Easy Prey (15 page)

“No, no, I've found an innocent guy in the prison system. You can get him out. And then you can take the credit, and the grateful taxpayers will undoubtedly return you to office for the—what, fifth time?”

“Sixth,” Towson said. “What the fuck . . . sorry darlin'—I'm eating breakfast with my granddaughter. What are you talking about?”

“Del Capslock was at the Alie'e party the other night. He wasn't there at the time of the murder, but he did meet an old friend of ours.”

“Who?” Suspicious now.

“Trick Bentoin.” Silence. Silence for so long that Lucas added, “Trick had gone to Panama to play gin rummy.”

Then, his voice soft and unshaken, Towson said, “This is a problem.”

“Yeah.” Lucas nodded, though there was nobody to see it.

“I've clearly identified it as a problem. Tomorrow, when I get to work, I'll get my best people working on a solution.”

“That would be good,” Lucas said.

Another long silence. Then: “Great Jesus fuckin' Christ, Davenport,” Towson screamed. And meekly added, “Sorry, darlin'.”

 
 
CATRIN.

What to wear to a Sunday lunch? She was married to a doctor, so she probably had some bucks. She'd be more comfortable with something neat, rather than something out on the edge: Boots and black-leather jackets were out. Lucas dug through his closet, through a stack of dry cleaning, and finally came up with what he hoped would be right—twill pants in a deep khaki, a crisp blue shirt, and a brown suede sport coat. He added dark brown loafers and his dress gun, a P7 in 9mm.

Checked himself in the mirror; smiled a couple of times. Nah. Better to can the little smile, he thought. Go for sincerity and pleasure at seeing her. . . .

 
 
ON SUNDAYS, CITY Hall was dead quiet. Not today. Lucas went straight for Roux's office; the secretary's desk was empty, but Rose Marie, dressed in slacks and a sweater with fuzzy white sheep on it, was in her office with two visitors. Dick Milton, the department's media specialist, was a former newspaper reporter who'd once written an eight-part investigative series—Sunday through Sunday—on oak wilt. Angela Harris, a departmental contract shrink, was perched on the windowsill.

“What do you think?” Lucas asked as he stuck his head in the door.

“Media-wise?” Roux looked up. “Just about what we expected.”

“Been a little rough on George Shaw,” Milton said.

“That's not rough,” Lucas said. He'd never liked Milton, even when he was reporting. “Rough is sitting in the county jail, waiting to go to Stillwater for ten years, which is what George is gonna do.”

“It's not gonna hold, the connection between Shaw and Alie'e,” Milton said. He looked at Roux. “This whole lesbian business . . . they stayed pretty delicate about it last night, on the news shows, but I was on the Net and I saw a scan of the first copies of
The Star
, and they got a big sexy picture of this Jael Corbeau. She's hotter than Alie'e, so it ain't gonna stay delicate very long.”

“When's
The Star
gonna get here?” Lucas asked.

“This afternoon, I guess. They got stories on the Net about how the
Star
editors tore the ass off a whole issue as it was going out the door, and turned it around to do an Alie'e issue. The
Journal
says all them other rags are suckin' wind.”

“So it's gonna pump everything up,” Lucas said. He looked at Roux. “You're still working the press pretty hard?”

“We're doing another press conference at ten o'clock, and then the Olson family and friends are supposed to be back around noon. They want the body as soon as they can get it. The funeral's gonna be later in the week, up in Burnt River. Then we'll probably have another press briefing around three o'clock, and if we need another, around seven.”

“Nothing came up overnight?”

“Nothing. Except this morning, Randall Towson called about Trick Bentoin.”

“I forgot to tell you about it,” Lucas said. “The murder washed it away. Del says Trick's in a Days Inn down on 694, so we'll pick him up tomorrow and get a statement. Towson is gonna call Rashid Al-Balah's attorney, I guess, as soon as we get a statement from Trick.”

“Maybe nobody will notice?”

“We should announce it the day of the funeral,” Milton said. “If we can hold off until then.”

“I dunno,” Lucas said. “We really ought to get Al-Balah out of Stillwater as soon as we can.”

“Al-Balah?” Roux said. “Fuck him. But why don't you get Bentoin today? Just in case.”

“Okay.” Lucas looked at the shrink. “What do you think about Alie'e? We got a crazy?”

She shook her head. “Too soon to tell. It looks more efficient than crazy, though. Of course, the man is disturbed in some sense.”

“He'd be more disturbed if I could get my goddamned hands on him,” Rose Marie said.

“Twelve of the people at the party have arrest records, and I'm looking at them for any sign of psychiatric involvement, but I don't see any so far,” the shrink continued.

“Twelve?” Lucas asked, looking at Rose Marie.

“Talk to Lester—but it's all small stuff. Shoplifting, petty theft, two misdemeanor domestic assaults, one street fight, a couple of ticket scofflaw cases . . . like that.”

Nothing.

A POST-IT NOTE was stuck to Lucas's door:
Come get me.
It was signed,
Marcy.
He walked down to Homicide, and found the place full of cops—more homicide cops than he'd ever seen in one spot, at one time, on a Sunday. Lester was perched on a desk at the end of the room, talking to a cop with a notebook. He spotted Lucas and shook his head. Nothing happening.

Lucas stepped back to Marcy Sherrill's desk. She saw him coming, said something into the phone she was holding, and hung up. “I'm really coming over?” She was a pretty woman in her early thirties; she liked to fight. She and Lucas had had a brief, intense affair, which everyone in the office had considered inevitable and overdue. After a couple of months, they'd called the thing off by mutual consent, to their mutual relief.

“Yeah, at least for a while,” Lucas said.

“Good. I'm trying to track down more people from the party—I bet we're missing forty people—but I'm not getting anywhere. I'm ready to bag it.”

“So you're up? Right now?”

“I could be, if you whispered in Frank's shell-like ear,” Marcy said.

“You remember Trick Bentoin?”

 
 
SHERRILL DIDN'T WANT to go after Bentoin, but if she could bring him into the state attorney's office, he could keep Del free all day.

“So if I do this, I can work Alie'e for you?”

“We're all working Alie'e after this,” Lucas said. “Maybe forever.”

Sherrill leaned back in her chair, locked her hands behind her head, and studied him.

“What?” he asked.

“You've got something going on, the way you look. You look sort of . . . snazzy.”

“Meeting an old friend for lunch,” Lucas said. No point in denying it. During the affair, Sherrill had learned to read his mind.

“Nice-looking, I'd guess.” She smiled.

“I don't know. I really haven't talked to her in twenty years.”

“Whoa. So what happened? She just came back to town?”

“No, she's been living down south, on the Mississippi, somewhere down there.”

And she
could
read his mind. She rocked forward, her face serious. “Lucas, is she married?”

He shrugged. “She's not entirely unmarried, as I understand it. Look, we're just having lunch.”

“Oh, God. Don't fuck her up, Lucas.”

He was offended, stiffened up. “I won't. And you go get Bentoin, okay? Call me when you've got him.”

“Lucas . . .” Even more serious now. “Lucas, man, she's your age, she's married, she's in the danger zone. You could seriously mess her up. I can tell by the way you're acting.”

“Find Bentoin.” He turned and left. In the hall, under his breath, he said, “Fuck you,” and looked at his watch. Plenty of time for an errand.

CARL KNOX HAD taken a fine Sunday morning to look at a stolen Kubota 2900 tractor with a front loader and rear-mounted backhoe; an accessory mower was piled on the front of the trailer that held the tractor. While Carl looked, a freckle-faced, straw-haired, outraged thief was talking about the turf tires, practically unused—the goddamn machine had only 145 hours on it, came straight off the best golf course in southern Minnesota. What was this two-thousand-dollar shit?

Carl couldn't hear him, because he was thinking about a Cree Indian guy named Louis Arnot up in Canada, who'd been calling around looking for just such a machine. Arnot would pay twelve thousand American if Carl could deliver the tractor to Kenora, Ontario, which he could, but his guys would have to change the numbers and he'd have to come up with some Kubota papers, and he hadn't done Kubota in a couple of years.

His daughter had come out to the shop with him. She'd been inside, fooling with the books, but now suddenly broke through the Service Department door and said, “The cops are here.”

“Uh-oh,” he said. He waved her back inside, and then looked at the tractor. “How hot
is
this thing?”

“Nobody even knows it's stolen yet,” Roy said nervously.

Davenport came around the corner of the building, fifty yards away. Knox said, quietly, “Here he comes. Don't look. I know this guy, and he's not here about the tractor.”

“I'll take the two thousand,” Roy said, his Adam's apple bobbing. Knox stepped away from the trailer to greet Davenport.

“Nice-looking machine,” Lucas said as he strolled up. “I use a B20 up north.”

“No offense, but that's practically a fucking lawn mower,” Knox said. Enough small talk. “What's going on?”

Lucas
was
offended, but tried not to show it. Instead, he looked at the freckle-faced thief: “Why don't you go get a Coke?”

“Sounds good,” Roy said. He hopped off the trailer and hotfooted it across the parking lot, toward the Service Department door. Through the glass panel of the door, Lucas could see the pale face of Knox's daughter peering out at them.

“Why's everybody so nervous?” he asked. “What's everybody doing at work on a Sunday?”

“You work every day if you have a small business, and you're not sucking out of the state trough,” Knox said.

“That can't be it,” Lucas said. He looked at the Kubota. “What, that hick steal this tractor?”

“Jesus, Davenport, he's a goddamn basement excavator who's going broke and has to sell his job. What do you want?”

“A list,” Lucas said. “We chase all over town, going after the big dope wholesalers, the gangs, the people pushing shit on the street, and we pretty much know every one of them. The ones we don't know, the ones we can't get at, are the really smart ones who only move a kilo or so a week, to rich people. Nobody ever complains, nobody ever gets caught. Nobody's standing on a street corner. We need some of those names.”

“You know I don't mess with dope. Too dangerous.”

“But you do loan-sharking, Carl. And you got that layoff business with the sports-book guys. You know a lot of rich people who get their money in strange ways, and put a lot of it up their nose, and who don't buy their shit down in the ghetto.”

“You're gonna get my nuts cut off,” Knox said.

Lucas shrugged. “So who's ever gonna know that you're talking to me? And it gives us just that much less incentive to figure out what you really
do
for a living. You know, the ugly details.”

“Is this part of the Alie'e Maison thing?”

“Yeah, part of it.”

“Nobody ought to be killing young girls,” Knox said. “I saw the story in the
Star-Tribune
this morning, the interview with her parents.” He looked toward the service door, where his daughter's face still floated in the rectangle of black glass in the service door. “I can ask around,” he said. “But like the last time, I might come up empty.”

“That helped, when you came up empty,” Lucas said. “It eliminated some possibilities.”

“So I can ask,” Knox said. “Now, you wanna take a hike before my kid breaks out in hives?”

 
 
LUCAS LEFT. HALFWAY back to the corner of the building, he turned and said, “I'll anxiously await your call.”

Knox shook his head and watched until Lucas had turned the corner. The freckle-faced thief eased out of the building and asked, “What'd he want?”

“Just bullshit,” Knox said. He turned to the thief. “You said nobody knows the tractor is gone yet?”

“Won't nobody know until tomorrow, when the owner gets back from Vegas.”

“Can you get it back there?”

“Get it back? I just stole it,” Roy said.

“Yeah, but this guy is gonna look it up, just sure as shit. If it's on a list, he's gonna be back here, and he's gonna want to know where it went. I'd have to tell him I turned you down, and then he'd come looking for you.”

“You wouldn't tell him. . . .”

Knox shrugged. “You're not a real big part of my business.”

“Well, goddamn, Carl . . .”

“So you take it back,” Knox said. “When does your guy go to Vegas again?”

“He goes every couple of months.”

“So steal it again, then. I'll give you three thousand,” Knox said.