Stolen Prey Read Free

bowling alley, a roadhouse.
    Furthermore, he thought that criminals in one area would know most of the nodes for the surrounding areas, no matterhow urban or rural the countryside might be, and would be attracted to those nodes when away from home.
    He wanted a thousand names of sources who’d talk to the cops, across that whole web of nodes; at least one or two sources for each.
    They would all know him by name, and there would be certain implicit guarantees in their transactions. Like no police comebacks.
    T O SET UP his system, he first had to learn about spreadsheets, and then a bit about computer secrecy: he had no interest in building a general criminal database, and needed a way to keep the work away from prying cop eyes. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to help other cops, it was just that as soon as more than one person began operating the database, it would stop functioning. Tipsters wanted a relationship: they didn’t want their names in a cop newspaper, and if they thought that was what was happening, they’d shut up or disappear.
    So Lucas had spent the summer talking on the phone, taking long rides out into the countryside to meet unusual men and women at sandwich shops and parks, filling out the database.
    H E REALIZED , at some point, what the computer had done for him. He’d been tempted, at one time or another, to move to a bigger police agency—one of the federal agencies, or to a really large city, like New York or Los Angeles. He’d not done that because he’d realized that the Minneapolis–St. Paul area was the largest size he could comprehend.
    In Los Angeles, a cop was caught in a blizzard of shit, and there was never any way to tell where the shit was coming from. You get three murdered in Venice, and the killer was almost as likely to come from Portland or St. Louis as from LA; was likely to be unknown to the local cops. Serial killers had operated for decades in the LA area, without the cops even knowing about it. Chaos ruled.
    That wouldn’t happen in the Twin Cities. There were three million people outside his St. Paul door, but he could just about understand who was out there, and where the shit was coming from.
    There were another two million in the state of Minnesota, and with the help of a computer and a spreadsheet, he was beginning to hope that he might also come to comprehend the state’s criminal base.
    The rise of the cell phone added another aspect to it: with the cell phone, an office was anywhere you wanted it to be. At one time, you might drive out to a crime scene, however many minutes or even hours from the office, and then drive back to get started on the case. With cell phones, you could constantly be hooked into a developing web of contacts, sources, and records.
    The downside, of course, was that you were constantly hooked into a web of contacts, sources, and records, and didn’t often have the time needed to simply
think.
    A SIDE BENEFIT to the construction of the intel network was that he had time to look for the robbers who’d taken his five hundred dollars and broken his wrist. He quickly found out that he’d been right about one thing: they’d done it before.
    They’d done it four times on the south side of the Twin Cities and its suburbs, and a half dozen more times trailing down I-35 to the south, which made Lucas think they lived down that way.
    As he pulled together his intelligence nodes south of town, he asked about them—thin shaky guy, big rough woman, up to their eyebrows in meth.
    He hadn’t yet found them when, in August, the peace and quiet ended.
    T HE BCA SUPERINTENDENT , who didn’t particularly like Lucas, but found him to be a valuable foil when it came to dealing with political issues, called him at home as Lucas was working his way through the
Times
and a bowl of steel-cut oatmeal, which his wife and daughter said was good for something—it was organic and saved the whales, or lowered his cholesterol, one of those things. He yearned for