When he’d last talked to her, she’d made a deliberately crude comment about three dead spics and an upper-class woman. Anyway, he remembered it that way; and he remembered that they’d had difficulty finding anyone to claim the bodies, or anyone who would even admit to knowing who they were.
Had they released the names by the time he’d seen Carmel? He didn’t think so. But who knows, maybe the television people had talked to the cops outside the house, and somebody made a comment. Or maybe a reporter had talked to a neighbor, and the names had gotten out. Maybe. That could explain how she knew the two Dinkytown dead were Latinos.
Carmel Loan. He scribbled her name on a legal pad, looked at it, then drew an arrow and scribbled another name: Rolando D’Aquila. Another arrow, at ninety degrees from the first, from Carmel to the next name, Hale Allen. He looked at that for a moment, drew another arrow from Carmel to Barbara Allen, and another from Carmel to Dead Spics. Of course, her connection to Marta Blanca and her dead boyfriend was purely part of his memory, nothing that could be proven . . .
A cold wind was already blowing through Lucas’s chest. He knew what he was going to do—he even knew how he was going to do it, to the smallest detail—but the idea chilled him. He felt like a wealthy man about to shoplift something expensive. And fooling with Carmel Loan was not like messing with a doper or a player or a stickup guy. If he screwed up, he could go to jail.
After a few minutes, he roused himself from the chair and walked down the hall to the Homicide office. Sloan was just leaving: “The goddamned air-conditioning is giving me goose bumps.”
“What are you doing tonight?” Lucas asked.
“Maybe taking the old lady out for a movie.”
“If you take her to Penelope’s, on Lake Minnetonka, I’ll pay for the meal and sign off on the overtime.”
“Ya got me,” Sloan said quickly. “For one thing, if I said no, the old lady’d murder me.” Sloan had a daughter in college and tuition to pay, and luxury was hard to come by. “What do I have to do?”
WHEN SLOAN HAD GONE, Lucas called Jim Bone, president of Polaris Bank: “Jim, are you gonna be home between eight and nine tonight?”
“Yeah; you need something?”
“I need to talk. Ten minutes, maybe. I’ve been running around like a mad dog, and I can’t spring any time during the day, and besides, you’re busy . . .”
“Come on over. Kerin would love to see you.”
“How’s she doing?” Bone’s wife was pregnant.
“Just starting to show.”
“You guys didn’t waste any time.”
“Yeah, well, we’re old people.”
MYRON BUNNSON TOLD everybody that his mother was a stone freak hippie and that his real given name was Bullet Blue, and that his father had been an Oakland Hell’s Angel, before the Angels got old. None of that was true. His parents were really named Myron (Senior) and Adele Bunnson, and they ran a dairy farm near Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
Bullet was working one of the three valet slots at Penelope’s. He saw the red Jag swing into the lot and said to the other two, “This is it. This is mine.”
“Three-way split, man,” said his friend Richard Schmid, who was trying to convince his friends to call him Crank. The third valet nodded: “Three ways.”
“No problem,” Bullet Blue said. “I’m just workin’ the chick.”
“Right.” Crank recognized the Jag. Bullet’s chances of nailing this particular chick, especially dressed as he was, like an organ-grinder monkey, were slim and none, and slim was outa town. Still, Bullet Blue wanted the car, and they all had their favorites.
Blue took the Jag and ten bucks from Carmel, who flashed a smile at him. “Thank you, ma’am,” Blue said, giving her his best look. The look apparently missed over her bare shoulder, and she was into the restaurant with her friend, a guy who Blue thought looked way too straight. Whatever. He hopped into the Jag, and rolled it into the valet parking area on the side of the restaurant. Lucas was leaning against a Chevy van, talking to the man who sat in the driver’s seat.
“You got the money?” he asked Lucas.
“Keys?”
Bullet dropped the keys into Lucas’s hand. Lucas passed them through the window to the man in the driver’s seat, who took them and clambered into the back. Lucas handed Bullet Blue a small fold of currency. “I’ll talk to McKinley.”
“If we could just get her off this one time . . .” Bullet slipped the bills into his pants pocket. The three-way split involved only the ten bucks from Carmel.
“I didn’t say I could do that,” Lucas said bluntly. From the van, they could hear the grinding buzz of the key-cutter. “The best we could do is maybe drop the charge to something less heavy. But she’s gonna do some time.”
“She’s already done time,” Blue protested. He was talking about his sister, who came off the farm two years after Bullet, and started calling herself Baby Blue. “She’s been sittin’ in jail for a month, waiting for the trial. Can’t we get her time served?”
“Not with this one,” Lucas said. “If she hadn’t had the gun . . .”
“It wasn’t her gun; it was Eddie’s,” Bullet said heatedly.
“But she had it. I’ll see if McKinley and the guys’ll go for two or three months. As it is, she’s looking at a year, and maybe more.”
“Anything you can do, man.”
“And you stay the fuck outa trouble, dickweed,” Lucas said. “Go back home if you gotta.”
“Right. Spend my life pulling cow tits.”
“Then get your ass back in Dunwoody—how much time you got to go there?” Lucas asked.
“One semester.”
“One semester. You get out, you start making some good money, and you make it wherever you go.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Bullet said.
“You don’t want to hear my Dunwoody speech?”
“I just ain’t made to fix cars, no more’n I’m made to pull cow tits; I’m made to rock ’n’ roll.”
“You’re made to . . .”
The man in the van spoke over Lucas’s shoulder: “All done.” He handed Carmel’s key ring to Lucas, and Lucas handed it to Blue.
“Dunwoody,” Lucas said.
“Rock ’n’ roll,” said Blue as he walked away.
LUCAS, WEARING his dark blue lawyer suit and carrying a black leather briefcase, said “Jim Bone” to the doorman at the desk, who looked at a list and said, “And your name, sir?”
“Lucas Davenport.”
“Go right on up, Mr. Davenport,” the doorman said, making a tick next to Lucas’s name.
Lucas had made a medium-sized fortune when he sold his simulations company; Bone’s bank managed it.
“. . . really risky,” Bone said. “The economy could drop like a rock and who’s going to pay a hundred dollars a round after that?”
Lucas nodded: “Yeah, but I wouldn’t have to make a hundred dollars a round—I could break even at sixty.”
“You don’t know anything about running a golf course,” Bone said.
“Of course not; I wouldn’t even try to. I don’t even like golf. That’s why they’re talking about professional management.”
“It’s not completely crazy,” Bone admitted finally.
“The whole point,” Lucas said, “is that I could give my daughter that big chunk right now, take a mortgage on the rest, put all the excess into course maintenance, building value. By the time she’s twenty-five or thirty, she owns the whole limited-partnership share, ninety-nine percent, while I own the general partner’s share, one percent, and we sell it and she’s fixed. She picks up four or five million, minimum, and who knows? Maybe five or ten.”
“The concept’s okay, but to tell you the truth, you might do better in the long run just to pay the government’s bite . . .”
When they were done, Lucas said good-bye to Kerin, who seemed much softer than when he’d first met her; slower, happier, pleased with herself. Bone, at the door, said, “I’ll
have the guys work it up for you. We’ll have something in a week.”
“Thanks, Jim.”
THERE WERE FIVE DOORS on Bone’s floor. Three apartments in addition to Bone’s, and the fire-stair door. No security camera. Lucas let the elevator doors close behind him, and pushed twenty-seven. As the elevator started up, he took a nylon sock out of his pants pocket, spread it apart and slipped it over the top of his head, like a watch cap. If there were somebody in the hallway, he could slip it back off— maybe without it being seen.
But the hallway of the twenty-seventh floor was dead quiet. Still in the elevator, blocking the door with his foot, he pulled the nylon down over his face, turned up his coat collar so it looked almost clerical, and did a quick peek out in the hall. No video cameras. He walked quickly down to Carmel’s apartment, slipped the first key in. The key turned—the other, he thought, must be for her office.
There was one light on, somewhere at the back of the apartment.
“Hello?” he called. No answer. “Hello?”
He did a quick tour, checking, his nerves starting to jangle. He’d done this before, but he’d make a poor burglar, he thought.
He started with her home Rolodex. There were dozens of names, most attached to the name of a law firm or a corporation—business acquaintances. There were a few names with a first and last, followed by a number, but usually by two numbers. An office and a home phone, Lucas thought. Probably not a killer’s number. There were ten numbers that involved simply a name and a number, and he copied those into a notebook.
Then, in the kitchen, he found another address book, this one, apparently, purely personal. He took a small Nikon camera from his briefcase, made sixteen shots, stopped to reload the camera, made eight more, and dropped it back in his briefcase.
Then he started through the apartment:
He found a Dell computer in her study, with a built-in Zip drive. He’d brought Zip, Jaz and Superdisks; he brought the computer up, clicked on the Computer icon, and dragged all of her documents to the Zip icon. As the computer began dumping to the Zip drive, he began looking through the array of filing cabinets on the other side of the room. He pulled the drawers one at a time, and in the last drawer, found a mass of paid bills—nothing big, just the usual once-a-month routine. He riffled through them quickly, separated out the phone bills for the last four months and used the camera again. But the last phone bill was almost exactly a month old . . .
He went into the kitchen, where he’d seen a neat stack of envelopes, flipped through them, found the US West bill. With another little jangle of nerves, he picked up a teakettle on the stove, tipped it to make sure there was enough water and turned it on.
He looked in the bedroom while he waited for the teakettle-to heat. Nothing obvious. He very carefully went through her drawers, afraid that he would disturb them in a way she could detect. He found nothing. He checked the closets quickly, and was closing the door when a brassy sparkle on the floor caught his eye. The sparkle had a certain quality that he unconsciously recognized. He stooped, scraped his hand along the rug, felt it, picked it up: an unfired .22 shell. He took a penlight out of his pocket, searched the closet floor, but found only the one cartridge.
He thought about it for a second, then put it in his pocket. He was closing the closet door when the teakettle began to hum. He hurried back to the kitchen, let the raw steam play down the back of the envelope, pried up the seal, took out the bill, shot a quick photo of the long-distance calls and resealed the envelope before the adhesive could dry. He put the kettle back and sniffed: the smell of the adhesive hung in the air, only faintly, but it was there, he thought. He hoped Carmel would take her time.
In the office, the computer was sitting quietly; he paged quickly through a few other folders, dragged a couple of them to the Zip icon, waited a few seconds until the files had been dumped, then shut the computer down.
All right. What else? He was ready to leave; before he went, he took a last look around.
The apartment was fabulous. But aside from the stuff in the filing cabinets, and stuck away in drawers, it hardly seemed to have been lived in: obsessively neat, everything in its place, like a stage set.
The phone in his pocket rang: Sloan.
“They’re leaving,” he said. “I just got my shrimp cocktail. I hope I’m not supposed to follow them.”
“Nah, let them go. But what do you think?”
“They’re tight, all right. It was kissy-smoochy all night. But I think the guy was expecting somebody else to show. He kept cruising the place, looking around.”
“Huh. Wonder what that’s about?” Lucas asked, feeling just slightly guilty. Then, “How come you’re eating a shrimp cocktail and they’re already leaving? You having it for dessert?”
“Well . . . yeah,” Sloan said. His voice went a little hoarse: “I love these things.”
WHEN CARMEL GOT HOME, a little after eleven—she had to work the next day—she stopped at the threshold of the apartment and wrinkled her nose. Something, she thought, was not quite right. She couldn’t put her finger on it: the air was wrong, or something. The apartment’s chemicals had been disturbed. She walked through, leaving the hallway door open so she’d have a place to run if she needed it, but found nothing at all.
“Huh,” she said as she closed the hallway door.
By the next morning, she’d forgotten it.
ELEVEN
When Lucas got home, he took the CompactFlash card out of his pocket, dropped another one out of the Nikon, and read them into his home computer. After transferring the files to Photoshop, he sharpened the photos as much as he could and dumped them to his photo printer. That done, he called Davenport Simulations and let the phone ring until a man answered, his voice grumpy at the interruption.
“Steve? Lucas Davenport.”
“Hey, Lucas! Where’ve you been, man?” Steve smoked a little weed from time to time; dropped a little acid on weekends, and let his beard grow. When the acid was on him, he could program in three dimensions. “You don’t come around anymore.”
“I’d be like the ghost of bad news, the former owner hanging around,” Lucas said. “But I needed somebody who could help me out with a computer problem. I thought about you . . . from your phreaking days.”
“I don’t do that shit anymore, hardly ever,” Steve said. “Uh, what do you need?”
“Is there anyone on the Net who could track down anonymous telephone numbers?” Lucas asked. “If there is, do you know how you could get in touch with him?”
Steve dropped his voice, though he probably was alone: “Depends on what the numbers are and how much trouble you want to go to. And whether you want to pay for it.”
“How much would it cost?” “If you want all the numbers and don’t ask any questions . . . I know a guy who does that kind of work. He could email them to you for a couple of bucks a name. How many do you have?”
“Maybe fifty,” Lucas said.
“Oh, Jesus, I thought you were talking about hundreds. Or thousands. I don’t know if he’d be interested in a little job like that.”
“I’d pay him more,” Lucas said.
“I can ask,” Steve said. “Say five hundred bucks?”
“That’s good,” Lucas said.
“I’m putting my name behind this, man. I’ll be stuck for the five hundred if you don’t come through.”
“Steve . . .”
“All right, all right.”
“I could use any other information they can find on the people who belong to the phone numbers—I mean, if they can do that.”
“That’d cost you more.”
“Go up to a thousand.”
“You got it: send me an e-mail with the numbers. I’ll pass it on. You’ll get it back by e-mail.”
LUCAS COPIED ODD, unusual or unidentified numbers from the photos and asked for names and addresses. He dumped the email to Steve, then checked his own e-mail account and found two letters, one advertising pornographic
photographs of preteens, which he deleted, and another from his daughter.
Sarah was in the first grade, starting to read and write, but her mother, a TV-news producer, had shown her how to use a voice-writing software program. Using the voice writer, Sarah now wrote Lucas a couple of times a week.
Lucas took fifteen minutes to interpret the voice-written text, and he wrote back, struggling to use words that Sarah could sound out, while at the same time trying to avoid the Dick-and-Jane syndrome. He was just finishing when a perky little female voice from the computer said, “You have mail.”
He sent the e-mail note to Sarah, then clicked on his in box. The sole piece of mail was a list of names and addresses attached to the phone numbers he’d sent out. All but two of the names had personal information attached. Lucas scanned it: the information appeared to come from credit bureaus, although some might have come from state motor vehicle departments. At the end of it all was a price tag: “Send $1000.”
“Quick,” he muttered. He looked at his watch. Just under half an hour.
He printed the numbers out, and turned to the documents he’d pulled from Carmel’s computer. Though he spent less than five seconds with most of them—virtually all were work-related—it was after three in the morning before he wiped the disk, shut down the computer and went to bed.
The next day, he chopped the disk to pieces with a butcher knife and dropped the pieces in two separate trash cans in the skyway: he had an almost superstitious dread of computer files turning up when they weren’t supposed to.
Then, while he was still in the skyway, between the Pillsbury building and the government center, he noticed a woman in a shapeless black dress, wearing a white scarf on her head, babushka-style. He turned to watch her walking away; some religious or ethnic group, he thought, but he didn’t know which. He went on to police headquarters, whistling, where he called Sherrill.