Wicked Prey (22 page)

“I saw Jenkins down the hall, reading the paper—he could take one of our cars.”

“Get him over here. Quick as he can make it,” Lucas said.

He tried to pry more information out of Weimer, but the lobbyist didn’t have much more: “The whole thing was quick. Professional. Bam-bam-bam. When the two of them were talking, they were totally calm and casual. Like a couple guys going out for a beer. Then, when the guy hit me for not telling about the hideout bag, he didn’t seem angry. He hit me like he was punishing a kid. Just . . . hit me.”

Lucas went down to the cafeteria while he waited for Jenkins, got a Diet Coke, read the
Star Tribune
about the convention: more marches, lots of people already arrested. Finished the story, glanced at his watch, took out his cell phone and discovered that he had no signal. He walked it up the stairs, and then outside, got a signal, and called Jenkins. “I’m two minutes away,” Jenkins said. “I had to drive halfway around town to get here.”

Lucas waited by the curb, saw Jenkins coming, waved him down. Jenkins passed a manila envelope out the window. “What a mess. You can’t get anywhere. St. Paul’s closing down the whole downtown area.”

“Thanks for this. See you back at the office.”

“I hope it’s serious.”

“It is.” Lucas patted the truck on the door, and headed back into the hospital. In the elevator up to Weimer’s room, he slipped the photo out of the envelope. The quality was bad—cell phone quality—but the woman was recognizable, and, Lucas thought, somewhat hot.

Dark hair, dark eyes, caught unaware, he thought, as though she had just turned around. She seemed to be in a nightclub, or some kind of night place—there were sparkly lights in the background, the corner of a mirror, the shoulder of another woman in what might have been a cocktail dress. The woman wasn’t looking at the camera, but off to the right; she might not have known about the picture, Lucas thought.

* * *

WEIMER WAS sitting, unmoving, staring at the television that was attached to the ceiling. When Lucas came in, he turned his head: “Hurts when I move. This is awful, I’m like a baby. Could you take the top blanket off? My feet are getting hot.”

Lucas stripped the cotton blanket off the bed, wadded it up, threw it on a chair and said, “Okay. I got a picture . . .” He should have had a bunch of pictures, a photo panel, and asked Weimer to pick one, but that, he thought, would be a pain in the ass. “I don’t want you to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ unless you’re sure. Take a look.”

He passed the photo over and Weimer looked at it for a second, or two, then nodded and said, “Hell yes. That’s her. Who is she?”

Lucas took the photo back and said, “I don’t know. But I will find out.”

“Beat the shit out of her, for me,” Weimer said. “Do that, and I’ll get you a personalized autographed picture from the next president.”

Lucas said, “You know who it’s going to be?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Weimer said. “Either one. We’re covered both ways.”

* * *

AS SOON AS he could use his cell phone, on the way out of the hospital, he called Carol and said, “Jenkins is on the way back. Grab him, get Shrake, see if you can shake Del loose, he’s wandering around town somewhere, doing his homeless act . . . Meet in the office in twenty minutes.”

In the car, he called Mitford, the governor’s man, and said, “We’re meeting in my office in twenty minutes to talk about the people pulling these robberies. You might want to come by.”

“The cop thing yesterday . . . is that going to break it open?” Mitford asked.

“Maybe, but maybe not,” Lucas said. “The money is getting to be less important, in a way.”

“All right. I’m over at the X. I can be there in twenty, if I can get through town at all.”

“You’re the guy who wanted to have the convention here,” Lucas said.

“Hey, I think it’s a great success and another sign that Minnesota is marching into a future that gets brighter and brighter minute by minute. See ya.”

* * *

 

THEY GATHERED in Lucas’s office, and Lucas kicked Carol out, despite her curiosity, and said to the cops, “You all know Neil . . .”

Then he told them about it, about the money in briefcases and satchels, about the robberies, about the killing of the cop in Hudson, about Lily Rothenburg’s story of the cop murders in New York, and about the Latina-looking woman and the dead kid in D.C.

“We’re dealing with murder as a policy. They’ve killed at least four people and that’s only the ones we know about,” Lucas said. “They’re a murder gang, and they’re here, and we need to run them down.”

“I didn’t know,” Mitford said.

“Nobody did—not really. We’re coming in the back door on this,” Lucas said. “Now, we’ve got to start pushing some buttons. I want to put this woman’s face out there. One of those ‘Do you know this woman?’ deals on national TV. I can go back to Lily on that, and she can help: she’s already plastering the place with Cohn’s photo.”

“What about me?” Del asked. “I’ve spent a lot of time getting tight with these protesters. I’m doing the sheriff’s office some good, and the St. Paul cops.”

“Stay with it until we get something we can use—and then I may have to pull you off,” Lucas said. “My feeling is, the big convention trouble is about over, after the arrests yesterday. Maybe more on Thursday, the big McCain day, but . . . if we need you, we need you.”

Del nodded: “Okay.”

Shrake: “The question is, where are they? After the trouble in Hudson, they know we’re papering the motels. So where are they staying? Out-state? Or have they taken off?”

“Condos,” Jenkins said. “There are probably six hundred condos around town with nobody in them and the developers have been renting them out to the Republicans, to the media, to anyone who wants one. If they knew about that . . .”

“They would,” Lucas said. “They’ve got good intelligence.”

“Then that may be the answer,” Jenkins said to Lucas. “Your pal Ralph Warren, you know, with all his connections everywhere . . . maybe they went through him. He had a couple hundred empty condos.”

“Yeah, well. He’s dead,” Lucas said. Warren hadn’t been a pal, and though Lucas had tried to keep him alive, he’d failed.

“Even if he’s dead, there’s still gotta be a business manager somewhere,” Jenkins said. “Somebody’s got to be running the company.”

Lucas jabbed a finger at him: “I’ll buy your idea. You and Shrake start running down condo managers, the ones with vacancies.”

“Maybe we should hold off on the woman’s picture for a couple of days,” Del said. “Maybe we can spot her without the TV. If we spook her, and she takes off . . . it’s one thing we’ve got that they don’t know about.”

Lucas thought about it, then said, “Okay. A day. If we come up with anything, we can stretch it out. After that, we’re going with the TV. I’ll get Carol to print up photos of Cohn and this woman for you guys to take around town.”

He turned to Mitford: “At night . . . they’ve been hitting these guys at night, because it’s easier to locate them, and it’s easier to operate without letting their faces be seen. We need the names of the four or five biggest money dealers that you still see out there, and we’ll put somebody in their rooms. See if we can ambush them.”

“I don’t know if they’ll go for that,” Mitford said.

“They’ll have to do their deals somewhere else. Maybe they can rent two rooms. But that’s what we need, Neil. We got four dead.”

Mitford nodded: “I’ll make some calls.”

LETTY HAD twenty dollars from Lucas when she walked in the door at Channel Three that morning. The receptionist buzzed her through the security gate and she walked back past the studios, where the
Bob & Jane
morning show was unwinding. She nodded to the weatherman, who walked by, on his way to do a thirty-second bit, shaking peanuts out of a cellophane bag, and said, “You’ve got something stuck to your cheek.”

He said, “What is it?”

“Peanut skin?” She brushed it off. “Gone now.”

“Thanks.”

* * *

 

SHE WENT on her way, turned into the greenroom, where people waited for their turn on
Bob & Jane
, got two sweet rolls, and ate them on the way back to Jennifer Carey’s office. She’d had breakfast, but not much—she and Lucas were both light eaters in the morning. She realized on the way over that since she planned to give the twenty dollars to Juliet, she’d better get a couple of sweet rolls when she could.

A coffee niche, for employees only, was located down the hall from Carey’s office. She stopped there, looked around, stepped inside, and picked up the coffee donation can and peeled off the plastic lid. Three or four dollars. Not worth taking.

She needed eighty dollars more, although a hundred would be better, she thought—enough to convince Whitcomb that Juliet had been working.

Down the hall, she found Carey poking at her computer. Carey looked up and said, “Hi, good-lookin’,” with just enough forced cheer that Letty instantly knew who’d ratted her out. It might have been Lois, but it had gone through Carey to Lucas.

“You ratted me out,” she said.

Carey started to deny it, and then gave it up: “You’re too young. You don’t think so, but you are. When I was your age, I thought I was twenty-eight, too, but I wasn’t.”

“How old were you when you shot your first cop?” Letty asked.

“Letty, that’s not fair.” Carey was a hockey mom, and sometimes acted like one.

“How old were you when you first drove your drunk mother home from the bar?” Letty asked.

“Letty . . .” Carey was getting flustered.

“How old were you when you first stole money to get something to eat?” Letty was all over her now.

“For Christ’s sakes, I gotta do what I think is best,” Carey said. “You’re fourteen.”

Letty leaned into it: “I know how old I am. When it comes to trouble, I
am
twenty-eight. Try not to forget that the next time you turn me in.”

Carey rolled her eyes: “I don’t want to fight with you.”

“I’m done,” Letty said. “But I need a ride to St. Paul and I need a camera in the park. I talked to some street kids—not prostitutes, just skaters from St. Paul—who are going to skate in one of the marches. It’ll make a good snip of film.”

“I’m going over in fifteen minutes,” Carey said, eager to make peace. “The cameras are already over there, so . . . we’ll hook you up.”

Letty smiled: “I’m not really mad at you. Everybody thinks they’re doing the right thing. You’re not, but I appreciate it anyway.”

* * *

CAREY HAD her personal reporting rules that she’d been passing along to Letty. Like, before you go out on a job, always pee first. Even if you don’t feel like you have to. A woman can never find a comfortable place to pee when she needs one. Check your makeup and your hair; there’s never a place to do that when you need one—a little too much hairspray is better than too little.

Letty went out in the newsroom to chat with some of the producers, keeping one eye on Carey’s office. When Carey came out and looked around, Letty waved at her, and Carey called, “I’ll be right back,” and she headed down toward the bathrooms. Letty ambled over to her office as she watched her go, and when she was sure that Carey was in the bathroom, she stepped into the office and pulled Carey’s purse out from under her desk.

Carey never had any idea how much money she had or what she’d spent it on. She was one of those people who believed that if she had checks, she must have money. She made a good salary, and her husband was rich, so money, at least the kind you spend during the day, meant almost nothing to her: Letty popped the purse and took a peek into Carey’s billfold. Must be a thousand dollars in fifties, Letty thought. She took two of them, decided that the thickness of the currency seemed not at all diminished and took two more. She put the billfold back in the purse, put the purse back as she’d found it, and ambled back out of the office and over to the people she’d been talking with earlier.

When Carey came back from the bathroom, she called, “Let’s do it,” and Letty went to join her.

* * *

THE SKATERS were gathering in Mears Park in St. Paul’s Lower-town, an area of older brick warehouses converted to lofts and condos and small, marginal businesses. Letty pointed them out and Carey looked them over, from the front seat of her SUV, and then said, “You know, you do have a natural eye for this. I told your dad that last night.”

“Maybe I’ll be an economist,” Letty said. “TV is starting to seem so superficial.”

Carey made a rude noise and said, “Let’s get a truck over here. You go get your friends lined up.”

* * *

CAREY CALLED a Channel Three van, and let Letty out to talk to the skaters while she took her SUV to a parking garage up the block. Letty got her cell phone out and called Juliet Briar: “Where are you?”

“Still at home. Randy’s sleeping,” Briar said.