Storm Prey

  Or maybe he was simply too damn dumb.

  Janis echoed in his head as he climbed into his car, and he thought, No. Not Right. Dead is just another word for nothing left to lose.

  DEL CAPSLOCK was leaning against the barrier wall, watching crime-scene techs working through the white van, when Lucas pulled onto the top level of the Blue Ramp. A couple of airport cops were observing, and Marcy was standing at the van. Del was wearing a Russian Army greatcoat, a black watch cap and galoshes, and looked like a guy who might have been hired to shovel the snow.

  Lucas parked and Del ambled over and said, "Shrake told me about what happened this morning, and then Everson mentioned this deal."

  "You look at her?"

  "Yeah. Not much to see," Del said. "I guess you know who did it."

  "Guy named Joe Mack," Lucas said. "He's one of the guys who stuck up the hospital, and probably killed the other two guys who were with him. Dumb sonofabitch."

  "You're looking pretty grim."

  "I'm feeling pretty grim," Lucas said. "Woman had a couple kids, and we met one of them. A preschooler. Cute. Scared for her mom. And herself."

  "Ah, jeez."

  MARCY HAD NOT TURNED to look toward Lucas, so he and Del walked up behind her and Lucas touched her shoulder and asked, "How you doing?"

  "I'm okay," she said. She glanced at him, then peered back into the van. "But we got him. More blood, and it's not hers. Same deal as at the hospital--she tried to fight whoever it was, scratched him."

  Marcy stepped back a foot or so, and Lucas leaned past her. The dead woman was on her back, her legs spread, her eyes still open. Stiff, either with rigor mortis or the cold.

  The anger bit at him again. Not necessary: a woman dead because of nothing. Lucas backed away, then asked to the technician's back, "You see any other damage? Head wounds? Was she hit with anything?"

  "She might have been hit a couple times," the tech said. "She's got some abraded skin on her cheek and forehead, but she died from strangulation."

  "Was a cord used, or . . ."

  "Looks like fingers," the tech said. "Like he crushed her windpipe with his thumbs. Really dug in."

  "Raped?"

  "No sign of that. Her clothing is fine."

  "So he just killed her," Lucas said.

  "Looks like it."

  "Okay. We need to go over every inch of the van. We need everything you can get from the driver's seat and the passenger seat... We need to know if she drove over here, or if Mack did."

  "Okay." The tech sounded annoyed: of course he would do that. Lucas backed out.

  "What are you thinking?" Marcy asked.

  "What Lyle Mack said--that Joe took a cab into town, went to Macy's. I went to Macy's, up to the men's department. There were two salespeople up there and neither one remembered anybody like him."

  "Did you think they would?" Marcy asked.

  "I wanted to check. He's gotta get a coat from somewhere. Anyway, they hadn't seen him. It's possible he carried the coat to another checkout desk. I'd want to see the receipt before I believed it, but it's possible."

  "And the point is . . ."

  "The point is, Joe didn't seem like this big an asshole." Lucas waved at the van. "He seemed like this hang-out guy. He seemed like a 'how ya doin'?' guy. He might do a burglary, he might strong-arm somebody, he'd steal something if he thought he wouldn't get caught, but... not this. This freaks me out."

  "He was panicked. Something cracked. I mean, look at the guy in the hospital. Somebody kicked him, didn't mean to kill him ... dumb guys, trashing around," Marcy said. "How many times have you seen it? A hundred?"

  "Yeah, yeah. It's just that everybody keeps saying what a basically good guy he was." He looked back at the van. "I'll tell you what--that wasn't done by a nice guy. He looked right into her eyes and choked the life out of her."

  THEY WERE still talking when Virgil called: "We're leaving the hospital."

  "Nothing happened with the kids?"

  "Nope. Sara's still got problems. They're now saying they could go tomorrow."

  "How's Weather?"

  "She's okay, but it's wearing on her," Virgil said. "There are Minneapolis cops over here, talking to people who might have been around when the pharmacy got hit. It's pissing people off."

  "It's a murder investigation."

  "I know, but a lot of the people over here, especially the docs, are pretty busy, and they figure what they're doing is pretty important. I mean, it is pretty important. So ... A couple people have made remarks to Weather, because they know she's involved."

  "Fuck 'em," Lucas said. "When'll you be back?"

  "Fifteen minutes."

  "See you there."

  LUCAS MENTIONED the cop-doctor tension to Marcy, who shrugged. "Not much to do about it. I'll tell the guys to go as easy as they can, but no easier."

  Del said, "They oughta ask why somebody would hold up the pharmacy."

  "For money," Marcy said.

  "But how much? I saw in the paper that they were estimating the loss at a million or so . . ."

  "Less than that," Lucas said. "That's if you count every last nickel on every last pill at street level . . ."

  "But say a million. Just for argument's sake. So, wholesale, on the street, a half-million, or less. If there is somebody involved at the hospital, that's at least four people, and probably more."

  "Lyle Mack makes five," Lucas said. "He's too short to have been one of the robbers."

  "Whoever," Del said. "So, say five guys, because the math is easier. Say they've got direct retailers--they'd get half of the half-million. That means these five, if they divide it evenly, it's fifty thousand each. How many big-time docs need fifty thousand so bad that they'd hook up with a bunch of dumb-ass bikers to rob a pharmacy?"

  Marcy said, "I see what you mean. We were working on the doctor angle because a witness thought it might be a doc. We'll start looking further down the food chain ..." She looked back at the van, then at Lucas. "As soon as we nail down Joe Mack, we go after Lyle Mack with a flamethrower. Joe Mack, when he gets a lawyer, won't say anything. He's toast, no reason to. Can't plead out on this thing. But Lyle. Lyle could talk, with the right encouragement. Or get Joe to. Put the finger on the guy in the hospital."

  "It's a plan," Lucas said.

  DEL FOLLOWED Lucas home. On the way, Lucas thought about Marcy: she was a good cop, but she might have been on the street a little too long, or a little too long for her personality. The murder of Jill MacBride hadn't affected her much--not as much as it affected Lucas, anyway. Another bad day in the life, but something she'd adjusted to. Lucas could blow off some murders easily enough, but some of them dug into his heart.

  MacBride's murder made him furious. Why had it happened? How could it happen? How could chance stack up like that, how could they drive a crazy man to run at the precise moment a woman was getting into her van to pick up her daughter at school? It sometimes seemed to him that there was an invisible hand behind it all, and it wasn't a beneficent hand. Evil in the world...

  WHEN LUCAS, with Del a hundred feet behind, arrived at Lucas's house, they found Jenkins leaning against the back of his Crown Vic, in the street, red lights flashing on the front grille and above the back bumper. He had a shotgun on his hip, muzzle pointed up at the sky, like a poster for a Rambo movie, if Rambo had ever worn a parka and winter boots. Lucas stopped at the entrance to the driveway: "What's up with the gun?"

  "Virgil's idea. If somebody's scouting the place, we want them to know we're armed to the teeth," Jenkins said. "If they make a run at her, we don't want it here, with the kids in the house and the housekeeper and all."

  "Probably scaring the shit out of the neighbors," Lucas said.

  "So what?"

  "All right. Don't freeze your ass off," Lucas said.

  "I'll be inside in a couple minutes," Jenkins said. "We figure if they're scouting the place, they probably followed us."

  Lucas pulled into the garage, saw Del st
op at the mouth of the driveway and get out, to chat with Jenkins. Making a show out of it.

  WEATHER WAS APPALLED by the murder of Jill MacBride. "Did we do something?"

  Lucas shook his head: "No--except that Marcy and I didn't run Joe Mack down. Pure chance. And this whole thing came out of kicking that poor bastard to death in the hospital."

  They sat for a moment, as Del stomped through the mudroom door. Then Virgil said, "Maybe we caught a break. With Joe on the run, Weather doesn't mean much anymore, as a witness. All she can do is identify a guy we already know is guilty of murder."

  Lucas said, "That's true. It's a hard way to get there, though."

  "Does that mean that everybody's going home?" Weather asked.

  Lucas shook his head. "Not until we get Joe. He's so goddamn deranged, he might still be looking for you. We'll get somebody to Photoshop our pictures of him and paper the hospital with him. But his brother says he's on the way to Mexico. Maybe he is."

  Letty had an unpaid, part-time job as an intern at Channel Three, fixed by an old friend of Lucas's. She said, "If nobody minds, I'm going to call in the murder. We can still get it on the six."

  Lucas said, "Just the murder. None of this--what we're talking about here."

  She left to make the call, and they sat staring at their coffee for a while, then Lucas sighed and said, "The kids never bothered me so much when I was younger. Back then, it was just another routine tragedy. I remember working the disappearance of a couple little girls, back in the eighties. I was still in uniform, they put me in plainclothes, temporarily, to ask questions. Most exciting thing I'd done. But it's really started to bother me the last few years."

  "Well, it's how you got Letty," Del said.

  They all looked after the girl; could hear her talking on the family-room phone. Lucas said, "She's got the scars. She was hurt worse than any of us know."

  Virgil said, "I'm getting pretty tired of guarding Weather's body. If you don't mind, I'm going to lounge around the hospital a little bit. Chat with people."

  "You might piss off Marcy," Del said. "She gets a little territorial."

  "She can live with it," Virgil said. "I've talked to their guys, and they haven't gotten a thing. Maybe, you know, something would pop up."

  "How are the babies?" Lucas asked Weather.

  "Better. We could go back in tomorrow."

  "They won't get at her when she's operating, or when she's with that crowd," Virgil said. "She can buzz me when she's done. Otherwise, I'm just sitting in the cafeteria, eating Jell-O."

  "All right," Lucas said. "Chat with people. Try not to piss off Marcy's guys."

  "What are we gonna do?" Del asked.

  Lucas told them about Marcy's plan to go after Lyle Mack, when Joe Mack was caught. "We're gonna pick him up, take him downtown, sweat him ... let him hire a lawyer, whatever. He could give us the insider at the hospital, or tell Joe to. We've got everything on Joe, nothing on Lyle, so maybe Lyle'll save himself."

  Del said, "The other thing we could do is, start figuring out who Joe Mack's friends are, and busting their chops. Somebody's hiding him."

  "Unless he's in Mexico," Weather said.

  "Marcy's got the feds looking for him," Lucas said. "Both the Canada crossings and the Mexican ones. We can't do that--all we can do is look around here."

  LYLE MACK TURNED the bar over to Honey Bee at nine o'clock and headed home. Felt odd to be leaving so early. He watched his rearview mirror, wondering if the cops were following him, or had bugged him somehow. Saw lots of cars, but had no idea if anybody had followed him.

  He lived in a shabby but quiet neighborhood a mile from the bar, a three-bedroom rambler with a dry basement and a two-car garage off the alley in back. He put the car in the garage, went inside the house, walked around turning on lights.

  Turned on the TV

  "Goddamnit." He was scared. He went into the kitchen and turned the lights off, then went back and tried to watch a late-night sports channel. Gave it half an hour, then went to bed. He lay there, unable to sleep. Lay there for eight hours, looking at the clock every fifteen minutes. Knew he must have slept part of the time... was asleep when the alarm went off at five o'clock.

  He got out of bed, drunk with exhaustion. Using his clean phone, he called Cappy. "Where are you?"

  "Wal-Mart parking lot."

  "Let's do it."

  "Call me when you're set," Cappy said.

  He got dressed in the dark, and when he got his coat and gloves on, he looked out through the crack between the front-room curtains, up and down the street. He saw no vehicles that didn't look like they belonged. He doubted that they were watching him, but...

  "Oh, Jesus," he said. He was scared. He went anyway. Out the back door down the sidewalk to the garage, into the garage, groping past the truck to the back door, then, after getting his guts up, out the back door and into the alley.

  Nobody in sight: a cold, dark night in January, looking down a narrow alley toward the street a half-block away. He listened for a moment, heard nothing but distant cars on 1-494, and headed toward the street.

  When he got there, he stopped beside a hedge and punched Cappy's number on his speed-dial. The phone rang and Cappy said, "Ten seconds."

  Ten seconds later, Cappy's van came around the corner. Not Joe Mack's old van, but Cappy's old van--and stopped at the mouth of the alley. Lyle Mack crawled in and said, "So fuckin' cold. You get off work?"

  "Yeah, I did. First day I ever missed," Cappy said. "Told them I had the flu."

  "Whatever," Lyle Mack said. He pointed. "Go that way." Cappy did a lot of turns through Mack's neighborhood, saw nothing behind them. They drove out to Cherries, stopped a block away, and Lyle Mack got into Joe Mack's old van. They headed into St. Paul, Cappy a half-block behind Lyle Mack.

  BARAKAT was waiting.

  Lyle Mack pulled into Barakat's driveway and Cappy parked in the street, and he and Lyle Mack went to the side door. Barakat jerked the door open, and they filed in, and Lyle Mack could see that Barakat was furious.

  "What the fuck is going on?" he shouted. "Your brother kidnapped and strangled some woman? You guys are crazy."

  "Ah, Joe fucked up bad," Lyle Mack said. "We've got him hid out."

  "They'll get him," Barakat said. "He's all over TV"

  "They won't get him," Lyle Mack insisted. "We got a guy named Eddie coming over from Green Bay. He's gonna drive him down to Brownsville. He's... going away."

  Barakat stared at him, eyes cold as black glaciers; just a thin patina of white under his nose. He was flying, Lyle Mack realized. He was high as a kite. Lyle Mack said, "This is Cappy. He's gonna come with you."

  Barakat's attention shifted to Cappy. "You as dumb as the Macks?"

  "Hope not," Cappy said. His voice was mild, and he smiled, the corners of his mouth turning up. His eyes were dead as planks.

  "I hope to God," Barakat said. He inspected Cappy for a moment, then nodded. "You could be an orderly. You got the look. We gotta talk before we go in."

  "Lyle said that you could teach me how to act like a hospital guy."

  "It's not rocket science," Barakat said. "I got a map for you and other stuff. A key. A place you can hide if you need to."

  "Cool," Cappy said. To Lyle Mack. "You best get back. Leave the van . . ."

  "... right up from the SuperAmerica. By the pink house."

  "Don't put it on the plow side. It might snow."

  "Don't worry . . ." Lyle Mack glanced at his watch. "I'm outa here."

  WHEN HE WAS GONE, Barakat said, "We have to leave in a half hour. So let's sit, and I'll tell you where you can go, and walk you through the map."

  "You got a little blow under your nose. In the whiskers," Cappy said.

  Barakat wiped his face with his hand and said, "Thanks. You want a taste?"

  "Well, yeah. If you got some extra."

  "Just a taste," Barakat said.

  They had two or three tastes, and Cappy banged around the kitch
en, going with the flow, talking like he didn't usually talk; told Barakat about living in Bakersfield, and riding his bike to Vegas and LA. Barakat told him about growing up in Lebanon and the war with the Party of God. "Goddamn, this is good shit," Cappy said, after a while. "You don't operate on people when you're high, do you?"

  "I don't operate on people. When somebody needs to be operated on, we call a surgeon."

  "So what do you do?"

  "Whatever," Barakat said. He said, "I can't believe that idiot kidnapped that woman. Then killed her. I mean, if you want to get hunted down like a dog . . ."

  "He didn't kill her," Cappy said.

  "He didn't? Who did?"

  Cappy raised his hand. "I did."

  Barakat fixed on him, then stepped sideways to the kitchen table and sat down. "How'd you do that?"

  CAPPY WAS TAKEN ABACK. Nobody wanted to talk about that. But Barakat seemed straight enough. Intent.

  "Well, Lyle called me up and says Joe has this big problem . . ." He told Barakat about driving over to the airport parking structure, about getting lost, about finding the van, about crawling in and strangling MacBride. Barakat took another hit of the cocaine and passed another one of his twists to Cappy, who unwrapped it and snorted it as the punctuation at the end of his story.

  "Okay, so you're saying that she was already on her back when you went in there?"

  "Sort of on her side, looking at me, and when I got in there she started to roll over and I thought she was going to scream or something, so I slap my hand over her mouth and pull her around and jump up on top of her and get her by the throat... my thumbs in her throat."

  "Did she fight?"

  "A little bit, but it's more like she was trying to get a grip on the floor of the van, or something."

  "Were her eyes open?"

  "Oh, yeah, right until she died," Cappy said. "They were like, huge. Like bubbles."

  Barakat scratched his throat and then said, "Makes me hard."

  "Yeah, me too, sometimes," Cappy said.