Easy Prey

Chapter 15

Lucas focused on driving, blowing past cars as Del gave a running commentary on gaps in the traffic: "Go left behind this red one, move over left, go, go" Down the ramp and around the corner onto I-35W, squeezing between an old Bronco and a generic Chevy pickup.

Halfway back, Lucas said, "We've done this before."

"That fuckin' Sherrill, she's always got her face in it," Del said. "Last time she goddamned near bled to death."

"Rose Marie said it's bad," Lucas groaned. "She said it's bad"

A pale-faced, blood-spattered Jael Corbeau was standing in the hallway just inside the emergency room door, with two uniformed cops, when Lucas and Del burst in. "Where is she?" Lucas asked.

"They're operating," Jael said, stepping toward him. "They rushed her right in."

Lucas headed for the hall to the operating rooms. Rose Marie was standing there with Lester. Lester grabbed Lucas's arm and said, "Slow down," and Rose Marie said, "You can't see anything down there, Lucas." Lester added, "She's already under, man, they've already got her asleep."

Lucas slowed down, realized Del was right behind him. "How bad?" Del asked, and Lucas asked, "Is she gonna make it?"

"She was hit twice," Lester said. "Once in the left arm, once in the left side of her chest. Busted a lung. She might've died except that she rolled up on her left side they said she might've drowned if she hadn't been on her side."

"Is she gonna make it?" Lucas asked.

"She's bad," Lester said, "but she's still alive. If they get you here alive"

"Aw, Jesus," Lucas said. He slumped against the wall, closed his eyes. Jael. He pushed away from the wall and headed back toward the entrance. Jael was still there.

"What happened?"

The words came out in a spate. "We were coming out of my house, going downtown, and this car came down the street and the window was open and Marcy yelled at me and got her gun out and this man started shooting at us. Marcy shoved me down and then she fell down, and the car kept going, and when I looked at Marcy she had blood all over her and I ran and called 911 and then I came out and tried to stop the blood and when the ambulance got there I rode down here with her"

"She got off a couple of rounds," one of the uniformed cops said.

Jael nodded, stepped toward Lucas, took his shirt in both hands. "She said to tell you, this is all she said, she said to tell you that she shot the car, She said, Tell Lucas I hit the car.' "

"What kind of car? You didn't get a license number"

"No, no, I barely saw it 'cause she pushed me. I went down."

"You didn't see anything."

She closed her eyes, still holding on to his shirt, and then said, "It was dark. Long and dark."

Lucas pressed. "Long and dark. What do you mean, long and dark? Like a Mercedes-Benz or a Cadillac?"

"No, I don't think so," she said. "It just looked long and dark."

"American?"

"I don't know. Like those big cars from twenty years ago. But I don't know what kind, I don't know, God"

Lucas put an arm around her and gave her a squeeze. "You did good," he said. "I'm amazed that you saw anything."

More cops came rolling in. Everybody was doing right: They were looking at all long dark cars, checking for bullet holes, looping the neighborhood down there. But Jael lived within whistling distance of a half-dozen interstate on-ramps. Everybody was looking, but without much hope.

Another doctor arrived, headed straight back. "Vascular surgeon," a nurse told them.

"What does that mean?" Lucas asked. "Heart?"

"No telling," she said.

One of the on-sterile circulating nurses came out of the operating room on an errand, and they trapped her. "I don't know," she said. "She's alivethey're breathing her."

After an hour, Del said, "We can't do anything here. All we can do is find out that she died, if she dies."

"So what do you suggest?" Lucas was angry and scared, his voice a croak.

"I suggest we go find that fuckin' Olson and look at his car," Del said. Sherrill had been shot once before, and nearly bled to death. Del had ridden with her from the shooting scene to the hospital, in a helicopter, squeezing the artery so hard that for weeks afterward Sherrill had complained about the bruise. "The bullet hole is nothin'," she'd said. "But that goddamn bruise where Del squeezed me that's killing my ass."

"We know what kind of car?" Lucas asked.

"Dark blue 1986 Volvo sedan. And the Olsons said they're staying at the Four Winds. That'd be a place to start."

"I'll drive," Lucas said.

The Four Winds was three blocks from the Mall of America, just south of the I-494 link of the beltway. They spotted the Volvo in the parking lot, stopped behind it, and got out to look. The car was old and dark, with patches of gray primer paint on the left front fender. No bullet holes.

"Goddamnit. That would have been easy," Del said.

Then Tom Olson turned the corner of the motel, carrying a sack of vending machine potato chips and a can of Coke. He saw them, stopped, and then stalked over. "What are you doing?"

"Looking at your car," Lucas said.

"Why?" He set himself squarely, and a half-step too close.

Lucas moved an inch closer yet, and Del moved a foot to the right.

"Because somebody in a long dark car just shot the police officer who was guarding Jael Corbeau."

Olson was amazed, and some of the grimness went out of his face. He shuffled a step back. "You thought it was me? I'd never Is she dead?"

"No. She's in the operating room," Lucas said. "Since whoever is doing the shooting may be taking revenge for the death of your sister, and since you drive an older, dark car we thought we should take a look."

"I didn't do it," Olson said. "If I were you, I'd take a close look at those hellhounds that Alie'e hung out with. They're the crazy ones. Not me. They're the crazies."

"You seem a little loosely wrapped yourself," Del said. He'd edged a few inches closer to Olson, to a spot that would allow him to hook the other man in the solar plexus.

"Only to a sinner," Olson said.

Del tightened up. "Easy, dude," Lucas said.

"Where were you at four-twenty this afternoon?" Del asked.

Olson looked at his watch. "Well, let me see. I must've still been at the mall."

"Mall of America?"

"Yes." They all turned and looked at it. The mall looked like Uncle Scrooge's money bin, without the charm. "I spent a couple of hours walking around the place."

"What'd you buy? Do you have any receipts?" Del was pressing.

"No, I didn't buy anything," Olson said. "Well, a cinnamon roll. I just walked around."

"Talk to anybody?"

"No, not really."

"In other words, you couldn't find anybody to back up your story, if you had to."

Olson shrugged. "I don't think so. I was just walking. I'd never been in the place before. It's astonishing. You know, don't you our whole culture is dying. Something new is being born in places like that. Snake things."

"Yeah, well" Now Del shrugged. "What're you going to do?"

"Pray," Olson said.

There was nothing more to say, and the need to know what was going on at the hospital was pressing on them. Lucas said, "Let's get back," and Del nodded.

"Sorry about this," Del said to Olson.

Lucas had parked behind Olsons car. Olson watched them get back in, then pushed through a set of glass doors to a stair lobby. Lucas rolled the Porsche out of the parking lot. "I got a bad feeling about Marcy," he said, with a dark hand on his heart.

Del said, "They got her alive, dude"

"I got a bad feeling, man." At the end of the motel drive, he slowed to let a car go, took a right, idled a hundred feet up the street to a traffic light, and stopped. "This is the second time she's been hit hard."

"You been hit just as hard."

"I never took a shot in"

Del interrupted, his voice harsh. "What the fuck is this? What the fuck is this?"

He was looking out the passenger-side window, and Lucas leaned forward to look past him. Tom Olson was running toward them, across the motel parking lot, waving his arms. They could see that he was shouting or screaming, but were too far away to hear him. There was a craziness in the way he rana violent, high-kick fullback run, as though he were fighting his way through invisible tacklers.

Lucas stopped the car, and both he and Del stepped out as Olson got closer. The traffic light changed to green; the driver of the Lexus that had come up behind them touched his horn. Lucas shook his head at the driver and stepped between the Lexus and the Porsche, heading toward Olson. Olson was fifty yards away when he suddenly stopped, leaned forward, and put his hands on his knees, as though he'd run out of breath. The Lexus guy pushed open his car door and stepped out on the street. The Lexus was trapped behind the Porsche, with more cars behind the Lexus. The driver shouted, "Move the car, asshole" and honked his horn again.

Lucas shouted back, "Police. Go around it." The manleaned on the horn, shouting unintelligibly; then another car behind the Lexus started. As suddenly as he'd stopped, Olson heaved himself upright and began running toward them again, crossed out of the blacktopped parking lot onto a grassy verge as Lucas and Del stepped onto the grass from the other side.

Then, with the horns honking behind them, Olson ran to within a few feet of them and stopped, his eyes wide and anguished, grabbed hair on both sides of his head above his ears, opened his mouth, said nothing, his jaw workingand then pitched facedown on the ground.

"Jesus Christ," Del said.

A few of the horns stopped, but one or two continued. They could hear the Lexus driver's voice again: "Hey, asshole, asshole"

They crouched next to Olson, and Lucas turned the unconscious man's face, lifted an eyelid with a thumb. Olson's eyes had rolled up, and Lucas could see nothing but a pearly sliver of white. "He's breathing, but he's out," Lucas said. "Call 911."

Del got his cell phone out and they both stood up, over Olson's crumpled form. A half-dozen horns were going again, and then the suddenbrrrrp of a cop touching a siren. A squad car rolled around in front of the Porsche, and the honking stopped.

Lucas took his ID out of his pocket and started toward the cop car as a Bloomington cop got out of the near side, another out of the far side of the car. They kept Lucas's Porsche between them. Lucas held his badge case above his head and shouted, "Minneapolis police. We need an ambulance and some help."

The cop behind the Porsche turned to say something to the other cop, and when Lucas closed up he held out the badge case, but the cop on the far side of the squad, the taller of the two, a sergeant, said, "Chief Davenport what's going on?"

"We don't know. We just talked to that guy at the motel and were leaving, and all of a sudden he came running across the lot screaming at us and now he's had some sort of fit. We need a paramedic right now, and we need you guys to hang around. Could you hold on a minute?"

"Sure."

He walked around to the Lexus; the driver had slid back inside, but Lucas grabbed the handle and jerked the door open. The man was in his fifties, red-faced, wattled. Lucas said, "I'm a police officer. We had a serious problem. My inclination is to jerk your ugly stupid ass out of this car, cuff you, and send you downtown on a charge of interfering with a police officer. A body-cavity search would teach you the real meaning of the wordasshole,"

"I just want to get going." The man was furious, unapologetic. "You had me blocked in. I'm busy, I'm in a goddamned hurry, and you're screwing around with some asshole."

Lucas said, "Put your car in park."

"Itis in park."

Lucas reached past him, turned the key, killed the engine. "Sit here until I tell you you can go. If you move, you go to jail."

"I'm in a fuckin' hurry," the man screamed.

Lucas went back to the Bloomington cops and explained what bad happened with Olson. An ambulance siren started in the distance. The traffic jam intensified as people leaving the mall stopped to gawk at the Porsche and the police car, and the man lying on the grass.

"The thing is, he was fine in the parking lot when we were talking to him," Lucas said. "Then he headed back to his hotel room, and a minute later, here be came running after us. Now he's had whatever this is. A fit."

A car was passing in the outside lane, and a kid yelled, "Did you shoot him?"

"Maybe a stroke," said the sergeant.

"He's just out," Del said. "He's like somebody knocked him out."

"I think we better go look at the motel," Lucas said. "Could you guys stay here and handle the pararnedics and traffic, but send another car over to the motel?"

"Yeah. Have somebody here in a minute." He looked at the Lexus. "What's the story on this guy?"

Lucas told him quickly, and the sergeant nodded. "Fuckhead. We'll keep him around for a while."

"That'd be good," Lucas said. "At least until he's cooled out."

Lucas and Del walked toward the hotel, off the grass, across the parking lot. The desk clerk had come to the front window to watch the commotion at the curb. Lucas showed him the badge case and said, "We need the room number and a key for a guest named Olson."

The clerk stepped behind the desk, punched up a computer. "We've got two Olsonsa Mr. Tom and a Mr. Lynn Olson."

"Give us both keys," Lucas said.

The clerk never hesitated. He looked in a slotted drawer, took out two keys, and pushed them across the desk. "Is there anything else I can do?"

"A Bloomington police car is gonna be here in a minute," Lucas said. "Send the cops up."

The Olsons' two rooms were adjacent, up an interior stairway and down a long carpeted hall that smelled faintly of disinfectant and something else, like wine or beer. "Would something in his own room freak him out?" Del asked as they counted the room numbers down the hall.

"I was wondering that," Lucas said. "Let's try his folks."

The elder Olsons' door came up first. Lucas knocked. No answer.

Knocked louder. They listened, then Del shook his head and Lucas put the key in the lock, turned it, and pushed.

No chain. The door swung open and Lucas stepped inside, smelled the blood and urine.

Lynn Olson lay diagonally across the double bed closest to the door, facedown, fully clothed, his head twisted strangely to the right, away from them. One arm was outstretched; a chromed revolver lay on the floor under his hand. His wife lay on the next bed, rigidly, straight down the middle, shoeless but otherwise clothed. She was faceup, her head on a pillow, a red gunshot wound showing at her temple.

"Oh, fuck," Del said from behind Lucas.

They moved slowly into the room, both of them unconsciously pulling their weapons. The room was actually a small suite, with a sitting area off the main room. The bathroom was in the back. Lucas checked quickly, found it empty, and went back to the main room.

Del, who'd stayed back, said, "Gun by the bed."

Lucas stepped toward Lynn Olson, touched his cheek: cold. He was dead, and had been dead for a while. There was no question about Lil Olson. They could see the spray from the gunshot wound on the far side of her head where the slug had exited. Lucas knelt next to the gun, got his nose an inch away from it: a nine-millimeter. "I don't think that's the gun that was used on Plain," he said. "That was a pretty big crater in the concrete. I don't think a nine would do that."

"And I can't see the thread. Alie'e goes down, so somebody kills Plain. I can see that: revenge, especially after that photo spread. He's making a buck off Alie'e's death, and maybe some nut takes it the wrong way. Same thing with Corbeau: she's one of the sinners around Alie'e, one of the muff-divers. But the parents. I don't see the parents."

Lucas shook his head. From the hallway, they heard a voice. "Hello?"

Del went to the door, poked his head out. "Down here."

Two new Bloomington cops arrived a moment later, one in his twenties, the other graying, heavier. "Two dead," Lucas said. "We're gonna need the crime lab, big-time, and like right now."

The gray-haired one said, "I saw you on TV. On the Alie'e thing. Is this more of that?"

Lucas nodded. "These are Alie'e parents."

The cop exhaled, hooked his thumbs over his belt, took another long look as though memorizing the scene. "Gotta hand it to you," he said, as though it were Lucas's doing. "This is some weird shit." He looked at his younger partner. "Call it in."

Lucas said, "I just thought of something. I'm gonna have to I need Lynn Olsons billfold."

"Aw, man, I don't know," the older cop said. Crime scenes were not to be messed with.

"Yeah, I know, but I need it." Lucas stepped back inside the room, looked around, saw a plastic bag stuffed into an ice bucket, got it, and walked over to Olsons body. He could see the lump of the wallet in Olsons back pocket, carefully lifted the pocket flap, gripped the wallet through the plastic bag, and slipped it out. With the wallet inside the bag, be opened it, found the drivers license in a credit-card slot, and maneuvered it out.

"Could you call this in?" he asked the older cop. "Ask them to run Lynn Olson, DOB 2-23-44. He lives in Burnt River, Minnesota. We need cars registered to him."

Bloomington came back in thirty seconds. Olson had three cars: a new dark-blue Volvo, a two-year-old Ford Explorer, and a green 1968 Pontiac GTO.

"You guys got it," Lucas told the Bloomington cops. "We need to look for this car in the parking lot." And to Del: "Come on."

On the way down the stairs, Del said, "Marcy's gonna make it."

Lucas looked at him. "You didn't talk to anyone?"

"No, man. You bummed me out with that bad vibe. Butthis was the vibe. Not Marcy. You were getting a vibe from this."

"Del, you can't be smokin' that shit while you're working."

"Yeah, well, watch. She's good." He seemed marginally more cheerful.

They found the Olsons' car in a minute, the blue Volvo, much like Tom Olson's car but a decade newer. Lucas walked around to the passenger side, squeezing between the Volvo and a red Chevy Camaro. He saw the bullet hole before he got to the door, reached down and touched it. Hard to mistake, either by sight or feel. "That's Olympic-quality shooting," Del said. He knelt in the narrow space to look at the hole, while Lucas turned to look back up the parking lot. Three Bloomington squad cars rounded the corner of the hotel, one after another, lights flashing, like a Shriners parade.

"I better call Rose Marie," he said. "I left my phone in the car."

Del handed him the cell phone, and he punched in Rose Marie's number. "This is Lucas," he said. "How is she?"

Lucas listened, Del peering at him. Lucas took the phone away from his ear and told him, "She's still on the table."

"She's okay," Del said, but now he sounded uncertain.

Lucas said to Rose Marie, "Okay. We've had a development down here."