help my self-confidence in social situations," he said.

She was still teasing him when the phone rang. When Lucas picked it up, Nordwall told him that O'Do

THEY NEVER FIGURED out who the killer was. He was buried under the name Roy Rogers, though nobody really thought that was his name. DNA records were kept in case anybody ever came looking for him.

AND FINALLY, a month after the shootings, deep in the bowels of the security hospital, nine patients and a doctor met for a group-therapy session. One of the patients, a man known for his silence, timorously raised a hand as soon as everybody had a chair.

Se

Lo

"Okay," Se

Lo

"May I see it?" Se

"May I have it back?" Lo

"Sure. If it's only rock songs," Se

Lo

"Do you have some thoughts about it?" Se

"Well, these are the one hundred best rock songs, okay?"

"Okay."

Lo