Shadow Prey by John Sandford

walked around the nose of the car and stepped onto the curb, a Chevy station wagon pulled up behind the Porsche and the driver tapped the horn. A moment later, Harrison Sloan climbed out of the wagon.
    “What’s happening?” Lucas asked.
    Sloan shrugged. He was a thin man with soft brown puppy eyes and a thin mustache. He might have played an RAF fighter pilot in a World War II movie, a pilot named Dicky. He was wearing a sweatsuit and tennis shoes. “I don’t know. I was asleep. Meany called and told me to get my ass down here.”
    “Same with me,” Lucas said. “Big mystery.”
    As they pushed through the outer doors, Sloan asked, “How’s the hand?”
    Lucas looked down at the back of his hand and flexed it. The Maddog had broken several of the bones between his wrist and knuckles. When he squeezed hard, it still hurt. The doctors said it might always hurt. “Pretty good. The strength is back. I’ve been squeezing a rubber ball.”
    “Ten years ago, if you’d been hurt like that, you’d have been a cripple,” Sloan said.
    “Ten years ago I might have been quick enough to shoot the sonofabitch before he got to me,” Lucas said.
    City Hall was quiet, smelling of janitor’s wax and disinfectant. The soles of their shoes made a rubberyflap-flap-flap as they walked down the dim hallways, and their voices rattled off the marble as they speculated about Daniel’s call. Sloan thought the hurried meeting involved a political problem.
    “That’s why the rush in the middle of the night. They’re trying to sort it out before the newspapers get it,” he said.
    “So why Lester and Anderson? Why bring Robbery-Homicide into it?”
    “Huh.” Sloan nibbled at his mustache. “I don’t know.”
    “It’s something else,” said Lucas. “Somebody’s dead.”
    The outer door of the chief’s office was open. Lucas and Sloan stepped inside and found Quentin Daniel in the dark outer office, poking at his secretary’s desk. Daniel was a broad man with the open, affable face of a neighborhood butcher. Only his eyes, small, quick, probing, betrayed the brain behind the friendly face.
    “Stealing paper clips?” Sloan asked.
    “You can never find any goddamn matches when you need them, and nobody smokes anymore,” Daniel grumbled. He was an early-to-bed, early-to-rise type, but he looked alert and almost happy. “Come on in.”
    Frank Lester, the deputy chief for investigations, and slat-thin Harmon Anderson, a computer savant and Lester’s assistant, were perched on side chairs opposite Daniel’s desk. Lucas and Sloan took empty chairs and Daniel settled behind the desk.
    “I’ve been on the phone all evening. Frank and Harmon have been here for most of it,” Daniel told Lucas and Sloan. “There’s been a killing in New York City. A commissioner of welfare. A little after five o’clock this evening, their time. He was a prize Italian named John Andretti. Either of you guys hear of him?”
    Lucas and Sloan both shook their heads. “Nope,” said Sloan. “Should we?”
    “He’s been in the Times quite a bit,” said Daniel, with a shrug. “He was a businessman who was getting into politics. Had some different ideas about welfare . . . Anyway, he’s got big family money. Construction, banking, all that. Went to Choate. Went to Harvard. Went to Yale Law. He had these great teeth and this great-looking old lady withgreat-looking tits and four great-looking kids and nobody in the family pushes dope or drinks too much or fucks anybody else’s husband or wife, and they all go to church on Sunday. His old man had him set to run for Congress this fall and then maybe the Senate in four years. You know, the New York media were starting to call him the Italian John Kennedy . . . .”
    “So what happened?” Lucas asked.
    “He got himself killed. In his office. There were three witnesses. This guy comes in, he’s got a pistol. He backs everybody off, then steps around behind Andretti. Before anybody can