“Can either you or Black come by for a minute?”
“Which would you prefer? Me or Tom?”
“Stop,” he said. “I just want to hear about the Allen case. And mention a couple of things to you.”
Sherrill came down a few minutes later and dropped into his visitor’s chair. “We’re running out of stuff to look at,” she said.
“Let me tell you what Hale Allen told me yesterday,” Lucas said. He laid it out quickly, then told her about the ethnic woman in the skyway. “She looked like the aliens the kid described, when she was putting together that composite photo. So we need to get a low-angle photograph of somebody in a dark dress, wearing a scarf over her head; then we need to plug in a bunch of faces, including Carmel’s.”
“Carmel Loan,” Sherrill said. “That could get rough, if we went public and didn’t have the goods.”
“Which is why I don’t want her to know that we’re looking at her. Not unless we get something solid.”
“All right,” Sherrill said. She pushed herself up. “I can probably get a picture of Carmel from your lady at the Star-Tribune library, if she still works there.”
“She does,” Lucas said.
“And I’ll have the ID guys put together a photo spread. We can base it on the composite the kid gave us. When do you want to talk to her? The kid?”
“The sooner the better,” Lucas said. “I don’t know how long memories last with little kids.”
“I’ll try to set it up this afternoon.”
“Something else,” Lucas said. He dug in his pocket. “Could you have the lab do an analysis on the slug?” He tossed the .22 shell to her. She caught it one-handed, looked at it, and then asked, “What’s going on, Lucas?”
“Nothing; it’s one of my twenty-twos. I just want to look at the difference between a random analysis and what we’re getting from the slugs we took out of the dead guys. Do we really have a case based on a metals analysis?”
She looked at him, suspicious, turned the cartridge in her hand. “Then, if I lost this particular shell,” she said, “you wouldn’t mind if I just sent in one of my own.”
Lucas said, “Send that one in, huh? Just send it in.”
“This one.”
“That one.”
“Lucas . . .”
“Off my case, Marcy,” he said.
She grinned at him and said, “Marcy, my ass. We’re operating, aren’t we?”
“Send the fuckin’ thing in,” he said.
LUCAS SPENT the morning running through the numbers he’d taken from Carmel’s address books and phone bills: he’d marked fifty-five of them to be checked. In three hours, he’d half-filled a yellow legal pad with notes, but nothing promising.
A few minutes before noon, he got to the final long-distance call on the last of the long-distance bills: a call made two weeks earlier, he noticed, a couple of days after Barbara Allen’s death. The note from the hacker said only, “Small business phone listed to Tennex Messenger Service.” Lucas dialed the number and a woman answered on the first ring: “Tennex Messenger Service.”
“Yes, could I speak to the Tennex manager? Or whoever runs the place?”
“I’m sorry, sir, Mr. Wilson is out. I can give you his voice mail.”
“Well, I was just wondering how I could set up an account with Tennex.”
“I’m sorry, sir; we’re an answering service. All I can do is give you his voice mail.”
“Okay, thanks, if you could do that . . .”
He was switched, and got a voice-mail introduction, a slightly vague voice that might have come from a drugged-out teenager: “You have reached Tennex Messenger Service, your, uh, fastest messenger service in the D.C. area. We are either, uh, on the phone or out on a call. We check back for messages, so, like, leave your name and, uh, phone number. Thanks.”
Not interested in talking to a strung-out bicycle messenger, Lucas hung up, yawned, stood up and stretched, and walked down to Homicide. Black was at his desk, shuffling through papers; Sloan had his feet up, reading a Pioneer Press.
“Lunch?” Lucas asked.
“Yeah, I could see my way clear to a lunch,” Sloan said. Sherrill pushed through the office door, spotted Lucas and said, “I sent that slug in, and we’re all set for four o’clock this afternoon.”
Sloan’s eyebrows went up. “Really? Where at?” he asked.
Sherrill correctly interpreted his tone and implication: “Shut up,” she said. To Lucas: “Mama is not happy with the fact that we’re coming back to see the kid. There was all the loose talk in the newspapers about hit men.”
“So I’ll let you warm her up when we get there,” Lucas said. “Woman talk, bonding, chitchat, that kind of shit.”
“Sexism,” Sloan said, shaking his head sadly. “And from a member of the Difference Commission.”
Lucas’s hand went to his forehead: “Ah, Jesus, I forgot. There’s a meeting tonight.”
They looked at him with sympathy, and Sherrill patted his shoulder. “It could be worse.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. You could be shot.” “He’s been shot,” Sloan said. “It’d have to be a lot worse than that.”
• • •
LUNCH WITH SLOAN was a long hour of gossip, with brief side trips into current styles of crime. Murder was down, even with Allen and the two dead in Dinkytown—the fourth, Rolo, was on the St. Paul books. Rape was down, ag assault was down, coke was down, speed was up and so was heroin. “Gutierrez told me that the day heroin started coming back was a happy day in his life,” Sloan said, speaking of one of the dope detectives. “He says Target’s gonna get ripped off, and Kmart and Wal-Mart, but at least they’re not gonna have a bunch of robot-crazy coke freaks running around with guns, thinkin’ that nothing can hurt them.”
Lucas nodded: “Give a guy a little heroin, he goes to sleep. Give him a little more, he dies. No problem.”
“Shoplift like crazy, though,” Sloan said.
“A cultural skill,” Lucas said, lifting up the top of his cheeseburger to inspect the solitary, suspiciously pale pickle. “Passed on by heroin gurus. Somebody oughta look into it. An anthropologist.”
“Or a proctologist,” Sloan said. “Say, with that commission meeting tonight, you won’t be shooting.”
“I’m thinking of giving it up, anyway,” Lucas said. “That goddamn Iowa kid shot my eyes out last time.”
“He’s a freak,” Sloan said. “He’s shooting Olympic, now. He’s got a target on his locker, ten bulls, every shot in the X ring. In the middle of the X ring—you can see black all around the edges.”
“He’s good,” Lucas said. “At my age, you can’t be that good. Can’t do it. Your fine muscle control isn’t fine enough.”
“Yeah, yeah. He’s sort of a dumb fuck,” Sloan said.
“I heard he was actually a smart fuck.”
“Yeah, well—he’s a dumb smart fuck.” Sloan looked at his watch. “I gotta get going. I gotta talk to a guy.”
ON THE WALK back to City Hall, Lucas realized that a mental penny had dropped during the lunch. Something was packed into the back of his head, now, but he didn’t know what it was.
But it was, he thought, something important: he dug at it, and realized it involved the Iowa kid. The kid was still a uniformed cop, but he volunteered for everything hard, and he had a thing about guns. All kinds of guns: he dreamt about them, used them, fixed them, compared them, bought and sold them. A throwback to an old western gunfighter, Lucas thought.
He tried to think about the coming interview with Jan and Heather Davis, the photo spread that Sherrill was putting together. A photo spread involved some risks: if the child identified Carmel as one of the killers, and they went to court, then a witness-stand identification could be challenged on grounds that the police had contaminated the witness’s memory with the photographs. So the whole thing had to be done just right.
As much as he tried to think about the upcoming interview,
the shooter from Iowa always came back. Something that Sloan said about him. Something small. He just couldn’t nail it down.
This, he thought after a while, is what it’s like to be senile. He had something in his head, but he couldn’t get it out. Finally, he walked down to the locker room, wandered through, looking for the Iowa kid’s locker: found it, with the target on it, just like Sloan said.
“Checking out the competition?” a tall blond cop asked. Another shooter, and Lucas nodded at him.
“I heard about the perfect score,” Lucas said. He leaned forward to look at it. The bull’s-eye on the target was called the ten ring, but inside the bull was another, much smaller circle: the X ring, not much bigger around than a .22 slug. There were ten small target faces on the target sheet: and in the middle of each X ring, a slightly soft-edged hole. Around each of the holes, the full X ring line could be seen. Lucas whistled.
“Guy’s abnormal,” the cop said. He was pulling on a bulletproof vest, slapping the Velcro fastening tabs in place. “My eyes are supposed to be twenty-twenty, but I can’t even see the X ring on them twenty-two faces. Keeping them inside the ten-ring is one thing; keeping them inside the X, man . . . that’s abnormal.”
“It’s tough,” Lucas agreed. “I’ve never done it.” He took a last look, shook his head, and started back to the office. Keeping them inside the ten ring was one thing, but inside the X . . .
He went back to his office, scrolled through the list of phone numbers he’d sent off on the Internet. And there it was, the last one.
Tennex Messenger Service.
“Sonofabitch,” he said. That had to be a coincidence.
He was still thinking about it when Sherrill and Black showed up with a file of full-length color photos of women, silhouetted, wearing head scarves with dark raincoats. A dozen different faces had been grafted into the folds of the scarf, as if the faces had suddenly been hit by light from a doorway.
“Not bad,” Lucas said, looking through them. “This one is Carmel?”
“Yeah—it’s weird how context makes a difference; I wouldn’t recognize her in a thousand years in that getup,” Sherrill said.
Black and Sherrill drove over together. Lucas followed. Davis met them at the door: “I hope we can do this without a lot of trauma,” she said, her voice tight.
“There’s no reason to be any trauma at all,” Lucas said. “If she can’t pick out a photograph, we’re done.”
“What if she does? What if this killer hears about it?”
“The killer won’t hear about it from the police,” Lucas said. “We’d do a videotape deposition, and keep her name confidential until a defense attorney did his discovery motion—by that time we’d have somebody in jail for first-degree murder, and there’d be nobody to come after her.”
“The whole thing just scares the heck out of me,” Davis said, hugging herself as though she were cold.
HEATHER WAS PLAYING with a fleet of trucks in a back bedroom. “You know what you need?” Sherrill asked. “You need a farm tractor. Maybe a cultivator to pull behind it.”
“I had a tractor, a John Deere, but it got lost,” Heather said. Her eyes narrowed. “The tractor was good, but you know what I really need?”
“What?”
“When we bought the tractor, we bought a combine to go with it, but I didn’t have anything to put the corn in. I could use a grain truck.”
“Yeah . . . well.” Sherrill was out of her depth. “Let’s look at these pictures, and we’ll get you back to the trucks.”
“Mom said you could probably get me a ride in a police car,” Heather said.
“Mmm, if you ask Uncle Lucas here, he could probably fix it.”
“He’s not my uncle,” Heather said.
“I can probably fix it anyway,” Lucas said. “Come on and look at the pictures.”
SHE DID: she looked at them all, carefully, and when she was done she said, “Nope.”
“Nope?”
She looked at her mother. “They don’t look right.”
“If they don’t look right,” Davis said, “then they don’t look right.”
“You’re sure none of them look right . . .” Lucas said.
“Well, they all look sorta right, but not really right.”
“If that’s what you say, that’s what you say,” Black said. They all stood up.
“Can Uncle Lucas still get me a ride in a police car?”
OUT ON THE SIDEWALK, Sherrill said, “Well, gosh-darn.”
“That’s a big gosh-darn from me, too,” Black said. “Though I don’t know if I’d want to put a kid on a witness stand with Carmel Loan ready to cut her up.”
“I’d take anything right now,” Lucas said moodily. “I’d take a chimp if it was ready to pick her out.”
“So what’re you going to do?” Sherrill asked.
“Gonna go home,” Lucas said. “Have a beer. Think about it. Cry myself to sleep.”
TWELVE
Lucas arrived at City Hall a little after ten o’clock in the morning—early for him—closed the door on his office, typed a memo, heading it “Confidential,” and recorded his interview with Hale Allen. He hand-carried it to Rose Marie Roux, the chief of police.
“How was your trip?” he asked.
“A Las Vegas convention in the middle of the summer— it was so hot that I was afraid to go outside.”
“Dry heat,” Lucas said.
“So’s an oven,” she said. “I was so bored I almost started smoking again. Whatcha got?”
He handed her the memo and she read it and said, “ Goddamnit, Lucas, this is awful. Why don’t you ever come up with easy stuff?”
“I do,” Lucas said. “I don’t bother you with it. And this, I don’t want anybody to see but you and me, Sherrill and Black, and maybe one judge. File it and forget it, until we need it.”
“Covering your ass,” Roux said.
“Covering everybody’s ass,” Lucas said. “I need to get her phone records for the last few months, and I need this to back up a subpoena.”
“Talk to Ross Benton,” Roux said. “He’ll give you the subpoena and keep his mouth shut. He’d love to see Carmel get nailed. She makes a game out of fucking with him in court. He had trouble with some decisions in that Prolle case, and she called him Schizo the Clown and it got in the Star-Tribune.”
“All right. I’ll carry a copy over to him, get the subpoena.”
“I hope you know what we’re doing,” Roux said. “I’m too old and tired to get burned at the stake by Carmel Loan.”
Lucas talked to Benton, the judge, and got his subpoena. “Let me know how it comes out,” Benton said, a light in his eye.
“Probably nothing,” Lucas said. “I’m beggin’ you not to leak it.”
“Don’t worry. If it’s nothing, and she finds out about this subpoena, I’ll stick a gun in my mouth.”
LUCAS WALKED the subpoena over to the phone company, presented it to the correct vice-president, emphasized the need for confidentiality and the criminal penalties for any breaches of it. The vice-president responded with the correct pieties, and they both walked down to a technical center where the information was printed out. Lucas asked the vice-president to note the date and time on the printout and sign it.
“Hope this doesn’t get me into trouble,” the vice-president said.
“We’re trying to nail a Mafia hit man,” Lucas said.
“Pretty funny,” the VP said as he signed.
BACK AT CITY HALL, Lucas thought about the pros and cons of asking a favor from the FBI. His stomach growled once, then again, and he answered: he walked down to the cafeteria and got a sandwich, ate it and read the paper, then walked back to his office and dug Mallard’s card out of his desk drawer.
One problem with the FBI was that once they signed on to a case, its agents tended to get a little overenthusiastic: laser-sighted submachine guns, helicopters, computerized psychological profiles. A further problem was that they also
tended to be underexperienced. A guy who came out of college, went into the FBI, and then spent twenty years working as an agent had about as much experience with actual criminals as a patrol cop a year out of tech school. So you’d look at a slightly graying forty-five-year-old—somebody about Lucas’s age—and you might think, hmm, not too bad. Then you’d find out that in cop years, he was about twenty-five.
On the other hand, the experience that they had tended to be with heavy hitters . . .
After another moment’s hesitation, he thought about Mallard’s attitude during their meeting: Mallard was one of the brighter ones, Lucas thought.
MALLARD PICKED UP his phone on the first ring. “Yes.”
“I have an intuition,” Lucas said after he identified himself.
“I’d be inclined to listen to an intuition,” Mallard said. “Our Minneapolis guys are strangely impressed by you. Or scared, or something.”
“Thank them for me, the next time you see them.”
“I didn’t say they liked you,” Mallard said. “They say you refer to us as the Feebs.”
“Well, that’s, uh, the old rivalry.”
“Sure,” Mallard said. “So what’s your intuition?”
“We have a possible suspect. Not for the shooter, but for the woman who hired her. To be honest with you, I’m not going to identify her because she’s a hot potato, and if I’m wrong, she’d nail me to the wall. I could be looking for a job somewhere way out-state.”
“So much for the preface,” Mallard said. “What’s the intuition?”
“We, uh, acquired a number of telephone contacts our suspect made about the time of the killing. One of them was in Washington—right where you are . . .”
“Not the state.”
“. . . and when I checked it, I got Tennex Messenger Service. Nobody home. It’s an answering service. And I was pretty much told that there’s never anybody home. And just yesterday I was talking to a friend about target shooting, and he told me about this young Iowa guy we’ve got, who just shot a round where he not only kept everything in the ten ring, but also inside the X ring.”