Free Silent Prey by John Sandford Page A

you’re weak. If some asshole mugged me, I’d have to take it.”
    “I don’t want to hear about it,” Lucas said.
    “I don’t want to talk about it, but I do, all the time,” Kennett said. “Ready to meet the group?”
    “Yeah, yeah . . .”
    Lucas followed Kennett through the entrance lobby, waited with him until the reception sergeant buzzed them through to the back. Kennett led the way to a conference room with a piece of notebook paper Scotch-taped to the door: “Kennett Group.” The room had four corkboards hung from the walls, covered with notes and call slips, maps of Manhattan, telephones, a couple of long tablesand a dozen plastic chairs. In the center of it, a burly, sunburned cop in a white shirt and a thin dog-faced detective in a sport coat were facing each other, both with Styrofoam coffee cups in their hands, voices raised.
    “ . . . your people’d get off their fuckin’ asses, we could get somewhere. That’s what’s fuckin’ us up, nobody wants to go outside because it’s too goddamn hot. We know he’s using the shit and he’s got to get it somewhere.”
    “Yeah, well I’m not the asshole who told everybody we’d have him in a week, am I? That was fuckin’ crazy, Jack. As far as we know, he’s buying whatever shit he’s using in Jersey, or down in fuckin’ Philly. So don’t give me no shit . . . .”
    A half-dozen more plainclothes cops, in thin short-sleeved shirts and wash pants, weapons clipped to their belts, watched the argument from the plastic chairs spread around the institutional carpet. Four of the six held Styrofoam coffee cups, and two or three were smoking cigarettes, snubbing them out in shallow aluminum ashtrays. One unattended cigarette continued to burn, the foul odor like a fingernail scratch on a blackboard.
    “What’s going on?” Kennett asked quietly, moving to the front of the room. The argument stopped.
    “Discussing strategy,” the sunburned cop said shortly.
    “Any conclusions?” Kennett asked. He was polite, but pushing. Taking over.
    The cop shook his head and turned away. “No.”
    Lucas found a seat halfway back, the other cops looking at him, openly, carefully, with some distance.
    “That’s Lucas Davenport, the guy from Minneapolis,” Kennett said, almost absently, as Lucas sat down. He’d picked up a manila file with his name on it, and wasflipping through memos and call slips. “He’s gonna talk to the press this morning, then go out on the street this afternoon. With Fell.”
    “How come you let this motherfucker Bekker get out?” the sunburned cop asked.
    “Wasn’t me,” Lucas said mildly.
    “Should of killed him when you could,” dog-face said. Dog-face’s two top-middle teeth pointed in slightly different directions and were notably orange.
    “I thought about it,” Lucas said, staring lazily at dog-face until the other broke his eyes away.
    Somebody laughed, and somebody else said, “Shoulda.”
    Kennett said, “You won’t remember this, Davenport, but let me introduce Lieutenants Kuhn, Huerta, White, Diaz, Blake, and Carter, and Detectives Annelli and Case, our serial-killer specialists. You can get the first names sorted out later . . . .”
    The cops lifted hands or nodded at him as their names were called out. They looked like Minneapolis cops, Lucas thought. Different names, but the attitude was the same, like a gathering of paranoid shoe salesmen: too little pay, too many years of burgers and fries and Butterfingers, too many people with big feet trying to get into small shoes.
    A red-haired woman walked into the room carrying a stack of files, and Kennett added, “And this is Barb Fell . . . . Barb, that’s Lucas Davenport in what appears to be a five-hundred-dollar silk-blend jacket and two-hundred-dollar shoes . . . .”
    Fell was in her mid-thirties, slender, her red hair just touched with gray. An old scar, shaped like a new moon, cupped one side of her long mouth, a dead-white