Kill Fee
ALSO BY OWEN LAUKKANEN
The Professionals
Criminal Enterprise
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
Publishers Since 1838
Published by the Penguin Group
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Copyright © 2014 by Owen Laukkanen
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Laukkanen, Owen.
Kill fee / Owen Laukkanen.
p. cm.—(A Stevens and Windermere novel ; 3)
ISBN 978-1-101-62477-7
1. Government investigators—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9199.4.L384K55 2014 2013025366
813'.6—dc23
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
FOR ANDREW AND TERRY
T
he billionaire picked a heck of a day to die.
It was a sunny Saturday in early April, a beautiful afternoon in downtown Saint Paul, the kind of day that seemed to chase away any memory of the long Minnesota winter just passed. It was not the kind of afternoon for a murder.
An hour before the billionaire met his end, a plain-looking man and a beautiful woman met for a greasy lunch at the old dining car on West 7th Street, and when they’d finished, dawdled slowly along St. Peter toward the Mississippi River.
They made an odd couple. He was paunchy and balding, pale and comfortably middle-aged. She was brown-skinned, statuesque, and maybe even a little severe, more than a decade his junior. And though they walked close beside each other, talked easily, and laughed quickly, there was a slight hesitation in their manner, an unresolved tension. They were something more than simply passing friends.
They reached 5th Street and turned west, walked past the stately old Saint Paul Hotel and into Rice Park, an oasis of calm amid the rush of the city. The day was sunny but still crisp, and the park was filled with families and other couples, native Minnesotans and tourists alike. The man and the woman walked aimlessly, took a leisurely tack past the Landmark Center, with its pink granite towers and turrets, and then crossed through the park toward the vast Central Library. They bought coffees inside the Saint Paul Hotel, and then wandered back out and found a bench in Rice Park. It was a Saturday afternoon, and neither Kirk Stevens nor Carla Windermere had anywhere else to be.
In truth, they looked forward to these meetings, Stevens and Windermere both. They weren’t always so languid—work, the Minnesota weather, and the demands of Stevens’s family made routines a fantasy—but they happened, a couple times a month, maybe, and that was almost enough.
Windermere sipped her coffee and tilted her head skyward, basking in the sun’s warmth. “This is what I’m talking about, Stevens,” she said. “This is what I’ve been waiting for. Sunlight. Warmth. Vitamin D.”
Stevens grinned at her. “Summer’s coming,” he said. “You survived another winter. You’re practically a Minnesotan now.”
“Like hell.” Windermere glanced at him sideways. “I’m a warm-weather girl, always will be. No matter how many snowstorms I live through.”
“You like it up here, though,” he said. “Kind of. Admit it.”
“Maybe. It ain’t the weather, though.”
He cocked his head. “Then what is it?”
Windermere shook her head, the hint of a smile on her lips. She took another sip of coffee and set the cup down on the bench between them. Then she looked around the park.
People milled about, enjoying the sunshine, taking pictures of the fountain, the Landmark Center, the hotel, the statues of the characters from the comic strip
Peanuts
—homage to its creator, Charles Schulz, a Twin Cities native. Windermere watched a family crowd around Charlie Brown, all of them smiling wide, posing for the camera, laughing and jostling one another. She waited until the picture had been taken and the family had wandered off before she turned back to Stevens.
“It ain’t you, either,” she said. “So don’t get any ideas. It’s not the food, or the scenery, or the nightlife. Miami’s got Minnesota beat every time.”
“Then it must be the work,” Stevens said. “Is that it?”
“The work.” Windermere pursed her lips. “Yeah, I guess so, Stevens. It must be the work.”
TWO AND A HALF YEARS EARLIER,
Kirk Stevens had driven from Saint Paul to the FBI’s regional headquarters in downtown Minneapolis, where he’d met a woman with bewitching eyes and a slight southern accent who’d sat him down in her cubicle in the Criminal Investigative Division and listened as he outlined a sensational theory about a group of nomadic young kidnappers. The woman was Windermere, and Stevens, a Special Agent with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, needed her help tracking the kidnappers out of state.
He’d intended to drop the case in Windermere’s lap and forget about it—he was, after all, just a state policeman—but Windermere had insisted he join her, put in a special request, and Stevens had found himself on a plane to Chicago less than a day later. It was the start of the roller-coaster ride of Stevens’s career.
A year or so later, it happened again. Carter Tomlin, a wealthy Saint Paul accountant-turned-bank-robber, an acquaintance of Stevens’s. Windermere sniffed him out. Stevens hadn’t believed her. Neither had her FBI partner, or her superiors, not until Tomlin had started to kill. Not until he’d dragged Stevens and his family into the middle of his murderous spree.
They’d drifted apart after that first kidnapping case. The second time, after Tomlin, they stayed close. Even amid the awful terror and the adrenaline rush, the sickening race against time and Tomlin’s dwindling sanity, Stevens had missed Agent Windermere. And though the FBI agent was about as prickly as a sea urchin, Stevens knew she felt the same.
So now here they were, a year after Carter Tomlin, sharing a park bench in downtown Saint Paul, drinking coffee and enjoying the sun, talking and laughing like lifelong friends. It was, Stevens thought as he looked around at the park, an almost perfect day.
ACROSS THE STREET,
a silver Bentley sedan turned in to the driveway in front of the Saint Paul Hotel. Stevens watched it glide to a stop outside the building’s ivy-covered façade. Windermere nudged him. “Check it out,” she said. “Maybe it’s Prince.”
“I get it.” Stevens shook his head. “Because this is Minnesota, right? Everybody in a nice car has to be Prince.”
“Or F. Scott Fitzgerald. But I don’t think he rolls in a Bentley.”
“I don’t think he rolls, period,” said Stevens. “I figure at this point he’s pretty much stationary.”
They watched as the driver climbed out of the Bentley and circled around to open the rear passenger door. A short, white-haired man in an expensive suit stepped out to the pavement.
“Fitzgerald,” said Windermere. “What did I tell you?”
Stevens squinted across the driveway. “He looks old enough, anyway.”
The white-haired man leaned on a cane as he stepped away from the big sedan and started slowly toward the hotel’s front doors. Windermere cast an eye at her companion. “Barely looks older than you, Stevens.”
Stevens arched an eyebrow. Started to reply, but never got the words out. A shot cracked out from somewhere, cutting him off. Someone screamed. A split second later, the white-haired man collapsed to the pavement.
