Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15

by John Sandford

  “How long from the time he drove in the garage until you saw the lump?” Lucas asked.

  “We’ve been trying to figure that out. We were talking on cell phones, so you can probably get the exact time from the calls, but I figure it was about ten minutes,” Winter said.

  “I think it might have been a little longer,” Stone said. “I think it might have been ten minutes before you walked up the ramp, then another few before you came back out, then walked down and looked in the door. . . . Maybe twelve or thirteen minutes.”

  “You can tell from the phone calls,” Winter repeated. The two cops were anxious to get out from under, Lucas realized. And he couldn’t see what else they might’ve done.

  “All right,” Lucas said. “You done good, guys.”

  Stone glanced at Winter, relieved. Lucas went back to the circle of cops around Rodriguez’s body.

  “Where’s his briefcase?”

  “Up there.” He pointed up, at the railing around the second floor of the atrium. “He set it down before he took the dive—if he took a dive.”

  “He’s a big guy to have somebody throw him over without a fight,” one of the St. Paul cops said.

  “Goddamn TV was all over him. He was about to lose his ass,” another one said.

  Lucas said, “I want to look in his briefcase.”

  “Crime-scene guys working it,” one of the St. Paul cops said. “Take the elevator.”

  Lucas went up, found a crime-scene cop probing the briefcase. “Papers,” he said. “This thing.” He held up a plastic box in his latex-covered hand.

  “What is it?” Lucas asked.

  The crime-scene guy turned it in his hand. “Zip disk, two-pack.”

  “How about a receipt? You see a receipt in there?”

  The cop dug back into the briefcase and came up with a slip of paper. He held it away from himself, in better light: “CompUSA. Zip disk. Two-pack.”

  Lucas walked back downstairs. The St. Paul chief of police was coming down the hall, two steps behind Del. Del lifted a hand, and the St. Paul chief said, “He jump?”

  Lucas said, “I don’t know, but I’d send a guy down to get his computer. I think he came down to clean out his disk drive. Maybe changed his mind when he walked up to the railing.”

  They all looked up at the railing. The St. Paul chief said, “Woodbury is out at his apartment. They say there’s no note.”

  “Didn’t have time to write one.” Lucas looked at Del. “You wanna ride out to Woodbury?”

  Del looked down at Rodriguez’s body, then up at the railing, and said, “Might as well. Elvis has left the building.”

  As they stepped away, the St. Paul chief said, “If he jumped . . . he took a lot of problems with him.”

  ON THE WAY out to Woodbury, Del called the Woodbury cops and got directions. Rodriguez’s apartment was in one of his own buildings. “The Penthouse suite,” the cop said, deploying a capital P. “That’s what I’m told.”

  “Find out who was watching his phones tonight,” Lucas said. “Find out if there was a call.”

  Del checked. “Not a single call at his apartment today,” he said.

  “Goddamnit.”

  Rodriguez’s building was a routine-looking apartment with a pea-gravel finish over concrete block, double-glass doors, and a line of mailboxes and buzzers between the two doors. A Woodbury patrolman sent them to four, the top floor. His apartment door was open, and Lucas stepped in, with Del just behind. “Dope money,” Del said as soon as he was inside.

  All the walls had flocked wallpaper; the furniture all came from the same store, and that was Swedish modern; high-style graphics on the walls. A plainclothes cop stepped toward them. “Chief Davenport. I’m Dave Thompson.”

  “How are ya? This is Del . . . what’d you get?”

  “Not much. Yet. He’s got a lot of paper in his office, taxes mostly. . . . No suicide note, nothing like that. We checked the answering machine, nothing there. No computer in the house.”

  “Talk to his neighbors?”

  “He’s only got one on this floor,” the cop said. “We haven’t been able to find them yet. It’s a married couple, they left here about six. People downstairs said they looked like they were going out. A little dressed up.”

  “All right. . . . Mind if I walk through?”

  “No, like I said. There just isn’t much to see. Mirrors in the bedroom. . . . Big TV, he’s got a home theater.”

  Lucas and Del did a quick walk-through, all the way to the back. The master bedroom was at the end of a central hall: mirrors on the bedroom wall beside the bed, and two more on the ceiling. Heavy pine chests and chest of drawers, with black metal fixtures. The next room up was a small office, with a built-in desk, a Rolodex, a two-drawer filing cabinet, and a telephone. A cop was on his knees, going through the cabinet. “Grab the Rolodex,” Lucas said.

  “We will.”

  The theater had a projection TV and a wall of video and stereo equipment, with a big black-leather circular couch facing it; a leather-covered refrigerator sat next to the couch. The room originally had been two bedrooms, Lucas thought: The join was imperfect, a ridge running around the ceiling and walls. “Dope money,” Del said. “A goddamn dealer’s wet dream.”

  The Woodbury plainclothesman wandered toward them, and Lucas asked, “Find anything like a wall safe?”

  “No, no, nothing like that.”

  “You might want to tear the place up a little,” Lucas said. “It’s about five-to-one that he has a little hideout someplace in here.”

  “Check the power outlets, see if any of them don’t work,” Del said. “That’s a longtime crowd favorite.”

  Lucas had stopped in the kitchen. A book of matches lay open on the counter next to the sink.

  “You think he smoked?” Lucas asked Del.

  Del looked at the ceiling, then at the curtains, sniffed, and said, “I don’t think so. Why?”

  “Had these matches sitting here. . . .” Lucas picked them up, then looked at the sink. Grains of black stuff in the strainer. He put his finger in it, rubbed lightly, and took it out.

  “What?” Del asked. The Woodbury cop strained to see.

  “Looks like ash,” Lucas said.

  “He burnt something?”

  “Maybe,” Lucas said.

  And that was it: a group of cops standing around on a carpet with too-deep burgundy pile, looking at the Leroy Neiman print.

  “WHAT’RE WE GONNA do now?” Del asked.

  “You think it’s a suicide?”

  “Yeah, I could buy it—it would solve a lot of problems. I’d like to know a little bit about his medical history, though,” Del said.

  “Doctors?”

  “Yeah. See if he was depressed, if he’d ever been treated. But maybe he just saw the walls coming down, walked up to that atrium and just . . . an impulse.”

  “From the second floor? Christ . . .” Lucas shook his head.

  “That’s a high second floor. You look down from there, you know you ain’t gonna bounce. I’m seeing a guy who’s freaked out, he’s got TV all over his ass, he knows he’s in trouble on the dope, he’s built up this fortune and he sees it drifting away . . . maybe he’s even guilty about Alie’e. Who knows? Anyway, he puts down his bag and dives over the rail.”

  Sounded good. “Maybe.”

  “I’d give it a strong maybe,” Del said. “Reserving the right to change my mind.”

  “So let’s see what the ME says.”

  LUCAS DROPPED DEL back downtown, thought about going over to see Jael, decided against. Thought about calling Weather—but she wasn’t the one to talk to about death and destruction, not when they might be limping back to some kind of reconciliation.

  And was that what they were talking about? Is that what she meant when she said he could call her? What the fuck did she mean? And why was he screwing around with Jael? And Jesus, he didn’t even want to think about Catrin.

  So he went home, thought about
the game for a few minutes, then took a shower and crawled onto his bed. Ran it all around his head, and drifted off to sleep.

  He woke twice during the night, lay awake for an hour each time, running it through. In the morning, he shaved, showered, and, still tired, headed into downtown St. Paul. On the way, he took out his cell phone and called the department photo guy.

  “I got a picture I want you to take,” he said.

  25

  FRIDAY. THE SEVENTH day of Alie’e.

  Rodriguez’s building had been cleaned up and was open for business; except for the cops working on his computer, nobody would have known. Lucas stopped at Rodriguez’s office and was introduced to Rodriguez’s secretary, a young woman who was dealing with her loss with equanimity. “I’ll be working tomorrow night,” she told Lucas. “In this economy, a dead guy could get a job. Whoops—maybe I oughta rephrase that.”

  “Do you think that Richard would have committed suicide?” Lucas asked.

  “He wasn’t the moody type,” she said. But she pressed a finger to her lips, thinking. “On the other hand, when he decided to do something, he’d do it, impulsive-like. Real quick. So, I mean, with all this publicity . . . But I don’t know. Maybe you really don’t know a person until he does something like this. And then, of course, you don’t know him at all, because he’s dead. So, like you never really get a chance to know anybody, you know? When you think about it.”

  In the hall, Lucas told the St. Paul cop, “She seems to be dealing with it.”

  “Yeah. A little too well, if you ask me. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was holding a little cash for the boss, or a little product.”

  “Cash, maybe. Not dope. She’s too ditzy to be trusted with dope,” Lucas said.

  “We’ll probably find out that she’s the brains behind the operation.” They both looked at her through the window slit beside the office door. She was talking to another cop, unconsciously twirling a ringlet of hair with an index finger. Lucas and the St. Paul cop looked back at each other and simultaneously said, “Maybe not.”

  “You know what I really need,” Lucas said. “I need to find the maintenance guy.”

  THE MAINTENANCE MAN looked worried. “I’ll do anything I can to help.”

  “What I need to know is, how would you get out of this building if you couldn’t go out the ramp and you couldn’t go out the front door and you couldn’t go out the Skyway?”

  “You mean, like, if there was a mystery man here last night?”

  “Exactly.”

  The maintenance man thought about it. “Couldn’t do it,” he said finally. “He’d need a key. But all the keys are on two rings, and you have to know what you’re looking for before you can use one. Otherwise, it’s just a bunch of numbers on the keys. So if you wanted to get just one, you’d have to steal the whole ring—which nobody did. Even then, you still wouldn’t know which key opened what until you tried them all. That’d take a couple of days if that’s all you did.”

  “So let’s say the guy didn’t have a key.”

  “Well, there are some windows on the second floor that open, so he could lower himself down—but that’d be pretty obvious. I mean, there are cars on the street at that time of night.”

  “And it’s a long way down,” Lucas said. “He’d need a big rope.”

  “Yeah.” The maintenance man thought for another minute, puzzled. “You say he can’t go out through the garage.”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, if it were me, I’d hide in the building until the cops were gone, and then I’d just jump out and walk away with the crowd. Lots of places to hide.”

  “St. Paul went through here pretty thoroughly, last night and this morning.”

  “No kidding—had me running around like a mad-man.”

  “How about access to the alley?”

  “Nope. Them overhead doors lock with padlocks and . . . Ohh. Wait a minute.”

  “What?”

  “The regular door there. There’s a great big dead bolt on it, but . . .”

  “It opens from the inside,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah. I never use it. If we got a big delivery, they ring and we open the overheads. . . .”

  “Let’s go look,” Lucas suggested.

  The maintenance man started toward the far end of the building. “It locks with a key from the outside.”

  “You can’t just pull it shut?”

  “No. Nope. Gotta lock it with a key from the outside, or with the knob from inside,” the maintenance man said.

  They walked down the basement stairs, then along a dark corridor to a loading dock. Lucas stepped over to the access door. The door was metal, with a small window with inset wire mesh. He said, “Don’t touch the lock. . . . You got any lights?”

  “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 Brown’s.”

  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 Brown’s 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 accura
te 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 a lot of people don’t even know her.”