“You gotta cover me,” Lucas said. “I’m not supposed to be talking. So . . . you’ve got multiple sources, okay?”
Ignace said, “That’s fine with me. I’ve already talked to a couple of people. I haven’t gotten much, but I can use them. So, saying I had multiple sources wouldn’t exactly be a lie.”
Not exactly.
LUCAS LED HIM THROUGH the chain of events, from the discovery of Pope’s body, to O’Donnell’s disappearance, to the call to the Cancun clinic, to the attack on Millie Lincoln and Mihovil, through the fight and the evacuations of the wounded to the various hospitals.
IGNACE TOOK a full day to write the story. It said, in part:
“. . . spent days looking for O’Donnell but couldn’t find him,” according to one investigator. “We decided we had to look at other staff members. We had the feeling that O’Donnell was another red herring, like Charlie Pope. We also decided that we couldn’t really trust the hospital personnel records, so we began researching the records on our own, vetting the staff members.”
A BCA researcher eventually contacted a clinic in Cancun, where, he was surprised to learn, Dr. Leopold Grant still worked. “That was the key,” said a source close to the investigation. “That’s when we knew we had identified the killer.”
Asked why they didn’t simply call the sheriff’s office and have “Roy Rogers” arrested at the hospital, the source said that “when O’Donnell disappeared, everybody thought he must be the killer. The Sheriff’s Department was involved in the search of O’Donnell’s house, and within a couple of hours, it seemed that everybody in Mankato knew we were looking for him. We didn’t know whether the Sheriff’s Department was leaking, or the hospital—but there was a big leak somewhere. When it came to Rogers, we didn’t want to take any chances. We knew he had at least two guns, taken from O’Donnell’s house, and we knew he was a complete madman. We wanted to take him down quickly, and secretly, without any warning. That’s why we did it the way we did, why we sent Davenport down with his team. These were all very experienced men, as we saw in the way they handled the firefight. And remember, we were only talking about an hour, not a long period of time. There was no long delay.”
Fatefully, when one of the researchers was looking into the “Leo Grant” personnel file, a direct call was made to the hospital. The research request was leaked inside the hospital, and apparently reached “Roy Rogers’s ” ears, who concluded correctly that he had been identified. He rushed from the hospital, back to his apartment, where the confrontation with Millie Lincoln and Mihovil took place, and the race to the hospital began.
ONE QUESTION POSED by Ignace and left out of the story when Lucas couldn’t answer it was “Why did O’Donnell take all of his money out of the bank the day he disappeared?”
Lucas shook his head. “We don’t know. We may never know.”
IGNACE IDENTIFIED LUCAS variously as a BCA official, an investigator, a state law-enforcement officer, a researcher, a source close to the investigation, a source who asked not to be identified, and a highly placed state official.
Because he actually named Rose Marie Roux, Carlton Aspen, the commissioner of the Department of Human Services, and Jerald Wald, the Senate majority leader, Ignace felt safe in saying that his sources included “police officers, state officials, legislators, and people directly involved in the firefight at St. John’s.”
ON THE EVENING THAT he finished the story, Ignace spent several hours on the Internet, checking apartment prices in Manhattan.
ROSE MARIE, ON READING the story the next morning, was pleased. “It might not be the truth, but it’s one truth, and best of all, its ours,” she said. She added, with some satisfaction, “The goddamn DHS is fucked.”
THE MORNING AFTER he talked to Ignace, Lucas woke up, expecting to get out of the hospital, to find an exhausted and angry Weather sitting next to his bed.
“Wait’ll I get you home,” she said. Her eyes drifted toward a nurse.
“Where’s everybody else?” Lucas said.
“They’re still back in London. I didn’t have time to get everybody here. Lucas, we gotta talk. I’m your wife. You don’t get shot and don’t tell me about it . . .” Tears started down her face.
The nurse said, “Maybe I better take off for a while . . .”
LUCAS WENT HOME that day. His eye was blacker than it had ever been, but his nose was more or less straight. His arm was immobilized from shoulder to wrist. Two quarter-inch metal rods went straight through his skin from an outer brace: they would be there for a few days, and then another minor operation would take them out.
An orthopedic surgeon was checking out the brace when Weather came back from the bathroom. The doc recognized her and they chatted for a few seconds, and then Weather, with a certain tone in her voice, said to Lucas, “You see these rods going into your arm?”
Lucas looked down and said, “Yeah?”
“That’s what orthopods call ‘sutures.’ ”
THE MORNING AFTER THAT, he and Weather were sitting in the kitchen, drinking coffee, reading Ignace’s story. Now that Lucas was ambulatory and she could see that his life wasn’t in danger, she was talking about getting back to the kids.
“Go ahead,” Lucas kept saying, “I’m really okay.”
His arm felt like a truck was sitting on it, and his face felt like somebody had driven a nail through his eye. He smiled and suppressed a wince.
“I feel like I’d be ditching you,” she said.
“No, no . . . I’m gonna be busier than hell.”
She started giving him more trouble about lying to her—although the night before, she’d settled most of his sexual problems, and any that he might have developed over the coming six or eight weeks.
Then the phone rang, and he snatched it up to get away from her eyes. Beloit, the doc from St. John’s, said, “I’ve got to talk with you. Privately. Secretly. May I come up?”
BELOIT CAME UP, and she and Weather sniffed each other’s credentials for a few minutes, then Weather went away and Beloit perched on a chair in the den and said, “I think I know why Sam withdrew money from the bank the day he disappeared.”
“I’d be interested,” Lucas said.
“I don’t know how to do this,” she said. “I don’t want anyone to hear it from me. I don’t want to testify. I’d lose my job and so would other people. But I need to get it off my chest . . .”
“So, we’ll call you a confidential source,” Lucas said. “If there’s no way to prove it, we’ll just pretend nobody said anything.”
She looked at him for a minute, then away, and finally her eyes came back: “We sort of had a social group in the hospital. The longhairs. We occasionally smoked a little dope.”
Ah. So that was it. He knew then what she was going to say but let her say it.
“Leo had the connection,” she said. “He knew the guy who brought it in from Canada. When the guy was coming by, he’d call Leo, but Leo didn’t have much money. So Sam would front the money, and he and Leo would go pick up a can of the stuff—it usually came in one of those big tobacco cans. Sam would parcel it around to the people in our group. We’d pay him our share, and he’d put the money back. He wasn’t making money on the deal, he was just . . . facilitating.”
“So Leo could have told him the guy was coming through . . .”
“And it was time. We’d been low, or out, for a while,” she said. “People had started asking when the guy from Canada was coming.”
“Okay. Would you happen to know the Canadian guy’s name?”
“Um, Manny,” Beloit said, with a tentative smile. “They used to call him Manny Sunshine.”
Lucas smiled. “It’s always Somebody Sunshine.”
“You can get this out, without my name?” she asked.
“I’ll have our dope guys look into Manny. If we can find him, we’ll have a talk. We don’t really want to bust a bunch of potheads. But it would be nice if we could explain the money withdrawal.”
>
“Please, please, keep my name out of it.”
“I will.” He liked her, even if she was a doper. He remembered seeing her kneeling over the woman in the cage, saving a life, as the shooting was going on around her.
“Do you think we’ll ever find Sam?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “We shouldn’t have found Charlie Pope, but we did. So . . . I don’t know.”
THREE DAYS AFTER Lucas’s truth appeared in the Star-Tribune, DHS officials, seeing how the wind was blowing, decided to preempt any chance of higher-level hangings by doing a few of their own. Cale and four other administrators were put on administrative leave from the hospital. The word was, they’d never be back, and there might be more heads to roll.
Lucas, Jenkins, Shrake, Sloan, and the wildlife officer were given citations by their various departments, a signal that the departments had decided they were clean.
THE LEGISLATURE SCHEDULED hearings, and a group of Mankato residents demanded that a monument be built, with the names of the victims inscribed on it, in a plaza, or perhaps a new park. Rose Marie, reading the story, said to Lucas, “You know, it never occurred to me.”
“What?”
“That somebody might make a buck on this,” she said, as she turned the page.
A WEEK AFTER the shootings, Sloan was gone. He had a lot of accumulated vacation, which he took as a lead-in to actual retirement. His vacation check also helped on the down payment on the bar; he assumed ten years of a fifteen-year mortgage, renamed the place Shooters, and, his wife told Lucas, “The first person he hired is nineteen years old and has tits out to here.”
Lucas said, “Huh. He’s smarter than I thought.”
WEATHER CAME BACK from London with the kids and the housekeeper. The orthopod took the steel rods out of Lucas’s arm but left two titanium screws, which would be permanent. The arm ached, and the cast drove him crazy. He found he could scratch his arm with an ingeniously bent clothes hanger.
Letty, his ward, said, “You know, every time you scratch, there’s a bad smell.”
“Thank you. You do so much to help my self-confidence in social situations,” he said.
She was still teasing him when the phone rang. When Lucas picked it up, Nordwall told him that O’Donnell’s body had been found in the middle of a cornfield two miles from his home. The body was found by a farmer responding to his wife’s complaints of a persistent bad odor from across the road. O’Donnell had been shot once in the forehead.
“Grant, Rogers, whoever he was, must have been looking him right in the eyes when he pulled the trigger,” Nordwall said.
THEY NEVER FIGURED out who the killer was. He was buried under the name Roy Rogers, though nobody really thought that was his name. DNA records were kept in case anybody ever came looking for him.
AND FINALLY, a month after the shootings, deep in the bowels of the security hospital, nine patients and a doctor met for a group-therapy session. One of the patients, a man known for his silence, timorously raised a hand as soon as everybody had a chair.
Sennet, who was running the group, suppressed a look of surprise and said, “Lonnie? You have something for us?”
Lonnie, who feared many things—too many things, hundreds of them, a new one every minute—dug into his pocket and took out a tattered roll of yellow paper. “I found this the day everybody got shot. I didn’t steal it, it was lying in the hall.”
“Okay,” Sennet said, encouraging him. “What is it?”
Lonnie unrolled the paper. “It’s a list. It says, Best Songs of the Rock Era. It has a hundred songs on it.”
“May I see it?” Sennet asked.
“May I have it back?” Lonnie looked frightened, as though the list might be seized. “I think about it a lot.”
“Sure. If it’s only rock songs,” Sennet said.
Lonnie passed the paper round the circle of the group, each person glancing at it. When Sennet got it, he scanned the list, then passed it around the rest of the circle, and back to Lonnie.
“Do you have some thoughts about it?” Sennet asked.
“Well, these are the one hundred best rock songs, okay?”
“Okay.”
Lonnie’s lip trembled. “But, there are no Beatles on the list. Don’t you see? There are no Beatles . . .”
LUCAS DAVENPORT’S “Best Songs of the Rock Era”
In no particular order, except that, as any intelligent person knows, any decent road trip will start with ZZ Top.
ZZ Top—Sharp-Dressed Man
ZZ Top—Legs
Wilson Pickett—Mustang Sally
Crash Test Dummies—Superman’s Song
David Essex—Rock On
Golden Earring—Radar Love
Blondie—Heart of Glass
Jefferson Airplane—White Rabbit
Jefferson Airplane—Somebody to Love
Derek and the Dominos—Layla
The Doors—Roadhouse Blues
The Animals—House of the Rising Sun
Aerosmith—Sweet Emotion
Aerosmith—Dude (Looks Like a Lady)
Bruce Springsteen—Dancing in the Dark
Bruce Springsteen—Born to Run
Bruce Springsteen—Thunder Road
The Police—Every Breath You Take
Tom Waits—Heart of Saturday Night
Van Halen—Hot for Teacher
The Who—Won’t Get Fooled Again
Gipsy Kings—Hotel California
Tracy Chapman—Give Me One Reason
Creedence Clearwater Revival—Down on the Corner
Eagles—Lyin’ Eyes
Eagles—Life in the Fast Lane
Dire Straits—Skateaway (Roller Girl)
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers—Mary Jane’s Last Dance
Janis Joplin—Me and Bobby McGee
The Doobie Brothers—Black Water
Joan Jett and the Blackhearts—I Love Rock ’n’ Roll
John Mellencamp—Jack and Diane
Pink Floyd—Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)
Pink Floyd—Money
Billy Joel—Piano Man
Eric Clapton—After Midnight
Eric Clapton—Lay Down Sally
AC/DC—You Shook Me All Night Long
AC/DC—Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap
The Hollies—Long Cool Woman (in a Black Dress)
Bob Dylan—Like a Rolling Stone
Bob Dylan—Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door
Bob Dylan—Subterranean Homesick Blues
The Rolling Stones—(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction
The Rolling Stones—Brown Sugar
The Rolling Stones—Sympathy for the Devil
Sex Pistols—Anarchy in the UK
Grateful Dead—Sugar Magnolia
The Pointer Sisters—Slow Hand
Eurythmics—Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)
Elvis Presley—Jailhouse Rock
David Bowie—Ziggy Stardust
Bob Seger—Night Moves
The Everly Brothers—Bye Bye Love
Jimi Hendrix—Purple Haze
The Kinks—Lola
Jackson Browne—Tender Is the Night
The Kingsmen—Louie, Louie
George Thorogood and the Destroyers—Bad to the Bone
Metallica—Turn the Page
Lynryd Skynyrd—Sweet Home Alabama
Queen—We Will Rock You
The Allman Brothers Band—Ramblin’ Man
Led Zeppelin—Rock and Roll
Tina Turner—What’s Love Got to Do with It
Steppenwolf—Born to Be Wild
U2—With or Without You
Black Sabbath—Paranoid
Foreigner—Blue Morning, Blue Day
Billy Idol—White Wedding
Guns N’ Roses—Sweet Child o’ Mine
Guns N’ Roses—Paradise City
Guns N’ Roses—Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door*
Lou Reed—Walk on the Wild Side
&nb
sp; Bad Company—Feel Like Makin’ Love
Def Leppard—Rock of Ages
Van Morrison—Brown Eyed Girl
Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels—Devil with a Blue Dress On
Aretha Franklin—Respect
John Lee Hooker, Bonnie Raitt—I’m in the Mood
James Brown—I Got You (I Feel Good)
The Righteous Brothers—Unchained Melody
Prince—Little Red Corvette
Chuck Berry—Roll Over Beethoven
The Byrds—Mr. Tambourine Man
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young—Ohio
Buddy Holly—Peggy Sue
Jerry Lee Lewis—Great Balls of Fire
Roy Orbison—Oh, Pretty Woman
Del Shannon—Runaway
Run-D.M.C.—Walk This Way
Otis Redding—(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay
Nirvana—Smells Like Teen Spirit
Paul Simon—Still Crazy After All These Years
Bo Diddley—Who Do You Love?
Brewer and Shipley—One Toke Over the Line
Ramones—I Wanna Be Sedated
The Clash—Should I Stay or Should I Go
Talking Heads—Burning Down the House
Dmitri Shostakovich—Jazz Suite No. 2: Waltz 2
*Yeah, yeah, I know it’s on the list twice.
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LUCAS DAVENPORT’S “Best Songs of the Rock Era”
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s Imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.