Wicked Prey (20 page)

Lucy, the third woman, had said, “Raphael is dead.”

Lucas and Dickens, the Secret Service agent, looked at each other, and another look passed between the three nervous women, and then Lucas said, “Who’s Raphael?”

Cheryl Ann, the second woman, said, “Raphael Sabartes, this Latino guy . . .”

“Spanish,” Fumaro said. “From Spain.”

Lucy said, “He was part-time tech support back in the Washington office and he died. In June. June twenty-first, midsummer’s day. They said alcohol and pills. The cops did. The police.”

Lucas’s eyebrows went up: “You think different?”

“Well, it was a lot of pills,” Lucy said. “A
lot
of pills. Couldn’t hardly have been an accident.”

“Police said it could have been an accident,” Fumaro said. “You’re drinking, you can’t get to sleep, so you take a pill. The pill makes you confused, and you don’t think you’ve taken the pill, so you take another one. And so on.”

“Thirty pills?” Lucy said. “He took thirty pills by mistake?”

Cheryl Ann said, “Then there was his girlfriend.”

Dickens: “What about the girlfriend?”

“Very pretty Latina, Mexican, I think, but older than Raphael,” Cheryl Ann said. “Raphael was about twenty-five; this woman, I think, might have been in her thirties.”

Lucy snorted. “She’d never see forty again, if you ask me. She took care of herself, but she was no spring chicken.”

“Raphael liked her,” Fumaro said.

“Raphael
loved
her,” Lucy said. To Lucas: “I don’t think Raphael was very sexually experienced.”

“He was sort of odd-looking,” Cheryl Ann confirmed.

“Like a Picasso,” Fumaro said.

“So this good-looking older woman who shares his heritage . . . well, some of it, anyway, she can speak Spanish . . . she eats him up,” Lucy said. She leaned toward Lucas: “Then he died, and
she never even came to the memorial service.
”

Lucas said, “He could have put together these rooms and names and organizations . . . ?”

Cheryl Ann snapped her fingers: “Like that. You know what? He was moody, that’s what we told the police, he was moody, but we never saw him happier than after he hooked up with this woman. Why would he commit suicide?”

Lucy said, “What if she broke it off with him that night? That could be a reason . . .”

Dickens had taken a chair; now he leaned back and put his hands behind his head, stared up at the ceiling, thinking, then said, “You know what?”

Lucas: “What?”

“Just between you and me, the biggest street-money guy, I happen to know, is named Chuck Prince. He works for America-United Aerospace Association, which is a lobby group for all the big air-defense manufacturers. He probably has four times as much money with him as all these other guys . . . why didn’t they hit him? I know he’s in town.”

Fumaro reached forward and called up a form. “He registered with us on twenty-nine June.”

Cheryl Ann said, her voice hushed and conspiratorial, “They don’t know about him. Because Raphael was dead. They killed him too soon. Holy shit. It’s just like in
Clue
. Colonel Lesbo did it, with the poison in the drink at the hotel.”

Dickens ventured a smile. “Lesbo?”

Cheryl Ann said, “The three of us saw them once—just once—at the Hamilton, in the bar, which is a weird place for Raphael, now that I think about it.” The other two women nodded.

“They saw us and we saw them, and we stopped to say hello and look her over and I got a very definite lesbian radio wave from her,” Cheryl Ann said. “Not that I’d really know.”

“You’d recognize her again?” Lucas asked.

“Maybe—but you know what? There’s a photograph of her,” Cheryl Ann said. “He took a picture of her with his cell phone, sent it to himself at the office, and printed it out, and pinned it up on the wall of his cubicle. After he died, we took the stuff off the walls and put it in a box and gave it to the police, when they came around. They might still have it.”

“What about the body?” Dickens asked.

“I think the Spanish embassy shipped it back to Spain,” Fumaro said.

Lucas said, “Time to call the cops, I guess. Were these District cops, or are you over in Virginia, or what?”

“Right in the District,” Fumaro said. “The guy who came to get the box was Detective Sams.”

Lucas wrote it down and went home to confront Letty.

* * *

LETTY WAS STANDING in the living room with her arms crossed, one foot all but tapping, a pose that Lucas recognized from encounters with more women, over the years, than he cared to remember. Before he could say a single word, Letty said, “I’m trying to get to be what Jennifer calls a Real Fuckin’ Reporter, and I do
not
want to hear about this story.”

“What story?” Weather asked.

Lucas, fists on his hips, looking at Letty but talking sideways to Weather: “Your daughter here is running down hookers, in St. Paul, and I won’t tell you what kind of questions she’s asking them, because it embarrasses me.”

Weather said, “Hookers?”

Lucas said to Letty, “I’m putting my foot down. I let you run all over me, but this time, by God, you are not going to go around this town looking for hookers. I mean, do you have any idea what those people could do to you? Of course not. You’re a teenager and you don’t have a single fucking idea what you’re getting into . . .”

“I do have a fucking idea because I tracked down one of these girls—on my own—and she’s no older than I am . . .”

“Watch your language,” Lucas said, getting loud. He knew he was about to start waving his arms, so he put his hands in his pockets, afraid that he might frighten her.

“You started it,” she said.

“Technically, you said ‘fuck’ first,” Weather told Letty.

Ellen came in from the kitchen, carrying Sam: “What the heck is going on here?”

“Letty’s interviewing hookers,” Weather told her.

“Hookers?”

“Aw, for Christ’s sakes,” Lucas said. To Letty: “You, young lady, are grounded.”

* * *

THAT WASN’T the end of it, of course. Lucas had never grounded anyone before, so the term “grounded” had to be defined. He couldn’t actually restrict her to the house, because she had to go to school the next week, and there was some slack there, and he actually approved of the idea of Letty working with Jennifer Carey. Besides, he wasn’t a jailer.

When everything was hashed over, Letty had negotiated it down to one restriction: she was not allowed to go downtown on her own, and anytime she went out of the house, she had to tell somebody specifically where she was going. If she violated the deal, she’d be restricted to the house for the rest of the week, including the weekend.

“All right. It’s not fair, it’s not right, but you’re the dictator,” she said.

Lucas said, “What do you mean it’s not right? You’re going around . . .”

“I’m reporting the news,” Letty snarled.

Weather jumped in: “Both of you shut up. A deal’s a deal. All right? All right.”

Ellen said, “Hookers? In St. Paul?”

“Aw, for Christ’s sakes . . .”

* * *

 

LETTY STOMPED OFF to her bedroom to mope, but she didn’t stomp as hard as she might: she had no intention of keeping the agreement.

* * *

LUCAS, ON THE WAY HOME, had called his secretary and told her to chase down the Washington cop, Sams, who’d looked into Raphael Sabartes’s death.

“It’s Sunday,” Carol said. “I might not be able to get him.”

“Try,” Lucas said. “Have we heard anything at all about this Justice Shafer guy?”

“No . . .”

“Of course not,” Lucas said. “If we had, you’d have called me instantly.”

“Right.”

“So find Sams.”

As it turned out, Sams was working nights, and was due to come on at 11 P.M. Lucas called the number Carol got, and left a note with Sams’s supervisor that he’d be calling right at 11 o’clock.

The rest of the evening was fairly tense, with Letty trudging up and down the stairs between her room and the refrigerator, stopping only once to say, “All my friends say it’s unfair.”

“All your friends are teenagers,” Lucas said.

Letty said, “You told me one time that you had a beer in a hockey bar when you were fourteen.”

“That was different,” Lucas said.

“How was that different?”

“There were adults around,” Lucas said.

“Huh, great. Adults giving a fourteen-year-old a beer,” Letty said.

Weather said, “Shut up, shut up, shut up, both of you, shut up.”

On her last trip down, she went to the refrigerator, got a bottle of water, and on the way back through the family room, where Weather and Lucas were watching the news, stopped and gave Lucas a kiss on the forehead, and went on her way.

“I think you’re okay,” Weather said.

* * *

AT TEN O’CLOCK, eleven Eastern, Lucas called Sams, got him, gave him the history, and told him about the interview with the women at the hospitality committee.

“Well, they might be right, but we couldn’t prove it,” Sams said. “No sign of violence, the kid was lying on his back on his bed, his shoes off, his hands crossed on his chest. Bottle of rum in the kitchen, glass by the bed.”

“But no note.”

“Nothing,” Sams said. “We never did find the woman. We didn’t know where to start, because nobody knew her name.”

“Find any DNA in the apartment?”

“There might have been some semen stains, but we didn’t run it—I mean, it didn’t come from the woman,” Sams said. “We didn’t do a full process, because . . . there didn’t seem to be any reason to. Everything in the apartment was pretty neat and clean.”

“No references to the woman . . . cell phone, date book . . . ?”

“Okay, here’s one thing. The kid’s cell phone had a lot of calls on it to one number, and the number was in the three-two-three area code. That’s LA. Pretty much downtown LA. We ran the phone down, and it was a dead end—one of those over-the-counter pay-as-you-go phones. We called it, but it was out of service. It never came back, as long as we called it.”

“So you don’t even know that it’s the woman’s phone,” Lucas said.

“Nope. We don’t. But: I talked to his uncle, from Spain, because his folks don’t speak English, and we figured out between us that he’d never been to California, and as far as anybody knew, he didn’t know anybody from there. But he was calling the number six times a day for two months.”

“So it’s gotta be her,” Lucas said. “He was in love.”

“I think so. Now that you’re asking, I’d have to say it was all a little odder than we thought at the time. She was just flat gone, and she shouldn’t have been
that
gone.”

“These committee women I talked to, they said you might have a picture of her,” Lucas said.

“We do have that,” Sams said. “When I got your note, I went and looked. The thing is, it was just odd enough that the ME didn’t want to rule it as a suicide. He left the cause of death open. Means of death was a load of sleeping pills with alcohol. Anyway, we’ve still got all the evidence, what there was of it.”

“Could you scan that photo and send it to me?” Lucas asked.

“Sure. Keeps me off the street—I’ll do it tonight.”

WHILE LUCAS was talking to Sams, Jesse Lane and Rosie Cruz were sitting at the back of Spor’s, an upscale deli off West Seventh Street, two blocks from the convention center, watching Shelly Weimer finish a corned-beef sandwich with a mound of yellow sauerkraut.

“The guy is a pig,” Cruz said.

“He ain’t all that neat, is he?”

Weimer was sitting across the shop under a poster of Albert Einstein. He went after the sandwich like a starving man, hunched over it, eyes scanning the shop, pieces of bread and strands of sauerkraut falling like shrapnel on the tabletop and onto his jacket and shirt and lap.

Lane and Cruz worked slowly through their hot dogs and French fries, not much to talk about, until Lane asked, “You’re from LA, right?”

“We don’t talk about where people are from,” Cruz said. Her voice was soft and pleasant, her eyes amused.

“Well, everybody knows where everybody else is from . . . if Brute’s from anywhere. Most of the time, he isn’t, but he used to be from Birmingham.”

“I like my privacy,” Cruz said.

“Sure. But, I figure you’re from LA. You look California. You act California.”

Now she was interested. “How do you
act
California?”

Lane checked Weimer, then turned back. “You know. Me ’n’ Tate were talking. When we’re done with a job, and you’re heading out to the airport, you dress like California. Light and cheerful. Lacy. We don’t dress like it in the middle of the country. Then, whenever we go to a restaurant, you pick at the food like you never seen it before. Like that hot dog. You ain’t gonna finish it, are you?”

“It’s not so good,” she said.