Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15

by John Sandford

  “I think we’d be remiss if we didn’t keep him available,” said a third. A woman chipped in, “He’s a violator. I say to heck with him.”

  THE MEETING BROKE up a little after nine. When Lucas went by the guard desk, Loftus, the guard he’d talked to, wasn’t there. The guard who was there said, “You’ve got a note from Dan. He’s hung up for a while,” and passed Lucas a piece of typing paper. Outside the door, Lucas opened the paper and found a map drawn with a ballpoint, and next to that, the words “11 o’clock.”

  Lucas went back to the hotel, got a corned-beef sandwich from room service, unpacked his suitcase, talked to Weather for fifteen minutes, watched the news, and headed out the door a few minutes after eleven o’clock. St. Louis was easy enough to get around, and Lucas found the place on the first try: a corner tavern with Budweiser and Busch signs in the window, and a flickering-orange “Andy’s” sign hung over the front door. A half-block up the street, a couple of guys were working on what looked like an eighties Camaro, using shop lights on orange extension cords that led across the sidewalk to the car at the curb. He could hear traffic, at some distance, and a nearly full moon was high and squarely aligned with the street. Felt kinda good.

  Inside Andy’s, a long bar led away from the door into the interior. A half-dozen guys and one woman seated at the bar turned their heads to see who was coming in, and gave him a good look when they didn’t recognize him. He could smell microwave pizza, popcorn, and beer; a jar of pickled pig’s feet sat at the end of the bar, beside a jar of pickled eggs. A bartender was wiping glasses, and as Lucas ambled past, he asked, “You looking for Dan?”

  “Yeah. Is he here?”

  “In the back on the right. Their pitcher is probably pretty down by now.”

  “So give me another one and a glass,” Lucas said. He gave the bartender a twenty, got his change, and carried the pitcher down the bar. Loftus and two other guys, who both looked like ex-cops, were sitting in Andy’s biggest booth, big enough for six or eight.

  When Lucas came up, Loftus lifted a hand, and Lucas slid into the booth with the beer. Loftus pointed at the other two men. “Dick Bender, Micky Andreno. Dick was homicide, Micky was a patrol lieutenant when he retired.”

  Lucas said hello, and they all poured beer and Bender said, “I called a guy up in Minneapolis and he said you weren’t the worst guy in the world. Said you got shot a lot, and that you like to fight. Said you got shot by a little girl.”

  “Right in the throat,” Lucas said. “That was a good fuckin’ day.”

  So he told the story, and they told a few, about car chases and assholes they’d known, one story about a cop who’d been killed when he’d run through a stream of water from a fire hose and got his neck broken, and then Lucas had to tell the story of the Minneapolis guy who’d fired a blank at his own head as a joke, and blown his brains out, and Andreno told about the three women—a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter—who had all been beaten to death by the men in their lives, the daughter when she was only seventeen: “She already had a kid of her own, a daughter, she’s growing up somewhere. How’d you like to have that curse on you?”

  After the dog-sniffing, they got another pitcher and Loftus asked, “How was the meeting?”

  “I’ll tell you, guys, they might get her, but if they do, it’s gonna be by accident,” Lucas said. “They’re gonna run computer programs all night, trying to nail down every single person she ever worked with. They figure she’s got to be staying with somebody she knows.”

  “Probably is,” Bender said.

  “I know, but Jesus, she worked for a big liquor company and a couple of bars here in town, with all those contacts, and she went to two different colleges that we know of—maybe they’ll get lucky, but that’s a hell of a lot of people,” Lucas said.

  “So what’s the choice here?” Andreno asked. “I don’t see that you’ve got an edge.”

  Before Lucas could answer, a fourth guy showed up, a former patrol sergeant named Bob Carter. He slid into the booth and was introduced, and said, “Pour me one of them beers…. Some asshole parked a Porsche outside.”

  “That’d be me,” Lucas said.

  “Really? A fuckin’ C4?” Carter was not embarrassed. “They must have good bennies in Minneapolis.”

  Then they had to dog-sniff some more until Lucas finally got back to Andreno’s question. “She bought a hot cell phone here in St. Louis—so she’s already gone to somebody. That guy might know where she’s at, he might know who she’s calling. How many guys you got selling hot cell phones here?”

  “’Bout a hundred,” Loftus said.

  “Wholesaling them? Well enough established that she could come back after a few years away and go straight to him?”

  “Don’t know that she did that,” Andreno said. “She might have called a friend, who got them for her.”

  “That’s right, but she must’ve called somebody connected, because Dichter called her, on her cell phone. And the feds have Dichter’s phone calls, both business and home from every phone we think he had, and she’s not on the list. Her phone isn’t. She never called him. She can’t have been here for more than a few days. Somehow, she got to Dichter through an intermediary. And she bought a phone at the same time.”

  “If Dichter was calling her at night, at eleven o’clock, I bet he didn’t have her number for long,” Bender said. “Why would you sit around all day looking at the cell phone number and then go out at eleven o’clock to call her?”

  The St. Louis cops sat and looked at him for a moment, waiting for Lucas to absorb the point. Lucas had absorbed it, and after a moment said, “That’s one thing the feds didn’t come up with,” and then, “Anybody who can’t keep their mouth shut, raise his hand.”

  Nobody raised a hand. Carter said, “Whataya got?”

  “I’ll tell you, if this shit gets out, Dan could be guarding a parking ramp,” Lucas said.

  Loftus didn’t bother to look around the table. “They won’t talk. Whataya got?”

  Lucas took a paper out of his pocket. He’d pulled it out of the information packet that Mallard had passed around. All the packets were supposed to remain in the building. “List of phone numbers that called Dichter,” Lucas said. He put it on the table, and the St. Louis cops huddled over it. Andreno finally said, “Pay phone at Tucker’s, down at LaClede’s Landing.”

  Carter said, “Yeah?”

  “Tucker’s is right next to the BluesNote. John Sellos.”

  Loftus leaned back and said to Lucas, “There you are. Sellos is connected, he knows Dichter and all the rest of them, and he’ll sell you a phone if you ask him right.”

  “Tell you what else,” Carter said. “Sellos used to work for John Ross, driving a truck. This was years and years ago.”

  “Maybe I oughta go see him,” Lucas said.

  Andreno looked at his watch. “Got time for a couple more beers—but if you’re going, I’d like to ride along. I know Sellos from way back.”

  “Don’t go hittin’ anyone. You don’t have a badge anymore,” Loftus said to Andreno. To Lucas: “Micky sorta liked to fight, himself.”

  Andreno shook his head. “Those days are gone. Now all I do is hit golf balls and wonder what the fuck happened.”

  They had a couple of more beers, and talked about what the four cops were doing in retirement. None of them was sixty, and all were looking at twenty years of idleness before they died. “If the goddamn pickled pig’s feet don’t get to me first,” Carter grumbled.

  A few minutes later, Loftus asked Lucas, “Did you meet Richard Lewis, the AIC?”

  “Yeah, he was in the meeting for a while. Dark suit, one of those blue shirts with a white collar?”

  “That’s him. I’ll tell you what, he don’t like this Mallard guy coming in and taking over. He’s running a little hip-pocket operation of his own, looking for Rinker. He’s got his intelligence guys doing it.” Loftus said it in a way that suggested a further step into treason—all in
the way of the brotherhood of cops.

  “Got any names?” Lucas asked.

  “Striker, Allenby, Lane, and Jones,” Loftus said.

  “Let me…” Lucas took a pen out of his pocket and jotted the names in the palm of his hand. “Striker, Allenby, Lane, and Jones.”

  “Don’t tell anybody where you got that.” Lucas looked at him, and Loftus said, “Yeah, yeah.”

  AT ONE O’CLOCK , Andreno tipped up his beer glass, finished it, and said to Lucas, “Let’s go.”

  As they stood up, Loftus looked at Lucas and said, “Might be best if we don’t spend too much time talking at the office—but I’ll be sitting here tomorrow night.”

  “We’re gonna kick some ass,” Lucas said. He burped. “Fuckin’ Budweiser.”

  “Jesus Christ, watch your mouth,” Loftus said, and he crossed himself.

  ANDRENO WAS A slick, hard, neighborhood boy: capped teeth, probably paid for by the city after they got broken out; forehead scars; too-sharp jackets, hands in his pockets; and the attitude of a housewife-slaying, mean fuckin’ vacuum cleaner salesman. Even if he hadn’t had an Italian name, Lucas would have bet that he’d gone to a tough Catholic high school somewhere, probably run by the Psycho Brothers for Christ.

  Andreno liked the Porsche and cross-examined Lucas on how he could afford it. As they rolled along through the night, top down, the moon in the rearview mirror, Lucas told him a little about the role-playing games he’d written in the seventies and eighties, how he hired a kid from the University of Minnesota to translate them into early computer games, how that drifted into simulations for police 911 systems…

  “Holy shit, you’re rich,” Andreno said.

  “Comfortable,” Lucas said.

  “Bullshit, you’re rich,” Andreno said happily. “Why don’t you give me this car when you leave? I’d look great in it—clubs in the passenger seat, kind of casual-like, driving along with my sunglasses and the Rolex.”

  “Couldn’t do that. You have to have a certain level of sexual magnetism before you’re allowed to drive a Porsche,” Lucas said.

  “And I’d have to get a Rolex,” Andreno said. He pointed at a slot near the curb, a half-block from the BluesNote. “Put it there. Then it’ll be close if we have to run for it.”

  “Run…?”

  “Pulling your weenie,” Andreno said. “John’s actually an okay guy, if you like crooked barkeeps who suffer from clinical depression and progressive hair loss.”

  “Think he’ll be there?”

  “He always is. He’s got nowhere else to go.”

  THE BLUESNOTE WAS only a couple of blocks from Lucas’s hotel, one of a collection of nineteenth-century brick buildings called LaClede’s Landing. Bars, mostly, a couple of music spots, all kinds of restaurants, tourist junk shops selling St. Louis souvenirs. Cobblestone streets. Like that; what you got in any older city when the city engineers decided to do something hip. At the door to the BluesNote, Andreno said, “Stay close behind me. Place is kinda dim.”

  They went in fast, straight to the back, though the kitchen doors and up a flight of stairs that had a “Private” sign above the first step, and at the top of the stairs. Andreno went straight on, across the landing, and pushed open the door at the top. “John…,” he said.

  John Sellos was a thin man, tired-looking, worn down, sitting behind a wooden desk in the screen glow of a cheap laptop computer. He looked at Andreno, and Lucas behind him, and said, “Ah, shit.” He said it in a quiet way, as though Andreno, or somebody like him, had been expected. Then: “What’re you doing? You’re not on the force anymore.”

  “I’m showing my friend around,” Andreno said. “This is Lucas Davenport—he’s a deputy chief from Minneapolis and is working now with an FBI task force on Clara Rinker. You heard of her?”

  “I heard of her,” Sellos said uncomfortably. He leaned back and crossed his legs. “What do you want?”

  Andreno glanced at Lucas, who looked at the two chairs in front of Andreno’s desk, carefully brushed off the seat of one of them, and sat down. “John…Can I call you John?”

  “You can.”

  “John,” Lucas said. “You helped set up Nanny Dichter to be murdered by Clara Rinker. We know that and you know that. And you know what the penalty is for felony murder in Missouri.” Lucas made a delicate slashing gesture across his throat. When Sellos didn’t immediately answer, Lucas knew that they were on the right track. So did Andreno. He moved off to lean against a wall, and nodded at Lucas, his chin dipping a quarter-inch. “We’ve got Nanny’s phone records, John,” Lucas continued. “We know you called him—we’ve got a witness who can put you on the phone. We’ve got Clara’s phone number, though she isn’t answering it. We know where the phone came from, and pretty soon we’re gonna know who stole it, and that person is gonna get on the witness stand and he is gonna put you on death row.”

  “I better get a lawyer,” Sellos said. His voice lacked enthusiasm, and he didn’t reach for a phone.

  “The question is, do you need a lawyer?” Andreno said, pushing away from the wall. “You don’t for me, because I’m not a cop anymore. Lucas, here, isn’t exactly official. We’re just a couple of street guys trying to come up with some information.”

  “So?” They were projecting rays of light, and all Sellos saw was bullshit and lies.

  “So we talk,” Lucas said, shrugging. “No need for everybody to get excited about a telephone. I mean, if the feds find you later, that’s their problem and your problem. But we’re not gonna talk to them about it. We got our own thing going.”

  Sellos turned skeptical. “You’re not going to tell them?”

  Andreno shook his head. “Nope. If you’ll help us out, I’ll give you my beeper number, and if Clara calls, you beep us. That’ll be it.”

  “But you’ve gotta tell us the rest of it now,” Lucas said. “Otherwise…you’re gonna need a lawyer—a really good lawyer—and you’re gonna need him really bad.”

  “I didn’t help set Nanny up,” Sellos said. He didn’t bother to deny any of it. “I had no idea what Clara was going to do. I thought she was going to try to talk to him and needed a safe way to call him. She came in, she put a gun on me—a big fuckin’ automatic. You know how many people have looked down Clara’s guns and walked away? Not many. Anyway, she got the phones—four phones—and she told me if I talk to you guys, she’ll kill me. And she will, if she hears about this. Not ten years from now on death row, she’ll kill me this week.”

  “When was she here?”

  Sellos told them the story. At the end of it, he stood up, went to a half-sized refrigerator, got a Heineken, popped the top off, took a sip. He didn’t offer one to Lucas or Andreno. “She wanted Nanny to call, and she wanted this Andy Levy guy’s phone number, the banker, so she could call him. That’s it, other than that she’d kill me if I talked to anyone.”

  Lucas asked, “You’ve never heard of this Andy Levy?”

  “No. When she mentioned him, that was the first I ever heard of him.”

  Lucas looked at Andreno and cocked an eyebrow. Andreno shook his head. “Never heard of the guy.”

  Back to Sellos. “You think he’s here in the city?”

  “That’s the impression I got.”

  They ran him through the story again, but Sellos had nothing more to say, except that Rinker had not disguised herself at all. “She looked just like she did when she was working at the warehouse, except richer. She looked pretty well-tended.”

  “Well-tended,” Andreno repeated, as though he liked the phrase.

  “Very well,” Sellos said.

  They left him behind the desk, worrying. Lucas said, “We won’t talk to anyone, and you better not. I mean, we’re a couple of friendly guys. I don’t think Clara would be all that friendly.”

  Andreno left his beeper number with Sellos. Sellos said he’d call the minute Rinker got in touch with him, if she did. “You aren’t gonna run, are you, John?” Andreno asked.

&n
bsp; “No, no. Somebody would find me. Either you or Clara. I got nowhere to run to.”

  OUT ON THE STREET, Andreno stretched and yawned and looked down the quiet streets and up at the sky, and said, “What a great fuckin’ night. This was more fun than I had in five years.”

  “Operating,” Lucas said.

  “That’s exactly what it is,” Andreno said, poking a finger at Lucas. “I’m operating again.” After a moment: “Is there anything else I can do? Any other way I can cut into this?”

  “Let me think about it,” Lucas said. “I’ll see what the feebs say tomorrow, when I drop Andy Levy on them. If Andy Levy isn’t dead tonight.”

  9

  LUCAS GOT UP EARLY, FOR HIM, A LITTLE after eight o’clock. He pulled on jeans and a T-shirt, went to the lobby and got a Post-Dispatch and a couple of Diet Cokes, returned to his room, lay in bed and drank the Coke and read the paper. Gene Rinker, in orange prison coveralls and chains, was on the front page, being taken into a jail somewhere, behind a row of shotgun-armed marshals.

  A show. A movie. The FBI was making a movie about being tough, about kicking a little Rinker ass. The Post-Dispatch quoted Malone on Gene Rinker’s arrest, and described her as a tough, flinty FBI agent, a veteran of the mob wars. A small photograph at the bottom of the story showed Malone talking to a marshal, looking flinty.

  “Maybe she is,” Lucas thought, and he extracted the comics and read them while room service put together some pancakes and bacon. During the leisurely breakfast, he started calling local banks, and got lucky with the fifth one.

  LUCAS GOT TO the FBI building at nine-thirty. Loftus wasn’t yet on duty; another man gave him his neck card and escorted him to the meeting room. When he stepped inside, the collected agents turned to look, and Mallard said, “We started at seven.”

  “Had a late night,” Lucas said. “Out drinking.”

  “Oh, good,” one of the male agents muttered.

  “Let’s try to keep ourselves together, folks,” Mallard said, but he was exasperated. Behind him, on the white board, was an expanded list of names, heavy on the Italian.