Wicked Prey (29 page)

“I’ve been shooting a little myself,” Lucas said.

“Yeah? A cop would have some great opportunities . . .”

* * *

IN THE END, they found two photos of the Lexus sitting in the driveway, and one of the Toyota. The Toyota was taken side-on, and from some distance, late in the afternoon, and they couldn’t make out anything special about it. In one of the photos of the Lexus, they could almost make out the license-tag number, in the thumbnail. “Hang on,” Harelson said. He isolated the license, magnified it: “Got it.”

“Amazing,” Barr said, and he slapped the fat man on the back. “Print that.”

* * *

THE CAR was registered to a Louise Janowitz, and Louise Janowitz had insurance through State Farm, and a driver’s license with the state of California. “So it’s Louise, not Lauren or Laura or Martha,” Barr said.

Lucas was a little skeptical. “Who knows, at this point? Why would she give the right name to the DMV when she lies about everything else?”

Barr, operating from his cell phone, said, “We’ll have her driver’s license photo in two minutes, down at the office. They can e-mail it to me and we can get it at a coffee shop Wi-Fi.”

“Gotta find the car,” Lucas said.

“We’re looking,” Barr said. “It’s not a common car, even out here. So, if it’s around, we’ll get it.”

* * *

THEY GOT the photo at a Starbucks, of a dark-haired, sallow-faced woman with large plastic-rimmed glasses and Three Stooges bangs. She peered out of the photo with a depressive frown, chin down. “Whoa. Gonna jump right on that,” Barr said.

“Didn’t think that was an option open to us,” Lucas said.

“Hey, gay or straight, don’t matter. Look at the vibration she gives out: you gonna jump on that, gay or straight?”

* * *

THEY DIDN’T find the car immediately, but they did get a break. One of the LA crime-scene people, checking the house phone, found an incoming call that morning, an hour and fifteen minutes before the fire erupted.

The call had come from an over-the-counter prepaid cell phone, with no real way to trace it—but after some rigmarole with the local prosecutor’s office, they got a list of phone calls from that cell phone. There weren’t many, but two of them, two days apart, went to a motel in Bloomington.

“Might be nothing, but might be something,” Barr said.

They were standing in the driveway of the burned house, talking, and Lucas saw the garage door across the street go up, and the pretty woman walk around the back of a Mercedes SL500. He waved at her, shouted, “Hang on,” and said to Barr, “Get your computer.”

Barr got it from his truck, and they walked it across the street.

“Did David what’s-his-face help out?” the woman asked.

“Yes, he did, and we’re grateful,” Lucas said. “Could you take a look at this . . .”

She peered at the photo of Louise Janowitz for several long seconds, shook her head and laughed ruefully, said, “Yeah, that’s her . . . but that’s not what she looks like. You’d never recognize her from that. She’s actually quite attractive.”

Lucas said to Barr, “That’s not good.”

* * *

THEY WERE sitting in a Fatburger in Marina del Rey, three hours after Lucas arrived, and Lucas looked at his watch, and then at a list Carol, his secretary, had made. He could get on a plane at four o’clock—maybe—and be back in the Cities by 10 P.M. The Bloomington motel was five minutes from the airport . . .

“You think you could get me on a four-o’clock plane out of LAX?”

Barr looked at his watch. “We’d have to move right along. I could call a cop out there, have him push you through.”

Lucas popped the last of the Fatburger. “I’m thinking this: I was hoping to get the house and maybe Knofler, and maybe see something you wouldn’t see, because I’ve got some background. Now, with no house and no suspect, I’m not going to get anything you won’t. The way I see it, they were ready for us: they had a whole exit plan all figured out. She’s probably in Canada by now.”

“Why Canada?”

“Well, Canada’s full of criminals, so it’s a good place to hide out,” Lucas explained.

“I didn’t know that,” Barr said. “Anyway—there’s that motel. In Bloomfield, or whatever it is.”

“Yeah. Bloomington. Maybe I oughta get back.”

Barr slurped up the last of his orange soda, looked at his watch, and said, “Let’s go. You got a ticket?”

* * *

FROM BARR’S CAR Lucas called Carol, who called Northwest and got the ticket fixed; and he called Del, who said he’d get Shrake and Jenkins and they’d meet him at the motel.

At the airport, an airport cop was waiting at the ticket counter and pushed him through security, and got him a ride to the gate. The cabin attendant said, “Man, you were pushing it,” and Lucas said, “Glad to be going home, though.”

They pulled the door shut behind him, and as he settled into his seat his cell rang: the cabin attendant said, “Sir, you’ll have to turn off your phone. We’re ready to roll.”

Lucas looked at the cell screen, saw that the call was from Los Angeles. He said, “I’m a police officer working a murder case. This will only take a minute and it could be important.”

She nodded, curious, and Lucas opened the phone and said, “Yeah?” and Barr said, “We found that Lexus.”

“Ah, jeez, I’m on the plane.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Barr said. “It was illegally parked on a nice quiet street up in Pasadena, Ninita Parkway. Nice green oak trees over the street, nice houses, nice cars. They noticed it when it exploded and burned right down to the wheels.”

“Man . . .”

“Some kind of bomb, probably on a timer,” Barr said. “If a kid had messed with that car, or if a cop had checked it out, they might have been barbecued. So: take care.”

“You, too. You ever need anything out of the Cities, let me know.”

* * *

 

THE THREE and a half hours going back wasn’t as bad as the three and a half hours going out, because, to his own surprise, Lucas dozed off in the quiet cabin. He had a window seat, and declined the meal; dropped back, the seat softened by a pillow from the flight attendant, and closed his eyes. When he woke up, the guy in the next seat, who was poking at a laptop, said, “Wish I could sleep like that.”

Lucas yawned and said, “How long was I out?”

“Close to three hours. Sleeping like a baby. We’re coming up on Sioux Falls.”

Lucas looked out the window, and there it was, lights of the city twinkling in the distance, Minnesota ahead in the dark. He was on the ground in an hour, on his cell phone, walking down the concourse: Del said, about the motel, “It’s pretty small and stinky. I don’t know. It could be something.”

“I’ll be there in fifteen,” Lucas said.

THE WAYFARER MOTEL was a crappy place, a long two-story rectangle with car parking on three sides and a chain-link fence and I-494 on the fourth side. Access was through two sets of hallways on each floor, up two sets of stairways. No elevators. The halls smelled of beer and cigarette smoke and disinfectant, with outdoor carpet hard underfoot.

Lucas hooked up with Del, Jenkins, and Shrake, and they did a stroll around the place, two-and-two, saw nothing of special interest, and met at the office. Two clerks were working the counter: a straw-headed kid, pale and thin, with Grand Theft Auto eyes; and a soft round Indian woman with a dot on her forehead.

They knew cops when they saw them, and the straw man said, “What’s up?” and Del rolled out the pictures of Cohn and the woman-of-many-names. The clerks studied them for a minute, then the Indian woman, who wore a name tag that said, “Jane,” shook her head and said, “No. They are not here.”

“You’re sure,” Lucas said.

“I work here twelve hours a day,” she said. “They’re not here. Not only are they not here, they’ve never been here, not in the last eight months and twelve days, since I got here.”

So they talked about the phone calls, and Jane explained that the phone number was the main number. If somebody called that number, one of the clerks answered it, and then switched it to the room. There was no record of which room took which call.

“Nothing suspicious lately? Nothing out of the ordinary?” Del asked. “Nothing that caught your eye?”

Straw Man glanced at Jane, then said, “Curtis Ramp was here. Not with his wife.”

Curtis Ramp was a Minnesota Vikings running back. Shrake said, “Jesus, I hope it wasn’t
before
a game?”

Straw Man shook his head: “It was Wednesday. He paid cash. He didn’t want us to know who he was.”

“That doesn’t help a lot,” Lucas said.

“Sorry, dude.”

“We may send a couple of guys over here to sit with you for a while, watch who comes and goes,” Lucas said. “We’ll call you.”

“Call the manager,” Jane said. “He’d have to set it up.”

* * *

IN LUCAS’S absence, a cold front had come through, and the night was now chilly: the first night of the northern autumn, which sometimes started in August. Out in the parking lot, they looked up at the rows of windows, and Lucas said, “Well, shoot. I thought it might be something.”

“Still might be,” Del said. “Oughta get somebody here early tomorrow morning, watch people when they’re moving around. Run some license tags . . .”

Shrake and Jenkins had come together in Jenkins’s Crown Vic, and they broke away, and Lucas and Del ambled down to the end of the parking lot to Lucas’s Porsche, talking babies. Del was saying, “. . . dilating, but then she got stuck. The doc said if she doesn’t go by the end of the week, she wants to do a C-section. I worried about it, but . . .” He realized he’d lost Lucas, who’d stopped, staring back at the lot: “What?”

“Look at that old rattrap pickup,” Lucas said.

“Uh . . .”

“It’s got Oklahoma plates.”

Del said, “Ah, jeez.” He went and looked, and came back. “This can’t be right, man. This can’t be right.” Down the lot, they could see Jenkins unlocking the door of his car, and Del whistled at them, and Jenkins looked up, and Del waved them back.

Lucas said, “It’s got an NRA sticker; it’s got a Bushmaster sticker.” Bushmaster sold M-15 variants.

“Can’t be right,” Del said. “What’d the connection be?”

“Don’t know,” Lucas said. He scratched his head, mystified.

“Jenkins had some of the guy’s pictures in his car,” Del said.

Jenkins and Shrake came up and looked at the truck, and Jenkins said, “There’re only two possibilities. Either it’s a terrific coincidence and no big deal, or something is a lot more fucked up than we know about.”

“You got those pictures?” Lucas asked.

“Got one,” Jenkins said.

“Let’s go ask Jane,” Lucas said. “She should know.”

* * *

JANE SAID, “Two-fourteen. Been here almost a week.”

Lucas said, “Let me get my gun. We’ll take him right now.”

DEL WAS WEARING JEANS AND A military-style olive drab shirt and yellow leather boots, and looked less like a cop than the rest of them, so they sent him ahead. He tiptoed up to Justice Shafer’s hotel room and stood with his ear to the door for a minute, and heard both the television and then a clunk from somebody moving around, and he tiptoed back down the hall and said, “He’s there.”

Shrake said, “How do we want to do this?”

“These guys have been rapping on the hotel doors with keys so they sound like a maid or something,” Lucas said. He took a quarter out of his pocket and held it up.

Del said, “There’s a peephole. He’ll see us.”

Lucas looked back down the stairway where they’d clustered, and said, “Go get Jane.”

Jane had a well-developed sense of self-preservation, and didn’t want to do it, but the four of them were several times larger than she, and they grouped around her and looked down at her until she caved and said she would.

“All you have to do is knock; as soon as you hear him start to open the door, you move away,” Shrake said.

“What if he just shoots?”

“For a knock on the door?” Jenkins asked.

“It’s almost eleven o’clock,” she pointed out.

“Nothing’s perfect,” Shrake said.

“If it turns out nothing’s perfect, I’m the one who gets shot,” she said.

“Maybe . . . what if he had a package at the desk?” Jenkins suggested. “She calls him from the front desk, says, ‘A woman just dropped a package for you...’”

“Sounds like bullshit,” Shrake said.

“To you, but if his file’s right, this guy ain’t no mental light-house,” Jenkins said.

“I could go with that,” Lucas said. To Del. “What do you think?”

“The big thing is, we don’t want him coming out of there behind a machine gun,” Del said. “We don’t want to spook him.”

“We could call in an entry team,” Shrake said.

Del: “You pussy.” And to Jane, “No offense.”

“Let’s call him from the desk,” Lucas said.