“But maybe not the dope?” Lucas asked of the chair.
Bone spun the chair around. He had a lean, wolflike face. He grinned, showing his teeth. “Maybe not, because there’s another good possibility that bankers don’t like to talk about—the other possibility is, he found a guy at the bank and either bribed him to okay the loan, or kicked back part of the loan itself.”
“But whatever happened, the bank guy would have to know.”
“I don’t see how he could avoid it, if his IQ’s over eighty,” Bone said. Then: “I hope I haven’t screwed anybody here.”
“You might be reading about it,” Lucas said. “This Rodriguez . . .”
Bone was a smart guy. He knew Lucas wouldn’t be on a routine errand. “Alie’e?”
“You might be reading about it,” Lucas said again.
DEL CALLED TO suggest they meet in St. Paul. Lucas checked on Marcy by phone, then got his car and headed across the river. Rodriguez’s office was in the Windshuttle Building, hooked by Skyway to Galtier Plaza. Lucas dumped the Porsche in the Galtier parking garage and found Lane and Del loitering in the Skyway.
“He’s down there now, talking to his secretary. See the Temps office? Look one window to the left, the guy in the pink shirt. That’s him.” Lane handed Lucas a pair of miniature Pentax binoculars, and Lucas looked down through the Skyway windows at the man in the pink shirt.
Rodriguez was ordinary. At six-two or six-three, he had thinning brown hair and a gut. He didn’t look Latino; he looked like an everyday Minnesota white guy. He was intent on the secretary’s computer screen. He said something to her, looked at a printer, looked back at the computer, tapped the screen, then turned back to the printer as a piece of paper rolled out.
As he turned back and forth, Lucas got a good view of his face. “You’re sure this is the guy?”
“This is the guy,” Lane said.
“He looks like a city councilman.” Lucas turned to Del, “What’d the BCA say?”
“He had a fairly heavy juvenile record in Detroit, burglary mostly. They think he was running dope early on, just deliveries on his bike, then got his nose into it. He didn’t do much in the way of sales. . . . Then he just disappeared. They never tried to find out where he went, they were just happy he was gone. They did some assessments on him when he was in juvenile care. They say he’s smart, but as far as they can tell, he never went to school after the fifth grade.”
“All right,” Lucas said. He handed the glasses back to Lane and said, “You go home, relax, have a couple beers, visit your girlfriend, whatever. But I want you back on this guy tomorrow morning at nine o’clock, wherever he is, and you can plan to stay on him every day, all day, until we take him down.”
“Good.” Lane nodded. “Where’re you guys going?”
Lucas looked at Del. “We better go talk to Rose Marie.”
ROSE MARIE HAD just broken free of a press conference when Lucas and Del arrived. They could see her through the glass door of her outer office, waving her arms around, as the receptionist shook her head in sympathy. Lucas pushed through the door. Rose Marie nodded at them, turned back toward the receptionist to finish what she was saying, saw Del’s “Lick Dick” T-shirt, did a worried double-take, lost her thought, and asked, “What?”
“We gotta talk.”
Inside her office, with the door closed, Lucas said, “I think we got the Alie’e killer. I’d say maybe eighty-five percent.”
Rose Marie looked from Lucas to Del and back to Lucas and asked, “Who?”
“A guy named Rodriguez.” They laid it out for her. At the end, she said, “So we know who it is, but we can’t convict him.”
“That’s pretty much it,” Lucas admitted. “When you make the leaps, you can convince yourself that he’s the guy . . . but a jury, I don’t think so. One thing, he doesn’t look like a dope dealer. He looks like a washing-machine salesman.”
“What if he isn’t the guy?”
“We put together a case. If we can put together a solid enough case to convince ourselves . . . maybe we’ll have a chance. Or maybe we’ll stumble over something,” Lucas said. “I mean, we convicted Rashid Al-Balah and he didn’t even do it.”
“So . . . we brace the loan officer from the bank.”
“As soon as we do it, he’s gonna go out the back door, make a phone call, and Rodriguez will know we’re on his ass,” Del said.
“Good thought. We ought to have Rodriguez tapped,” Lucas said. “If we can get him talking about it . . .”
“Do we have enough for a tap?” Rose Marie asked.
“Probably,” Lucas said. “We can get that going this afternoon. The best thing that could happen to the county attorney’s office is to have something to distract from the Al-Balah story, when it breaks. If we can hang Rodriguez for Alie’e, Al-Balah moves to page nine.”
“Al-Balah has already broken,” Rose Marie said. “The county attorney’s guys decided it’d be better to get out there first with the news, put some of their own spin on it.”
“Still . . .”
Rose Marie nodded. “I’ll get them started on a tap.”
Then Rose Marie laid out the situation with Tom Olson. He was out of the hospital, but was being tailed by relays of Homicide and Intelligence cops, who would stay with him twenty-four hours a day. Alie’e’s funeral had been delayed until the elder Olsons’ bodies were released, so they could all be buried together—and that might be a while yet, because the situation in the Bloomington motel room was so complicated.
“If Olson’s the guy—the one who’s going after everybody else, in revenge for his sister—we think he might go after Jael Corbeau again, or the other woman, Catherine Kinsley.”
“Or that Jax guy.”
“Jax checked out,” Rose Marie said. “He’s gone to New York, but says he’ll be back for the funeral. He’s probably shopping for the right outfit to wear when he throws himself in her grave.”
“So we’re just watching?” Lucas asked.
“No. We’ve had these family briefings every day, and we’re going to continue them. In fact, Olson’s coming here in”—she looked at her watch—“about twenty-five minutes. We’re going to try to point him at Kinsley. We’ll talk a little about Alie’e’s relationship with her. Kinsley and her husband are going up north to their cabin, which is way the hell out in the woods. You can’t even find them with a map. We’ll have a team at her house, waiting, if Olson goes that way.”
“How about Jael?” Lucas asked.
“We think he’s less likely to try her, because he tried once, and she ran him off,” Rose Marie said. “But we’ll have a team there, too. I’d appreciate it if you’d stop by and talk to her. She’s scared, and she’d like to have you around.”
“All right,” Lucas said. “And listen, I know Angela Harris is a smart shrink, but I saw Olson’s face when he came running across the grass to tell us about his folks. And man, I don’t know about this multiple-personality stuff, but that was . . . real. That was so strong that if his personalities were gonna dissolve, or whatever they do, that would have happened right then. I mean . . . I’ve never seen anything like it. Ever.”
“We’re keeping that in mind, of course,” Rose Marie said. “But it’s what we’ve got, right now.”
“So we’re set?” Del asked, stepping toward the door.
“If everything went exactly right—exactly right—we could have both these guys in twenty-four hours,” Rose Marie said. “If the bank guy calls Rodriguez, if Olson goes for Kinsley . . .”
“There’s gotta be at least one time in life when everything works,” Del said. “One time.”
“Bullshit,” Lucas said. Out in the hall, when they were away from Rose Marie, he added, “She says they’re keeping in mind that it might be somebody else, but they’re not. They just put all their chips on Olson.”
“And we put all of ours on Rodriguez,” Del said.
“Yeah, but there’s a major difference,” Lu
cas said.
“What’s that?”
“We’re right. They might not be.”
19
DEL WENT OFF to coordinate with the county attorney’s office on the wiretaps and the subpoena for Rodriguez’s bank records. Lucas went down to the Homicide office and spent an hour looking over the typescript of the Rodriguez interview, and talked to Frank Lester and Sloan about the multiple-personality idea.
“Everything I know about it I learned from TV,” Sloan said. “But you gotta admit, the guy looks good. He’s got motive, he had access to the shooting car, he could get close enough to take his parents out . . .”
“When he came running after us, after he found the bodies . . . he looked like his head was trying to explode,” Lucas said. “He was trying to pull the hair out of the sides of his head; I’ve never seen anything like it. Then he dropped in his tracks.”
“Could be psychological pressure from the other personality,” Lester said. “Or maybe he’s just goofy.”
“What we saw was real. He wasn’t faking anything. If his other personality killed his parents, the personality we saw didn’t know it,” Lucas said.
LUCAS LEFT THE City Hall as the streetlights were coming on. Fifteen minutes later, he slid to the curb at Jael Corbeau’s house and headed up the walk. Every room inside the house was lit; everything outside was dark, including the front porch. When Lucas reached for the doorbell, a voice from the corner of the porch said, “Go on in, Chief.”
“Who is that?” he asked. He didn’t turn his head.
“Jimmy Smith. From dope.”
“You cold?” Lucas asked, still speaking at the door panel.
“Nah. I’m wearing my deer-hunting camies.”
“Excellent.” Lucas pushed through the door into the living room, where he met another dope cop, Alex Hutton, who stood to one side with a hammerless .357 in his right hand. He slipped it away when he saw Lucas’s face, and said, “Franklin and Jael are upstairs. Cooking.”
“Franklin cooks?” It seemed unlikely.
“He’s teaching her how to make one-minute meals, you know, for during football commercials.”
“The guy has talent,” Lucas said.
Hutton took a step closer, dropped his voice, and said, “I don’t know where this chick has been for the first part of my life, but she is hot.”
“I thought you were married with about nine kids,” Lucas said, dropping his voice. He added, “Besides, she sorta likes other girls.”
“I only got three kids . . . and I think Jael likes a little of everything,” Hutton said, glancing at the door that led into the back of the house and the kitchen. “If she wanted to bring another chick along, I could handle that—conceptually, anyway.”
“Except that your wife would stab you to death.”
“Fuck my wife. She’s history. I’m abandoning her. I figure if I abandon a wife and three kids, the papers will pass on the story. You only get in trouble for five or more.”
“I forgot all about stakeouts,” Lucas said. “The sexual fantasies, and all that, when you’ve got nothing to do.”
AS HE WALKED up the stairs, Lucas could hear Franklin’s gravelly voice. He was saying, “All right, hands clear of the counter. Hands clear . . .”
Jael: “I’m arranging the cheese sacks.”
“Nope. No good. Gotta be like you just threw them in the fridge. . . .”
Lucas leaned in the kitchen door, and a second later, Hutton came to stand behind him. Franklin and Jael had their backs to them, and Jael was closing the refrigerator door. Franklin looked at his watch and asked, “Ready?”
“Ready.”
“Five seconds . . . four, three, two, one, GO!”
Jael jerked the refrigerator open, pulled out two sacks of grated cheese, threw them at the kitchen counter, snatched a plate out of the cupboard, opened a bag of blue-corn nacho chips, and spilled them onto the plate.
“Too many chips, too many chips,” Franklin warned. She grabbed a handful of them off the plate, threw them back in the bag, quickly arranged the others on the plate, and Franklin said, “Fifteen seconds.” Jael opened the two bags of cheese, working frantically, spread a small handful from one bag over the plate of chips, opened the other, spread another small handful, and asked, “Is that good?”
“You’re looking good, but you’re a few seconds behind,” Franklin said. “Gotta keep rolling.”
She picked up the plate and pushed it into the microwave, said, “One minute,” pressed a series of buttons, and the microwave started to hum. Then she went back to the refrigerator, grabbed a jar of salsa, popped the top, got a spoon and dumped three large spoonfuls into a small glass dessert bowl, glanced at the microwave timer, put the top back on the salsa jar, stuck it in the refrigerator, and wrapped up the top of one of the cheese bags, while watching the timer. Then she reached out. . . .
“Not too soon, not too soon,” Franklin said. Jael jabbed a button, popped open the microwave door, thrust the salsa bowl inside, slammed the door, and pushed the Resume button.
“Might be too much time,” Franklin said.
“No, I think we’re okay,” Jael said. Working quickly, she wrapped up the top of the second cheese bag, put both cheese bags back into the refrigerator, took out two beers, stepped back to the microwave, said, “Three seconds.”
There was a popping sound, then another. Franklin said, “Shit. I told you. There goes the salsa.”
The microwave beeped and Jael opened the door and looked inside. The interior was spattered with little gob-bets of salsa. “I’ll get it later,” she said.
“Classic line,” Franklin said with approval.
She pulled out the dish full of chips and the bowl of salsa, turned to the cooking island, saw Lucas for the first time, put the chips on the butcher-block top, and said, “Time.”
Franklin looked at his watch. “One minute, twenty-nine seconds. If you add ten seconds going and coming, you could’ve missed a pass play.”
“I don’t think I can cut much time,” she said.
“You just don’t have the moves worked out yet,” Franklin said. “You lost time with the chips, arranging them, you lost time getting the salsa out. And now you gotta go back and clean the microwave.”
Jael looked at Lucas and asked, “Did you know that if you heat up salsa too fast, the onions pop like popcorn?”
“Everybody knows that,” he said as Franklin turned around. Franklin seemed mildly embarrassed.
“I’ve been cooking seriously for half of my life, and I didn’t know that,” she said. “Even the idea of heating it up seemed pretty brutal.”
“Gotta have it about medium-warm, a little better than room temperature.”
Hutton chipped in. “You want boiling-hot cheese on the chips, medium-warm salsa, very cold beer. You want that range.”
“Do all men know this?” she asked.
All three of them nodded, and said at once, “Of course.”
THE HOUSE ORIGINALLY had four bedrooms and a full bathroom upstairs. Jael had wiped out the bottom floor as a studio; had rebuilt a kitchen upstairs, in what had been the master bedroom; the other three she’d turned into a snug little living room/dining room, a small library/office, and her own bedroom. The space was carefully assembled and connected, and Lucas felt comfortable.
They’d chatted with Franklin and Hutton for a few minutes, eating the nachos with melted cheese—“I can feel my heart clogging up. This stuff is absolute shit,” Jael said—and then Jael said to Lucas, “Let’s go talk.”
As she stepped past him, she caught his wrist in her hand and led him out of the room; Hutton raised an eyebrow. In the living room, Lucas sprawled on a couch while Jael settled back in an oversized chair. Lucas said, “Great chair,” and Jael said, “All guys don’t really know about that nacho-cheese thing.”
“You’re right. There’s probably some raggedy-ass cowboy out on a ranch in North Dakota somewhere who doesn’t have either a TV or a microwave
.”
She said, “It really . . . wasn’t bad.”
“If you eat that stuff three days in a row, you’ll be as big as Franklin.” Franklin completely filled an average doorway. “In fact, Franklin used to be about your size.”
She nodded, getting rid of the topic. “I went to see Marcy a couple of hours ago. I just missed you.”
“She’s hanging on,” Lucas said, his face going grim. “But she’s harder than goddamn nails. If anybody can make it back, she’s the one.”
“I feel . . . you know. Guilt, I guess.”
“Don’t,” he said. “This has nothing to do with you, really. It has something to do with a nut, and some asshole who killed Alie’e and Sandy Lansing.”
“I can’t get Plain’s body,” she said. “But I finally found Dad. He’s on St. Paul Island, which is about as far from here as you can get and still be on Earth. It’ll take him a few days to get here.”
“How is he?” Lucas asked.
“Devastated. I’d like to get the thing . . . done with.”
“I’ll see about it,” Lucas promised. “This thing with Plain . . . when did that end?”
“A year ago.”
“A year? I thought it might be more recent . . . the way he acted.”
“Time was not a big deal with Plain. Everything was right now. He could read a history book about Rome and get angry about the Roman empire.”
“Tell me about Alie’e,” Lucas said. “Was there anybody that she talked about? Anybody who might be a little over the edge?”
“Are you questioning me?” But she smiled, and when she did, her torn-paper face was beautiful, tough and vulnerable at once.
“No, no. Of course not. And if you want to talk about something else, that’s fine. But I start brooding about this kind of stuff. You know, why? Most people are freaked out by the idea of shoplifting. If you get somebody killing several people, he’s either completely psychotic, delusional, nuts, living in a different world, listening to God . . . or he thinks he’s got a reason. This guy we’re looking for, he thinks he’s got a reason. So there should be some connection to Alie’e. Somewhere, a connection.”
Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15 Page 23