Easy Prey (19 page)

 
 
AND LATER: “HOW'D you get rich?”

“Computers,” Lucas said.

“Ah,” she said. “Like everybody.”

She was not in a condition to talk much about her brother. Halfway back, she put her head down, the heels of her hands in her eye sockets, and began to sob. Lucas let her go, and drove; she stopped after a while, and wiped her eyes. “God. I can't believe it.”

Lucas dropped her at her house. A man was sitting on the steps, fiddling with the wheel on a bicycle. “Don,” she said. “A friend. He keeps hoping I'm going to sleep with him, but I'm not going to.”

“It's a country song,” Lucas said.

She looked at him quickly, and almost smiled. “You'll call me if anything happens. If they catch anybody.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you think this person . . . I mean, if it's about Alie'e, do you think . . .” Her voice trailed away, then her hand went to her mouth and she said, “Oh.” She looked up and down the street.

“What?”

“There used to be a lot of crack around here,” she said. “That's why all the houses have bars on the windows, and big doors.”

“It's going away now,” Lucas said. “Burned itself out.”

“I know. But when there was a lot of crack, the crack kids would try to break in all the time. I'd hear them, and I'd go yell at them from a window, and they'd run away. But somebody tried to break in the night before last. I thought it might be crack, but I thought it was weird, too. The guy didn't look like a crack kid. He was too big, he was . . .” She made a gesture.

“Porky?” Lucas asked.

“Well, I don't know if he was porky. I was gonna say he looked sort of rednecky . . . sort of. Why?”

“White?”

“I think so, but I couldn't really see him. But his clothes looked . . . white.”

Lucas peered through the windshield at Don, the friend, who was now standing up, looking at them as they idled by the curb. “Can you trust this guy?”

“Don? He wouldn't hurt a fly.”

“Do you have anybody you can trust, who would hurt a fly?” Lucas asked.

“Why? Tell me.”

“A woman in your brother's building saw a man last night. She said he was porky. She saw him probably within a few minutes of the time your brother was killed.”

“You think?”

“I think we shouldn't take any chances. The guy who killed your brother is a nut. Stick with Don. I'm gonna have a cop drop by and hang out with you.”

“How'll I know it's really him? The cop.”

“Not a him, it's a her. Ask for her ID. Her name's Marcy Sherrill.” He looked at her. “I think you'll probably like each other.”

13

LUCAS WENT TO Rose Marie's office. The secretary waved him through, and he found her talking to a slender man with a red beard and an expensive black suit. “This is Howard Bennett. He's a curator over at the Walker Art Center,” Rose Marie said.

“I've been there a few times,” Lucas said.

“Inside?” Rose Marie asked suspiciously, one eyebrow going up.

“Not actually inside,” Lucas said. “When I was in uniform, the guards would get us over there to chase people who were trying to, you know . . .”

“Fuck in the spoon,” Bennett said.

“The exact words I was looking for,” Lucas said. The Walker Center had a Claes Oldenburg sculpture of a spoon with a cherry. Fucking in the spoon was the Twin Cities equivalent of flying a Cessna 185 through the arch in St. Louis.

“Yeah, well, Howard is an expert in photography. He says Amnon Plain's murder is gonna be a bigger deal than Alie'e's.”

“I didn't quite say that,” Bennett said. “But it'll be bigger with a different crowd.” He smiled a thin, marmotlike smile. “You'll get press synergy. A whole new, even more weasel-like element of the press will get on your case, demanding action.”

“That's good,” Rose Marie said. “We weren't getting enough attention.” She looked at Lucas: “How bad was it?”

“Bad. I don't know what you're getting from St. Paul, but I think it's a different killer. Maybe somebody just taking the opportunity, hoping we'll think that whoever did Alie'e and Lansing also did Plain—but I don't think it was the same guy.”

“So it might not be directly related.”

“Maybe not. On the other hand, it could be. It's possible that a couple of people have seen the killer. They said he was ‘porky' and ‘big' and ‘rednecky.'”

Rose Marie looked at Lucas for a second, then at Bennett. “Howard, I really appreciate your telling me about Plain. Can I call you . . . ?”

Bennett knew when he was being shuffled out. He smiled his marmot smile again and said, “Say hello to your friends in the legislature.”

“You can count on it,” Rose Marie said. She followed him into the outer office, shook hands, then stepped back inside and closed the door. “You think it was Tom Olson?” she asked Lucas.

“The thought crossed my mind,” Lucas said. “He's heavyset. We know he's got a temper. We know he's distraught. We know that he might be a little bit of a nut.”

“Or maybe a lot of a nut,” she said.

“Maybe the photo spread set him off. I've never seen anything quite like it before.”

“Not outside a men's magazine.”

“Not even in men's magazines. It was a lot artier than that shit. And decadent. It had this weird end-of-time feel to it, that might have fed straight into his paranoia.”

“So what're we going to do?”

“We're doing some research on him. And I'm going to put Sherrill with Jael Corbeau—somebody tried to break into her house the night before last, and the guy was sorta porky.”

“Okay. Sherrill for as long as she can stand it, but when she needs a break, I want somebody else with Corbeau. She doesn't get killed in Minneapolis. And we better get somebody with Catherine Kinsley, too.”

“The problem is, nobody's looking for Trick,” Lucas said.

“Don't worry about Trick.”

“We've got to get Al-Balah out. There's gonna be a lawsuit, and we've got to at least keep our heads up on that,” Lucas said.

“Sure. If you happen to stumble over Trick, that's fine. But the priority has got to be Alie'e, and keeping people alive. This thing in St. Paul is almost like a good break. We get some time to work without everybody breathing down our necks.”

“They'll all be back here tomorrow morning.”

“That's twenty-four hours.”

BACK IN HIS own office, Lucas called Sherrill on her cell phone. She'd heard about Plain, and Lucas told her to get with Jael Corbeau: “A bodyguard job?” she complained. “Why can't you pull somebody in?”

“Look, it's a high-danger point right now. We don't have anybody to chase yet, but somebody killed Plain and somebody may be stalking Jael. I want
you
with her. I
don't
want you looking like a cop. I want you to girl around with Corbeau a little. Her brother's dead, but if you could get her out in the open, making arrangements for the funeral . . .”

“You mean, like
bait
?” Sherrill asked.

“Not a word I'd choose,” Lucas said.

“Hmm.” She was thinking about it. “That doesn't sound so bad, when you put it that way. Maybe pull this guy right in.”

“Yeah. So get over there. She's expecting you.” When he got off, he walked down to Homicide, found Frank Lester, and told him that the chief wanted somebody with Kinsley. “Might as well,” Lester said, “since nobody's getting dog shit.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Nothing.”

 
 
LUCAS CALLED DEL. “I called your office a couple of times,” Del said. “I think I'm gonna need a couple of search warrants.”

“What happened?”

“The other guy, Curtis Logan, is on vacation somewhere—maybe Vegas. So I hung around James Bee last night, staying out of sight, and at one point he hooked up with Larry Outer. You remember Outer?”

“Vaguely. Wasn't he involved with that Chicago bunch?”

“Yeah. I thought he'd gone away, but I followed Bee down to this pie place on Grand Avenue, and who does he hook up with, but Outer. After a while, they go out to Outer's car, and they talk for a couple of minutes, and then Bee goes back to his own car. Outer's car has Illinois tags, which I got, and I tracked those, and they gave me an apartment in Evanston. I'm willing to bet that Outer is dealing with Bee, and if we stop him on some bullshit, we're gonna find some coke in his car. And if we find some coke in his car, even a little bit, then we can probably get a search warrant for his apartment, and if they find
anything
there, that'd be three felonies in Illinois. And Illinois is a three-strike state.”

“You're such a clever fuck.”

“Not only that—when I pulled Outer's sheet outa the NCIC, there's a misdemeanor warrant on him for skipping out on child support in Cleveland. He ditched some chick and her kid.”

“A vicious criminal. A mad dog.”

“No doubt. So we can take down Outer without having to go through any perjury bullshit on a search warrant. When we get him, we've got him in an armlock, unless he's willing to have somebody kick his door in Illinois. So he gives us Bee, and we use that to get a warrant, and we hit Bee's apartment and maybe his office, and get a list. And maybe that gets us back to Alie'e's.” He rubbed his eyes. “Convoluted as hell, but it's what we got.”

“And for Logan, we have to wait until he gets back from Vegas.”

“Unless Outer can give us him along with Bee.”

“So it all hangs on Outer,” Lucas said.

“Yup.”

“You have any idea where he is now?”

“In a motel in Plymouth. I'm standing outside a McDonald's looking at his car, freezing my ass off.”

“You been there all night?”

“We've been everywhere all night—we got here about ten minutes ago. Which brings me to the question: What are you doing up at this time of day?”

“Amnon Plain,” Lucas said.

“Uh-oh. What'd he do?”

“You haven't heard the radio? He was shot to death last night.”

“Over in St. Paul. He's seriously dead.”

After a moment of silence, Del said, “Goddamnit.”

“Yeah.”

“Though it does add a certain frisson to the case.”

“A what?”

“Frisson. It's a French word. So get me some guys over here--”

“There's nobody to get,” Lucas said. “Everybody over here is already jumping through their ass.”

“So what are
you
doing?” Del asked.

 
 
DEL WAS SITTING in the front window of a McDonald's eating a Big Mac out of a bag and watching the motel across the street. “He's got the blue Olds,” he said when Lucas slid into the booth across from him. “You get an okay on the warrant?”

Lucas nodded. “No problem. It's a little old—the Cleveland cops didn't know what I was talking about, and it took about fifteen minutes to find it.”

“If it's still good, it's still good,” Del said. He was red-eyed, tired.

“You look a little ragged,” Lucas said.

“I'm buzzed on caffeine. I'm so buzzed I talked to the counter girl for ten minutes at a hundred miles an hour. Scared the shit out of her.”

“Hmm.” The counter girl was keeping an eye on both of them. Lucas looked at the Olds parked across the street, nose-in to a motel door. Everything looked so quiet, but fifty times a year, somewhere in the country, a cop would kick a door off a nice quiet parking lot and the guy inside the room would shoot him. “So you want to do it?”

“Yeah.” Del wadded up the bag with half the burger still in it. “Let's go.”

They left one at a time, and walked around behind the McDonald's so that if Outer happened to be looking out his window, he wouldn't see them crossing the street. At the hotel office, they showed the day manager the warrant and their badges. He wanted to call the chain headquarters in Rococco, Florida, for instructions, but they got the key to Outer's room and Lucas told the manager to stay out of sight, no matter what they said in Rococco.

“I'll kick it, if you do the key,” Del told Lucas on the way down. “I got so much caffeine, I might miss the keyhole.”

“All right.”

They stopped at the door, listened. A television was on; that was good—it'd cover the noise of the key. Lucas held the key up, and Del stepped into kicking range. When they were ready, Lucas hovered the key a quarter inch outside the lock. The idea was to slip the key quickly into the lock and turn it, and push the door. When the door hit the chain, if it did, Del would kick it. They wouldn't try to sneak the key into the lock for the simple reason that it was almost impossible: The slightest vibration would wake the dead, if the dead was a nervous dope dealer. With the quick open-and-kick, you were usually inside before the target had time to react, whether he heard it or not.

Del nodded. Lucas got right, then jammed the key and turned the knob, and Del kicked the door and exploded into the room, Lucas two feet behind him, Del screaming, “Police, police. Freeze!”

Outer was sitting on the toilet, a wad of toilet paper in his hands, his slacks down around his ankles. The bathroom door was open—he'd been watching ESPN. When Del landed on the carpet opposite the bed, his pistol pointing, Lucas backing him, Outer sat up, raised his hands, and then, in a deafening silence, said, “Ah, man. Can I wipe?”