Storm Prey

by Sandford, John

  Now, he knew, you just had to find the right women.

  SHAHEEN WAS a more intricate situation, and Barakat more sober about it: “I have known him for a long time. He is nothing, but still, I have known him. I would like to do this quietly. No guns. We have to come and go, leave him behind ...”

  As an emergency room physician, Barakat had seen all kinds of trauma. After considering it, he decided that the best solution would be a blow to the head with something heavy. “When he is down, then we can finish him. The main thing, we attract no attention. With what the woman saw, Karkinnen, we don’t want somebody describing me.”

  Shaheen lived in an anonymous tan-stucco apartment building in south Minneapolis. Barakat and Cappy left the van on the street and walked back to it, in the night, and Barakat said, “His light’s on.”

  “He have a girlfriend?”

  “Shaheen? No. There’s a girl back home that he’s supposed to marry, fixed by his father. But he’s told me he doesn’t care for her.”

  “Don’t care about that—I just wondered if he had one, if she’s up there.”

  “What are your ideas for this?” Barakat asked. “To be quiet about it.”

  “Got no ideas,” Cappy said. “Just be simple and do it.”

  THE APARTMENT building had an interior door that was supposed to be locked, but Barakat pulled on it, hard, and the lock popped and they went through.

  “How’d you know about that?” Cappy asked.

  “Lock has been broken for two years,” Barakat said. “Nobody uses their key anymore.”

  SHAHEEN PEEKED around the door to see who it was, then let them in. “Now what? Has something happened?”

  “We came to tell you that nothing has happened, everything is okay,” Barakat said. “The police have found the people who did it, and they were killed.”

  “The police killed them? I didn’t hear ...”

  And they got into it, talking in circles about the people who’d robbed the hospital. Cappy had come lounging in the door behind Barakat. Shaheen glanced at him and then turned to his talk with Barakat, glancing sideways at Cappy from time to time, but not asking who he was, or what he was doing with Barakat.

  Shaheen’s apartment was furnished in Poor Student, with ramshackle bookcases holding dozens of texts, piles of medical papers. A couch faced two old easy chairs, with a glass-topped coffee table between them, and, to one side, a wooden desk with a computer, printer, and more piles of paper. A bar separated a kitchenette from the living room. There were two interior doors, both open, one leading to a bathroom, the other to a bedroom. They could see the toilet stool in one and the end of a bed in the other.

  Shaheen smoked. A large glass ashtray sat on the dining bar; as they talked, they moved past it, toward the circle of the couch and chairs. Cappy picked up the ashtray. Shaheen’s back was to him and he lifted it in one hand, a question. Barakat gave him a tiny nod, and Cappy stepped toward Shaheen, who started to turn, and slammed it into his head, an inch behind his ear.

  Shaheen went down as though shot. Barakat put his hands on his hips and said, “You know, I hate to see this.”

  “A little late to stop now,” Cappy said.

  “Oh, we can’t stop.” He knelt down and pushed a finger into Shaheen’s neck. “Still alive,” he said.

  Cappy said, “Here,” and he knelt beside the supine man, pinched his nose, put his hand over Shaheen’s mouth, and pressed. Shaheen was profoundly unconscious, and never resisted. After a moment, he began to tremble and shake, and then he died.

  Barakat checked again and said, “Well, that’s that. Good-bye, Addie.” Then he rolled him, fished his wallet out of his pocket, and took out a wad of cash. “He doesn’t trust banks—there may be some more around, maybe in the refrigerator.”

  They found an envelope with $1,100 under an ice-cube tray; Cappy probed the bedroom, but found nothing more. Barakat had brought with him a dozen sample boxes of Viagra, distributed through hospitals and doctors’ offices, two boxes of Tamiflu, and three bottles of stimulants.

  They wiped them, then handled them with Shaheen’s dead but still sweaty hands, and then put them in a shoe box under Shaheen’s bed. The stimulants had the hospital’s name on them.

  “Now, we go away,” Barakat said. They wiped the ashtray and touched the doorknob only with a paper towel, careful not to wipe it, and were gone.

  “The thing about this is, this solves several long-term problems I have had,” Barakat said, as they walked back down the sidewalk to the car. “I never liked Addle. He was always trying to climb out of his place. Also, he spied on me for my father.”

  “Hope he didn’t tell your old man about the hospital.”

  “He didn’t know about the hospital for sure. He thought I did it, but he wasn’t sure. And now, it’s not a problem,” Barakat said. “You hungry?”

  Cappy nodded. “I could use a bite ... Man, like that spook was all pink down there, you know? I didn’t know that about them.”

  He didn’t think about Shaheen, because Shaheen was now irrelevant.

  17

  VIRGIL TOLD LUCAS, “I got tired of wandering around doing nothing, so finally I started asking everybody I met if they knew any Arabs with French accents, or accents that might be French, who’ve been acting flaky. Or Frenchmen who look like Arabs.”

  They were sitting at the dining table, with coffee. Weather was holding her head in her hands, and every once in a while said something like “Oh my God.”

  Lucas asked, “What happened?”

  “Nothing yet,” Virgil said. “The question hasn’t had time to metastasize. I figure the politically correct wolverines will be onto it pretty quick. They’ll blab it all over the hospital, and I should have about six formal complaints and three answers by noon tomorrow.”

  Weather said, “Oh my God.”

  Lucas patted her on the leg and said, “Don’t worry. If it works, we’re golden. If it doesn’t work, and there are too many complaints, we’ll reprimand him and tell everybody he’ll be required to go to sensitivity training. He’s going to the Bahamas in two weeks, anyway, so he’ll be out of sight.”

  “Oh my God.”

  Lucas asked Virgil, “Run into any good-looking doctors over there?”

  “A couple,” Virgil said.

  “I heard radiologists are hot. And dermatologists. They’re more intellectual than, like, surgeons,” Lucas said.

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Virgil said.

  Weather said, “Sometimes, the two of you think you’re being funny, but you’re not that funny. I’ve got to work with a lot of ... of ...”

  Lucas said to Virgil, “She’s trying to find a softer word for ‘Arab.’ Like, ‘Persons of Middle Eastern heritage.’”

  “Fuck you,” Weather said.

  “See?” Lucas said. “A dermatologist never would have said that. They’re more classy.”

  LUCAS CAME to bed at one o’clock, moving quietly, and Weather said, “I’m awake.”

  “You should be asleep. Are you okay?”

  “We’re going to do it,” she said.

  “Yes. I hope that thing with Virgil isn’t keeping you awake.”

  “No. I know how to prioritize,” Weather said. “I even understand what he’s doing, but you’ll never get me to approve of it. You know, officially.”

  “Gods of correctness,” Lucas said.

  “Mmm.”

  “Thinking about the babies?” Lucas slipped under the blankets.

  “They’re just like us, but they don’t understand,” Weather said. “They’re alive, they have emotions, they have intellectual processes, they are learning, they know some words ... they’re physically underdeveloped because they haven’t been able to walk or crawl, but they’re like us. They’re lying there, maybe in some pain, wondering what’s happening, and tomorrow, by this time, one or both of them might be dead, because of what we’re doing.”

  “Weather—”

  “I know. I woul
dn’t want to do anything else, or be anywhere else, but: it’s a load.”

  “Did you take a pill?”

  “No. I’ll be fine. Maybe if we could just do a spoon for a few minutes,” she said.

  “Listen,” Lucas said. “It’s gonna work out. That’s the karma here ... it’s going to work.”

  “You don’t believe in karma.”

  “Snuggle up,” he said. “Close your eyes. It’s gonna work.”

  WEATHER LEFT at six, got to the hospital fifteen minutes later, bodyguards fore and aft. Maret was gathering the team together for a pep talk: “This time we must keep going. We are close, but still several hours away. Everybody must resolve to work quickly. If we can save five minutes here or there, it’s worth doing. We’re in a race. We are not sloppy, but we are quick.”

  Weather went down to the separation lounge and found the Rayneses talking to a stress counselor. “You okay?” she asked them.

  “Gabriel says that one way or another, we’ll finish today,” Lucy Raynes said.

  Weather nodded. “We will. The babies look better, but they can’t take much more. We’ll finish.”

  “God willing,” Larry Raynes said.

  She left them, went to the women’s locker room, changed into scrubs; when she came out, the babies were being rolled into the operating room.

  LUCAS STAYED UP just long enough to see her off with Virgil, Jenkins, and Shrake, then went back to bed, looking for another hour or two of sleep. It came hard: his mind wouldn’t stop churning, looking for strings that might lead to the doctor. He finally rolled out of bed at eight, cleaned up and headed down to his office. He was just turning into the parking lot when he got a call from Virgil.

  “Your pal Marcy’s all over me,” Virgil said.

  “Because of the Arab thing?”

  “That’s ten percent of it,” Virgil said. “The other ninety percent is, an Arab doctor from Lebanon was murdered down in south Minneapolis last night. He used to live in Paris. They’re taking some unusual drugs out of his apartment, and some wrappers for more drugs they haven’t found. Like, a lot of drugs.”

  “You’re serious.”

  “She should be calling you in about two minutes,” Virgil said. “I probably got in first because you’re on my speed dial.”

  “Where’s this at? The murder? You got an address?”

  “No, but like I said, she’ll be calling. Jenkins and Shrake are still here. I’m gonna run down there and take a look.”

  LUCAS’S CELL PHONE booped, and he said, “There she is. Talk to you later.” He pressed the flash button, and Marcy came up. “You know what your guy Virgil did yesterday?”

  Lucas asked, “So what’s the address? You there yet? What kind of drugs ... ?”

  THE MINNEAPOLIS cops were all over the scene, Marcy standing in the hall talking to the lieutenant in charge of the homicide unit. She saw Lucas and walked down toward him and said, “That fuckin’ Flowers. They were talking all over the hospital yesterday about how he was looking for an Arab, and see what happens?”

  “The dead guy is an Arab?”

  “Yes. Adnan Shaheen, from Lebanon,” she said. “Decent rep, far as we can tell, but we’ve got some dope containers and other stuff, and it looks like it might have come out of the hospital pharmacy.”

  “This didn’t happen because of Virgil,” Lucas said. “He didn’t kill anyone. We’ve got a stone killer who’s cleaning up the mess left from the hospital holdup.”

  “Pretty goddamn far-out there, though ...”

  “Don’t get on his case. He’s coming by in a few minutes,” Lucas said.

  “Already been here and gone. And I did get on his case. He is the most uncooperative, insubordinate—”

  “What’d you want him to do? Say he was looking for a swarthy doctor?” Lucas asked.

  “Shut up,” she said.

  “So we got the doc ...”

  “And another problem,” Marcy said.

  Lucas nodded: “Who killed the doc?”

  She said, “It’s pretty clear to me that it’s a gang thing. Somebody else in the Seed got wind of the robbery and hijacked it.”

  Lucas nodded and said, “Let me take a look.”

  NOT MUCH TO SEE—a dead man with a broken head and a small puddle of blood beneath it, lying on his back, arms beside his body, palms up, in what Yoga people called “the corpse pose,” for good enough reason. Lucas watched the processing for a few minutes, then asked, “Who found him?”

  “Neighbor. Another guy who works downtown, they carpool into work. He knocked a couple times, and Shaheen didn’t answer, and Shaheen’s car was still in the parking lot. He peeked in at a corner of the blinds, and he could see him on the floor. Like we did with Lyle Mack.”

  “Gives me an ice cream headache,” Lucas said. “Listen, I’m gonna go put a damp cloth on my eyeballs.”

  “You do that,” she said. “If you think of anything, let me know.”

  “I already thought of one thing. The doc was friendly enough with the killer that he let the guy hit him from behind.”

  LUCAS WENT OUT and sat in his truck for a while, then put it in gear and headed over to University Hospitals.

  Virgil was lounging in the cafeteria, again, waiting. “Am I gonna get some shit?” he asked.

  “Nah,” Lucas said. “We were looking for an Arab. So what? Turned out we were right.”

  LUCAS GOT a doughnut and a Diet Coke and came back to Virgil’s table and said, “When I think about a gang holding up the pharmacy, I think of a tight group of people: Joe Mack, who was seen by Weather, and Chapman and Haines, with Haines confirmed through DNA. Lyle Mack was involved, probably as the brains behind the operation. Ike Mack was probably in charge of selling the drugs downstream. And the doc, who probably set up the robbery, including the theft of a key.”

  No one else would be needed for the job, he said, and there’d be no reason to tell anyone else about it. Telling somebody else would just be an unnecessary risk.

  “First, I thought it was somebody in the group,” Lucas said. “They’d committed a murder, inadvertently, and I thought the killer was probably wiping out anyone who could pin the murder on him. And I thought it had to be the doc. Everybody else we know about were friends, and knew each other forever, and now they’re all dead. So the doc must be the killer.

  “But then the doc was killed. And the doc ... I don’t see him as a longtime friend of this bunch. The Macks don’t have medical friends.”

  “You’re making a logical case for the existence of at least one more guy,” Virgil said, “which we already know, unless the doc beat himself to death.”

  “But one more guy wouldn’t have any function in the holdup. And that guy didn’t know what happened to the drugs, because he had to torture Lyle Mack to get the information. So he’s a total outsider. Then, the way Lyle Mack was tortured, I thought it had to be two guys, one guy sitting in the chair, pinning Mack to the floor, the other guy cutting on him. And that powder on him ... I thought the other guy was the doc. The guy who did the cutting.”

  Virgil said, “Logically, if there could be one outsider, there could be ten outsiders. All the Macks had to do was tell one guy, and the outsider gets his gang together and hijacks the robbery. You don’t need the doctor and ...” Virgil paused, mid-screed, and then said, “No, that’s not right, is it?”

  “I don’t think so,” Lucas said. “Did the Macks tell everybody they knew what they were doing? Why would they do that? And why would the outsiders kill everybody in the gang, if they weren’t involved in the pharmacy murder? If all they wanted was the drugs, if they were outsiders, they could have tortured Lyle Mack and killed Ike, and nobody would have known who they were. So why did they kill the doc? How’d they even know about the doc? Why did they make a run at Weather?”

  “That could have been Joe Mack or Haines or Chapman, right?”

  “No. Haines and Chapman were already dead. The autopsy suggests they were killed the day
of the robbery. At least twenty-four hours before Weather was attacked. Weather says the biker was a small guy, and Joe Mack is notably large.”

  “So there’s at least one other guy,” Virgil said. “The guy who killed Jill MacBride. That’s some outsider DNA, right?”

  “If it doesn’t belong to the doc.” Lucas thought about it for a minute, then said, “But it won’t belong to the doc, because the guy who killed Jill MacBride is the guy who tortured Lyle Mack. Same cold killer. Same ...”

  He stopped and turned away from Virgil and said, “Oh, Jesus.”

  “What?”

  “How did the guy who killed Jill MacBride get to the airport? And how did Joe get out? MacBride’s car was still there.... Somebody picked him up, and killed MacBride, right? The killer picked up Joe Mack. Joe either called him, or Lyle Mack called him and sent him over to pick up Joe. We know Joe Mack talked to Lyle, after he ran.”

  “They could have taken the train in and out,” Virgil said. “But it’s about nine hundred and ninety-nine to one that they drove.”

  Lucas stood up, suddenly excited: “You know what? You know what? The day Joe Mack ran, he was signing his van over to a skinhead. He signed the paper, but the guy never gave Joe any money. No check, nothing. Nothing we saw. I suppose the skinhead could have given Joe a wad of cash ahead of time, but that usually doesn’t get done, you know, until the papers are signed. They were either friends, or Joe Mack owed him big. And this was a hard-looking guy.”

  Virgil’s eyebrows went up. “The skinhead—what does he look like?”

  “You know, a skinhead,” Lucas said. “Probably twenty-five, wind-burned face, skinny, muscles in his face ...”