Mind Prey

that, Marcy—’cause maybe he did.” His fingers were still playing with whatever-it-was, turning it, twisting it. “I don’t want people thinking we went after him without some evidence.”
    “Do we have any?” Black asked.
    Lucas said, “Nobody’s said anything about it, but Dunn and Andi Manette just separated. There’s another woman, I guess. Still…”
    Sherrill said, “Be polite.”
    “Yeah. With everybody. Stay on their asses, but be nice about it,” Lucas said. “And…I don’t know. If it’s Dunn, he’d have to have somebody working with him.”
    Sherrill nodded. “Somebody to take care of them, while he was talking to the cops.”
    “Unless he just took them out and wasted them,” Black suggested.
    Nobody wanted to think about that. They all looked up at the same moment and got their faces rained on. Then Hendrix slid out from under the Lexus, with a ratcheting of metal wheels, and they all looked down at him. Hendrix was riding a lowboy, wore a white mechanic’s jumpsuit and spectacles with lenses the size of nickels: he looked like an albino mole.
    “There’s a bloodstain on the shoe—I think it’s blood. Don’t disturb it,” he said to Sherrill, passing her a transparent plastic bag.
    Sherrill looked at the black high-heeled shoe, said, “She’s got good taste.”
    Lucas flipped whatever-it-was between his middle and ring fingers, fumbled it, and then unconsciously slipped it over the end of his index finger. “Maybe the blood’s from the asshole.”
    “Fat chance,” Black said.
    He pulled the mole to his feet and Lucas frowned and said, “What’s that shit?”
    He pointed at the leg of the mole’s jumpsuit. In the headlights of the crime-scene truck, one of his pant legs was stained pink, as though he were bleeding from a calf wound.
    “Jesus,” Black said. He pulled on the seams of his own legs, lifting the cuffs above the shoes. “It’s blood.”
    The mole dropped to his knees, pulled a paper napkin from a pocket, and laid it flat on the wet blacktop. When it was wet, he picked it up and held it in the truck lights. The napkin showed a pinkish tinge.
    “They must’ve emptied her out,” Sherrill said.
    The mole shook his head. “Not blood,” he said. He held the towel between himself and the truck lights and looked through it.
    “Then what is it?”
    The tech shrugged. “Paint. Maybe lawn chemicals. It’s not blood, though.”
    “That’s something,” Sherrill said, her face pale in the headlights. She looked down at her shoes. “I hate wading around in it. If you don’t clean it up right away, it stinks.”
    “But it’s blood on the shoe,” Lucas said.
    “I believe it is,” said the mole.
    Sherrill had been watching Lucas fumble with the whatever-it-was and finally figured it out. A ring. “Is that a ring?” she asked.
    Lucas quickly pushed his hand in his coat pocket; he might have blushed. “Yeah. I guess.”
    “You guess? Don’t you know?” She handed the shoe bag to Black. “Engagement?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Can I see it?” She stepped closer and consciously batted her eyes.
    “What for?” He stepped back; there was no place to hide.
    “So I can fuckin’ steal the stone,” Sherrill said impatiently. Then, wheedling again: “’Cause I want to look at it, why do you think?”
    “Better show it to her,” Black said. “If you don’t, she’ll be whining about it the rest of the night…”
    “Shut up,” Sherrill snapped at Black. Black shut up and the mole stepped back. To Lucas, “Come on, let me see it. Please?”
    Lucas reluctantly took his hand out of his pocket and dropped the ring into Sherrill’s open palm. She half-turned, so she could see the stone in the headlights. “Holy cow,” she said reverently. She looked at Black. “The diamond is bigger’n your dick.”
    “But not nearly as hard,” Black said.
    The mole sadly shook his head. This kind of talk between unmarried men and women was another sign that the world was going to heck in a handbasket; that the final days were here.
    They all started through the drizzle toward the school, the mole looking into the sky for signs of God or Lucifer; Black, carrying the bloody shoe; Lucas with his head down; and Sherrill marvelling at the three-carat, tear-shaped diamond sparkling in all the brilliant flashing cop lights.
     
    T HE SCHOOL CAFETERIA was decorated with hand-painted Looney Tunes characters, and was gloomy despite it: the place had the feel of a bunker,