'Think it'd be worth the trouble?'
'Yes,' she said. She put her index finger on the head of one of the figures in the photo. 'See this guy?'
Lucas looked at the photo again. The tip of her finger was touching the head of a stocky Indian man, but only the outer rim of his face and one eye were visible. The rest was eclipsed behind the head of another figure in the foreground.
'What about him?' He took the photograph and looked more closely at it.
'That could be our man,' she said. 'The guy who lit up Andretti. It looks a lot like him, but I need a better shot to be sure.'
'Whoa.' Anderson eased out of his chair to take a look. The lumpy mound of Bear Butte was in the background, gray and brooding, a lonely northern outpost of the Black Hills. In the foreground, a group of Indians, wearing calico shirts and jeans, were gathered behind one of the elderly medicine men. Most of the men were looking to the left of' the camera, toward a group of sheriffs deputies. Bluebird was there with his gun, one of the few who were looking more or less at the camera.
'So how do we get back to your friend and see what else is on the negatives?' Lily asked.
'I'll talk to the chief tonight,' Lucas said. 'We'll have to meet with some of the people at the paper tomorrow morning. First thing.'
'Tomorrow?' she snapped, incredulous. 'Christ, the guy's on his way here right now. We've got to get going tonight.'
'That would be… difficult,' Lucas said hesitantly.
'What's difficult? We get the negs, print them and find somebody who knows my guy's name.'
'Look, I know the papers here. They'll need three meet- ings and eight consultations before they'll make the pictures,' Lucas said. 'That won't get done tonight. There's no way that we'll see the negatives.'
'If we put on enough heat…'
'We're talking bureaucracy here, okay? We can't move it faster than it's willing to move. And if we go tonight, there's a good chance I'll burn my friend. The first thing they'll do is look at their files, and they'll find their record photo's gone. I don't want to do that. I want to get it back in the file.'
'Jesus Christ, you fuckin'…' She snapped her mouth shut.
'Shitkickers?'
'I wasn't going to say that,' she lied.
'Bullshit. I'll tell you what. I'll get as much done tonight as can get done. All the newspaper people will get called, it'll all be explained, they can have all their meetings, and we'll be over there at eight tomorrow morning, looking at prints.'
Her eyes searched his face for a moment. 'I don't know,' she said finally.
'Look,' said Lucas, trying to win her over. 'Your killer is driving a junker. If he pushed it as hard as he could, he wouldn't get here until tomorrow night anyway. Not unless he's got a relief driver and they really hammered it out the whole way.'
'He was alone in the motel…'
'So we don't lose anything,' Lucas said. 'And I save my friend's ass, which is a pretty high priority.'
'Okay,' Lily said. She nodded, her eyes on his face, then stepped past him toward the door. 'I'll see you tomorrow, Harmon.'
'Yeah.' Anderson looked after her as she went through the door. When she was gone, he turned to Lucas, a small smile playing on his face.
'You got the look,' he said.
'What's that?'
'Like a bunch of people look after they talk to her. Like you been hit on the forehead with a ball-peen hammer,' Anderson said.
Daniel was eating dinner.
'What happened?' he asked when Lucas identified himself.
'We came up with a photo from the StarTribune' Lucas said. He explained the rest of it.
'And Lillian thinks he might be the killer?' Daniel asked.
'Yeah.'
'Damn, that's good. We can get some mileage out of this. I'll talk to the people at the Trib,' Daniel said. 'What do you think about the approach?'
'Tell them we need the rest of the negatives on that roll and any other rolls they have. Argue that the photos were taken at a public news event, that there is no secret film involved-nothing involving sources, nothing confidential. Tell them if they help catch Andretti's killer, we'll give them the story. And they'll already have the exclusive pictures that solved the assassination.'
'You don't think they'll pull the confidentiality shit?' Daniel asked.
'I don't see why they should,' Lucas said. 'The pictures weren't confidential. And we're talking about serial assassination of major political figures, not some kind of horseshit inciting-to-riot thing.'
'Okay. I'll call now.'
'We need them as early as we can get them.'
'Nine o'clock. We'll get them by nine,' Daniel said.
Lucas hung up and dialed the StarTribune library. He gave his friend a summary of what had happened and arranged to meet her near the paper's offices.
'It's kind of exciting,' she whispered as she leaned over his car. He handed her the manila envelope. 'It's like being a mole, in John le Carre.'
He left her in a glow and headed home.
Lucas lived in St. Paul. From his front-room window, he could see a line of trees along the Mississippi River gorge and the lights of Minneapolis on the other side. He lived alone, in a house he once thought might be too big. Over ten years, he'd spread out. The double garage took an aging Ford four-wheel-drive that he used for backcountry trips and boat-towing. The basement filled up with weights and workout pads, a heavy bag and a speed bag, shooting gear and a gun safe, tools and a workbench.
Upstairs, the den was equipped with a deep leather chair for dreaming and watching basketball on television. One bedroom was for sleeping, another for guests. He'd converted a third bedroom into a workroom, with an oak drawing table and a bookcase full of references.
Lucas invented games. War games, fantasy games, role-playing games. Games paid for the house and the Porsche and a cabin on a lake in northern Wisconsin. For three months, he had been immersed in a game he called Drorg. 'Drorg' was an invented word, inspired by cyborg, which itself was a contraction of the words cybernetics organism. Cyborgs were humans with artificial parts. A drorg, in Lucas' game, was a drug organism, a human altered and enhanced by designer drugs. To see in the dark, to navigate by sonar with enhanced hearing, to have the strength of a gorilla, the reflexes of a cat. The brain of a genius.
Not all at once, of course. That's where the game came in. And the drugs had penalties. Some lingered: Call for su-perstrength and it hung on when you needed superintelli-gence. Call for superintelligence and the drug pushed you to madness and suicide if you couldn't acquire the antidote. Take the pan-effects drug and it flat killed you, period; but not before you achieved superabilities and eventually intolerable pleasure.
It all took work. There was the basic plot to write-Drorg was essentially a quest, like most role-playing games. There were also scoring systems to build, opponents to create, boards to design. The publisher was excited about it and was pressing. He wanted to do a computer version of it.
So five or six nights a week, for three months, Lucas had been in the workroom, sitting in a pool of light, plotting his patterns. He listened to classic rock, drank an occasional beer, but mostly laid out a story of information bureaucracies, corporate warfare, 'luded-out underclasses and drorg warriors. Where the story came from, he didn't know; but every night the words were there.
When he got home, Lucas put the car in the garage, went inside and popped a frozen chicken dinner into the microwave. In the five minutes before it was ready, he checked the house, got the paper off the front porch and washed his hands. He'd eaten all the french fries and three of the four chicken nibbles-he wasn't exactly sure what part they were, but they did have bones-when Lily Rothenburg's face popped into his mind.
She came out of nowhere: he hadn't been thinking about her, but suddenly she was there, like a photograph dropped on a table. A big woman, he thought. A little too heavy, and not his style; he liked the athletes, the small
