Mind Prey (22 page)

"No, but he was with this girl, and we were at her house, so she knows him."

"How sure are you?"

"I wouldn't be sure except for his eyes? The eyes are the same. The mouth's different? But the eyes are right? And he was really a gamer, he was a good dungeon master, he knew everything. But he was scary? Really wired? And something this girl said made me think he'd been in treatment?"

Lucas looked at his watch. "Where are you? I'd like to come over and talk." He wrote it down.

"Sloan, c'mon," Lucas said.

The narrow man got his jacket, a new one, a new shade of brown. "Where're we going?"

Lucas explained as they walked out. "She had a sound about her," Lucas said. "I don't think it's bullshit."

The woman lived in a student apartment complex across I-494 from the university. Lucas put the gray city Plymouth in a fire zone and they went inside, following a blonde co-ed in a short skirt and bowling jacket. They all stopped at the elevator, Sloan and Lucas looking at the girl from the corners of their eyes; she was very pretty, with round blue eyes and aretrousse nose that might have been natural. The girl studied the numbers at the top of the elevator doors with rapt attention. Nobody said anything. The elevator came, they all got on, and all three watched the numbers at the top of the door.

The woman got off at three, turned, smiled, and walked away. The doors closed and Sloan said, "I think she smiled at me."

"I beg your pardon," Lucas said. "I believe it wasme she smiled at."

"Bullshit. You stepped in front of it, that's all."

Cindy McPherson, the gamer, was a confused Wisconsin milkmaid. She was a large girl with a perfect complexion and a sweet country smile, who dressed in black from head to foot, and wore a seven-pointed star around her neck on a leather shoestring.

"The more I looked at the picture, the more I was sure it was him," she said. She sat on the edge of the Salvation Army couch, using her hands to talk: Lucas had the impression that under the black dress was a former high school basketball jock. "There's something about his face," she said. "It's like a coyote's--he's got those narrow eyes and the cheekbones. He could've been pretty sexy, but it was like there was something... missing. He just didn't connect. I think he connected with Gloria, though. She was pawing him."

"This Gloria--what's her last name?"

She shrugged. "I don't know. I've seen her around with people, we hang out over there, but she's not a good friend of mine. A couple of years ago, there were some raves over, like, in the industrial park up 280? That's where I met her. Then I'd see her over in Dinkytown, and a couple of months ago I saw her and she said they were starting a game. So I went up and he was the dungeon master."

"Can you show us the place?" Sloan asked.

"Sure. And Gloria's name is on the mailbox. She checked her mailbox when we were going up the stairs and I saw that it said Gloria something."

Dinkytown is an island of well-worn commerce off the campus at the University of Minnesota, two- and three-story buildings selling clothes and fast food and compact discs and pharmaceuticals and Xerox copies. They were backing into a parking space when McPherson pointed across the street and said, "There she is. That's Gloria. And that's her building."

Gloria was a thin, hunch-shouldered woman, dressed, like McPherson, in head-to-toe black; like McPherson, she wore an amulet. But while McPherson had that perfect, open face and peaches-and-cream complexion, Gloria was dark, saturnine, her face closed and wary like a fox's.

"Wait here, or go get a sandwich or something," Lucas said to McPherson. "We might have some more questions for you."

He and Sloan scrambled through the traffic and hurried through the apartment house door. Gloria was just locking her mailbox and held a green electric-bill envelope in her teeth.

"Gloria?" Lucas was out front.

She took the envelope out and looked at them. "Yes?"

"We're police officers, we'd..."

"Like your help," Sloan finished.

Gloria Crosby might have been pretty, but she wasn't: she was unkempt, a little dirty, her face was formed in a frown. She reluctantly took them to her apartment on the top floor. "Been working on a thesis, haven't had much time to clean," she said. When she opened her door, the apartment smelled of tomato soup and feathers, with an overlay of tobacco and marijuana.

"Do a little grass from time to time?" Sloan asked cheerfully.

"I don't, no," she said. She seemed almost slow. "Marijuana makes you more stupid than you already are. Some people choose that, and I say, 'Okay.' But I don't choose it."

"Smells sort of grassy up here," Sloan said.

"A couple of people were visiting last night, and they smoked," she said offhandedly. "I didn't."

"You don't think that's wrong?" Lucas asked.

"No, do you?"

Lucas shrugged and Sloan laughed. Sloan said, "About two months ago, you played D&D up here with a group of five people. The dungeon master was this man. We need his name." He handed her a copy of the composite.

Crosby took the flier, looked at it for a long time. Then her forehead wrinkled and she said, "Well--this isn't the guy, but I know who you're talking about. He looks sort of like this, but the eyes are wrong. His name is... David." She dropped her hand to her side and went to a window and looked down at the street and pulled on her lower lip.

Lucas said, "What..."

She put up a hand to silence him, continued to look down at the street. After a moment, "David... Ellers. E-L-L-E-R-S. God, I almost forgot. Tells you about my relationships, huh?"

"Do you know..."

"How'd you know about the game?" she asked, turning to look at them. She was interested, but totally unflustered: so unflustered that Lucas wondered if she was on medication.

"I'm in the gaming net, besides being a cop," Lucas said.

She pointed a finger at him and said, with the first flicker of animation, "Davenport."

"Yeah."

"You did some wicked games, before you went to computers," she said. "Your computer games suck."

"Thanks," Lucas said, dryly. "Do you know where this guy lives?"

"He's the guy who took the Manette chick?"

"Well, we're looking into that..."

"I think you're barking up the wrong tree," she said. "David was from Connecticut and he was on his way to California."

"I got the impression that you knew him pretty well," Lucas said.

She sighed, dropped into a chair. "Well, he stayed here for a week and fucked me every day, but he was just here that one week."

"What kind of a car did he have?" Lucas asked.

She snorted and showed what might have been either a smile or a grimace. "A traveling gamer, on his way to California? What do you think?"

Lucas thought a minute, and then said, "A Harley."

"Absolutely," Gloria said. "A Harley-Davidson sportster. He tried to scam me: he said he'd love to take me with him, but he needed the money to trade up to a softtail. I told him to pick me up when he got it."

She had few details about David Ellers: she'd met him at a McDonald's, where he was arguing with some people about the MYST game. He didn't have a place to stay, and he looked nice, so she asked if he wanted to stay over. He did, for a week.

"I hated to see him go," she said. "He wasintense ."

He was from Connecticut, she said. "I think his parents had money, like insurance or something. He was from Hartford, maybe."

"What do you think?" Lucas asked Sloan when they were back on the street. McPherson was walking back toward them, eating a cheeseburger, carrying a McDonald's bag.

"I don't know," Sloan said. "If she was lying, she was good at it. But it didn't sound like the truth, either. Goddamn dopers, it's hard to tell. They don't have that edge of fear."

They got to the car just as McPherson did; she offered some fries to Lucas and Sloan, and seemed slightly chagrined when Sloan took some. "What happened?" she asked.

"She said he was passing through," Lucas said, briefly. "She said his name is David Ellers, he's from Connecticut, and he was on his way to the West Coast."

McPherson had taken a large bite out of the cheeseburger, but she stopped chewing for a moment, then looked sideways out the car window, shook her head at Lucas, finished chewing, swallowed, licked her lips, and said, "God: when you said that, Connecticut, it popped into my head. I asked this guy if he knew my friend David, because they both came from the same town. Wayzata. But he said he went to a private school and didn't know him."

"Wayzata?" Sloan asked.

"I'm pretty sure," she said.

"Gloria saidhis name was David," Lucas said.

McPherson shook her head. "It wasn't. I would have remembered that--I mean, two Davids from the same town and the same age and all."

Sloan sighed and looked at Lucas. "God, it's a shame the way young people lie to us nowadays."

"And the old people," Lucas said. "And the middle-aged." To McPherson he said, "C'mon. Let's go see if she remembers you, and if that helps her remember the guy's name."

"Jeez, I kinda hate to be seen with cops," McPherson said.

"Is that what they taught you in Wisconsin?" Sloan asked as they got back out of the car.

"Nope. They taught me that if I get lost, ask a cop. So I got over here at the U, and I got lost, and I asked a cop. He wanted to take me home. With him, I mean."

"Must've been a St. Paul cop," Lucas said. "C'mon, let's go."

They climbed the stairs again, but when they knocked on Gloria's door, there was no answer. "Could be visiting another apartment," Sloan said. But it didn't feel that way. The building was silent, nothing moving.

Lucas walked down to the end of the hall and looked out a window: "Fire escape," he said. An old iron drop-ladder fire escape hung on the side of the building. He checked the window above it, and the window slid open easily. "The window's unlocked from inside. Goes down the back."

He leaned out: nothing moved.

Sloan said, "She's running."

Lucas said, "And she knows him--you go that way."

Sloan ran for the stairs, while Lucas went out the window and ran down the fire escape. At the top of the lowest flight, he had to wait for a counter-weight to drop the stairs to a narrow walkway between the apartment and the next building. The walkway was filled with debris, blown paper, a few boards, a bent and rusting real-estate sign, and wine bottles. Lucas looked one way toward the street, and the other toward an alley that ran along the back of the buildings. If she'd gone out to the street, they should have seen her. He ran the other way, toward the alley, high-stepping over dried dog shit and a knee-high pile of what looked like cat litter. Just down the alley was the rear door of a pizza shop, with a window. Behind the window, a kid was hosing down dishes in a stainless-steel sink. Lucas went to the door and pushed through: and a woman leaned against a counter, smoking a cigarette, and the kid looked up. "Hey," she said, straightening up. "You're not supposed to..."

"I'm a cop," Lucas said. "Did either of you guys see a woman come down the fire escape in back of the building across the alley? Five, six minutes ago?"

The woman and the dishwasher looked at each other and then the dishwasher said, "I guess. Skinny, dressed in black?"

"That's her," Lucas said. "Did you see where she went?"

"She walked up that way..." The dishwasher pointed.

"Was she in a hurry?"

"Yeah. She sort of skipped, and she was carrying like a laundry bag. She went around the corner. What'd she do?"

Lucas left without answering, ran down to the corner. There was a bus stop, with nobody waiting. He ran across a street, into a bakery, flashed his badge and asked to use a phone: a flour-dusted fat man led him into the back and pointed at a wall phone. Lucas called Dispatch: "She might be on a bus, or she might be walking someplace. But flood it: we're looking for a tall, pale woman in her middle twenties, dressed all in black, probably in a hurry, probably carrying a bag of some kind. Maybe a sack. Check for a car registration and get that out."

Back on the street, he looked both ways: he could see three or four women dressed in black. One might have been Crosby, but when she turned to cross a street, Lucas, running up from behind, saw it wasn't her. A cop flashed by: two guys looking out the windows. Lucas turned back: there were students everywhere.

Too many of them in black.

Lucas walked back to the apartment's front door. Sloan turned the corner and walked toward him from the other end of the street. Sloan shook his head, took off his hat, smoothed his hair, and said, "Didn't see a thing."

"Goddamnit, this is just like the fuckin' game store. We were this close," Lucas said, showing an inch between his thumb and forefinger. He looked up at the building. "Let's see if there's a manager."

A glassed-over building directory showed a manager in 3A; his wife sent them down the basement, where they found him building a box kite.