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.”
16
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.
br />
Del: “You pussy.” And to Jane, “No offense.”
“Let’s call him from the desk,” Lucas said.
JENKINS WAS RIGHT: Shafer was not the Wizard of Oz.
Del was positioned at the end of the hallway, opposite the stairs that led down to the lobby, listening on his cell phone as Jane made the call from the front desk, with Lucas and his cell standing next to her.
Upstairs, Shafer snatched up the phone and said, “Yeah?”
“Mr. Shafer, a woman has left a package for you at the front desk. You can pick it up at your convenience,” Jane said. “I get off in an hour.”
“Thanks. Be right down.”
Jane hung up and Lucas said into his cell phone, to Del, “He’s coming out.”
Lucas, Shrake, and Jenkins gathered at the bottom of the stairs, but in the cross-hall, out of sight from the stairs themselves. When Shafer unlocked his room door, Del started walking toward him, beer can in one hand, cell phone in the other. He said, “I’m on the way, darlin’.”
Shafer glanced at him and turned away, headed down the hall, then down the stairs, Del moving fast now to catch up. At the very last second, as he stepped off the bottom stair, Shafer might have suspected that something was wrong. He turned and looked at Del, who was coming down on top of him in a linebacker’s rush, and he flinched and then Jenkins kicked his legs out and Shrake landed on him.
Shafer started struggling and thrashing, but not too hard, grunting under the weight of Del and Shrake, because he knew cops when he saw them. He stopped thrashing after a few seconds and said, “What d’you want?” and Shrake put the cuffs on.
Lucas said to him, “Who’re you gonna hit?”
“What are you talking about?” A little more thrashing against the cuffs.
“We know all about the .50-cal, Justice.” Lucas squatted next to his head. “We found your little spot up on the hill. You gonna hit McCain? You gonna hit Palin? Who you gonna hit?”
“What hill? What?” His eyes were wild. “Hit McCain? Are you nuts?”
LUCAS CALLED Dan Jacobs at the security committee: “Listen, if you’ve got a couple of loose Secret Service guys rattling around, we nailed that Justice Shafer guy,” Lucas said.
Jacobs shouted, “Lucas, goddamnit! That’s great. That’s wonderful. Where is he?”
“We’re putting him in a car, taking him up to Ramsey County. Tell the Secret Service that they’re welcome to sit in. Things might be a little more complicated than we thought. We’ve got a BCA crime-scene crew on the way to the motel where we grabbed him and we’re staking the place out, looking for accomplices.”
“Accomplices. What accomplices?” The joy was gone.
“Like I said,” Lucas said, “it’s complicated, and it’s probably not good.”
SIX SECRET SERVICE agents showed up to watch Del talk with Shafer. Lucas got the feeling that if there were an assassination plot against McCain, it wouldn’t do a guy’s career any harm to get in on the ground floor when it was broken up.
Del had brought the can of Budweiser with him, and it was sitting by his boot heel, unopened, where the video camera couldn’t see it. Shafer was dressed like Del, in a khaki hunting shirt, jeans, and hunting boots, and was handcuffed to a metal table. He kept looking at the video camera in the corner, as though trying to see the crowd that gathered behind it.
One of the Secret Service guys, looking at the monitor, asked, “You sure about your interrogator?”
Lucas said, “Yes,” and stopped.
Shrake, feeling a level of discomfort, added, “We’re giving Shafer somebody he can get comfortable with. If we need somebody with a plutonium suit, we can put one of you guys in there. Later.”
The Secret Service guy gave him a gentle poke to the gut with an elbow, and said, “You know I love you.”
DEL SAID, pushing a picture of the woman-of-many-names across the table at Shafer, “You’re sure that’s her?”
“That’s her. That’s her, and she’s Bill Hefner’s girlfriend. The anarchists are coming in, and they’re gonna tear you guys a new butt-hole. When you come looking for help, our guys’ll be there, ready to go. We’re coming in from all over the country, we’re the final backstop. Hefner is tight with you guys. He’s on your committee.”
Del rubbed his forehead and said, “I hate to tell you this, Justice, but Hefner isn’t on a committee, he’s in jail in Oregon, and he never heard of you, and he doesn’t have a girlfriend, he’s got a wife, and this lady . . .” He tapped the photograph. “This ain’t her.”
“He’s in jail?” Shafer suspected a lie.
“He sold a couple of modified ArmaLites to an ATF guy and he’s in fuckin’ jail,” Del said.
“That’s fuckin’ crazy,” Shafer said.
“Tell us about scouting out that bluff over town,” Del suggested. “We know you were up there, because we found a couple of shells. They’re your shells, Justice. They’ve got your prints on them.”
“You’re framing me,” Shafer said. “You’re trying to get me.”
One of the Secret Service agents asked Lucas, “You read him his rights?”
“More or less,” Lucas said.
The agent nodded. Lucas got the impression that he didn’t much care; prosecution wasn’t his problem.
DEL ASKED, pressing, “Then how’d they get up there? Answer me that.”
“Somebody else put them there,” Shafer said.
“Some other dude did it,” Del said, the skepticism right out there. “The two-dude defense.”
“It’s the truth,” Shafer said. Then, his eyes lifting, he said, “You answer me a question. Answer me this: How in the hell did I get wherever you said it was and let off a couple of rounds with that .50 cal and nobody noticed? You ever hear a .50-cal? How’d I do that?”
“Good question,” one of the agents said. “How did he do that?”
Del said, “We don’t know when you were up there. You might have done it two weeks ago, and somebody thought they were backfires. The highway’s right down the hill.”
“Good answer,” said another one of the agents.
“A .50-cal don’t sound like no fuckin’ backfire,” Shafer said.
“Good point,” the Secret Service guy said.
“And look at me,” Shafer continued. “You got me swearin’ like the devil. I don’t talk like that, and now you got me talkin’ like you.”
Lucas turned to the head Secret Service guy and said, “Did Jacobs tell you about our murder gang?”
“I heard something about it,” the guy said.
“So I got a story for you,” Lucas said. He looked through the window, where Del was retracing his steps in the interrogation. “Let’s find a place to sit down.”
THE AGENTS all sat around straddling backward chairs, and Lucas laid out the details of the assaults on the convention moneymen, and the cop shootings, which the local Secret Service guys already knew about. “So we know who these guys are, more or less, and what they’re doing. One of them is dead. Their usual practice, at this point, would be to get out—maybe they haven’t gotten everything they wanted, but in the past, they’ve always been cautious.”
“But now they’re going crazy,” one of the agents said.
“That’s right,” Lucas said. “And we don’t know why. We do know that one of them is talking to Shafer and his .50-cal, and from what we understand, the woman with the gang actually financed the gun. Not only financed it, but gave him the list of stores to check out. She told him that the store guys were all connected to this Hefner guy, that the store might be bugged, so he should show up, talk about buying some ammo, and then get out. Then the store guys supposedly would pass the word that Shafer was still on the case.”
“What a dumb shit,” one of the agents said.
Lucas threw his hands up: “That’s what we all get. What a dumb shit. But these other people aren’t dumb shits. Why are they dragging Shafer under our noses? I mean, I guess the big question is, what?
??re they up to? Something about the convention? Why haven’t they gotten out of town? We’re wondering, are they pointing at McCain’s big night? Is there something in that?”
The lead agent nodded, and turned to his men: “Okay, you’ve heard it. We need to talk to the presidential details, we need to beef up the protection even more than it is. We need to work out new travel routes—we need to find new angles on everything. I want the goddamn X Center sterile. Sterile. McCain’s here in two days, Palin will be here . . .”
“It’s not Palin,” Lucas said. “They were in town, all set to go, before she was even picked. If it’s anybody, it’s McCain—but we might be missing something completely obvious. What worries me most is that we have some ideas about Cohn, but we really don’t know him. What if it’s political?”
“You mean . . . what if they really make a run at McCain?”
“Yeah. Is that too weird?” Lucas asked.
“Nothing’s too weird. You’ve got two dead cops.” The agent brushed his hand through his neatly trimmed silver hair. “Man: this is serious. We need more guys. If they planned this out way ahead of time . . .”
Another agent said, “We got two days to figure it out.”
DEL GAVE UP on the interrogation and gave one of the Secret Service guys a shot at it. “We can hold him, but there’s not much—he had no idea about those .50-cal shells up on the hill. I got Nancy to run a quick comparo on the shells, and she says they came from the same gun, the extractor marks are right there. He says that when he was sighting the gun in, he always collected all his brass and keeps it in the back of the truck, in an army ammo can. I called Dick out at the motel, he looked in the can and says there were fourteen loose used shells, and Shafer says there should be twenty. He thinks this chick must have stolen them.”