Easy Prey

Chapter 16

While Del waited at the car, Lucas led the arriving Bloomington cops up the stairs to the Olsons' room, then violated the crime scene again. This time, over the Bloomington cops' protests, he took the Olsons' car keys off a dresser.

"The keys are completely out of the scene," he told them. "You won't get anything off the car keys But we need to look in their trunk."

"Yeah, but" the sergeant said uneasily. It was all against his training.

"Look, it's okay. I'll take the responsibility," Lucas said. "But I'd appreciate it if you could come down and watch while we open the car."

The sergeant agreed to walk along. Lucas opened the car trunk, found nothing but odd bits of traveling luggagea camera bag, a half-full laundry bag, two golf clubs and a couple of loose balls, an open box of plastic garbage bags, an empty cooler, and, under a purple Minnesota Vikings jacket, a gray-metal toolbox.

"Looking for a big gun?" Del asked.

"If this is what it looks like, if this is murder-suicide man, it'd make life easier," Lucas said. He dipped into the box of garbage bags, pulled one out, ripped a couple of chunks out of it, made mittens out of the chunks and opened the toolbox. The top of the box was a lift-out tray with a socketwrench and sockets. He lifted the tray out. Tools. "Nothing," he said.

Del had taken the keys out of the truck to open the passenger-side door. "I don't see anything."

Del stood up. "But the hole in the door This could clean up Marcy and probably Plain. Revenge shootings. Either that or"

"What?"

"What if Lynn Olson was trying to fuck his daughter, and something happened? He was drunk at the party and maybe Lansing I don't know."

"Where'd Plain come into it?" Lucas asked, thinking it over.

"Maybe he saw something?"

"Why wouldn't he tell us? He said he didn't like them much, the whole crowd around Alie'e."

"I don't know," Del said.

They stayed at the motel for an hour, watched the preliminary crime-scene work, and made arrangements for a statement for the Bloomington cops.

"You gotta do the gun right now," Lucas said as a crime-scene tech crawled over the room. "It may be the gun used to shoot Marcy Sherrill."

"We'll have it in a couple of hours, no more," the tech said. "Have they taken a bullet out of her?"

"I don't know." Lucas called to ask, and was told that both bullets that hit Sherrill had done clean pass-throughs. Another crime-scene team was at Jael Corbeau's studio, trying to recover a slug from what looked like a bullet hole in a wooden railing. Jael was still at the hospital.

A cluster of television camera trucks had appeared at a diner across the street. Bloomington was keeping them away from the motel, and a Bloomington cop had moved Lucas's Porsche back into the lot. As they left the motel, Lucas could see sudden movement among the cameramen, the cameras going up on their shoulders.

"We're about to go on TV," he said. Del dipped his head and stepped behind Lucas. At the car, he kept his head down, one hand over his face. As they pulled out of the parking lot, a TV truck pulled out behind them in pursuit. Lucas lost it on the interstate, cutting through evening traffic like a shark.

They'd made the phone checks: Sherrill was still on the table. She'd taken a lot of blood, but the prognosis had improved. Tom Olson was asleep. He'd been disoriented at the hospital, his body overcome with shock. He'd been sedated.

North of town, at James Bee's house, the cops had cleaned out the computers and the Rolodex. There'd been one cross-match between the Rolodex and the names on the party list from Silly Hanson's, and a competent Minneapolis cop named Loring was running down the cross. The cops at Bee's house also found three ounces of cocaine in a bedroom. Bee claimed it belonged to his wife, the blonde, who denied it. They were both being transported to the county jail.

They still had the outstanding warrant for the second house, but Del shook his head: "Everything's too heavy right how," he said. "If we need it, let's do it tomorrow. Let's go talk to Beemaybe he'll give us what we need."

"Let's stop at the hospital first."

"Yeah, wellI assumed that," Del said.

They weren't allowed to look into the operating room, and Sherrill was still on the table.

"Jesus, how long's it been?" Lucas asked Rose Marie.

Rose Marie bad taken an empty hospital room, and was working two separate patient telephones. She looked at her watch. "Four hours."

"How much more can they have to do?"

"I don't know what they've done, Lucas. Look go away. Go do something."

"Like what?" he asked.

"I don't care, but this isn't good for you." She looked at Del. "You either."

Del said, "So lets go talk to Bee."

Bee was with his lawyer. Lucas knocked on the door, poked his head in. "Wanted you to know we're looking for some information and we might be able to talk."

"I don't think so," the lawyer said. "Your search warrant is a piece of toilet paper."

"Au contraire," Del said. "That thing is a piece of gold. Your client here is going straight to jail, and he won't be passing Go."

Bee looked troubled. He said, "I don't think I've exactly got a problem. For one thing, it wasn't my cocaine, it was Connie's. But say I wanted to help Connie what would you need to know?"

"We're trying to find out who was running Sandy Lansing, the woman killed with Alie'e Maison. She was dealing, but she was retail. We're looking for the guy behind her."

Bee shrugged. "Let me talk to Ralph here. I don't know if I could help you even if I wanted to. But let me talk to Ralph."

"Talk to Ralph," Lucas said. And to Ralph: "I understand you've been shootin' beaver again."

Ralph grinned and said, "Shhh," and Bee said, "What?"

Ralph said, "I got a little beaver problem up at my cabin."

"Larry Connell said about once an hour he'd hear a high-powered rifle," Lucas said.

"Deer seasons coming up," the lawyer said. "I need the practice. And those fuckin' beaver, if they block up that creek, it's gonna flood my whole property. Goddamn rodents. I hate them almost as much as I hate the DNR."

"What beaver?" Bee asked.

"Talk to you later," Lucas said.

"You know what you dumb shits did?" Bee said. "You took the one guy who'd know about this for sureyou took and put him in prison. He hates your ass, and he ain't never gonna talk to you."

Del said, "What?" and he and Lucas looked at each other, then simultaneously said, "Rashid Al-Balah."

Outside, Lucas said, "We gotta nail down that poker game. If Tricks gonna be anywhere, that'd be it."

"Gimme two hours," Del said. "You going back to the hospital?"

"Yeah."

"Turn on your cell phone."

"Okay."

"No. I wanna see you do it," Del said.

Lucas took out the cell phone and turned it on. Del took out his, punched a speed-dial code, and Lucas's phone buzzed. "Satisfied?"

"Keep it on," Del said. "I don't want to be kicking down the door of a high-stakes game by myself."

Lucas walked through the tunnel to the government center and took an elevator up to the county attorney's office. Randall Towson was in conference. Lucas got him out, into a hallway.

"What's going on?" Towson asked. He was holding a printout of what looked like a financial spreadsheet.

"Have you talked to Al-Balah's attorney about Del bumping into Trick Bentoin?"

"Not yet, but I can't put it off much longer," Towson said.

"Could you call him now?" Lucas asked. "And tell him that we've lost Trick, and can't do anything yet, but we're looking. And that we might want to talk to Al-Balah tomorrow."

"Makes us look retarded," Towson said. "He'll be calling the papers two minutes after he hangs up."

"We really need to talk to Al-Balah," Lucas said. "It's the Maison case."

He gave Towson a quick explanation, and Towson said finally, "All right. I gotta call him anyway. I'll do it right now. You sure you'll find Bentoin?"

"No. But Del's heard that it's a big game, and that normally would be a magnet for the guy. Even if he's not there, somebody else at the game might know where he is."

"How's Marcy?"

"I'm going over there now. She was still on the table, the last I heard."

"Listen, she's gonna make it," Towson said. He knew that Lucas and Marcy had had a relationship. "She's in good shape, and once they get her on the table"

"Yeah, well. I hope."

"She's gonna make it, man."

At the hospital, Lucas nodded at a couple of loitering cops and headed straight for the desk. A nurse saw him coming, shook her head, and said, "She's still not out, but Dr. Gunderson came out for a Coke and said they've got almost everything hooked up again. It shouldn't be much longer."

"She's doing okay?"

The nurse equivocated. "She's doing as good as she could. I understand" She looked both ways, as though worried she might be caught giving out unauthorized information.

"Yeah, yeah?"

"I understand that the bullet hit her just below her breast and a couple of inches off the centerline, so there's a lung problem and they've got a problem with bone splinters from her ribs, but there's no spinal involvement. I think if they've got the bleeding under control and if she's strong enough, she should make it. That's whatI think, but I'm not in there."

"Bless you," Lucas said. "She's pretty strong."

He headed down to the room that Rose Marie had commandeered, and found her talking with Frank Lester.

"Anything new?" Lester asked.

"Maybe the edge of something," Lucas said. "How about you? And where's Jael?"

"You talk first."

Lucas gave them a quick account of the raid on Bee's house, Bee's suggestion that Al-Balah might come up with the name, and Del's search for Trick Bentoin. Rose Marie took it all in and said, finally, "You're still about three levels away from the killer."

"Or maybe four or five," Lucas said. "Where's Jael?"

"We had Franklin take her back to her place to get some clothes. We're gonna ditch her someplace safe, maybe over in Hudson, keep her covered. She wants to talk to you again. I think she blames herself for what happened to Marcy."

"Goodkeep her out of the way," Lucas said. "What'd you get?"

The police shrink, Angela Harris, had come in to talk with Lester an hour earlier, after she'd heard about the death of Alie'e's parents. "She doesn't think it's a murder-suicide," Lester said.

"She knows about the bullet hole in the car door?"

"Yeah, but she's predicting that we'll find the killings weren't murder-suicide. She thinks that they were killed in revenge for the murder of Alie'e. Along with Plain, and along with the attempt on Corbeau, if that's what it was. She thinks we need to take another very close look at Tom Olson. She's talked to some guys who know him, and he's apparently had some odd psychological episodes in the past that suggest he may have multiple personalities. Harris thinks one of the personalities is a psycho."

"Aw, man. That's too weird," Lucas said.

"Yeah, but she says it explains what happened with the parents. Olson gets in psycho mode, and starts eliminating people who he blames for killing Alie'epeople who led her into her lifestyle with dope and lesbians and all that. The tabloid pictures set him off: the rouged nipples and all of that, some kind of psychosexual trip with his sister.

"So he goes after Plain, then he goes for Corbeau because of this lesbian stuff that's been coming outhe hits Marcy instead, but he was going for Corbeau. Then he kills his parents, the people who are really responsible for putting her in this life and weknow he blames them for that. Then, having killed them, he wanders off in psychological exhaustion to the mall, changes personalities. This personality has no idea what the other personality did and then in that same personality comes back to the motel, runs into you, then goes up to his parents' room and finds the bodies. He comes running after you, but in the shock, he begins to disassociate."

"Disassociate?"

"Fuck me, I don't know," Lester said. "That's what she said."

"He falls apart," Rose Marie said. "Somewhere, his main personality knows what he did but can't handle it. So his whole jury-rigged persona starts falling to pieces. He has what you sawsome kind of fit."

Lucas thought about it, then said, "He'd have access to his fathers car. If it's not murder-suicide"

"We thought about that. What we're doing right now is waiting for the crime-scene guys and the ME to finish down there. If they say it's a murder-suicide, then we slow down a little; if they say it's not, then we look at Olson. He's not going anyplace; he's asleep, in the hospital. The paramedics said the shock really got on top of him."

"All right," Lucas said. "Things are looking a little better for Marcy."

Rose Marie nodded. "She's gonna make it, Lucas."

They all thought about that for a minute, and Lucas felt a finger of darknessthe first premonition of the day. But he didn't say anything. He said, "There's a science thing that I picked up from the computer jocks I used to work with."

"Yeah?" Lester asked.

"Yeah. If you have enough information to make a good prediction, then you're probably getting a grip on the situation. If Harris is predicting that the Olsons aren't a murder-suicide, despite appearances, then maybe she's onto something."

"You oughta talk to your girlfriend the nun," Rose Marie said.

"I'll call her," Lucas said.

He hung around awhile, watching Rose Marie work the telephones. Lester went out and got a Diet Coke and brought one back for Lucas. They were talking about nothing, waiting, when Lucas's cell phone rang.

"It's Del," Lucas said, fumbling the phone out of his pocket.

But it wasn't Del. A surprised dispatcher said, "Is this Lucas?"

"It's me. I mean, it's my phone, anyway."

"How come you're answering the phone?"

"I'm running around What's going on?"

"I'm relaying a message from the Maplewood cops. They found that car you were looking for."

"Car?"

"Yeah, that, uh, I wrote the name Derrick Deal?"

"Oh, yeah." From about ten years ago. He looked at his watch: six hours, two more dead bodies, one shot cop. "Where was it?"

"In some executive's reserved spot out in a 3M parking lot."

"At 3M?" And he thought, Uh-oh.

"Yes. That's what they say. They want to know what you want to do with it."

"Can you patch me through? To the cop?"

"Uh, just a minute" A few seconds later, she came back. "I talked to them, and the executive whose space it is has a cell phone in his pocket, so you can call them directly. He's standing right there with them."

The executive's name was Marx; he sounded interested. "The car's been here since yesterday. I finally called the cops, the police, to get it towed, because I was getting angry about it. They say it's on some kind of hit list."

"Yeah lemme talk to the cop."

The cop came up, and when Lucas identified himself, said, "Hey, Chief, what's happening with the car?"

Lucas gave him a quick story and asked, "Is there anything unusual about it?"

"Yeah, one thingyou can see the keys on the floor of the drivers side. A key ring. They might've fallen out when he got out, and he locked it behind him."

"Nothing else?"

"Nope. The car's clean. Nothing else inside that we can see, except some maps and aWall Street Journal on the floor of the backseat."

"Listen, this has to do with the Maison case and that car could be pretty important. I wonder if I could get you to open the door and use the keys to pop the trunk."

"Jeez, I don't know. We don't carry the door openers anymore," the cop said.

"How about if you break the window? It's pretty important."

"Aw, man I'd have to call in. Can I get back to you?"

"Can I hold?"

"Sure, just take a second."

While the cop was calling in, Lucas said to Lester, "I'm gonna start using this phone, and then people are gonna start calling me on it, and pretty soon I'll be as crazy as the rest of you fuckers."

"It feels kind of good after a while," Lester said. "People call you up, you feel important. Pretty soon, you start thinking about a beeper."

"Yeah, in a pig's eye," Lucas said.

"You just haven't experienced it yet," Lester said. "The connectivity rush."

Franklin leaned into the doorway, and Lucas and Lester both looked up at him. Lucas said, "I thought you were with Jael Corbeau."

"She's right there," Franklin said, pointing to his left. "Talking to a nurse. I can shoot the nurse, if you want."

"That's okay," Rose Marie said. Franklin asked about Marcy, and Rose Marie began filling him in.

Then the Maplewood cop called back and said, "Listen, Chief, my chief wants to talk with you. You got a number he can call?"

"Hang on," Lucas said. He handed the phone to Lester and said, "Give him your cell-phone number."

Lester read his number off, then handed the phone back to Lucas.

Lucas could hear the Maplewood cop repeating the number to somebody else, and a second later, Lester's phone rang. He handed it to Lucas, who said, "Hello?"

The Maplewood chief asked, "If we bust this car, are we gonna get sued?"

"There's a suspicion of foul play, so we really don't want to move it, just in case," Lucas said, rolling his eyes at Lester. "We'll take responsibility. If the city won't, I'll pay for the window myself."

"On your head," the Maplewood chief said, and Lucas could hear him talking in the background. He put his own phone to his ear, and the Maplewood cop at 3M said, "Okay, we're gonna bust it."

Lucas said, "If you gotta pick up the keys, use gloves. Just in case." In his other ear, the Maplewood chief said, "Take it easy," and Lucas said, "Yeah, thanks," and handed the phone back to Lester, while the cop was saying, "We can leave the keys. I can see a trunk latch."

From 3M, Lucas heard a crunch, then a door, and the Maplewood cop said, "We're popping the trunk." And a moment later, "Ah, shit."

Lester, who'd been looking at Lucas's face, asked, "What?" and Franklin and Rose Marie, hearing the tone, stopped talking and looked at Lucas. Then the Maplewood cop came back and said, "I hope this guy ain't a friend of yours."

"Aw, man." Lucas stood up. "What does it look like?"

"Looks like somebody busted him in the head with a shovel. He's way dead."

"Little guy? Maybe sixty? Long haircut for his age?"

"Yeah. You got him. What's the deal?"

Lucas looked at Rose Marie and said, "We got another one. I don't think it's about Alie'e. I think it's about Sandy Lansing."

"Is this about Maison?" the cop asked in his ear.

"So where does Alie'e's family fit in?" Rose Marie asked.

"Maybe Tom Olson is on a revenge tripbut the first killings, that started it off, that's about Lansing."

"Who're you talking to?" the Maplewood cop asked.

To Rose Marie, Lucas said, "Just a minute," and into the phone, "I'll be out there in a few minutes. Exactly where're you at?" He made a mental note of the address, and hung up.

"Can we avoid talking about Deal?" Lester asked. "To the media?"

"I don't think so. The Maplewood cops know we're talking about Alie'e, and you knowword's gonna get out."

"We've had a cop shot and four killings in one day." Rose Marie looked at Lester and then Franklin and back to Lucas. "What're we gonna do?"

Lucas left them, found Jael huddled next to the nurses' station, Franklin standing by the outer door. Jael saw him and stood up, and Lucas said, "How are" Jael reached around his neck with both arms and put her head against his chest and hung on.

"I'm coming apart," she said after a while. "I can't do this."