Wicked Prey (19 page)

“How many of them will take it seriously?” Dickens asked.

“Some won’t—but most of them will post the pictures,” Lucas said. “We’ve got the tag on his truck posted, too, and the highway patrol guys are looking for it.”

Dickens Nodded, then asked, “Why haven’t we found him?”

“I’d say he’s probably ditched himself,” Lucas said. “He’s here, or up in Duluth, or over in Eau Claire, watching TV and trying to get his guts up.”

Again, Dickens nodded, as if Lucas confirmed what he thought, and said, “That’s what I think, too. Damn hard to catch somebody who holes up, and when there’s nobody to ask about him—no family. Shafer’s mother hasn’t see him in eight years and nobody knows where his old man went, and that was twenty years ago.”

They thought about that for a minute, then Dickens asked, “What do you want me to do in here?”

Lucas, who mostly dealt with the FBI, at the federal level, thought that was about the most modest and reasonable question he’d ever been asked by a fed. He smiled and said, “Do the unreasonable federal act: scare them.”

* * *

THERE WEREN’T many people to scare the shit out of, as it turned out—three women in their forties or early fifties, all a little heavy, harried, confused about the questions.

Their leader, whose name was Helen Fumaro, who wore a large cluster of American Indian turquoise jewelry around her neck, said, Yes, they assigned blocks of rooms. Yes, if somebody had access to their computers, they could have figured out who was staying where, and when, and even the rate. Would they know who the lobbyist representatives were? Well, the billing addresses were right there in the computer . . . If you could get into the computers, and if you knew who you were looking for, you could find them.

“But
we
wouldn’t know who they were looking for,” Fumaro said, her hands fluttering in front of her, as though she were air-typing. “I don’t know who any . . . moneymen are. I get a list of people who’ve been approved by our Washington office, and then we arrange the hotels depending on their numerical rating, one through ten.”

“How does that work?” Lucas asked.

Fumaro said, “If you’re a one—there aren’t many—you get the best rooms in the best hotels. You get what you want. If you’re a ten, well, we might have to tell you that, regretfully, the hotels are all booked up.”

“I always wondered how that worked,” Dickens said.

“So who’d have access to both lists?” Lucas asked. “Just you three?”

Fumaro scratched at her hair part with a Number Two pencil. “Well . . . everything we’ve got is mostly on our computers here . . .” She waved at three laptops. “We’re networked and we’re online, but . . . I mean, when we leave, we turn off the computers.” She looked at the door to the skyway. “If somebody sneaked in here at night . . . but then they’d need the passwords . . .” She looked at the other two women. “Any ideas?”

They sat mute, shaking their heads.

“What about in Washington?” Dickens asked.

“You know, nobody in Washington cares, as long as the work gets done,” Fumaro said.

Another one of the women, whose name was Cheryl Ann, said, “You know, really, what we do is clerical work. That’s all. We get lists, we put them in a computer, and match them to available rooms. If we get a match, we send a confirmation. If it doesn’t match, we call up people and see if we can figure out what to do. We put names in little squares. We don’t know these people.”

The third woman, whose name was Lucy, said, “You know . . . never mind.”

Fumaro asked, “These people who were beaten up. What were their names?”

“John Wilson, Bart Spellman, Lorelei Johnson,” Lucas said.

She scooted her office chair over to one of the laptops, called up a form and typed
John Wilson
into a blank. Another form blinked up, with Wilson’s registration, showing the bare information of name, room assignment, billing address, and credit card guarantee. Lucas, looking over her shoulder with Dickens, said, “But that doesn’t say who he worked for.”

“That’s on another input form,” Fumaro said. She popped up another form, which showed Wilson’s employer and a payment guarantee from a travel agency.

“But that doesn’t have the room assignment,” Dickens said. “You’d have to get both of these forms to put those together?”

They hashed that over, and decided that if you
knew
who you were looking for, you could find the room number; but you’d need the name first. Dickens said to Lucas, “Whoever did it had to have a fix on the targets. Then he could get the room assignments . . .”

“But he would have had to get them from these computers, or access to these computers,” Lucas said. “In Washington, I think.”

He told Dickens about the line of reasoning they’d worked out in Wilson’s hospital room. “Cohn and the gang members had to have the names quite a long time ago.”

“The logic is a little leaky,” Dickens said. “But I see what you’re saying.”

Lucy, the third woman, asked Fumaro, “When was Wilson registered?”

Fumaro checked and said, “May seventeenth.”

Lucy asked, “How about Spellman?”

Fumaro checked. “May ninth.” To Lucas and Dickens: “That was just before the big rush. The big rush started around the first of June. That’s when everybody was getting set with their rooms.”

“So they were before . . . Raphael,” Lucy said.

The three women all looked at one another, and Lucas looked at the three of them looking at one another, and then he asked, “Who’s Raphael?”

“Raphael’s dead,” Lucy said.

BETWEEN THE TIME LUCAS GOT THE call about Letty, and the time he got home, he’d bumped and stumbled over what might be critical information about the Cohn gang. His initial dismay about Letty had dissipated; but it all came back as he got closer to home.

Her bicycle was in the driveway, so she was home, and by the time he went through the connecting door between the garage and the kitchen, he was steaming.

Weather, Sam, and Ellen the housekeeper were in the kitchen when he went through. He snapped, “Where’s Letty?” and Weather looked at his face and asked, “What happened?” and Letty said from the living room, “I’m in here.”

She’d been waiting. Her voice had a hard edge to it and Weather stood up and asked again, “What happened?” and Lucas started for the living room.

* * *

LETTY AND JULIET BRIAR had ridden around in the Channel Three van for a while, and Letty borrowed a hundred dollars, fifty each from Frank and Lois, promising to pay them back “as soon as I can steal it from Dad.” She gave the money to Briar and said, “Now you’re covered. You don’t have to go around making dates.”

Juliet said, uncertainly, “Randy might make me tell.”

“You don’t have to tell,” Letty said. “You can make something up.”

“What if he asks me what the guy was like?” Briar asked.

“Well . . . make something up. See that guy walking across the street?” Letty pointed through the windshield and they all looked at a guy wearing a blue seersucker suit with a white shirt and a red bow tie. “The bow tie guy was your date.”

“He has a southern accent,” Lois said.

“He has a southern accent and he took you to a hotel room at the Radisson, on the twelfth floor, but he wouldn’t let you look at the number, and then he took you back out and wouldn’t let you look at the number when you were leaving,” Frank said.

“Randy doesn’t care about that,” Briar said.

“But it’s a good detail, and it makes it sound more real,” Letty said.

“He only gave you seventy-five dollars,” Lois said. “But he went in the bathroom and you stole the rest.”

“You don’t understand,” Briar said. “Randy might
make
me tell the truth.”

“
You
don’t understand,” Letty said. “You fib.”

She was insistent, and Briar looked away and bobbed her head and said, “Okay.”

Frank looked back from the driver’s seat and said to Letty, “We need to get out and have a secret talk where Lois and Juliet can’t hear us.”

Letty frowned. “What?” He repeated himself and she asked, “Why?”

“Because.” He pulled over to the curb, said to Lois, “I’ll leave everything running, be back in a minute.”

He got out and Letty followed, and they walked a way down the street, where they could see a bunch of cops in riot gear, apparently waiting for something to happen that was out of sight. Two more cops, on horses, were riding slowly toward the riot cops.

“Listen, you know about the problem I had,” Frank said. “Everybody in town does.”

“I heard something about it,” Letty admitted.

“I’ve known a few of these girls . . . sometimes, a lot of times, with the younger ones . . . they don’t think for themselves. They’re so . . . screwed up . . . that they think what they’re told to think. When Juliet says that Randy will make her tell—she knows that if Randy pushes her, she’ll tell the truth. Then, maybe, she gets beat up. I don’t know. I don’t know what kind of deal you got going . . .”

“But she’s got the money,” Letty protested. “All she has to do is tell a little lie . . .”

“She can’t,” Frank said. He looked desperately embarrassed. “She does exactly what people tell her, because when she doesn’t, she’s learned that she’ll get beat up. So, back there in the car, you got a little sharp with her, and she agreed. Because you
made
her agree.”

“I didn’t . . .”

“Yes, you did,” Frank said. “These people, sometimes, they can’t resist a push. When she gets alone with Randy, if he smells a rat and pushes her, she’ll tell the truth.”

Letty scuffed along, then looked back at the truck. “Poop.” She turned, and started back, and then said, “Frank, thank you. You’re a great guy for telling me this. You know, after, your problem.”

Frank blushed and when they got back to the van, Letty popped the back door and said, “Juliet, let’s walk.”

* * *

THEY GOT OUT of the van and started walking up the hill and generally back toward the Radisson hotel. Juliet asked, “Do you want the money back?”

Letty, surprised, said, “No, of course not. That’s your money. You got it from a fat guy named Stan with a southern accent who was wearing a blue-striped suit and a red bow tie.”

Briar’s head bobbed and Letty continued: “Frank told me that you might have a little trouble lying to Randy.”

Juliet looked away. “I can’t do it. Or maybe, I can, if he doesn’t find out. But if he guesses, he can
make
me tell.”

Letty said, “How much trouble have you had with the cops?”

Briar shook her head. “I’ve never had any trouble.”

“You’ve never been arrested?”

She shook her head and then smiled, proud to show off her expertise. “Randy told me how to do this. Taught me. It’s not hard. You gotta watch out for the undercover, but the undercover usually operates up where all the whores hang out. I ask . . . guys on the street. I pick
them
. If somebody picks me, I’m supposed to get pissed . . . Keeps off the undercover. Randy, if Randy gets arrested for two more years, they’ll put him back in prison.”

“Okay. Well. I asked you because I’ve been in trouble with the cops,” Letty said. “I even shot one. Twice. I mean, I shot him two different times, a couple days apart. I used to get busted by the highway patrol because I’d drive around when I was too young . . .”

Briar was looking at her openmouthed. “You shot a cop?”

“Yup. You can look it up on the Internet. My name is Letty West and you can look it up,” she said.

“Okay,” Briar said. “But we don’t have an Internet.”

Letty hooked her arm with Briar’s. “Now. When I was in all that trouble, all the time, I had to tell a few fibs. Well, lots of fibs. The way I did this is, I made a little box in my mind, and I put the truth in that, and then I made the box small. So I knew what the truth was. But then, I imagined, you know,
another
truth. What might have happened. What people would rather have had happen. So, if the highway patrolman saw me downtown, and asked me if I was driving, and I was, I’d just say, ‘No, my mom brought me.’ That was a better truth for everybody, see? Then I didn’t get in trouble, and he didn’t have to give me a hard time . . . Way back in my head, I knew what the truth was, but the fib was at the head of the line. That’s what everybody wants to hear, anyway. Randy doesn’t want to hear that I’m talking to you—he wants to hear that you, you know . . .”

“Gave a guy a blow job,” Briar said.

“Yeah. Okay?”

“Okay.” Another helpless head bob.

“So let’s go sit on that bench, across the street,” Letty said, pointing at a bench in a riverfront park. “We can practice. I’ll teach you how to lie to Randy. Like I lied to the cops. You can tell
me
about blow jobs.”

She really did sort of want to know.

LUCAS, TALKING with the women at the hospitality committee, felt the ice going out: the break.