Sudden Prey

over to the hospital, and I kept thinking, how could they know he was coming? How could they know? They couldn’t just hide outside his house twenty-four hours a day, waiting for him to come along. Why would they? We’d had it on TV that everybody was safe in the hotel . . .”
    Lucas pointed a finger at Sloan: “The answer was right there in front of me: Stadic told them. He was the only one who could have.”
    Sherrill shook her head. “Seeing that might seem possible when you’re working it out backwards. At the time, nobody would have figured it out.”
    “I should have,” Lucas said.
    “You’re feeling sorry for yourself,” Sloan said. “Get your head out of your ass.”
    “Since I didn’t see it . . . well, I don’t know what else I could’ve done at the hospital,” Lucas said. He spread his hands, looked around the waiting room as though an answer might be written on the walls, then back at Sherrill and Sloan. “I sit here thinking about what I could’ve done, and I can’t think of anything better. Not that that’d given her the best chance of staying alive, with what we knew at the time. Everything we knew said that LaChaise was insane.”
    “That’s exactly right,” Sloan said.
    “The way I hear it, from what Weather told the docs, she spent the whole time with LaChaise working on him, convincing him he ought to stay alive . . . that she oughta stay alive. And it worked. They were both getting out of it and then boom! He blows up, and she freaks out,” Lucas said.
    “That’s got to have some kind of effect on you,” Sherrill said.
    “What kind of effect? He was a giant asshole,” Sloan said. “Getting shot was too good for him.”
    “That might not be the way she sees it,” Sherrill said.
    “Well.” Sloan looked away. “I mean, what’re you supposed to do?”
    “I don’t know,” Lucas said. He pushed the conversation away. “Have you seen Del?”
    “Yeah, he’s gonna hurt for a while,” Sloan said. “He’s not, you know, injured that bad, but he hurts like hell.”
    “His wife is pissed,” Sherrill said. “She says we should have had more people up there, besides Del.”
    “She’s right,” Lucas said.
    “What about Sandy Darling?” Sloan asked Lucas. “I hear she’s talking.”
    “Yeah.” Lucas nodded. He’d spent the best part of an hour listening to the interrogation, before leaving Hennepin General for the University Hospitals. “Basically, she was kidnapped.”
    “Who killed her old man?”
    “She doesn’t know. She said it wasn’t LaChaise or Butters or Martin.”
    “Stadic?” asked Sherrill, in a hushed voice.
    “I think so,” Lucas said. “He was trying to get rid of everyone. He got the truck tags, somehow, and figured out where they lived. He probably thought they were hiding up there, and went up to take them out. He had to see everybody dead to get free—and they all would’ve been dead if Sandy Darling hadn’t tripped over her goddamn cowboy boots and fallen on her face in the stadium.”
    “It’s a hell of a story,” Sloan said. “The question is, how much of it is bullshit?”
    “Maybe some,” Lucas said. “Maybe not, though. There were a couple of things: she said while they attacked the hospital, they chained her to a post in Harp’s garage. There’s a chain around the post, and there’re two padlocks, just like she said, and there’s paint missing from the post and it’s on the chain, as if somebody was trying to pull it free. The chain’s got latents all over it, so we’ll know if she was handling the chain. I think she was. Then she says she tried to climb out a window on Harp’s building, walk down a ledge and go down the fire escape, but that the fire escape was jammed. There are fingerprints on the window, and the fire escape is jammed—it’s actually an illegal latch, but you can’t see it. So that’s right. And walking that ledge in her bare feet, on snow, you’d have to be pretty desperate. And when she called from the dome, she didn’t know it was all over, and she tried to warn me that LaChaise was going after Weather . . .”
    “All right, so she walks,” Sloan said. He stood up, yawned, and said, “The big thing is, you gotta take care of yourself. ”
    “I gotta take care of Weather, is what I gotta do,” Lucas said.
    Sloan shook his head: “Nope. Nobody can take care of Weather except Weather. You gotta take care of yourself.”
    “Jesus, Sloan,” Sherrill said. She was getting