Hidden Prey

you. Fifteen minutes.”
    Lucas dropped into a visitor’s chair as the assistant gathered up his papers and left. “What the hell is a pie and a restruck?” Everybody in the department knew what a rif was—a reduction in force. Five percent across the board, the result of one of the occasional budget crises that struck between tax increases.
    “Pie chart and restructure,” Rose Marie said, moving aroundbehind her desk. She had just turned sixty. Her hair was flyaway, and she was wearing a loose gray skirt and white blouse. A gray jacket hung in a niche in the corner. “These days, you don’t know PowerPoint, you ain’t shit. What’re you up to?”
    Lucas shrugged. “Got that thing down in Worthington. It’s ninety-nine percent that the Carter kid did it, but his family covered him with an attorney. We can’t even talk to him. Unless we come up with a witness, we’re not going anywhere.”
    A wrinkle appeared in her forehead. “But he did it?”
    “Yup. Michelle told a girlfriend that she thought she was pregnant, and that she’d told him so. He didn’t want to deal with it, so he strangled her and threw her body off the bridge. But he was smart about it. He wasn’t supposed to see her that night. He snuck out of the ball game and picked her up. All kinds of people saw him at the game, in the stands, under the stands, before, during, and after. Nobody can pin down any time that he was gone, and nobody saw him pick her up. She probably slipped out to meet him. So . . .”
    “We’re toast.”
    “Unless he has a conscience or somebody in his family does,” Lucas said. “To tell you the truth, I think he’s a little psychopath. Maybe even the family is fooled.”
    Rose Marie sighed. “Shoot. I would have liked to have gotten that one.”
    “If she really had been pregnant, we could have done a DNA on the fetus, and that would have given us some kind of motive, but . . .” He spread his hands, a gesture of frustration. “We can’t even prove the pregnancy angle.”
    “What’re you gonna do?” Rose Marie lit up—an illegal act—and blew smoke toward the ceiling, relaxing with the nicotine. “Maybe something will happen.”
    Lucas nodded. Sometimes, something did. A witness wanders in, the killer blurts out a confession to a friend, who goes to the cops.
    “What else?” Rose Marie asked. She had a can of pencils on her desk, chose an unsharpened yellow one, and gave it an experimental twiddle.
    Lucas continued: “Del is working the McDonald’s thing. He hates it, he’s running a forklift all day. We still don’t know what the fuck is going on. The Bruins’ auditors claim another thousand bucks went out the door last week, right under Del’s nose, and he says it didn’t, and they put him on the night shift, but there are only a few guys on the night shift and they’d all have to be in on it . . .”
    “That could be,” Rose Marie said.
    “I don’t know,” Lucas said. “Anyway, we’re working it. And Dannie’s trawling for that pimp in the Brainerd festival killing.”
    “How’s Del’s leg?” Del Capslock, one of Lucas’s investigators, had been shot in the leg a few months earlier, and a bone had been broken.
    “Still hurts, still goes to rehab,” Lucas said.
    “Maybe he came back too soon,” Rose Marie suggested.
    “Nah, he’s okay. He was going nuts, sitting on the couch.”
    Rose Marie twiddled the pencil for a few more seconds, then tried a tentative drumbeat with the eraser end. “I don’t care about Brainerd so much,” she said finally. “We’ll get the guy, it’s just a matter of time. But the Bruin family and their employees put thirty thousand dollars into the governor’s campaign last cycle. If Del can break that . . .”
    “He will, sooner or later. If there’s anything really going on. I gotta wonder, what are the chances it’s some kind of tax scam by the Bruins?”
    “Ah, Jesus, don’t go there, ” she said. “Besides, I talked to Elroy Bruin, and this is no tax scam. He was pissed.”
    “Okay.”
    “So what are you doing?” The pencil drumbeat picked up.
    Lucas shrugged. “Spent some time down in Worthington, trying to figure out the Carter kid. Then, the feds are worried about stuff coming across the border from Manitoba; I’ve been talking to Lapham upin Kittson County about it. He doesn’t want to spend a dime out of his budget. He wants to set up a task force, so we’d have to pay for it. I’ve been trying to