Wicked Prey (5 page)

“I’d like to get out there; just to see it, you know?” Lucas said.

Del was doubtful. “You look too much like a cop—or even a Republican.”

“Not
that.
”

“Well—you got that vibe. You’d have to tone it down,” Del said. “Like, borrow clothes from me.”

Lucas shuddered: “Maybe not.”

He was, in fact, a clotheshorse, this morning wearing a light checked sport coat over an icy-blue long-sleeved dress shirt, black summer-weight woolen slacks hand-knit by an Italian virgin, and square-toed English-made loafers.

* * *

CAROL SHOUTED: “Lily Rothenburg on two.”

Lucas said to Del, “I got a call coming here.”

Del said, “Pick it up. I ain’t going anywhere, if it’s Lily calling.”

“Fuck you,” Lucas said. He and Lily had once been a passing fashion, including a geometrical insanity in an earlier Porsche. Del knew all about it: Lucas shook his head and picked up the phone. “Lily?”

“Lucas Davenport,” she said, “How’s every little thing?”

“Well, we got a lot going on, so . . . pretty good,” Lucas said. “How about you? How’s the kid? If you’re divorced, I can offer you space in my garage.”

She laughed and said, “From what I hear about Weather, it’d be more like the backyard. But, the kid’s fine and I’m not divorced.”

“Del’s here, he says hi . . .”

They caught up for a few minutes, then she said, “Look. We’ve got a problem—or, maybe, you’ve got a problem. We had an armored car robbery here two and a half years ago, and two guards were killed. They were off-duty cops. The robbery crew got away with a half-million dollars.”

“Not that big, for an armored car,” Lucas said.

“Well, there was more inside, but the thing went bad. Most of the money was behind a locked barrier inside the truck,” Lily said. “The idea was, if trouble started, the guards would put the keys in a solid-steel lockbox inside the back, which they didn’t have keys to, and then nobody could get at the money . . . that’s what they did. But somebody got pissed, we think, and started shooting, and all the shooters got were the receipts from a couple of big-box stores that hadn’t been put behind the barrier yet.”

“How does that get to us?”

“We think the leader of the crew was a guy named Brutus Cohn,” Lily said. “We got an anonymous tip. A male caller, deep southern accent, calling from Kennedy. He said that he’d seen Cohn getting on a plane at Heathrow, in England, yesterday, going to Los Angeles. He said he knew him from Alabama, and Cohn is from Alabama. He said Cohn had grown a red beard, and Cohn is a redhead.”

“So he sounds good,” Lucas said.

“Yes. Anyway, this guy said he was waiting to get on his plane, when he saw Cohn. He didn’t want to call from London, because he was afraid we’d identify him, and he’s afraid of Cohn. So he got way back and watched Cohn going into a gate for a flight to Los Angeles. By the time we got to the LA cops, Cohn’s flight was an hour out. They met the plane, and there was no Brutus Cohn. There was no way to get back to the original source, so we checked with Heathrow. Everything was right: there was the Kennedy gate, and down the way, the LA gate. But the gate was a joint gate—and the next gate down, where Cohn could also have been headed . . .”

“. . . came here.”

“Right. The Minneapolis plane was on the ground for three hours before we got it straight. Our people talked to the flight crew, and there was a man in first class who probably was Cohn. He almost certainly was the guy that the source saw, and the source said he knew Cohn pretty well. The crew said he was very tall, fairly thin, muscular, red hair, and charming with the flight crew. The girls liked him, and that’s Cohn, from what we hear.”

“What’s he doing?” Lucas asked.

“Don’t know. It’s possible he moved right on through the Cities, changed planes, and is gone. But it’s also possible that he’s up to something,” Lily said. “He’s a serious, ultra-violent holdup man who needs a big score so he can bury himself somewhere. He mostly worked in the south, down to Florida, north to Atlanta, west to New Mexico. Maybe California. Maybe one job in Mexico. The FBI isn’t sure about all of that, but if they’ve got him right, there have been at least five dead in thirty to forty robberies, and one survivor shot through the chest who should’ve died. He’s the guy who eventually identified Cohn for the FBI, from prison photographs. So. We’ve been looking, and waiting, and here he is. You’ve got that convention going on . . . lots of cash there. A boat-load of cash.”

Lucas said, “Let me ask you this—how’d the caller know you were looking for Cohn?”

“We didn’t make any secret about it,” she said. “We put out posters, we sent some guys to Birmingham to look up his old acquaintances, his relatives, dear old Mom. They got some TV time, it was sort of a thing, you know, a modern Jesse James. Got some attention down there.”

“You want him pretty bad,” Lucas said.

“Yes, we do.”

“Send me what you got,” Lucas said. “I’ll spread it around to the TV stations.”

“Ah—don’t do that,” Lily said. “He’s very careful. You could almost call that his MO. If he suspected we were onto him, he’d be gone in a minute.”

The problem, she said, was that New York really had no solid proof that he’d been involved in the armored car robbery. They had DNA that they believed had come out of the struggle between the cops and the shooter, but they didn’t know whether it was Cohn’s DNA, or DNA from somebody else in the gang.

“Cohn would have done the killing, if he thought he needed to, but we don’t know that he was the shooter. He was there, but maybe didn’t pull the trigger. Then, we think we found the place where they got together before the robbery, a motel out in Queens, but they burned it down, so we got nothing. No DNA, nothing.”

“Burned it down?”

“Yeah. Fire guys say somebody doused the place with a mix of gasoline and motor oil, and torched it,” Lily said. “Fire kills DNA . . .”

“I know. But it seems kind of extreme,” Lucas said.

“That’s Cohn. He’s Mr. Extreme. He did three years in prison in Alabama, a newbie, but he was running the place by the time he left.”

“So if you don’t want us to spread his face around, what do you want?” Lucas asked.

“We want to send you a bunch of photos,” Lily said. “They’re twelve years old, but we Photoshopped them to age him, and we added the beard. We thought some of your guys could walk them around to the local hotels and motels, see if you can spot him. And then . . . see what he’s doing.”

“You mean, let him take a shot at another armored car?”

“You wouldn’t have to wait until the last second,” she said, but her tone was rich with suggestion.

“But they’d have to be making a move . . .”

“Yeah, well. Life in the big city, huh?” Lily said. “The thing is, if he knows he put some DNA on somebody, here in New York, he’ll try to shoot his way free.”

“You want us to kill him,” Lucas said.

“I didn’t say that. I said, he killed two of our guys, and probably three more people, along the way,” Lily said.

Lucas thought about it for a moment, then said, “Send the stuff. I’ll get it to the people who need it.”

“Lucas . . . thank you. And stay in touch.”

“INTERESTING little conversation,” Del said.

* * *

CAROL ROUTED THROUGH a call from Dan Coates, his opposite number in Wisconsin. Lucas filled him in on Justice Shafer. “We sent the file across the river, to the sheriffs’ departments between us and Eau Claire, but it’d help if you goosed them along a little. You know, so you can deflect the blame when something goes wrong.”

“Who’d point the finger at us? If something went wrong?” Coates asked. He was crunching on something like a carrot or a celery stick.

“Listen, if something goes wrong at the convention, with a seven-hundred-and-fifty-yard shot from a .50-cal, everybody will point the finger at you. And at me, and every other local cop. Think about it.”

“I’ll call everybody,” Coates said. “How much you want to put on the Vikings?”

“Screw the Vikings. They’re a bunch of criminals,” Lucas said. “Not that Green Bay won’t stink the place up.”

“Let me tell you . . .”

They were discussing the possibilities when Del yawned and stood up and said, “I’m gonna go see that Arab dude in the sandwich shop.”

Lucas took the phone away from his mouth: “Careful.”

“Think about a disguise,” Del said. “If you go out on the street.”

From the outer office, Carol called, “Why don’t you drive the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile? Nobody would suspect.”

Lucas said, “Del . . . shut the door on the way out, okay?”

* * *

DEL DIDN’T SHUT the door. Carol propped herself in it, and when Lucas got off the phone, asked, “Are you serious about going out there?”

“Yeah. There are about a million people wandering around out there, and I’d like to go out and see it,” Lucas said.

She nodded: “Listen, I was looking at
National Geographic . . .”

“Didn’t know you were an intellectual . . .”

“. . . and one of the guys in it, one of the photographers, this war photographer, looked like you. Attitudinally, if you know what I mean. If you got some Levi’s and gym shoes and, like, a long-sleeved shirt and rolled the sleeves way up over your elbows, and messed up your hair, and put some convention credentials around your neck, and borrowed a camera bag from Dan Jackson and a couple of cameras—you could make it as a photographer.”

Lucas shook his head. “Pretending that you’re a reporter tends to piss people off.”

“Don’t. Wear your official ID,” Carol said. “Who looks at it? They just see the tags.”

“I’ll think about it,” Lucas said.

She shrugged. “Do what you want—but you could look like a photographer.”

HE THOUGHT ABOUT Lily for a while, and the Cohn gang, and then he went on the Internet and looked at pictures of war photographers. Carol was right, he decided; he could be a photographer. Maybe. He called Jackson, said he was coming down for wardrobe and makeup.

On the way out of the office, he told Carol to print the pictures of Justice Shafer, and of Brutus Cohn, when they came in. “Call Minneapolis and St. Paul and Bloomington and get a list of firearms dealers who might be dealing dirty. Big enough so that their names would be around: somebody that a bad guy could find if he blew into town.”

“You want them rated by their dirt quotient,” she suggested.

“Yeah. I’ll go chat with them. Give me something to do,” he said.

* * *

LUCAS HAD A small Nikon single-lens reflex digital camera, given to him for Christmas by Weather, along with a couple of zoom lenses. He used it to take pictures of the kids. When Jackson backed out of the equipment closet with two Nikon cameras, and an old Domke cloth camera bag and three lenses, he knew more or less how they worked.

“What we’re gonna do,” Jackson said, peeling a strip of black gaffer tape off a roll, “is we’re gonna tape out the Nikon and the D2x logos, which some war guys do to reduce visibility, you know? Then, not many people will know that you’re shooting older cameras.”

“I’m not going to be shooting them much,” Lucas said.

“Gotta look like it, though,” Jackson said. “Do take a few shots, you might like it. The other thing is, make your shirt kinda military. Black, or olive green, with the sleeves rolled up. Military’s sort of photo-trendy.”

“What do I do if somebody asks me who I’m with?” Lucas asked.

“I just keep moving and say, ‘BCA,’ and they’ll nod like they know who it is,” Jackson said. “Sounds sort of like BBC, NBC, CBS, ABC.”

“Maybe I oughta wear white socks,” Lucas suggested.

“Maybe you oughta take it seriously,” Jackson said. “You could get your ass kicked, if somebody took you the wrong way.”

“Lots of cops around . . .”

Jackson looked up. “You know, one way you’d be safe is, wear a police uniform. Nobody’ll fuck with you. Nobody’ll talk to you, either, other than to say hello.”