Wicked Prey (26 page)

WHITCOMB HEARD the word, or enough of it, and turned and saw the tall dark-haired man staring at him from the corner table, and pushed Briar back and said, loudly, “You got a problem, fuckwad?”

The woman with the dark-haired man said something, an urgent twist to her face, and he said something back, and then the woman got up and walked rapidly toward the exit gate.

The dark-haired man threw money at the table, then stepped over to Whitcomb and said quietly, “If you don’t take your hands off this young woman, you little fuckin’ greasy pimp, or if you use that language on me again, I’m going to throw you in front of a fuckin’ car.”

The guy was drunk, Whitcomb realized. He realized it in a stupid, distant way, and the one thing he’d learned for sure as a cripple was that nobody fucked with cripples. Not deliberately. He flicked away Briar’s neckline, and she rocked back and said, “Randy, maybe . . .”

Whitcomb snapped, “Shut the fuck up,” and said to Cohn, “Listen, you fuckin’ twat . . .”

Cohn yanked him out of the wheelchair so quickly that he might have been levitated by God.

* * *

COHN KNEW he was drunk, knew this could be the end, but
McCall was dead,
and this
fuckin’ cripple
. . . this
pimp
. . .

He snatched Whitcomb out of the chair with one powerful hand on Whitcomb’s neck, and the other, as the cripple came up, on his belt. Two women screamed and he knocked a chair over with his leg and a table scraped across the brick patio with a metallic scream, and Cohn was blind now to everything but a hole in the air in front of him, leading out to the street.

He took six long strides to the fence that separated the bar patio from the sidewalk, yanking Whitcomb along, Whitcomb windmilling, another two steps through the patio gate and across the sidewalk to the curb, and then he heaved Whitcomb at the windshield of an oncoming minivan.

Whitcomb was unnaturally light, because of his withered legs, and he hit the hood of the car, flattened over the windshield, screaming, windmilling with his arms, then skidded off the far side and was hit by another car.

Cohn didn’t slow down to watch, though he heard the satisfying
thump
of the second car. He turned back through the patio, walked into the bar, a woman’s white face following him. Out of sight of the witnesses, he stripped off his black sport coat to show his white short-sleeved shirt, and quickly swerved out the side exit and down the street.

He could hear people shouting from the patio, but there was no pursuit as he turned the corner. He walked down the block and around, across the street, past a cluster of cops who were looking down at the screaming, talking on shoulder radios. Another half block, and he turned back into the same skyway they’d taken out of the condo.

Didn’t feel good: there was still McCall back there, dead.

But he didn’t feel as bad as he had, either.

LUCAS AND DEL sat on a bench in the hotel’s lobby while the St. Paul cops worked the crime scene. Del said, “I got the notification going. He’s got parents and a couple of sisters.”

“Okay.”

Neither one of them spoke for a minute, then Del said, “I feel kinda bad that I don’t feel worse. I didn’t much like the guy. He was a stiff.”

“Still one of us,” Lucas said.

“You know what I mean,” Del said.

“Yeah. Freaks me out, though. Three cops killed, this year, and we were involved in all three of them. That Indian dude up north, on Virgil’s case, the guy in Hudson, now Benson.”

“Yeah. What can you say?”

“Lot of guys gone down over the years,” Lucas said.

“Yeah.”

Another minute, then Lucas looked at his watch.

“What’re you going to do?” Del asked.

“First thing, right at the crack of dawn tomorrow, soon as the TV people wake up, I’m gonna have a big-mother press conference,” Lucas said. “I’m gonna paper the country with pictures of Cohn and this chick. Then, we’re gonna find them and kill them.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Del said.

LUCAS WOKE AT 5 A.M. after three hours of sleep. He came up feeling depressed, a mental cloud hanging overhead; a darkness. He shaved carefully, let a hot shower beat on his shoulders and back, getting in the mood to talk to the press. Thinking it over. And Benson . . . gone. If he’d been in the room, would he have done any better? Why had they opened the door? Benson hadn’t been ready, his vest undone, the shotgun dropped . . .

Weather, who would have been up in a half hour anyway, had rolled out and was brushing her teeth when he got out of the shower. He toweled off and then wrapped his arms around her and squeezed and said, halfheartedly, “Naked man attacks helpless housewife.”

She gave him an elbow and grumped, “Back off,” and, “You better get going,” and a moment later, “I still can’t believe it.” She’d known Benson, from another case.

“I . . . ah, never mind,” Lucas said, and he went and got dressed, a somber suit for a somber day.

THE PRESS CONFERENCE was set for six, to catch the earliest news programs, especially locally and on the West Coast, where the unknown woman might have come from. That gave him time to eat breakfast before he headed out, time to again work through what he was going to say. Del and Shrake and Jenkins and Neil Mitford, the political operator, and Rose Marie Roux, the state public safety commissioner, would all be there, Rose Marie speaking for the governor, and both Mitford and Roux working the reporters off-camera.

Lucas ate Egg Beaters and bacon, with coffee, heard the paper hit the front porch and went and got it, glanced at the headlines. The killings had been too late to catch the paper, although they’d be all over the television broadcasts—one cop, one innocent woman, and one masked intruder, all dead in one of the most expensive hotels in the Cities, right in the middle of the convention.

The press conference, Lucas thought, on the way in, might not be entirely friendly. He took his truck instead of the Porsche, for the reduced flash, and wondered whether he’d screwed up. If they really believed that a murder gang was operating in town, maybe there
should
have been two cops in each room? And fewer rooms, if necessary? They simply hadn’t had the manpower, with the convention in town—and maybe they hadn’t had the faith that anything would really happen. Maybe he’d been a bit perfunctory in his briefing of Benson and the other guys.

But they were supposed to be pros—they were supposed to know how to handle a deal like this. They all knew that a cop had been killed in Hudson. Why had Benson unlocked the door? The killers had been able to kick the safety bolt, but wouldn’t have been able to kick the cross lock, if the door hadn’t been opened . . .

No answers yet: maybe he’d get some from the crime-scene people.

* * *

ROSE MARIE ROUX, his boss, was getting out of her Buick when he pulled into the BCA parking lot. She waited for him, squinting against the early morning sun, and when he caught up with her, said, “The governor’s going to call Benson’s folks this morning.”

“All right.”

“You good?” she asked.

“Aw . . . you know.”

She nodded. She’d been a cop before she was a lawyer, and a politician. “Let a little of it out, when you’re talking to the cameras. Get angry. Makes better tape—you’ll get better distribution on the pictures.”

He half-laughed—snorted—and said, “Pretty fucking pathetic when you have to pull that bullshit.”

“Modern times,” she said.

* * *

 

NELLY CASSESFORD from Channel Three was walking up the sidewalk from the Channel Three van, carrying a cable of some sort. She saw Lucas and Rose Marie and slowed down to wait for them.

“We need to get started right on time, because we’re up to our necks in convention stuff,” she said. She was a slight, dark-haired woman with warm brown eyes. “Lots of trouble last night, lots of tape.”

“We’re good,” Lucas said. “Did you talk to your guys about getting this out to LA?”

“Yup. Larry Johnston called them last night. They like that LA connection with the woman, don’t care so much about the convention, so you’ll get some time. Did you talk to everybody?”

Lucas nodded. “Yeah. I just hope they don’t kiss us off.”

“They won’t. This is great stuff—manhunt. Woman-hunt. Unknown killers. Good-looking femme fatale. Appeal to the public for help.” She didn’t say, “Dead cops,” which was good.

* * *

THERE WERE four cameras and a cooperative light setup in the BCA conference room. Del, Jenkins, and Shrake, all looking tired and ruffled, were clustered in the back of the room, and Mitford was talking to a St. Paul political reporter. He spotted Lucas and Lucas went that way, and Mitford asked, “You all set?”

“Yeah. You gonna say anything for the governor?”

“No. I’ll leave it to you,” Mitford said. “You know he’ll be calling Benson’s folks . . .”

“Rose Marie told me,” Lucas said. He glanced at his watch. Three minutes to six. Time to do it.

* * *

 

ROSE MARIE went first, the usual political platitudes about tragedy and a life dedicated to government service. Then Lucas went on, and he did let it out, as Rose Marie had suggested, and though it felt a little calculated, he found it pretty easy to do.

“A murder gang is operating in the Twin Cities and they’ve killed two police officers and an innocent woman, and we need to take these people off the street
right now,”
he said through his teeth. “We’re distributing photos of two of the people involved. We don’t know who the woman is, but we believe that she’s in St. Paul and that she may have come from the Los Angeles area. If you see her, or if you know where or who she is, we need to find her. She may have been involved in the death of a young and innocent Spanish man whom she seduced and then possibly murdered in Washington, D.C. . . .”

Let it out. From the intent expressions of the reporters, he figured it was working; gonna be good tape.

When he was done, he bounced a few questions, and then said, “We’ll keep you up on this. I understand that the governor will have a comment later. He personally knew and valued Agent Benson and he’ll be talking to Benson’s folks this morning.”

He saw Rose Marie nod and he was done.

* * *

WHEN THE reporters were heading out, Del asked, “What next?”

Lucas said, “We’ve got about a million cops out there. Let’s get some guys, and get these pictures to every one of the cops. Tell them, you know, if they’re standing around, to talk to people—shop owners, bank tellers, whatever, ask if they’ve seen these guys. Maybe something will pop up. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

“I hate it when we have to get lucky.”

COHN AND the other three had done some drinking over the night, a couple of bottles of blended whiskey, ginger ale, and ice cubes, an old-fashioned way to get hammered, and also to overfill the tank. Lane woke at seven o’clock, hungover, and had to pee so bad he was almost afraid to move. He first thought about McCall, and the dread of a close-by death hung on him. He coughed, and stirred and pushed himself up and staggered off to the bathroom in his underwear.