Lucas Davenport Novels 16-20

by John Sandford

  They thought about it through their pie; halfway through, Shrake mumbled, “You know what? They’re still here.”

  LETTY HAD been lying on her bed, thinking about her next move, when they arrived, and she wandered into the kitchen as they were talking. Shrake said, “Hello, sweet thing,” and Jenkins said, “The movie star.”

  Letty patted Shrake on his broad back and said, “If only you were forty years younger,” which made Lucas laugh so hard that he choked. “A piece of chicken breading went up my nose,” he said. Shrake pretended to sulk: “For Christ’s sakes, I am only forty.”

  “And in good shape,” Letty said. “For a guy that old.”

  “What’re you up to?” Lucas asked.

  “Not much going on tomorrow. I’m going to write the Mockingbird essay tonight, I guess.”

  “Better than messing around with hookers,” Lucas said. He gave a short recap to Shrake and Jenkins.

  “Sounds like a good story to me,” Shrake said.

  “You get better-looking by the minute,” Letty said.

  Jenkins squinted at her: “How old are you?”

  “Fourteen.”

  Jenkins looked at Lucas and shook his head: “Jesus Christ, Lucas, you attract trouble. You’re a fuuuhhh . . . trouble magnet.”

  “Was that a French trouble magnet?” Letty asked. “A freaky trouble magnet? A fancy trouble magnet? A . . .”

  “Fuck off, kid,” Jenkins said.

  AFTER TRADING a few more insults with Jenkins and Shrake, Letty got a single-serving milk bottle and walked back up to her bedroom, sat on the bed and thought about it some more.

  What if Randy killed Juliet? If he did, it’d be Letty’s fault. The thought went round and round like a carousel, and always came back, no matter how she twisted it up.

  What if Randy did something so awful . . .

  And yet she had the feeling that Randy was too manipulative for that. He’d fly into a rage, he’d beat Juliet, maybe, but he wouldn’t kill her. She was his sexual ATM. If she timed it just right, if she listened outside the house, she could have the police there within a couple of minutes.

  And the original threat remained. If Lucas found out that Randy had been stalking Letty, he’d kill Randy. If he did it with his usual intelligence, it would be taken care of quietly enough; but now, because of Letty, Jennifer knew about it. What she would do, if Randy disappeared, Letty didn’t know. She really was a goody-goody.

  One way or another, Letty had to make the call. Had to make it.

  19

  THEY MET IN A BCA classroom as the sun was sliding down in the west, everyone that Lucas had managed to scrape up: two St. Paul detectives, six BCA agents who volunteered time because of the Benson shooting—more would have volunteered, but they were already on the street, working the convention—and two detectives from Minneapolis, along with Shrake and Jenkins. Two Secret Service agents sat in the back, but the Secret Service was so pressed by the night’s political ceremonies that they couldn’t free any men for the actual search.

  Lucas unrolled oversized printouts from the county assessor’s office, showing every building in downtown St. Paul. One of the assessor’s men had gone over the maps and marked the buildings that had either rental apartments, or condos that somebody might rent out on their own.

  “We didn’t have time to write all this stuff on each individual map, so everybody take a contact sheet from Carol,” Lucas said. Carol waved a stack of Xerox paper at them. “On it, you’ll find the latest phone number we have for the condo association president or the apartment manager. Talk to them face-to-face.”

  They had too many buildings, but divided them up as well as they could, some of them getting a few large ones, some getting a bigger batch of smaller ones.

  “Warn the president or the manager or the owner, or whoever you get, not to go nosing around on his own, or make any inquiries. We’re pretty sure they’re in there somewhere, and if we miss them, we’ll either have to start over, or figure something else out. Carol is passing out updated photos of the suspects, changing hair color and other stuff according to what we’ve found out about them.”

  There were the usual questions, and reiterations, and some confusion about geography on the part of the out-of-towners who didn’t know the downtown area, but they got everybody oriented and ready to go by dark.

  “Listen, people,” Lucas concluded. “Do not—DO NOT—try to take these guys. They’ve already killed four cops, one of them our own guy, another one who was helping us out over in Hudson. If you get a line on them—anything at all—I can pull our BCA SWAT guys off the street and go in and take them down. These guys have a reputation for hitting armored cars and other hard targets, and they have access to any kind of firearms that they want. These are tough guys and we could be talking heavy weapons. Let SWAT do their thing. We don’t need any more dead heroes.”

  THEY ALL went out in pairs, except for Lucas, who stuck with Shrake and Jenkins. The three of them took the two largest condos. Shrake said, “I bet they picked the biggest one they could get into. In a small one, somebody’s always going to notice a stranger. Somebody’ll try to make friends. In a big one, there are people coming and going all the time.”

  Lucas nodded: “I’ll buy that.”

  “If that fuckin’ Flowers was here, we could split up, two and two,” Jenkins said.

  “He’s coming, but he was way the hell out in Bigelow,” Lucas said.

  “Where’s that?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s way the hell out.”

  THE TWO condos were kitty-corner from each other in the same block, with a shopping area and offices in a mall between them. They parked underground and walked around the block to the larger of the two buildings. On the way, they ran into a walking train of people in formal wear, women with glittery icefalls of diamonds around their necks, down their breasts. They were heading up the skyways toward the convention hotels at the top of the hill.

  Shrake: “She’s got more money on her tits than I got on my house.”

  “Both our houses. Together,” Jenkins said, looking after them.

  Lucas’s phone rang, and he looked at the screen. Del. Lucas punched him up and Del said, “It’s a boy.”

  “You knew that,” Lucas said, and “Congratulations. Jeez, whoever would have even believed it, Del.” He passed the phone to the other two, who gave Del the raft of shit that he’d expect, and both congratulated him, and Lucas took the phone back and Del said, “I gotta get some sleep. I think I’m more beat up than my old lady.”

  “I doubt it,” Lucas said.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “House-to-house,” Lucas said, deliberately discouraging him. “You wouldn’t be interested.”

  “I’m going home,” Del said.

  AT THE apartment, another jeweled train went by, and they gawked, and Jenkins said, “These aren’t even the rich ones. The rich ones are staying up there. These ones have to walk in.”

  Lucas called the association president, whose name was Dan Eller, and Eller buzzed them up to his apartment on the twenty-fourth floor and met them at the door. He was bald, mustachioed, genially overweight, and retired.

  After Lucas explained, Eller said, “The problem is, we have rentals here, too, and those people are coming and going all the time.”

  “How about the people on the floors? Who knows who?”

  “I can help you with the condo levels, but I don’t know about the rentals,” Eller said. “I mean, I know a couple people, maybe they could chain you up with more.”

  “You haven’t seen anybody who looks like these guys . . . ?”

  “No, and I’m around the building a lot,” Eller said. “Pretty much on every condo floor every day. We’ve been having roof and drainage problems, and, it’s gonna cost to fix, so I’ve been politicking.”

  “People have rented out their condos, though, right?”

  “Yup. A few. People have cabins up north. They stay up there and
make money down here on the convention.”

  Eller gave them a list of names—“most of them are older, they’ll be home”—and also the name and phone number of his opposite number in the other apartment building. “That building’s all rentals, but they set up an apartment association, and Ken runs it. More like a tenants’ union than a condo association.”

  THEY DECIDED to start at the top, and rode the elevator up, and when they got off, Jenkins stopped, and when Lucas and Shrake looked back, he said, “You know what? We look exactly like a bunch of flatfeet.”

  Lucas looked at them, and himself, and sighed and nodded. “All right. You two guys do this building. I’m gonna go talk to this Ken guy in the other building.”

  “This is feeling kind of weak,” Shrake said, turning around to look at the empty hallways. “I got that empty-tank feeling.”

  “Maybe it’ll go away when you do some actual work,” Lucas said.

  BUT IT was the worst kind of police work, Lucas thought, as he took the elevator back down. The kind of stuff done as a last resort, talking to people who you had no reason to suspect knew anything at all. Or maybe, he thought, like church bingo; sort of dull and hopeless, but somebody was going to win. Just not you.

  On the street level again, another two glittery couples brushed past, aiming up the hill. Four cops went down the street on horses; horses seemed to be everywhere. The cops looked him over, but the last cop lifted a hand and said, “Davenport,” and Lucas waved back, and pushed into the lobby of the apartment building.

  Ken Jacobsen, who lived on the eighteenth floor of the second tower, looked at the photographs and shook his head. He’d been cooking liver and onions, and the apartment was fragrant with the gravy. “Let me give you some names, people to talk to.”

  “Are you around the building much?”

  “Off and on,” Jacobsen said. “But we’re not directly responsible for the buildings. We’re not owners, so it’s not quite like it is in Dan’s condo.”

  As Lucas was going out the door, Jacobsen said, “Hey: let me make a call, here. I’ll see if the Hassans are still in the building.”

  The Hassans were two cell-phone-equipped Ethiopian janitors: their English wasn’t good, but was good enough that Lucas was sure that they hadn’t seen Cohn or Diaz.

  “Terrorists?” one of the Hassans asked.

  Lucas nodded. “If you see them, call nine-one-one.”

  “Nine-one-one,” said the second Hassan. “We will do.”

  LUCAS TALKED to two widows and a widower, and was growing depressed, looking into their tiny apartments, when a call came in from one of the Minneapolis detectives: “We got a hit. A good one.”

  “Good one?” Lucas asked, the evening suddenly brighter.

  “Old lady says she saw a guy going through with two women. Tall, thin, dark hair, mustache. She said the woman looked like a Filipino, but that seemed close enough—the picture you gave us does look sort of like something else. So I showed her the mug shots, and she’s not sure on the woman, but she’s fairly sure about Cohn. She said it’s him.”

  “Terrific. This is terrific,” Lucas said. “You said Park Vista? Where’s that at?”

  The cop told him, and Lucas said, “Hell, you’re right down the street.”

  “It’s Park Vista Two, exactly. It’s the door on the left. This old lady was no dummy—I got a good feeling about it, man.”

  “Okay. I’m coming over, I’m bringing my guys, I’m cranking up the SWAT.”

  “Listen, I can watch the lobby and the door, but my partner thinks you should bring the SWAT in through the basement,” the cop said. “They can bring their van right down the front ramp—it’ll take a Sprinter van, the manager says, so the SWAT stuff should fit. From there, it’s either up the elevators or up the stairs.”

  “I’ll hook you up with the SWAT guy. His name is Able Peterson, you can talk him in. This is good work, man.”

  HE CALLED the SWAT commander: “Able, we need you.”

  “Goddamnit, Lucas, you got them? Where?”

  Lucas gave them the address off Mears Park. “It’s the new ones, the ones with the colored panels. It’s the one on the left as you look at them from the front. I’ve got the name of a guy who can let you into the basement level, the parking level.”

  “It’ll take me twenty minutes to break off here, get my guys ready to go.”

  He gave Peterson the cop’s phone number, and then called Shrake and Jenkins: “We’ve got a line on them.”

  “Where at?” Jenkins asked.

  “Park Vista—those big twin buildings on Mears Park.”

  “That’d be about right. Half-full, big buildings . . .”

  “Two minutes,” Lucas said.

  LETTY DECIDED that she had no choice: or rather, she had a choice, but both options were bad. One was bad for Briar, one was bad for Lucas, and that tipped the balance. You took care of your own.

  She’d gotten Whitcomb’s phone number the first day; now she rode her bike across town to the Capitol lawn as the evening came on. There were a couple thousand people floating around, after some kind of event, maybe a music thing. A Channel Three van was parked at the bottom of the hill, on the street. Among the crowd she spotted a group of frat boys from the University of Minnesota, who were towing some sorority girls around in little red wagons, tiny floats for Obama. She chained her bike to a tree and jogged over.

  One of them, a tall young man with green soap-spiked hair that made him look a little like the Statue of Liberty, was wearing a homemade button that said “Greeks for Obama,” and Letty grabbed him.

  “You wanna be a TV star?” she asked him.

  “Shit, yes.”

  “Try not to say ‘shit’ when you’re on camera,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

  She jogged down the hill to the van and knocked on the door.

  Lois looked out at her: “Letty,” she said. She seemed abashed, having ratted Letty out a couple days before. “Are you supposed to be here?”

  Letty said, “Could we do a minute on some kids from the U? They’re pretty funny . . . Frats for Obama . . .”

  Lois said, “If they’re coherent . . .”

  Letty said, “Get a camera . . .” and she headed back up the hill to the frat boys. They did a minute, and then Letty told Lois that she better head home, but she wanted one last look around. Lois said, “Okay. And that frat boy stuff—not too bad.”

  “At least he didn’t say ‘shit’ on TV,” Letty said.

  ALIBI.

  Two minutes later, she was on her bike, the streets not so well-lit now, but she had her switchblade and the confidence that she could move quickly enough, and in the dark, that nobody could move on her. She was right.

  From an outdoor phone at Metro U, six blocks from Whitcomb’s house, she made the call: tried to put on an accent that she’d picked up from HBO specials on hookers. A male voice, and she said, “Randy, you know that bitch of yours is hanging out with the Davenport kid? Thought you’d like to know.”

  “What? What?”

  “That bitch of yours is hanging out with the Davenport kid, told her what you were up to. You take care.”

  “This ain’t Randy. Wait a minute.”

  Letty groaned. Wrong guy. Then Randy came up: “What?”

  She did it all over again, then clicked off, got back on her bike, headed up the hill toward Whitcomb’s house, pumping as hard as she could.

  ON THE way over to Park Vista, Lucas called Operations at the BCA and got an urgent warrant started: “I don’t care who you call, but I need it in five minutes. If we don’t get it, we might have to go anyway, because these guys are killers and they’re going to kill again, and maybe tonight.”

  All recorded: building a case for a warrantless entry.

  They walked over separately, keeping in mind that together, they looked like flatfoots. Lucas found the Minneapolis cop standing with a civilian, by the electronic gate on the parking ramp. Lucas said, “You’
re Doug Swanson.”

  “Swenson.” The cop nodded and said, “My partner’s Dan Long. We got a call from your SWAT guy, he’s on the way.” Swenson looked at his watch. “They’re still ten or fifteen minutes out.”

  “What about the apartment?” Lucas asked.

  Swenson flicked a finger at the civilian. “This is Carl Bishop, he’s the manager. He gave us a key to an apartment down the hall. Dan’s up there with the key in the lock, and if anything moves in their apartment, or anybody comes down the hall, he’ll go on in, like they just caught him getting home . . .”

  Jenkins: “We oughta get out of sight. If they’re out and they come down that entry ramp and see us, it’ll be the OK Corral.”

  THEY MOVED inside, to the lobby, and then into the mail room, looking at the backside of three hundred mailboxes. Lucas called Able Peterson and asked, “How long?”

  “We’re staging, we’re getting armored up. I sent Dick McGuire over there with some listening gear. He ought to be coming in the door with a carry-on suitcase. If you could get him into an adjacent apartment . . .”

  Both of the adjacent apartments were occupied, but one of them was occupied by a retired cop who said he’d be happy to see them. About that time, McGuire came through the front door and they sent him up, after warning Dan Long that McGuire was a cop, and on the way.

  Two minutes later, McGuire was at work, and two minutes after that, he called Lucas and said, “I can’t hear a thing. If there’s anybody there, I should be able to hear something. I should be able to hear them breathing—I think the place is empty.”

  “Gotta go in,” Lucas said. “Could be somebody dead . . . maybe there’s something about the walls that’s defeating the listening gear.”