Shadow Prey (15 page)

She looked at him for a moment and shook her head. "Jesus..."

"So what's the problem?" Lucas prompted, smothering a yawn.

She got back on track. "Hood's not driving his own car. He's the listed owner of a 1988 Ford Tempo four-wheel-drive. Red. That car's still at his former home up in Bemidji, along with his wife and kid. The Bemidji cops have some kind of source in his neighborhood-some cop's sister-in-law-and the red car's been there all along. We're not sure what Hood was driving out of that Jersey motel, but it was big and old. Like a 'seventy-nine Buick or Oldsmobile. It had bad rust."

"So we've got no way to spot him on the highway."

"Unfortunately. But..." She thumbed through the printouts. "Anderson did a computer run on him and talked to the state people. He's got a Minnesota driver's license but no second-car registration. So Anderson went through everything else in the computers and bingo. Found him listed as a defendant in a small-claims-court filing. He bought a TV on time and couldn't make the payments."

"And his address was on the filing."

"Nope. Anderson had to call Sears. They looked up the address on their accounts computer. It's an apartment on Lyndale Street."

"Lyndale Avenue," Lucas said. He sat forward now, intent.

"Whatever. The thing is, the apartment's rented to a guy named Tomas Peck. Sloan and a couple of Narcotics guys are over in the neighborhood now, trying to figure it out."

"Maybe he moved."

"Yeah, but Peck has been listed as the occupant for two years. So maybe Hood's living with him."

"Huh." Lucas thought it over as she sat leaning forward, waiting for a comment. "Are you sure you've got the right Bill Hood? There have got to be a lot of them...."

"Yeah, we're sure. The Sears account had a change of address."

"Then I'd bet he's still living at that apartment," Lucas said. "We're on a roll, and when you get on a roll..."

"... it all works," Lily said.

Lily had not gone down to look for Hood, she said, because Daniel wanted to keep the police presence in the neighborhood to a minimum. "The FBI's all over the streets. They must have half a dozen agents going through the community," she said.

"Isn't he going to tell them about identifying Hood?"

"Yeah. He's already talked to a guy." She glanced at her watch. "There's a meeting in half an hour. We're supposed to be there. Sloan should be back and Larry Hart's coming in sometime this morning," Lily said. She was quivering with energy. "God damn, I was afraid I'd be here for a month. I could be out of here tomorrow, if we get him."

"Did Daniel say who the FBI guy is?" Lucas asked.

"Uh, yeah. A guy named..." She looked at her notes. "Kieffer."

"Uh-oh."

"Not good?" She looked up at him and he shook his head, frowning.

"He doesn't like me and I don't like him. Gary Kieffer is a most righteous man. Most righteous."

"Well, get your phony smile in place, then, because we're meeting with him in twenty-seven minutes." She looked at her watch again, then at his nearly empty coffee cup. "Where can we get more coffee and a decent Danish?"

They walked through the tunnel from City Hall to the Hen-nepin County Government Center, took a couple of escalators to the Skyway level, walked along the Skyway to the Pillsbury building. Standing on the escalator a step above him, she could look straight into his eyes; she asked if he had had a long night.

"No, not particularly." He glanced at her. "Why?"

"You look a little beat."

"I don't get up early. I usually don't get going until about noon." He yawned again to prove it.

"What about your girlfriend? Is she a night person too?"

"Yeah. She spent half her life reporting for the ten-o'clock news, which meant she got off work about eleven. That's how we met. We'd bump into each other at late-night restaurants."

Going across the Skyway, Lily looked through the windows at the glossy downtown skyscrapers, monuments to the colored-glass industry. "I've never been in this part of the country," she said. "I made a couple of cross-country trips when I was doing the hippie thing, back in college, but we always went south of here. Through Iowa or Missouri, on the way out to California."

"It's out of the way, Minnesota is," Lucas conceded. "Lake Michigan hangs down there and cuts us off, with Wisconsin and the Dakotas. You've got to want to come here. And I suppose you don't often get out of the Center of the Universe."

"I do, once in a while," she said mildly, refusing to rise to the bait. "But it's usually on vacation, down to the Bahamas or the Keys or out to Bermuda. We went to Hawaii once. We just don't get into the middle part of the country."

"It's the last refuge of American civilization, you know- out here, between the mountains," Lucas said, looking out the windows. "Most of the population is literate, most people still trust their governments, and most of the governments are reasonably good. The citizens control the streets. We've got poverty, but it's manageable. We've got dope, but we've still got a handle on it. It's okay."

"You mean like Detroit?"

"There are a couple of spots out of control..."

"And South Chicago and Gary and East St. Louis..."

"... but basically, it ain't bad. You get the feeling that nobody even knows what goes on in New York or Los Angeles and that nobody really cares. The politicians have to lie and steal just to get elected."

"I think my brain would shrivel up and die if I was living here. It's so fuckin' peaceful I don't know what I'd do," Lily said. She looked down at a street-cleaning machine. "The night I came in, I got here late, after midnight. I caught a cab at the airport and went downtown, and I started seeing these women walking around alone or waiting for buses by themselves. Everywhere. Jesus. That's such... an odd sight."

"Hmph," Lucas said.

They left the Skyway and got on an escalator to the main floor of the Pillsbury building. "You have a little hickey on your neck," she said lightly. "I thought maybe that's why you looked so tired."

They sat in the dining area of a bakery, Lily eating a Danish with a glass of milk, Lucas staring out the window over a cup of coffee.

"Wish I was out there with Sloan," she said finally.

"Why? He can handle it." Lucas sipped at the scalding coffee.

"I just wish I was. I've handled a lot of pretty serious situations."

"So have we. We ain't New York, but we ain't exactly Dogpatch, either," Lucas said.

"Yeah, I know...."

"Sloan's good at talking to people. He'll dig it out."

"All right, all right," she said, suddenly irritable. "But this means a lot to me."

"It means a lot to us too. We're up to our assholes in media; Jesus, the street outside the office this morning looked like the press parking lot at a political convention."

"Not the same," she insisted. "Andretti was a major figure...."

"We're handling it," Lucas said sharply.

"You're not handling much. You didn't even get here until ten o'clock, for Christ's sake. I'd been standing around for two hours."

"I didn't ask you to wait for me; and I told you, I work nights."

"I just don't have the right feeling from this. You guys-"

"And if I read the newspapers right, you guys in New York have screwed more than your share of cases to the wall," Lucas interrupted, talking over her. "If you guys aren't deliberately blowing up some black kid, you're taking money from some fuckin' crack dealer. We're not only pretty good, we're clean...."

"I never took a fuckin' nickel from anybody," Lily said, her voice harsh. She was leaning over the table, her jaw tight.

"I didn't say you did, I said..."

"Hey, fuck you, Davenport, I just want to nail this sono-fabitch, and the next thing I hear is that New York cops are taking payoff money...." She threw a paper napkin on the table, picked up the Danish and the carton of milk, and stood and stalked away.

"Hey, Lily," Lucas said. "God damn it."

Gary Kieffer didn't like Lucas and made no effort to hide it. He was waiting in Daniel's office when Lily arrived, with Lucas just behind her. He and Lucas nodded at each other.

"Where's Daniel?" Lily asked.

"Off somewhere," Kieffer said coldly. He was wearing a navy-blue business suit, a tie knotted in a full Windsor, and well-polished black wingtips.

"I'll go check," Lucas grumped. He backed out of the office, looking at Lily. She dropped her purse beside the chair next to Kieffer's and sat down.

"You'd be the New York lady officer," Kieffer said, looking her over.

"Yes. Lily Rothenburg. Lieutenant."

"Gary Kieffer." They shook hands, he with an exaggerated gentleness. Kieffer wore thick glasses and his large red nose was pitted with old acne scars. He crossed his hands over his stomach.

"What's the problem with you and Davenport?" Lily asked. "There's a certain chill...."

Kieffer's blue eyes were distorted by the heavy glasses and looked almost liquid, like ice cubes in a glass of gin and tonic. He was in his early fifties, his face lined by weather and stress. He was silent for a moment, then asked, "Are you friends?"

"No. We're not friends. I just met him a couple of days ago," she said.

"I don't like to talk out of turn," Kieffer said.

"Look, I've got to work with him," Lily prompted.

"He's a cowboy," Kieffer continued. His voice dropped a notch and he looked around the office, as though checking for recording devices. "That's my estimation. He's gunned down six people. Killed them. I don't believe there's another officer in Minnesota, including SWAT guys, who has killed more than two. No FBI man has. Maybe nobody in the country has. And you know why? Because in most places, if a guy kills two people, he goes on a desk. They won't let him out anymore. They worry about what they've got on their hands. But not with Davenport. He does what he pleases. Sometimes that's killing people."

"Well, I understand that in his area..."

"Yeah, yeah, that's what everybody says. That's what the news people say. He's got the media people in his pocket, the reporters. They say he does dope, he does vice, he does intelligence work on violent criminals. I say he's a gunman, and I don't hold with that. Except for Davenport, we don't have the death penalty in Minnesota. He's a gunman, plain and simple."

Lily thought it over. A gunman. She could see it in him. She'd have to be careful. But gunmen had their uses.... Kieffer was staring straight ahead, at the photos on Daniel's wall, caught in his own thoughts of Davenport.

Lucas came back a moment later, Daniel trailing behind him with a cup of coffee. Sloan and another cop, the second one unshaven and dressed like a parking-lot attendant, were a step behind Daniel. Everybody called the second cop Del, but nobody introduced him to Lily. She assumed he was undercover Narcotics or Intelligence.

"So what do we got?" Daniel asked as he settled behind his desk. He looked into his humidor, then snapped it shut.

"We've got a map. Let me explain the situation," Sloan said. He moved up to Daniel's desk and unrolled a copy of a plat map from the City Planner's Office.

Billy Hood had apparently left Bemidji a year before, drifted down to the Twin Cities and moved into an apartment with two friends. The apartment was on the first-floor corner of the building, just to the right of the entrance. A careful, secretive questioning of the elderly couple who worked as building superintendents suggested that Hood's roommates were in residence. Hood had been gone for more than a week, perhaps ten days, but his clothes were still in the apartment.

"What are the chances of getting a search warrant?" Lucas asked.

"If Lily will swear that she has probable cause to think Hood's the man who killed Andretti, there'd be no problem," Daniel said.

"The problem is, we've got those two guys who live with him," said Sloan. "We've got nothing against them, so we can't kick the door and bust them. But if we go talk nice to them, what happens if they're part of the whole deal? Maybe Hood's calling them every night to find out what's happening. They could have a voice code to warn him off...."

"So what are you suggesting?" Daniel asked.

The cop named Del pointed at the map. "See this building across the street? We can get a ground-floor apartment and set up there. There's only two ways out of Hood's building-the other way's on the side-and we can see both of them from the apartment across the street. We think the ideal thing would be to set up a surveillance. Then, depending on how he arrives, grab him just before he goes in, or when he comes back out."

"What do you mean, 'how he arrives'?" Daniel asked, looking up from the map.

"There're not many cars on the street. He could pull up right to the front door, hop out and go inside. If he's nuts, we want to be in a position where we can tackle him. You know, a couple guys walk down the street, talking, and when they get to him, wham! Take him down, put on the cuffs."

"We could put somebody inside..." Daniel suggested, but Del was already shaking his head.