Silken Prey (36 page)

“You had a warrant?”

Corcoran laughed, and then started coughing. When he recovered, he said, “Oh, hell, no. That was a different time, up here. I just did what needed to be done. Anyway, I checked her, and she was pissed, but she didn’t have a thing. Said she went down there to apply for a waitress job. I said, ‘Lauren, you ain’t no waitress.’ And she said, ‘Jim, you never been poor.’ She called me ‘Jim,’ when everybody else her age would have been calling me ‘Mr. Corcoran.’ She was fifteen and all grown up.”

“I’ve known women like that, girls like that,” Lucas said, thinking of his Letty.

“But that wasn’t the kicker,” Corcoran said. “The kicker was, we had some rednecks out here who made a connection down in the Cities, and got the local cocaine franchise. One day, I borrowed a couple deputies from the sheriff and we raided them, and we got a half-kilo of coke and eight thousand dollars in cash. I locked it up in the evidence cage at the police department, which was on the side of city hall. That night, somebody cracked the back door on city hall, slick as you please, broke through the drywall into the police annex, cut the lock on the cage, and took the cash and the coke. I know goddamned well it was Lauren and I didn’t have one speck of evidence. I just looked at her and I could see it in the way she looked back at me: she thought it was funny. She was getting back at me for bracing her.”

Lucas smiled, and said, “Yeah, I can see her doing that.”

“You got something on her?” Corcoran asked.

“Exactly what you got,” Lucas said. “A belief.”

“And not a speck of evidence.”

“Not a speck,” Lucas said.

“Well, good for her,” Corcoran said. “I always liked that girl.”

On the way out of town, Lucas stopped at the only gas station to get a Diet Coke and whatever kind of Hostess Sno Ball imitation they had, and found himself looking at a rack of postcards.

•   •   •

A
COUPLE OF DAYS
later, Lauren and Kidd were going out for a late lunch, and they stopped in the bottom hallway to check the mail. Lauren took a postcard out of the mailbox and Kidd asked, “Anything good?”

“It’s a postcard from Lucas. . . . It says, ‘Glad you’re not here.’” With a puzzled look on her face, she turned it over and found a photo looking out over Iron Bay and Lake Superior.

“Oh, shit,” she said, stricken.

“What?”

“Lucas knows.”

•   •   •

F
IFTEEN MINUTES LATER,
wrapped in warm winter jackets, she and Kidd stood side by side on the Robert Street bridge, looking down at the dark waters of the Mississippi.

Kidd said, “This is the only time since I knew you, all those years, that you ever kept anything that they could stick you with.”

“Because it’s gorgeous,” she said. A gold watch dangled from her fingers. “It’s a Patek Philippe, from 1918. I’ve looked it up—it could be worth anything up to a quarter million.”

“And it would hang you, if anybody ever saw it,” Kidd said.

“I know,” she said. “But I refuse to give it back to a killer.”

“It’s a shame, though,” Kidd said.

“Would you do it if it was a Monet?”

“Jesus Christ, no,” Kidd said. “If it was a Monet . . . I’d . . . I’d . . .”

“You’d never drop it in the river,” Lauren said. She relaxed her fingers, and the watch dropped like a golden streak through the gray light of winter, and a quarter million dollars disappeared into the black water below the bridge.

“That’s it,” Lauren said, dusting her hands off. “Not a speck of evidence, now.”

“Not a speck,” Kidd said, hooking an arm through hers. “C’mon, little housewifey. Let’s go get a cheeseburger.”

•   •   •

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