Easy Prey

by John Sandford

  "Yeah."

  The maintenance man found a wall switch and turned the lights on. They both looked at the lock, and Lucas said, "The bolt's open."

  "Aw, man."

  Lucas looked around the dock and asked, "Did Rodriguez ever get anything here?"

  "His furniture, probably."

  "You ever see him here otherwise?"

  "No. Nobody comes down here, except for deliveries. Unless there's something wrong with the plant."

  "Hmph. Better go talk to St. Paul," Lucas said.

  "What'd St. Paul say?" Del asked.

  "First they said it was all bullshit, it didn't make any difference. There was no indication that there was anyone else in the building. Then they started pissing on each other," Lucas said.

  "Over here, we'd be shooting at each other."

  "That's a kinder, gentler city," Lucas said. They were walking across town, Lucas with a large-sized manila envelope in one gloved hand. The day was even colder than it had been early in the week, and though the sky had turned blue, a gusty wind was cutting along the streets. Shoppers were bundled in long coats, and businessmen snarled into the wind.

  "If you don't tell me what's in the envelope, I'm gonna be pretty embarrassed when we get there," Del said.

  "Pretend like you knew all along."

  "You're just bustin' my balls because you got up crabby."

  "Nope. I'm actually pretty cheerful," Lucas said.

  "And that surprises me," Del said. "I figure you've either solved the case or you're fuckin' Jael Corbeau."

  "Why couldn't it be both?" Lucas asked cheerfully.

  "Nobody's that's lucky," Del said. "So what's in the envelope?"

  "Let India tell you," Lucas said. "When we get to Browns."

  India, Philip the manager, and the other woman who'd looked at Rodriguez's picture were waiting at the desk when Lucas and Del arrived at Browns Hotel. Lucas slipped a photograph out of the envelope and passed it across; the photograph had been taken that morning with a digital camera, and had been printed out only a half hour earlier. "Do you know this guy?"

  Del tried to edge sideways to get a look, but Lucas cheerfully blocked him off.

  "That's him," India said. The other woman nodded, and Philip, looking down his nose at the photo, said, "Yes, I've seen him."

  "Did he know Derrick Deal?"

  "He may have," Philip said. "He probably did. I think I saw the three of them talking once. At least once. So maybe…"

  "He was definitely around here," India said.

  Del reached out, took the picture, glanced at it, and said, "It's like I been telling you since the start, Lucas. It's that fuckin' Spooner."

  "You've got to be kidding," Rose Marie Roux said. She was leaning back as far as she could in her office chair, hands covering her eyes as if to block out the horror of it all. "We've already started taking credit on Rodriguez."

  "He was murdered," Lucas said. "It kept me up half the night, thinking about it. And remember how we decided that if Angela Harris could make an accurate prediction about the murders of the Olsons, then we'd have to pay close attention?"

  "I remember."

  "So I was awake half the night, working this out. And when I got done, I made two predictions. First, that I'd find a way the killer could have gotten out of Rodriguez's building. And second, that the people at Brown's would recognize Spooner. I'm also making a third prediction. We know we only got about half the people at the party—Frank's got his people running pictures of Spooner around to the party people we interviewed. I'm predicting that somebody will put him at the party."

  "Ah, mother. Run it down for me," Rose Marie said.

  Lucas ticked the points off:

  ■ "We had a guy who came out of the slums of Detroit with no education—and two years later, is setting up a Miami corporation to buy legitimate apartments which he uses to wash his drug money. That's a little too sophisticated.

  ■ "If it's too sophisticated, where did he figure out how to do it? How about a banker?

  ■ "What does the banker get out of it? How about dope, money, and women?

  ■ "What does Rodriguez get? How about financing, a way to wash his dope money, and legitimacy. He was a smart guy, even if he didn't have much education.

  ■ "What happens at the party? Who knows? But Spooner winds up killing Sandy Lansing, maybe accidentally. Alie'e witnesses the killing, so he has to kill her. He then evaporates—maybe goes out the window, I don't know. In any case, he doesn't come up on our party list. He's not part of that crowd, he's just Lansing's boyfriend, and lot of people don't even know her."

  "Wait a minute," Rose Marie said. "There's a fairly big jump in there. All the other stuff is linked, but that's a pure jump—"

  "Let me finish," Lucas said.

  ■ "We identify Rodriguez as being at that party, because, unlike Spooner, he's known to be rich and single, and so he gets some attention from the other partygoers.

  ■ "When Al-Balah links Rodriguez and Lansing, we assume that since they were dealer-employee, that there'd been a falling-out. We then assume that Derek Deal knew about them, because we knew Rodriguez was Lansings boss. We assume that Deal went to Rodriguez, tried to blackmail him, and got killed for his trouble. But when I took a photo of Rodriguez over to Brown's, nobody recognized him. And I remembered that, back when I first talked to Deal, he wasn't absolutely sure that Sandy Lansing was a dealer. He thought she might be, but he didn't know. And that suggests to me that he didn't know who her boss was. He definitely knew who her boyfriend was—we confirmed that today, with the photo of Spooner. He went to Spooner, not Rodriguez, and he got killed.

  ■ "Of all the people who were at the party, the ones most likely to finger Spooner as being there were Lansing, who was dead, and Rodriguez, who couldn't, because that would drag the whole drug-apartment deal out into the open.

  ■ "So then I talk to Spooner. I try to intimidate him by suggesting that we're about to bust Rodriguez, and let him know that we're watching Rodriguez, that we're all over him.

  ■ "Spooner realizes that if we really come down on Rodriguez, his goose is cooked—Rodriguez will try to stay clean as long as he can, but he's not gonna suck it up for first-degree murder. He'll talk to us, and one thing that will come out is that Spooner was at the party. And Spooner had some kind of relationship with Lansing. Sex, dope, something. He'd be as good a suspect as Rodriguez. But if Rodriguez commits suicide…"

  ■ "Spooner knows we're watching Rodriguez, and probably suspects that includes tapping the phone. So he goes to Rodriguez's apartment and slips a note under the door.

  Probably something unsigned, maybe even typed. It says something like, 'They're coming for you—you gotta get anything incriminating off your computer. Burn this note.' "

  "And we find ashes in the sink at Rodriguez's apartment," Del said. "Though he could of flushed it."

  "Nothing gets rid of paper like burning," Lucas said. He continued:

  ■ "So Spooner watches Rodriguez until he sees him leave for home, then hides out in the building where he can watch the entrance from the ramp. Rodriguez goes home, gets the note, thinks, 'Oh, man, if they get the computer, my goose is cooked.' He stops at CompUSA to get a Zip disk, because he plans to dump his files to the Zip disk, then either write over the hard drive or just take it out and throw it in the river. They're cheap enough.

  ■ "Spooner knows we're watching, so he can't just whack Rodriguez and walk out the Skyway or the ramp or the front door, which would be the logical way to get out, especially if you're in a little bit of a hurry. He has to sneak out. The basement door."

  "How'd he know about that?" Del asked.

  "Who knows? Maybe from hanging around with Rodriguez. Maybe he actually scouted the building the day before. Whatever the reason, if Rodriguez was murdered, the killer snuck out, as though he knew the place were being watched."

  "How'd he kill him?" Rose Marie asked.

  "Hit him with something flat a
nd hard. Not a baseball bat, because the wound would be wrong. Maybe a two-by-four."

  "Oooh. Sting the hands," Del said.

  "He then hauls Rodriguez over to the railing, hangs him over, head down, and lets go. Rodriguez hits headfirst and he's gone," Lucas said.

  "I'll tell you something," Rose Marie said. "Remember when those people were doing their swan dives over in the county government building? I saw a couple of those. They didn't go headfirst—they just let themselves fall, and generally landed flat. Rodriguez would have had to made a conscious decision to dive—to land headfirst. That doesn't feel right. Even people who want to die don't want their identities erased. Their faces broken up."

  "I hadn't thought about that, but you're right," Lucas said. Del nodded.

  They all sat and thought about it, Rose Marie swinging back and forth in her chair, and finally she asked, "Have you guys figured out the rest of it?"

  "We've figured out that we'll never get him, if that's what you mean," Del said.

  Lucas nodded. "We've publicly said, or let it be known, that we think there are two killers working: one who killed Lansing and Alie'e, and somebody who's killing in revenge for those murders. Therefore, the most likely candidate as the Rodriguez killer is that second man, especially since Rodriguez's name was leaked. But we know it can't be, because we were watching the guy who's probably the second man, and he was clear over on the other side of town. And the second man, even if it isn't Olson, also wouldn't have known how to lure Rodriguez back to his office, wouldn't have known that Rodriguez had a twenty-four-hour police escort, wouldn't have known about the phone taps. All of which would count about zilch with a jury."

  "And we'd already pretty much pinned the Alie'e and Lansing killings on Rodriguez, and the details were leaking. Even the suicide fits… It's too late to change our minds," Del said.

  "If we did change our minds, and we bust Spooner, the defense would put Rodriguez on trial and they'd win," Rose Marie said. "You've got me two-thirds convinced it's Spooner, but if you were talking to a jury, it'd still be eighty-twenty for Rodriguez. All we've got as evidence on Spooner is this long chain of Lucas Davenport suppositions."

  "Suppositories," Del amended.

  "That's not totally true," Lucas said. "We can put him with both Lansing and Deal. Nobody could put Deal with Rodriguez. If we can put him at the party…"

  "It'd be weak but usable, if Rodriguez wasn't there as an alternative candidate," Rose Marie said. "You haven't even suggested why he'd kill Lansing. With Rodriguez, we could suppose it was some kind of criminal falling-out between wholesaler and retailer."

  Another ten seconds passed in silence, then Rose Marie said, "So what do I tell Olson? He's coming in here in fifteen minutes, so I can give him the official word on Rodriguez and say that we're satisfied that Alie'e's killer is dead. What do I say now?"

  "Bullshit him," Lucas said. "Tell him that there's some evidence that Rodriguez was the one, but we're continuing to examine other possibilities."

  "He's gonna want some kind of closure," Rose Marie said.

  "Fuck closure," Lucas said. "Nobody gets closure."

  "With this bunch, nobody deserves it," Del muttered.

  Lucas asked Del to check with the Homicide cops who were circulating Spooner's picture among the known partygoers. "I've got to do some paper," he said. "Maybe when you're up-to-date with Homicide, you could check with Marcy. Tell her I'll be over as soon as I can."

  When Del was gone, Lucas went back to his office, locked the door, looked at his watch, leaned back in his chair, and closed his eyes. Ten minutes later, his eyes popped open. Time to move. He got up, walked back down to Rose Marie's office, and peeked: door closed. He stepped inside and asked the secretary, "The Olson bunch in there?"

  "Yup. A pretty sad-looking bunch, too."

  Lucas backed out of the office, got his coat, put it over his arm, and went to the end of the hall, where he could see the chief's office door but where somebody also might think he was waiting for somebody to come in the front door. Out on the street, the media wagons were piled up; a square-jawed trench-coated reporter was doing a stand-up, with City Hall as background. More airtime for Alie'e.

  A cop named Hampstad wandered by, leered at Lucas, and said, "You hear the one about the guy with the headache?"

  "Aw, Jesus," Lucas said.

  "Guy goes to the doc, and he says, 'Doc, you gotta help me. I got this terrible headache. It feels like somebody is pounding a nail through my forehead. Like I got a big pair of pliers squeezing behind my ears. It's tension from my job. I can't stop working right now, but the headaches killing me. You gotta help.' So the doc says, 'You know, I do have a cure. Exactly the same thing happened to me—I was working too much, and I got exactly the same headache. Then one night I was performing oral sex on my wife, and her legs were squeezing my head really tight, really hard, and the pressure must have done something, because the headache was a lot better. So I did this every night for two weeks, and at the end of two weeks, the headache was gone.' And the guy says, I'm desperate, Doc, I'll try anything.' The doc said, 'Well, then, I'll see you in two weeks.' So the guy goes away, and two weeks later he comes back for his appointment and he's the most cheerful guy in the world. And he says, 'Doc, you're a miracle worker. I did just what you told me, and the headache's gone. Vanished. I feel great. I think it's got to be the pressure, and—by the way, you've got a beautiful home.' "

  "Saw it coming," Lucas said without cracking a smile.

  "Bullshit, saw it coming. You're cracking up inside," Hampstad said.

  "Have I mentioned our sensitivity sessions? We have them—"

  "Fuck a bunch of sensitivity," Hampstad grumbled. "Nobody has a sense of humor around this place anymore."

  At the end of the hall, Olson stepped through the chief's door. Lucas pushed away from the wall. "Gotta go," he said. He walked down to the front doors, looked at the media wagons for a count of twenty, then started back toward the chief's office. He heard them as he was coming to the corner, and nearly ran headlong into Olson. They milled for a second, Lucas said, "Sony, sorry, excuse me," and then Olson said, "Chief Davenport… we just talked to the chief."

  "Yes, I knew you were coming."

  "Not very satisfying," Olson said. "She was much more—I don't want to save evasive, but she was much less positive than I had expected. About this Rodriguez man."

  Lucas looked at him for a long beat, then at the rest of the group from Burnt River. "Could I speak to you privately for just a minute?" Lucas said.

  Olson nodded, looked at the Burnt River people, said, "Excuse me for a minute," and he and Lucas walked down the hall toward the front door.

  "The chief is, uh… Did you know I came to see you preach last night?"

  "I thought that might be you in the back. I wasn't sure," Olson said.

  "I was impressed. I'm not from the same stream of… Christianity… as you, I'm a Roman Catholic, but I was… affected." Lucas said, letting himself grope for the words. "What I'm trying to say is, I know you're a good man, I could see it last night. I hate lying to you. The chief wasn't King, but, to tell you the truth, most of us think that Rodriguez was innocent. That he may have been murdered himself."

  "What?" Olson was stunned, but his voice was hushed. "Then who…"

  "A banker named William Spooner. He essentially set Rodriguez up in the drug business, showed him how to launder his money… He was carrying on an affair with Sandy Lansing."

  "Then why don't you…"

  "We're investigating him every way we can, but to be honest—please don't tell anyone I told you this—it's going to be very difficult to get him on this. The two chief witnesses against him would be Sandy Lansing and Rodriguez himself. They're both dead. And even if we arrested him, a defense attorney could simply prosecute Rodriguez during Spooner's trial, and frankly, Rodriguez is a much more inviting suspect. Even if he didn't do it."

  "Are you saying that Spooner'll never be punished?" O
lson asked.

  "I don't know what's going to happen, I really don't," Lucas said.

  "I don't know what to say," Olson said. "I should talk to Chief Roux again."

  "Don't do that, it'll just cause problems for her. She's trying as hard as she can with all this media attention… She wants the media to concentrate on Rodriguez for a few days, since it can't hurt him anymore, while we go after Spooner."

  "This is… I don't know."

  "I'll tell you what you can do," Lucas said, trying to feel the sincerity. "You can pray for us. After what I saw last night, I believe it will do some good."

  Olson looked at him for a moment, a speculative examination of several seconds, then said, "I will."

  Lucas said goodbye, shaking Olsons hand, then walked through the group of Burnt River people, down the hall, and to his office. Felt the dark finger of hypocrisy stroking his soul. All for justice, he thought. Or for something. Winning, maybe.

  Lucas waited in his office until he figured Olson would be gone, then walked down to Homicide to talk to Lester. "We need to put a couple of people on William Spooner," he said. "More to cover him than to watch him."

  "What's going on?" Lester asked.

  "I just gave Spooner's name to Olson. I didn't tell Rose Marie, so she'll have a little insulation. But if Olson starts wandering around in his car, and we're too far back… he could walk right up to Spooner's front door and nail him before we could catch up."

  "Man, I don't know about this," Lester said, shaking his head.

  "We were willing to do it with Jael and Catherine Kinsley—use them as decoys—and they weren't even guilty of anything."

  "Yeah, but they sorta volunteered," Lester said.

  "They had no choice, Frank. Their names got leaked and played in the papers and on television, and somebody in this department leaked them. They wouldn't have volunteered if their names hadn't already been out there."

  "All right, all right… I get a little puckered up sometimes."