Naked Prey Read Free Page B

man, hatless, in a blue suit and gray cashmere overcoat, swinging a black Coach briefcase with no thought of the North, of dead people hanging in a frozen stand of oaks. Both coat and case were Christmas gifts from Weather, and though he’d taken some grief about them—they were a little too fey for a cop, he’d been told—he liked them. The coat was soft and warm and dramatic, and the briefcase had that aristocratic thump that impressed people who were impressed by aristocratic thumps. That included almost all bureaucrats.
    He was surrounded by bureaucrats, as the result of a political cluster-fuck that had stretched across three or four different sets of politicians. When the dust had settled, the former Minneapolis chief of police was the Minnesota Public Safety Commissioner, and Lucas had a new job fixing crime for the governor.
    Lucas’s job was officially designated “Director, Officeof Regional Studies.” The ORS had been planted within the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and drew its budget and support from the BCA—but Lucas reported directly to Rose Marie Roux and through her to the governor. The governor had already been burned by a couple of outstate murder cases that had gone unsolved, and he’d had enough of that.
    In both cases, the local sheriff’s departments had investigated the murders, before calling in the BCA. When the cases proved too complicated or politically touchy, they started screaming for help—and blamed the BCA, and the state, when the cases went unsolved.
    That the cases had been mucked up by the locals hadn’t cut any ice with the hometown newspapers. Where was all the scientific investigation stuff they kept seeing on the Discovery Channel? Why were they sending all that taxpayer money to St. Paul? What was the governor doing, sitting on his ass?
    Questions that a 44 percent governor didn’t appreciate.
    So the governor created the Office of Regional Studies in consultation with Roux. The office was intended, as the insiders all knew, to “fix shit.” The BCA director, John McCord, hated the idea. Nobody above him really cared. They just wanted shit fixed. Lucas smiled at the thought. He hadn’t fixed anything big yet, but this call sounded like others he’d gotten from Roux over the years.
    Lucas smiled often enough—he liked his job and his life—but the years had given him a hard face and French-Canadian genes had left him with crystal-blue eyes. His hair was dark, with flecks of gray, and a white scar ran across his forehead and one eyebrow onto the cheek below. Another scar dimpled his throat, a nasty round white spot with a slashing tail. He’d been shot by a little girl and had been choking on his tongue and on the blood from the wound, passing out, and a surgeon—the same one he’dlater married—had opened his throat and airway with a jackknife.
    That had all been years ago.
    Now, he thought, he spent too much time in a chair. In an effort to fight what he saw as sloth, he’d been playing winter basketball with a group of aging jocks from Minneapolis. He was broad-shouldered, quick-moving, and not quite gaunt.
    H E BRUSHED BY a redheaded woman who was leading a muffin-sized red dog in a muffin-sized red Christmas sweater down the sidewalk. The woman smiled and said, “Hi, Lucas,” as they passed. He half-turned and blurted, “Hey. How ya doin’?” and smiled and kept going. Where’d he know her from? Somewhere. He was up the steps, inside the shopping mall that led to the DPS, in an elevator: A bartender, he thought. She used to be a bartender. Where? O’Brien’s? Maybe . . .
    R OSE M ARIE R OUX’S office was a twenty-foot square that she’d furnished with her own money: a good cherry-wood desk, two comfortable visitors’ chairs in green leather, a couch, a few prints and photographs of politicians, a bookcase full of reference books and state procedure manuals.
    Rose Marie was sprawled in a chair behind her desk, an overweight woman with