Lucas Davenport Collection

by John Sandford

  He started to leave, then thought about what Weimer had said: “You’re them.”

  He knew about them . . . He thought about it for a minute, then checked Weimer’s other bags, found nothing but an expensive-looking camera. Started toward the door again, then stopped, went back, yanked the bed apart, pulled the whole platform away from the wall . . . and saw the backpack jammed against the foot of the platform. A cheap black nylon backpack. Weimer had been smart, having heard of the other robberies, and had set up a decoy bag . . .

  McCall popped the backpack: here were the hundreds. Lots of them. McCall smiled and said aloud, “You da man.”

  Back out to the van, driving away, said, “Weimer’s a wiseass. There were two bags. I got both of them.”

  Weimer said, “I had to try.”

  “Shouldn’t have,” Cohn said, and he hit Weimer in the kidney again, and this time, Weimer screamed, and Cohn hit him once more.

  McCall said, “Coming up.” They took a one-way road between the back of St. John’s Hospital and the freeway, a dark road, weeds on the freeway side, and halfway down, stopped, and Cohn rolled Weimer out into the street, the bag still over his head.

  As they pulled away, Cohn slid the door shut and asked, “How’d we do?”

  “Did good,” McCall said. “Maybe more than the first guy.”

  “Damnit: it’s like taking candy from kids. Put that with the hotel deal, and we can get anything we want. Anything.”

  “If it’s what I think, we already got more than three million . . .”

  “What’re you going to buy in LA with three mil divided by five? Huh? Tate? You can’t even buy a nice house with your share. We hit the hotel; if it’s what Rosie says it’ll be, you’ll get maybe three for yourself. That’ll buy a nice house. Live in Beverly Hills with that kind of money.”

  McCall thought about it, said, “Not in the best part of Beverly Hills,” and Cohn started to laugh.

  THE PAIN in his back was brutal and Weimer stayed on the concrete, pulled the bag free, got oriented, and rolled to the gutter. All he saw of the van was two red taillights, disappearing around the corner. He had no idea what kind of van it was, or even what color it was.

  The pain in his back was ferocious. He tried to stand, almost fell, then turned and vomited up most of the sandwich he’d eaten, along with all the sauerkraut. When it was all up, he remained hunched over, spitting, and he thought, A million-five. Jensen was going to shit.

  He got to his feet, took a step and groaned again. He was hurt, and maybe bad. He didn’t know which way to go, didn’t know that the building he was looking at was the back of a hospital. He took a couple of steps, and the pain radiated through his back; he took another step and then headlights flared behind him.

  He stepped to the side and started waving at the car. Hospital security, as it turned out. “I got robbed and beat up,” he told the security guard, who’d stopped thirty feet away. “I gotta get to a hospital. I’m hurt bad. You know where a hospital is? We gotta call the cops.”

  12

  THE NEWS ABOUT WEIMER got to Lucas through the Secret Service. Dickens heard about it from a St. Paul cop on the security committee, and suggested that the cops call Lucas. A St. Paul lieutenant named Parker called at eight o’clock, and Ellen, the housekeeper, brought the phone to the bedroom and said, “St. Paul police. They say it’s important.”

  Weather was already at work, and Ellen said that Letty was up and waiting for a ride to Channel Three.

  “Tell her I’ll be ready in fifteen minutes,” Lucas said. He took the phone: “Yeah. Davenport.”

  “Don Parker at St. Paul. We had a robbery last night, and we’ve been told you’re tracking them.”

  “Lobbyist guy?”

  “That’s what I’m told,” Parker said. “He’s not talking much, said they took his travel money, but said it was the same deal as two other ones he heard about. Anyway, he’s at St. John’s.”

  “Hurt?”

  “Peeing blood. Probably get out tomorrow, depending. They rabbit-punched him a few times. Took him for a ride in a van, robbed his room. There’s something going on there.”

  “I’ll go talk to him,” Lucas said.

  “Dick Clay is working it for us, but he’s back in the house already . . . if you need anything.”

  Lucas hung up and thought, All right: the motherfucker’s still in town.

  LUCAS GOT CLEANED UP and headed out to the kitchen, where Letty was reading the newspaper and eating toast. They were a little reserved after the fight the night before, and Lucas had a quick microwave oatmeal with milk and a banana, then they loaded into the Porsche and headed north and west toward Minneapolis.

  Letty said, finally, looking out the side window, “Can’t wait until I get my license.”

  “You’ll be lucky if you get a license at all, after a stunt like yesterday’s,” Lucas said.

  She turned back to him and said, “You want to let it go, or do you want to argue? I mean, I’ll argue if you still want to.”

  “Let it go,” Lucas said.

  “Okay. Like I said, I can’t wait until I get my license.” She reached out and ran a hand over the dashboard. “Take this thing out on the highway and blow the coon-farts out of it.”

  Lucas laughed and said, “You should live so long as to get your hands on this car, sweetie. I’m thinking Hyundai. Used.”

  “You should live so long as to see me driving a Hyundai,” she said.

  She got him laughing, and though he could feel the manipulation, it felt kinda good . . . because that’s what daughters were supposed to do. Then they were across the bridge and into town and down to the station, and he waved and she was inside and he headed back to St. Paul.

  SHELLY WEIMER was propped up in a bed, a fat man with a pencil-thin mustache in the St. John’s Intensive Care Unit, a saline drip running into one arm. He was reading the Wall Street Journal, holding it up with one hand, while the other hand took the drip. He folded the paper when Lucas walked in, and asked, “Who’re you?”

  “I’m with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Lucas said. “Lucas Davenport.”

  “I’m really hurt,” Weimer said, and the hand holding the newspaper trembled with the effort of speaking. He reached out, slowly, and dropped it on a service tray.

  “I’m sorry,” Lucas said.

  “Kept hitting me in the back, in the kidneys. Hit me even after they had the money.” He groaned, as if to emphasize the money.

  “You didn’t see any faces?”

  “No. The guy who was hitting me was wearing a mask,” Weimer said. “The driver I couldn’t see at all . . . You’re Mitford’s guy.”

  “Not exactly. We talk,” Lucas said.

  “But you know the score.”

  “More or less. You had a shitload of illegal money stashed in your room and a guy named Brutus Cohn and one of his gang members grabbed you in an alley and threw you in the back of a van, and put a bag on your head, got your room key and took the money. And beat you up.”

  Weimer nodded, shifted in bed, winced, and said: “That’s it, in a nutshell. I didn’t know his name was Brutus Cohn, and you might want to go easy on that ‘illegal money’ thing. Since you know all of that, why haven’t you picked him up?”

  “We’re looking, we haven’t found him,” Lucas said. “He’s ditched himself somewhere—could be headed out of town by now. But, we’re looking. Got his face all over national TV.”

  “Won’t get my money back,” Weimer said.

  “No, it won’t, but it really wasn’t your money, anyway,” Lucas said. “So: what can you tell me?”

  Weimer said, “I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve got one thing.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, I . . .” He groaned and arched his back and flailed at it with his good hand, groaned again, and then went slack, and looked at Lucas. “It keeps twisting, like a muscle’s turning back there . . . God bless me.”

  “The one thin
g,” Lucas said.

  “Ah . . . I was eating in this sandwich shop and I got up to go,” Weimer said. “Left the money and the tip on the table, walked out the door, turned left, walked down this little short alley around the building to the parking lot to my car. I opened the door and bam! They got me. Just bam-bam! Like that.” He had small round hands and he slapped them twice. “So, I think they had to be watching me, to be all ready. The guys in the van couldn’t see me, because you couldn’t see into the back of the shop. I think somebody was inside the place.”

  “You saw somebody?”

  Weimer shifted again, his face going pale, and he said, “Ahhh. God, I hate this shit . . . Okay: There was a tough-looking hillbilly guy and this cool-looking woman in the front booth. They didn’t look like they should go together, but they were. I noticed her looking back at me two or three times—caught her looking. I am what I am, and my wife likes me okay, but I’m not exactly a chick magnet, okay? They don’t look at me more than once.”

  “Okay.”

  “So she was checking me out,” Weimer said, “Now I wonder if she was checking me out for this Cohn guy? Maybe she made a call when I got up to leave.”

  “You see her on a cell phone?” Lucas asked.

  “No, but I didn’t look.”

  Lucas asked, “There’s no chance that she was a Latina-looking chick, was she?”

  Weimer’s eyebrows went up: “You know who she is?”

  LUCAS CALLED Carol, at the office, and had her check his e-mail. The photo from Washington was there. “Print it. I need it. Is there somebody who could run it over to St. John’s? Light and sirens?”

  “I saw Jenkins down the hall, reading the paper—he could take one of our cars.”

  “Get him over here. Quick as he can make it,” Lucas said.

  He tried to pry more information out of Weimer, but the lobbyist didn’t have much more: “The whole thing was quick. Professional. Bam-bam-bam. When the two of them were talking, they were totally calm and casual. Like a couple guys going out for a beer. Then, when the guy hit me for not telling about the hideout bag, he didn’t seem angry. He hit me like he was punishing a kid. Just . . . hit me.”

  Lucas went down to the cafeteria while he waited for Jenkins, got a Diet Coke, read the Star Tribune about the convention: more marches, lots of people already arrested. Finished the story, glanced at his watch, took out his cell phone and discovered that he had no signal. He walked it up the stairs, and then outside, got a signal, and called Jenkins. “I’m two minutes away,” Jenkins said. “I had to drive halfway around town to get here.”

  Lucas waited by the curb, saw Jenkins coming, waved him down. Jenkins passed a manila envelope out the window. “What a mess. You can’t get anywhere. St. Paul’s closing down the whole downtown area.”

  “Thanks for this. See you back at the office.”

  “I hope it’s serious.”

  “It is.” Lucas patted the truck on the door, and headed back into the hospital. In the elevator up to Weimer’s room, he slipped the photo out of the envelope. The quality was bad—cell phone quality—but the woman was recognizable, and, Lucas thought, somewhat hot.

  Dark hair, dark eyes, caught unaware, he thought, as though she had just turned around. She seemed to be in a nightclub, or some kind of night place—there were sparkly lights in the background, the corner of a mirror, the shoulder of another woman in what might have been a cocktail dress. The woman wasn’t looking at the camera, but off to the right; she might not have known about the picture, Lucas thought.

  WEIMER WAS sitting, unmoving, staring at the television that was attached to the ceiling. When Lucas came in, he turned his head: “Hurts when I move. This is awful, I’m like a baby. Could you take the top blanket off? My feet are getting hot.”

  Lucas stripped the cotton blanket off the bed, wadded it up, threw it on a chair and said, “Okay. I got a picture . . .” He should have had a bunch of pictures, a photo panel, and asked Weimer to pick one, but that, he thought, would be a pain in the ass. “I don’t want you to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ unless you’re sure. Take a look.”

  He passed the photo over and Weimer looked at it for a second, or two, then nodded and said, “Hell yes. That’s her. Who is she?”

  Lucas took the photo back and said, “I don’t know. But I will find out.”

  “Beat the shit out of her, for me,” Weimer said. “Do that, and I’ll get you a personalized autographed picture from the next president.”

  Lucas said, “You know who it’s going to be?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Weimer said. “Either one. We’re covered both ways.”

  AS SOON AS he could use his cell phone, on the way out of the hospital, he called Carol and said, “Jenkins is on the way back. Grab him, get Shrake, see if you can shake Del loose, he’s wandering around town somewhere, doing his homeless act . . . Meet in the office in twenty minutes.”

  In the car, he called Mitford, the governor’s man, and said, “We’re meeting in my office in twenty minutes to talk about the people pulling these robberies. You might want to come by.”

  “The cop thing yesterday . . . is that going to break it open?” Mitford asked.

  “Maybe, but maybe not,” Lucas said. “The money is getting to be less important, in a way.”

  “All right. I’m over at the X. I can be there in twenty, if I can get through town at all.”

  “You’re the guy who wanted to have the convention here,” Lucas said.

  “Hey, I think it’s a great success and another sign that Minnesota is marching into a future that gets brighter and brighter minute by minute. See ya.”

  THEY GATHERED in Lucas’s office, and Lucas kicked Carol out, despite her curiosity, and said to the cops, “You all know Neil . . .”

  Then he told them about it, about the money in briefcases and satchels, about the robberies, about the killing of the cop in Hudson, about Lily Rothenburg’s story of the cop murders in New York, and about the Latina-looking woman and the dead kid in D.C.

  “We’re dealing with murder as a policy. They’ve killed at least four people and that’s only the ones we know about,” Lucas said. “They’re a murder gang, and they’re here, and we need to run them down.”

  “I didn’t know,” Mitford said.

  “Nobody did—not really. We’re coming in the back door on this,” Lucas said. “Now, we’ve got to start pushing some buttons. I want to put this woman’s face out there. One of those ‘Do you know this woman?’ deals on national TV. I can go back to Lily on that, and she can help: she’s already plastering the place with Cohn’s photo.”

  “What about me?” Del asked. “I’ve spent a lot of time getting tight with these protesters. I’m doing the sheriff’s office some good, and the St. Paul cops.”

  “Stay with it until we get something we can use—and then I may have to pull you off,” Lucas said. “My feeling is, the big convention trouble is about over, after the arrests yesterday. Maybe more on Thursday, the big McCain day, but . . . if we need you, we need you.”

  Del nodded: “Okay.”

  Shrake: “The question is, where are they? After the trouble in Hudson, they know we’re papering the motels. So where are they staying? Out-state? Or have they taken off?”

  “Condos,” Jenkins said. “There are probably six hundred condos around town with nobody in them and the developers have been renting them out to the Republicans, to the media, to anyone who wants one. If they knew about that . . .”

  “They would,” Lucas said. “They’ve got good intelligence.”

  “Then that may be the answer,” Jenkins said to Lucas. “Your pal Ralph Warren, you know, with all his connections everywhere . . . maybe they went through him. He had a couple hundred empty condos.”

  “Yeah, well. He’s dead,” Lucas said. Warren hadn’t been a pal, and though Lucas had tried to keep him alive, he’d failed.

  “Even if he’s dead, there’s still gotta be a business manager somewh
ere,” Jenkins said. “Somebody’s got to be running the company.”

  Lucas jabbed a finger at him: “I’ll buy your idea. You and Shrake start running down condo managers, the ones with vacancies.”

  “Maybe we should hold off on the woman’s picture for a couple of days,” Del said. “Maybe we can spot her without the TV. If we spook her, and she takes off . . . it’s one thing we’ve got that they don’t know about.”

  Lucas thought about it, then said, “Okay. A day. If we come up with anything, we can stretch it out. After that, we’re going with the TV. I’ll get Carol to print up photos of Cohn and this woman for you guys to take around town.”

  He turned to Mitford: “At night . . . they’ve been hitting these guys at night, because it’s easier to locate them, and it’s easier to operate without letting their faces be seen. We need the names of the four or five biggest money dealers that you still see out there, and we’ll put somebody in their rooms. See if we can ambush them.”

  “I don’t know if they’ll go for that,” Mitford said.

  “They’ll have to do their deals somewhere else. Maybe they can rent two rooms. But that’s what we need, Neil. We got four dead.”

  Mitford nodded: “I’ll make some calls.”

  LETTY HAD twenty dollars from Lucas when she walked in the door at Channel Three that morning. The receptionist buzzed her through the security gate and she walked back past the studios, where the Bob & Jane morning show was unwinding. She nodded to the weatherman, who walked by, on his way to do a thirty-second bit, shaking peanuts out of a cellophane bag, and said, “You’ve got something stuck to your cheek.”