Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15

by John Sandford

  “She didn’t say too much . . . just that thing about how the shots weren’t too loud.”

  “Did she say what she took off the body?”

  “Nothing like that,” the woman said, and Lucas heard the lie in her voice.

  “How did you find me?”

  “I thought about where a state policeman would stay in Duluth, and called, and they switched me up to your room.”

  Smart enough, Lucas thought. He took the shot: “Listen, miss. We know that Mary Wheaton was killed by mistake. We know there was another woman down there. I mean, we know it was you. We would really like to talk to you. For your own protection. We found the place you were staying . . .”

  She said, frightened, “I’m going to hang up now.”

  “No, no, no, wait, wait, wait. Tell me one thing. Please. Did you—did she—shit, however you want to say it, did somebody recover a computer from the dead man? And what happened to it? It could be critical.”

  Another pause, then: “She gave it to me. She was afraid to sell it in Duluth, because it was full of Russian. So I took it down to Minneapolis and I sold it. I needed money to get back to Los Angeles.”

  “Who did you sell it to?”

  “A man, a young man, a student, maybe, at the university.”

  “What’d you do, just walk around asking people? Did you have a contact?”

  “I had a contact. This is a man who . . . buys things.”

  “Okay. Tell me this, then. Please. I’m really not mean, I’m just anxious, I don’t want you to hang up before I can ask these questions . . .”

  “You sound mean,” she said again. She said, “I’m outa here. I’m going to LA. Don’t bother to look for me.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Lucas said urgently. “Tell me, this young man, do you have a name? Can you tell me what he looks like?”

  “His name is George. He is blond and he’s good-looking. He has a square jaw and blue eyes and a short haircut; he puts gel in his hair. He was wearing one of those football jackets, you know, the kind that is wool with leather sleeves, red wool with white leather sleeves.”

  “When did you sell the computer? How long has he had it?”

  “Two days . . . I sold it to him the night before last.”

  “Where?”

  “At Moos Tower, the medical building. There’s a cafeteria in the basement. He had a table. There are two or three guys who buy stuff there. Stolen stuff. In Moos Tower.”

  “Can you . . . ?”

  “I’m going to hang up now. I’m afraid you’re tracing this call.”

  “No, no, please . . .”

  But she was gone. And maybe, he thought, to LA, where they’d never find her.

  “AH, BOY . . .”

  Hoping she’d call back, Lucas left the room phone open, got on his cell phone and called the duty man at BCA offices in St. Paul. “The call would have gone into the main desk, and they transferred it up to my room: see if you can pin it down. Where it came from—we need the number.”

  Then he made another call, and a woman answered. “Marcy? Lucas.”

  She was happy to hear from him. “Hey, man, you haven’t called for weeks. What’s going on?”

  Lieutenant Marcy Sherrill was head of the Intelligence Unit for the Minneapolis police, and a protégé. He sketched in quickly what had happened, and said, “So I’ve got a problem. Is there any chance that you could put somebody over at the U, and see if you can figure out who this guy is? I’ll come down and get him, but I need to get something started.”

  “I’ll put somebody over there right now—it’s a little late, there may not be too many people to talk to, but I can have somebody there in twenty minutes.”

  “Thanks, sweetie. How’s the love life?”

  “We gotta talk. Do you know Don Cary?”

  “Yeah—but he was married the last time I checked.” Lucas looked at his watch. Time was running . . .

  “Not anymore,” Marcy said. “His wife, you know, was a computer freak. She said, ‘Fuck Minnesota,’ and took off for California. He wasn’t invited. The divorce was final last week.”

  “You might be moving on him a little too quick.”

  “Actually, he started mooning around here two months ago, and we’ve gone out for a lunch a few times. He was pretty much over her before she left . . . The marriage had been in trouble since about week one. He’d like to have a kid or two.”

  “He’s a pretty good guy, for a lawyer. He plays a mean game of lawyer-league basketball,” Lucas said. “Marcy, we gotta talk, and I gotta run, right now. I gotta.”

  “Keep your ass down; I’ll get back.”

  He hung up, looked at the phone for five seconds, ten seconds, willing a call from the witness woman. Nothing; he tossed his keys up in the air, caught them, and took off, listening for the ring of the telephone until the door banged shut behind him.

  9

  LUCAS KEPT A police flasher in the back of the truck, spent the ten seconds necessary to stick it to the roof of the car and plug it into the cigarette lighter, and took off, running at speed up the hill, through a couple of red lights, and out the back side of Duluth toward Virginia. As soon as he got free of traffic, he called Reasons, but got his wife.

  “He is not here just now,” she said, in an accent much like Nadya’s. “He has a cell phone . . .”

  Lucas took the number and redialed. Reasons came up after three rings, and Lucas said, “We got a problem, man.”

  He explained, and when he was done, Reasons said, “You want me to come?”

  “I don’t know what you’d do. The place is overrun by cops already, but I thought you oughta know.”

  “Jesus, I oughta come.” Reasons sounded anxious. “But my wife . . . she’s been giving me some shit about being gone all the time, and I was just on my way home.”

  “Go home then. I’ll fill you in tomorrow.”

  “Thanks. If anything more comes up, let me know.”

  LUCAS FUMBLED AROUND in his pocket, found the numbers he’d scribbled down for the Virginia cops, and dialed in again. As he did, he looked down at the speedometer: he was pushing the car along at ninety-five, and the car didn’t like it. The Virginia cops came up and Lucas identified himself: “What happened at Spivak’s? Is my guy okay?”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t release any information on that,” the woman said. Her voice was cool, almost bored. “It’s an ongoing incident. If you could call back in an hour . . .”

  “Jesus Christ, was anybody hurt? I’m with the fuckin’ BCA.” He was talking too loud again.

  “Sir, this is being recorded . . .”

  “Go ahead and record it, you moron!” he shouted. “I’m trying to find out if my guy is okay. What’d you do, shoot him?”

  “Sir . . .”

  He hung up, tried his man’s phone, and got an answering-machine recording. He dialed Rose Marie Roux at her home in Minneapolis, was told by her husband that she was at a concert with a girlfriend. “Aaron Copland, the cowboy shit. I took a pass.”

  Frustrated, Lucas dropped the phone on the passenger seat and concentrated on driving. But he couldn’t stand it, and ten minutes later, he picked up the phone and called Virginia again. Same woman: “Sir, I’ve reported this incident to my supervisor. I cannot give you any information . . .”

  LUCAS CLICKED OFF and pushed the car until it wouldn’t push anymore, and instead, whimpered with the wind and tire noise. The side of the highway, for all practical purposes, was empty, the houses a half mile apart, and he was flying through a tunnel carved out by his not-especially-bright headlights. He got off at the first Virginia exit, throttled back to sixty as he went through town and still squealed his tires on the turn onto the main drag.

  Two cop cars were parked outside Spivak’s, light bars turning, a cop standing next to one of them. A silver civilian car was double-parked beside the cop cars. Probably another city car, Lucas thought. He dumped the Acura across the street from the bar, killed
the engine, and headed for the bar entrance at a trot.

  A cop was writing on a clipboard, using his car hood as a desktop. When Lucas started across the street, he looked up and called, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, where you goin’ there?” and Lucas held up his ID and said, “BCA—you got one of my guys.” He was at the door and the cop yelled, “Hey, wait a minute, buddy,” and then Lucas was inside, moving through the bar into the back. The cop was behind him, and yelled, “Hey! Hey!”

  Then Lucas was through the bar and past Setters and Pointers and into the back, into the party room where they’d interviewed Spivak. Three uniformed cops and two guys in civilian clothes were talking. Lucas’s man, Micky Andreno, was perched on a chair to the side, legs crossed, hands cuffed. “You all right?” Lucas asked.

  “I’m annoyed, not hurt,” Andreno said. “But I’m very annoyed.”

  The cop who’d followed Lucas in said, “Hey, when I’m talking to you . . .”

  Lucas pointed his finger at him and snarled, “Shut the fuck up. Who’s running this clown factory?”

  One of the men in plainclothes snapped, “I am. Who the fuck are you?”

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “John Terry, I’m the chief.”

  “I’m a BCA agent, I work for the governor, and I’m running a double-murder investigation that was almost a triple murder if it wasn’t for my guy here, and nobody in this fuckin’ humpty police department would tell me what the hell was going on and now I find my guy all chained up and let me ask you—you caught the guy who went running out of here, right? The double murderer who went running out of here because you put the call on your fuckin’ unscrambled police frequency . . .” His voice was rising and he could feel the blood in his forehead.

  Andreno said, “Tell ’em, brother,” which didn’t help, and added, “They didn’t catch him—they didn’t even chase him. A guy went outside and looked around with a fuckin’ flashlight.”

  “That’s not fuckin’ true,” said Terry. He was a weathered sixty, maybe, with a red drinker’s face and a pushed-in nose. “We’ve got a team looking for him.”

  “Yeah, now,” Andreno said. “By now the guy’s down in the fuckin’ Twin Cities shootin’ pool and playing with his girlfriend’s tits.”

  “Who the fuck are you?” Terry demanded. “You got no ID, you got no badge, you got no car, who the fuck do you think you are?”

  “I’m under fuckin’ cover,” Andreno shouted at him. “Maybe you heard of that? And I gotta car. I just didn’t want you in it.”

  One of the cops, trying to be reasonable, said, “The call was on the command channel . . .”

  Lucas took a step back and put up his hands, palms out, as if pushing away from them. “All right, all right: let’s start over. Okay? Let’s start over. And let’s take the cuffs off my guy, here, okay? Okay? Let’s take the cuffs off.”

  THEY MOVED OUT to the front of the bar. One of the cops went around behind the bar and put together some Cokes and ice, and Lucas told Terry about the investigation.

  “ . . . I got this spy here, this Russian, and we think she’s got somebody working with her. So after we come up with Spivak, she says, ‘Well, let’s do Spivak tomorrow, after we do the paperwork.’ I think, I wonder why that is? Why don’t we do him today? But I go along with it, because I already called Micky in. I tell Micky to keep an eye on Spivak, just in case. So he stakes out the place, and Spivak never comes out after the place closes. Micky starts to worry about it, so he stands up on the garbage can in back and peeks into the back room . . .”

  “I see Spivak standing on two six-packs of whatever . . .”

  “Bud Light,” Terry said.

  “Whatever,” Andreno said. “His knees are shaking like crazy, he’s about to hang himself, and I call Lucas. I’m standing in the back, still on the phone, and I hear Lucas talking to you, and the next thing I know, the back door bangs open and this guy comes outa there like a rocket ship. I go running after him but as I go past the door I see Spivak hanging by the neck, so I gotta stop and run inside and try to lift him up by the legs so he don’t strangle, and then your guys got there. About an hour later.”

  “Two fuckin’ minutes,” one of the uniformed cops said. “And we looked for the guy. We knocked on doors down there to see if anybody saw anybody tearing out of there in a hurry, or anything.”

  “Nobody saw anything,” said another cop.

  “What pisses me off,” Andreno said, “Is that when your guys got here, one of them points his pistol at me and says, ‘Okay, drop him,’ and Spivak is going aaagggaaaaaaghh.”

  They all looked at him for a moment and then Lucas started to laugh, and then another cop started and then the second one, and the chief rubbed his forehead and said, “Ah, for Christ’s sakes.”

  SPIVAK WAS AT the medical center with rope burns around his neck and on his face where the rope had cut against it. He had pulled muscles in his neck and back, and had a damaged larynx. He could talk—croak—but just barely, said the cops who’d brought him in.

  His wife, a short, broad woman who might have been Spivak’s sister, was in the hallway outside the hospital room where Spivak was being treated, and when she saw them coming, she said, “John Terry, I don’t want you talking to him. You go away.”

  She was frightened and angry. Terry said, “I’m sorry, Marsha, but we gotta talk to him. This is a murder investigation. Two people have been murdered . . .”

  “He almost got hung,” she wailed, and then she started to cry, “You almost got him killed . . .”

  Two more people came around the corner, a man and a woman, both short and stocky, both in their late twenties or early thirties, both Spivaks, Lucas assumed. One of them said, “Ma, what’s wrong. Ma? Is he okay?”

  “He’s okay,” she sniffed. “The police say it’s a murder investigation . . .” and she cracked again and wandered over to a chair and sat down. The young woman said, “John, what the heck is going on here?”

  “Carol, you just go take care of your mom. We need to talk to your dad for a minute. We don’t know exactly what happened yet, but we’re working on it.”

  “Did you catch anybody?”

  “Not yet. That’s what we’re working on. You go sit down and we’ll talk to your dad for a minute and then you can come in.”

  SPIVAK WAS PROPPED up in a hospital bed, covered to the waist with a sheet, his neck wrapped in gauze, more gauze taped to the left side of his face, another blob stuck on his earlobe. When they walked in, he looked at Lucas and croaked, “What the hell?”

  Lucas asked, “Did you recognize the guy?”

  “No. Never saw him before.” The words came out in spurts, as though each one hurt. “Tall guy. Black hair. Black eyes. Skinny. Big nose. Maybe forty. Black raincoat. Gloves. Waited in bar. Everybody gone. Asked him to leave. Pulled a gun. Made me tie rope up. Made me stand on beer bottles. Hung me. Had radio. Kicked out beer bottles when he heard cops was coming. Ran out back.”

  “American? Foreign?”

  “American. I think. No accent. Shot me in ear.”

  “In the ear?” Andreno asked. “I saw blood, didn’t hear no shot.”

  “Silencer. When I wouldn’t stand on bottles. Shot my earlobe off. Bullet one inch from eye. Scared shit out of me.”

  “What did he want?” Lucas asked.

  “Same as you. Wanted to know, who was in room.”

  “What’d you tell him?”

  “Same as you. Don’t know.”

  “You didn’t know a single one of them?”

  “No. Told you.”

  They went on for a while, but Spivak knew nothin’ about nothin’.

  Finally, Lucas said, “I’ll tell you, Mr. Spivak, you’re bullshitting us. There are already two people dead and you were almost a third. This guy is nuts, and he could come back if we don’t catch him.”

  Spivak’s eyes flicked away, and without looking back at Lucas, he shook his head.

  THEY SPENT FIVE minutes with
the family, but the family claimed they knew nothing about any meeting at the bar, and pushed the cops off and disappeared into Spivak’s room.

  The chief said, “This is really screwed up.”

  Lucas asked, “How well do you know Spivak?”

  He shrugged: “Well—I think he moved here from somewhere else when he was a kid, so I’ve only known him since kindergarten. That’s what, fifty-four years?”

  “He’s a good guy?” asked Andreno.

  Terry nodded: “Yeah, he’s okay. He’s just a guy. He runs a bar. He can be an asshole, sometimes. Most of the time, he’s okay.”

  “Goddamnit. The problem is, there’s something going on with this spy shit, and I don’t know what it is,” Lucas said. “Spivak isn’t talking, and he knows some shit . . .”

  Terry nodded in agreement. “I saw him look away. I’ll tell you what, maybe you scared him. I’ll go in and bullshit with him when you’re gone. Tomorrow morning, see what he has to say. We’ve known each other a long time.”

  “I’d keep an eye on him,” Lucas said. “This guy out there, whoever he is—he’s not fuckin’ around.”

  “I’ll get them to put him down in intensive care. That way, he’ll be behind the nurses’ station and there’ll always be somebody right there. I’ll have guys stop by, and we got an extra car, I’ll park it out front.”

  “Good. Talk to him, then. Call me.”

  “Get this guy some ID,” Terry said, tapping Andreno on the chest. “And tell him to watch his mouth. He wise-assed us so much some of the guys wanted to shoot him to stop the bullshit.”

  Andreno said, “You guys . . .” But Lucas waved him off.

  “I gotta ask you a favor,” Lucas said to Terry. “I’d like to put out a story—your newspaper, the TV, however—that you got a call from a passerby about something weird happening at Spivak’s. Maybe somebody heard a scream. When you sent a car, you missed the bad guy, but a cop or a passerby saw Spivak hanging there and cut him down. Just have somebody else do what Micky did. Tell your guys to keep their mouths shut—tell the family that. I want to keep Micky a little secret.”