Storm prey

6

THE BCA HEADQUARTERS was in a modern building out in a St. Paul residential area, the parking lot mostly empty at six o'clock on a cold winter night. Lucas let himself in, climbed the stairs to his office, dropped his coat, and walked down the hall. Frank Harris was sitting in his office, in the dark.

"You asleep?" Lucas asked.

"Thinking," Harris said. "And my eyes are tired."

Lucas settled into a visitor's chair. "You know the situation."

"Yeah, and I'll give you everything we've got," Harris said. He was a slim shadow, in a suit and tie, on the other side of the desk. "But I don't like it. I wouldn't do it if it wasn't your wife."

"I don't need any inside sources. I don't need any of your guys, I won't give anything up. What I need is names: I'll generate my own information," Lucas said.

"If you talk to a smart guy, and a few of them are pretty smart, they'll get an idea of how deep our information is," Harris said. He didn't particularly like Lucas, and Lucas knew it, and knew why.

Harris was a third-generation cop, had struggled to get out of a suburban police force and into the BCA, had hustled his way up through the ranks, lived on his seventy-five thousand dollars a year, married when he was twenty, had three kids. Lucas had parachuted into a top spot, helped by political muscle, and worse, was rich, drove a Porsche, once had a reputation as a serious womanizer, and still got more than his share of face time with the media.

Now Lucas shook his head. "No. Two or three names-it's nothing. Especially if I go in dumb, and thrash around. I swear to God, Frank, we're not going to burn you. We just need a place to start."

"Well, don't get hurt," Harris said. He leaned forward and pushed a paper file across the desk. "Shred it when you finish reading it. If it got out, it'd be a goddamn disaster. If you need another copy later, I can print another one."

Lucas took the file and stood up. "Thanks, Frank. I owe you."

Sometimes, he thought, walking away, you do favors for people you don't like, because you're cops. Just the way it was. SHRAKE WAS SITTING in Lucas's office, waiting, and Lucas shut the door behind himself, sat down and opened the file. Maybe two hundred pages, printed out in color: surveillance and source reports, photographs, mug shots and rap sheets. They covered the Hells Angels and Bad Seed, with miscellaneous stuff on the Outlaws, Banditos, and Mongols.

Lucas cut the stack of paper roughly in half and pushed it across to Shrake. "Read. Mention anything that looks like anything-especially with the Seed." THE ANGELS were the main biker gang in the Cities. The Seed didn't have a clubhouse, but ran out of a bar called Cherries, south of the river, the reports said. The Seed had a working treaty with the Angels, and Angels members were welcome at Cherries. On the other hand, the report said, the Seed also had some alliances with the Outlaws in Illinois, and might then be a trusted communications link between the two bigger rival gangs.

Money for the gangs came from drug dealing, fencing, and miscellaneous small-time street crime, although most of the members also had jobs, and membership turnover, outside a core group, was heavy.

"The thing is, these guys are perfect for the hospital job," Shrake said. He had rap sheets for the two dead Seed members, Haines and Chapman. "They fit physically, the clothes are right. The Seed has gang contacts both west with the Angels and east with the Outlaws, and they've always moved drugs: they've got the retail connections. Haines and Chapman both have robbery convictions; Haines did time in Wisconsin, Chapman in California. Haines has a crim-sex no-pros because the girl backed off, but he's in the database, one, two, three DUIs, small amounts of marijuana… Chapman has three assaults, one conviction, juvie record of assault, had a weapons charge that was dealt… small amounts of dope. Assholes. Completely likely to hold up a pharmacy."

"That no-pros is why they killed Haines. Somebody knew he was in the database, and that after we processed Peterson, we'd have him," Lucas said. "They were afraid he'd flip." LUCAS FOUND a reference to the owners of Cherries, Lyle and Joseph Mack, brothers, who'd been patched in the Seed in the early nineties; and another reference to their father, Ike Mack, who'd been a Seed member in the sixties. A surveillance photo of Lyle Mack showed him sitting on the steps of a bar, surrounded by beer bottles, taken after the autumn river-run of 2006.

"We need to talk to this guy-he'd know all the locals," Lucas said, pushing the photo across the desk.

Shrake picked it up. "Short and chubby. He wasn't at the hospital."

"But he'd know Chapman and Haines, and I'll bet we get the DNA back on Haines."

He thumbed through the rap sheets, found sheets for both the Macks. "Huh. Criminal possession of stolen goods. Two different busts for each of them, they dealt on all of them. Maybe involved in some sports betting, small-time bookies. Joe Mack has three DUIs over ten years. Looks like they've run a couple bars, one up by Hayward, another in Wausau. Showed up here about eight years ago, bought Cherries. They get a few complaints every year, noise, parking problems. Have some hookers going through, but not regular. Used to have a porno night… More like dirtbags than hard guys. But they're merchants. They buy and sell. They seem to be close to the center of the Seed."

He pushed a copy of a mug shot of Joe Mack across the desk: six years old, it showed a big man with a ponytail, clean-shaven.

They continued reading, and a half hour on, Shrake said, "There are a hundred killers out at Stillwater who we could turn loose, and they'd never in their lives commit another crime. If we replaced them with a hundred of these guys, we'd have to find new jobs. You get these guys with ten offenses, mostly ratshit stuff, they deal on it, they walk. You know they did ten times that many that never got reported or they never got caught on."

"Just having a good time, Saturday night," Lucas said.

"Yeah. Murder, rape, robbery, assault, extortion, fighting, drugs, prostitution, criminal sexual assault, domestic assault, drunk driving, you name it," Shrake said. "Makes my teeth hurt."

"You've never had a problem with a fight," Lucas said.

"Pretty big difference between a fight during an arrest and an assault," Shrake said.

"You're sounding self-righteous."

"Got me on that," he said.

They read for another half hour, trading sheets back and forth, putting down names, and then Lucas looked at his watch.

"Getting to be prime time out at Cherries," he said. CHERRIES LOOKED like a suburban split-level house, but larger, a frame building with a blacktopped parking lot out front and along the west side, and a loading dock with a dumpster in back. There were ten or twelve vehicles in the parking lot when they arrived, and only one was a sedan-the rest were SUVs, pickups, and Ford and Chevy commercial vans, every one with a trailer hitch. Snow was piled up on the perimeter of the lot, and Budweiser and Miller neons hung in the visible windows.

Lucas pulled the Lexus around so the lights played off the tags of the two vehicles parked in front of the loading dock. Shrake checked the tag numbers against a list and said, "Yup. That's them. Elvis is in the house."

Lucas pulled up tight in front of the two vehicles and parked. Shrake took a pistol out of his belt holster and put it in his side coat pocket. "Joe and Lyle," he said.

"Watch your back," Lucas said.

They got out, crunched around the bar to the front door. The air smelled of barbeque and auto exhaust from the highway, and they could hear the thump of a country song. Cold; lots of stars, but cold. Shrake said, "'Bubba Shot the Jukebox."'

"Huh?"

"That song. Mark Chesnutt." He pulled the door open and held it, and Lucas led the way in.

Just a run-down bar-type bar; fifteen booths and a dozen tables, a bar with a few stools, a jukebox, the odor of snowmelt and wet wool and beer and barbeque beef and tacos, a whiff of illegal cigarette smoke. Two waitresses, both with push-up bras under T-shirts-one of Barack Obama's face done up as the Joker in the Batman movie, the other with the slogan "Ride It Like You Stole It"-were working the booths. A redheaded female bartender in a frilly white blouse was talking to a big man hunched over the bar.

Lucas and Shrake didn't look like the rest of the clientele. They had no facial hair, and they were wearing white-collar-worker winter coats, unbuttoned; like, unbuttoned so they could get at a gun. Every other male had some kind of hair on his face, and a parka hanging off a hook at the end of his booth. Talk dwindled as Lucas led the way to the bar, Shrake a couple of steps behind.

"We're with the state police," Lucas said to the bartender. "We need to talk to the Mack brothers."

The bartender looked at the clock, then shook her head. "You missed them. They left here half an hour ago."

"I wonder why they left their cars in the parking lot?" Lucas asked. He leaned across the bar. "Go get them. And mention that we've blocked their cars in. And if we don't talk to them now, we'll talk to them downtown. This is just a friendly visit, but it could get pretty fuckin' unfriendly if they want it that way."

She looked at Lucas for a minute, then at Shrake, said, "Asshole," dropped her wet bar towel on Lucas's hand, turned and walked through a door into the back.

Lucas wiped his hand on his pant leg and said to a waitress, "Nice place."

She ignored him.

The big man whom the bartender had been talking to asked, "What's up?"

"You know Mikey Haines or Shooter Chapman?" Lucas asked.

"Maybe. I remember the names. Sort of. What'd they do?"

"They got themselves shot in the head with a shotgun," Lucas said. "Found the bodies this morning."

The big man's face pulled together. "Are you shittin' me?"

"Do I look like I'm shittin' you?"

"Didn't see anything on TV," he said.

"Didn't make the evening news, but it'll be on at ten," Lucas said. He looked at a television set in the corner, which was showing a hockey game. "Took a while to identify them."

The big man finished his beer in one gulp, wiped his mouth on his sweatshirt sleeve, and said, "I gotta get out of here."

"Why?"

"Look, I don't know nothin' about nothin'," he said. "I really don't. But if somebody's startin' a war, I don't want to be sittin' here suckin' on a Budweiser."

Two more guys got out of a booth, pulling their coats on as they headed for the door. Shrake put out a hand. "Friends of Haines and Chapman?"

"Never heard of them," one said, and they were gone. A SHORT MAN, whom Lucas recognized as Lyle Mack, followed the bartender out of the back, an aggrieved look on his face. "Now what?"

"We're investigating the murders of Shooter Chapman and Mikey Haines," Lucas said.

Mack registered what looked everything in the world like shock. The bartender, eyes wide, put both hands to the sides of her face, her mouth open. Her lips working, no words coming out. If they were faking it, Lucas thought, they deserved Oscars.

"What?" Mack got the first response out.

"Is your brother around?" Lucas asked.

"He's in the can… Uh, shit, come on back. We can talk in the office."

He turned and went through the door, heading into the back. Lucas and Shrake walked around the end of the bar past the bartender, who asked, "How were they killed? Are you sure they were murdered?"

"They were shot with a shotgun and put in garbage bags and thrown under a bridge," Shrake said. "If it wasn't murder, it was a really weird accident."

They went through the door behind the bar, heard Lyle Mack yelling at his brother, up a set of stairs. "The cops are here-they say Shooter and Mikey been killed. Come on out of there."

And he turned back and said, "Come on to the office."

The office was a small plywood room attached to the loading dock; one chair behind a desk and two chairs in front of it, two filing cabinets, an old computer, and a new multitask print-fax-copy-scan machine.

Mack took the desk seat and Lucas sat down while Shrake leaned in the doorway. "You know them?" Lucas asked.

"Sure. They're members of the club," Mack said. "I bet the fuckin' Mongols had something to do with this. We're okay with everybody else."

"You know any Mongols? They're pretty thin around here," Shrake said.

"Well, who else…?"

"Lyle, don't give us any shit. I've had some dealings with the Seed in the past, and people got killed, and I've got very little patience with you guys," Lucas said. "You push dope and you used to do a little strong-arm robbery and you ran a couple massage parlors and I know all that shit. So what I want to know is, were Haines and Chapman hustling meth or coke? Who were they selling it to? Did they owe somebody? Were they scared?"

Shrake stepped back and let another man through the doorway, Joe Mack, who had a lean, pale-white face and lantern jaw, with a black do-rag on his close-cropped head. If he'd had a gold hoop earring, Lucas thought, he could have played Long John Silver.

"They're dead?" Joe Mack asked. His eyelids were half-closed, and he smelled of alcohol.

Lyle nodded at Lucas and said, "This guy is giving me a lot of shit. He thinks they were dealing dope."

Joe Mack registered astonishment so profound that Lucas almost laughed, and Shrake did. He said, "Dope?" as though it were inconceivable.

"Let me 'splain something to you guys," Shrake said. "This is a double murder, at least, and maybe a triple. We think they were the guys who knocked over the pharmacy at University Hospitals three days ago, and kicked the pharmacist to death."

Lyle Mack: "No…"

"And you're bullshitting us, right now, is what you're doing," Shrake continued. "That's accessory after the fact on three murder-ones, which is just as good as doing it yourselves. We'll shake it all out, and you'll go to prison… if you keep bullshitting us."

Lyle Mack shook his head: "All right. Shooter and Mikey could be assholes. We know that. But we don't know anybody who'd kill them for it."

"The Mongols would," Joe Mack said to his brother.

"Aw, for Christ's sakes, forget the Mongols," Lucas said. "We're gonna prove Haines did the pharmacy, by tomorrow. Then we're gonna come back here with a flamethrower, if we don't get some cooperation. This is their club. This is where they hung out, where their friends were. So: Who were they running with? They hang out with any hospital people? What?"

Lyle Mack said, "Listen… we're bar owners. We make money at it. These guys are customers, but they're not good friends or nothing. They always come in together, they hang together. And you know, they bullshit with the guys, but they were partners. They hung with each other."

"They gay?" Shrake asked.

Joe Mack snorted. "I don't think so. They were Seed. Seed don't take gays."

"No gays, no sex perverts of any kind," Lyle Mack said.

"When was the last time they were in?"

The two brothers looked at each other, and then Lyle Mack said, "Could have been Saturday. I'm pretty sure they were here on Saturday night."

"Did they seem nervous, or worried, or scared?" Lucas asked. "Were they hanging with anyone new?"

Lyle Mack exhaled, looked at his brother, back at Lucas, and said, "Listen, if we, you know… if we talk to you, this gets out, we're done. The place gets wrecked, we get the shit beat out of us, or killed."

"We don't talk," Lucas said.

"If the information is good," Shrake added. "If it's not good, we might talk."

Lyle Mack said, "Saturday night, they were hanging with Anthony Melicek and Ron Howard. Drank a few beers. They were on the Deer Hunter for a couple hours."

"The Deer Hunter?" Shrake asked

"Game machine," Joe Mack said.

"Where do we find these guys?" Lucas asked. He was writing their names in his notebook.

"I don't know," Lyle Mack said. "You've probably got their addresses. Or Ron's, anyway. He's on probation, some kind of thing with his old lady."

"You mean, he beat her up," Lucas said.

"No, no. I mean he and his old lady are on probation," Lyle Mack said. "I'm not sure exactly what they did, but they might have been selling stuff."

"Stolen stuff."

"Maybe. If you tell anybody we told you this…"

"Who else did they hang with?"

"Man, they hung with each other…" THEY HAD two names, and not much more; and assured the brothers that they would hang around in the parking lot, talking to customers coming and going, so that Melicek and Howard wouldn't know where their names had come from.

Lucas stood up, took a card out of his wallet, and dropped it on the desk. "If you hear anything, it would behoove you to call me. No motorcycle big-shot bullshit, burning the card or any of that; just a quiet call. Nobody will know, and it might be useful to you sometime, to have a guy you can call. If you know what I mean."

SHRAKE LED the way out, Lucas a step behind; when they'd gone through the door into the front, Lyle Mack said to Joe, "We're in a lot of fuckin' trouble, Joe."

Joe Mack said, "We oughta get out of here."

"Can't," Lyle Mack said. "If it was only a robbery, we might get out of town. Murder, they'd come after us. Come after you. We gotta find that chick and shut her up." THERE WERE still fifteen or twenty people in the bar, but in clusters now, four and five together. From behind the bar, Lucas called, "Can I have your attention? Anybody here know Mikey Haines or Shooter Chapman?"

Dead silence.

"I know some of you must be their friends, if they had any friends," Lucas said. "Somebody took them out and blew their faces mostly off, with a shotgun, and I would like any opinions anybody's got about that."

More silence, then one voice, "We got no opinions."

Shrake said, "If you get home and find out you got an opinion, about who may be executing Seeds, you call the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and ask for Agent Shrake. S-h-r-a-k-e. Shrake."

"The reason you should do that is, being a tough guy is just fine, but if somebody's shooting you in the back of the head with a shotgun, from an ambush, like they did with Shooter and Mikey, tough isn't good enough," Lucas said. "So you got any ideas, it might be your own life you're saving." THEY DID SPEND fifteen minutes in the parking lot, grabbing people as they came and went-mostly went-but got no more names.

"Can't talk to us in public," Shrake said. "Gang law."

"Talk about the cold shoulder," Lucas said. "My shoulder's frozen all the way down to my ass."

"Let's go. Look up those other two guys," Shrake said. "We can come back if we need to."

Lucas looked back at the club. Lyle Mack was staring out a window at them, his head visible from the neck up, like a bust of Beethoven, or somebody.

Tony Soprano, maybe. BACK IN THE CAR, Shrake got on his phone and got addresses for Anthony Melicek and Ron Howard, the two men named by Mack as friends of Chapman and Haines. Howard lived in Cottage Grove, a suburb to the southeast, and he was on probation, for theft. Melicek lived in the opposite direction, on the edge of downtown Minneapolis, not far from the Metrodome.

"Howard," Lucas said. He punched Howard's address into the SUV's navigation system, and they headed east. As they drove, Shrake called around until he found Howard's probation officer, a woman named Melanie. They talked for a few minutes, and Shrake rang off.

"She says Howard and his wife got caught stealing eight hundred and sixty board-feet of walnut and cherry from a wood specialty place in Shakopee. Got caught loading it onto their pickup. She says there was an argument about money he'd given them for some wood, and he told the cops he was just taking what he was owed. She said he was probably right about what he was owed, but he broke through a back door, so there it was. They both got probation. He had some arrests six or eight years back when he was running with the Seed, drugs, firearms, did some county-jail time over in Wisconsin. She says he's not a problem."

"Good. I'm not in the mood for a big deal."

"Neither am I." A minute later: "I wish Weather wasn't involved. I mean… you know."

"Yeah, and she won't budge, either," Lucas said. "She'll be over at the hospital every day. Marcy's not getting anywhere inside the hospital. I might have to go over there with my nutcracker."

"I've done hospitals before," Shrake said. "You know what the problem is? Doctors. No offense, you know, about Weather being a doctor…"

"S'okay."

"They're so sure they know everything. They were the smartest kids in high school, which is how they got in premed, and they were the smartest guys in premed, which is how they got in med school, and then they get this big piece of paper that says, 'Yup, you're the smartest,' and they truly believe that shit. They will tell you everything you need to know about your job. They never answer questions-they'll tell you that you don't need to know that answer. You need to know the answer to something else."

"Hey, I live with one," Lucas said. "And she's a surgeon. They're worse than everybody but the shrinks."

"And you gotta shrink for your best friend…"

"Almost intolerable," Lucas said. "Goddamn Weather, if I didn't love her, I'd choke the shit out of her about twice a day."

"To say nothing of your goofy daughter," Shrake said. "No offense again, but she really does scare me. Sometimes, she acts like a forty-five-year-old narc."

Lucas laughed and said, "The sad thing is, I've never been happier."

"Well, that's nice," Shrake said. "I mean, that really is. That makes one."

"One what?"

"Happy cop." HOWARD LIVED in a rambler-style single-story house halfway down a hillside, brown fiberglass siding with a two-car garage on one end; bright light was shining through the three windows in the garage door. A pickup and an old Camry were parked in the driveway.

Lucas looked at the dashboard clock: ten-forty-five. Not too late. Shrake had taken the pistol out of his pocket and put it back in its holster, and now took it back out and stuck it in the pocket. "Better safe," he said.

Lucas rang the doorbell, and a moment later a woman came to the door and peeked out behind a chain. "Who is it?"

"We're with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension… state police," Lucas said. "We're talking to people who knew Mike Haines and Shooter Chapman."

"Oh… jeez. Just a minute." She pushed the door closed and the chain rattled, and she said, "Ron's in the shop. We thought somebody might come by."

"You're Mrs. Howard?"

"Yes. Donna." She was using the female nicey-nice voice, submissive, scared by cops. She looked pleasant enough, a round woman with brown hair and dark eyes and a prominent mole by the corner of her mouth. Lucas smiled at her and stepped inside, carefully shuffled his feet on the mat inside the door and she said, "Oh, don't worry about that. He's this way…"

He followed her through the small kitchen, past a dining table and through a garage door. The garage had been converted into a woodshop, with a table saw, band saw, drill press, and lathe fixed to the floor, and a long workbench with wood-cutting tools along the far wall. Howard was working over the lathe, wearing goggles and earmuffs; his back was turned to them. The air smelled of fresh-cut wood, and a stack of wooden bowls sat along one wall of the shop.

Donna Howard flipped a switch on the wall, a quick on-and-off, and a light flickered and Howard backed away from the machine and turned around, saw them, hit a kill switch. He pulled off the goggles and headset as the machine wound down; he was holding a nasty-looking chisel. He saw them check it out and hastily put it aside. "Police?" THEY SAT in the Howards' small living room. Howard started right out with an explanation of the burglary they'd been convicted of. "I hadn't been in trouble for years, since I was a kid. But I gave those assholes twelve hundred dollars for the wood I needed, and they kept putting me off. If I don't produce, I don't eat. They wouldn't give me the money back, either, said they'd already ordered the stuff and the supplier was having problems and all of that. Bullshit. So I made the mistake. Two mistakes-I took Donna with me."

"The judge knew all that, so he went easy," Donna Howard said.

"Did you ever get your money back?" Shrake asked.

"Yeah… but the lawyer cost us two thousand, and we were lucky to get off that easy. Tell you what, soon as it was settled, I put the word out on the Internet. Won't be many guys going out there for their turnin' wood, I can tell you."

Lucas said, "I understand you guys were talking to Shooter and Mike last week."

"Yeah. A friend called and told us about them being dead. He was down at the bar when you were there," Donna Howard said. "I've never known anybody who was murdered."

"How well did you know them?"

Howard shook his head. "I've known them since we were all kids, running around in the woods in Wisconsin. They never grew up. I rode with the Seed for a while, but you know, it gets to be a lot of bullshit. People hassling you, cops coming around. Some of the guys were enormous assholes. Ridin' was fun, you know, impressing the squares and then… you wonder why the hell you're drunk all the time and living out of a shitty apartment. So I got a straight job and met Donna, and we eventually started the business. But we still go up to Cherries three or four times a year, talk with the older guys. That's about it."

"So you wouldn't know what they were up to." Lucas let a little skepticism show in his voice.

"No, we really don't." They sat silently for a moment, then Howard said, "They were always trying to hustle something up. Usually, it was like buying stuff from drug guys up in Minneapolis. Stolen stuff, computers and cameras and stuff. About a million iPods. They'd sell them to high school kids for ten bucks each."

"They'd done some time for robbery…"

"Yeah, but they weren't any good at it," Howard said. "Fact is, Shooter was sort of a chicken, and Mikey was just dumb."

"Pulled off a pretty slick robbery up in the Cities," Shrake said. "We think they're the ones that knocked over that hospital pharmacy."

"Really?" Donna Howard looked surprised. "That doesn't sound like them. They were more the Saturday-night liquor store guys."

"Didn't a guy get killed?" Ron Howard asked.

"Yeah, they kicked a guy, and it turned out he was on some blood thinner because of his heart," Shrake said. "He bled to death internally. They got him to the emergency room, but the docs couldn't stop it."

"God, that's awful." Donna Howard put her knuckles to her teeth. "I can't believe they did that."

"Could have been accidental," Lucas said. "The guy tried to sneak out a cell phone, and they kicked him a couple times. But, you know, you're robbing a place, and somebody dies because of it, it's murder."

Ron Howard grunted: "I can believe they did that. Kicked the guy. That's just another screwup. I just can't believe they thought of it-holding up a hospital. How much did they get?"

Lucas said, "Nobody really knows. Street value, maybe anything up from half a million."

Howard laughed: "Man. Those guys were small-timers back in grade school. No way they pulled off a half-million-dollar robbery."

More questions, met with a general lack of information: the Howards, Lucas decided, really didn't know much about Chapman and Haines. When they ran out of questions, Howard asked one.

"Who told you about us? Had to be somebody at Cherries, right?"

"We talked to quite a few people, looked at some records and stuff, your name was in there," Lucas said.

Howard looked at him for a moment, then down at his knuckles, which showed a small, damp cut, the kind woodworkers got. He said, "I'll tell you what, Officer, you're bullshitting me, right? I mean, I haven't ridden with those guys for years, but here you are, real quick. Had to be Cherries."

Lucas shrugged. "What difference does it make?"

"It pisses me off," Howard said. "Those guys knew we'd gotten in trouble, so they sicced you on us. And they're making chumps out of you. Anybody who knew us, and knew those guys, knew we didn't have much to do with them. We're just old acquaintances. We'd talk to them, but it was all old-time stuff. Everybody knows I'm straight."

"Did you see the artist's sketch of what the pharmacy robber looked like? Should have been on the ten-o'clock news."

They both shook their heads. "Don't watch the news anymore. It's just too depressing."

"The third guy on the robbery, would have been a pal of Haines and Chapman. Big guy, lots of hair, beard."

"That's about ninety percent of the Seed, right there," Howard said.

Donna Howard asked, "It's not my place… it wasn't the Macks, was it? The ones who gave you our name?"

"I really can't say, Mrs. Howard," Lucas said.

"Then I can't tell you what I was going to tell you," she said.

They all looked at each other, and Shrake started with, "Listen, there've been a bunch of murders, and you could get yourselves in serious shit-"

Lucas held up a hand, shutting him off. He said to Donna Howard, "The people who gave us your name said that if we let their name out, you'd tell the rest of the Seed members and that would be the end of them."

"Oh, bullshit," Ron Howard said. "We're not gonna get somebody killed because of this. Then we would be in trouble. All I want to do is keep the business going, and that's hard enough."

"Do not pass along what I'm going to tell you," Lucas said. "Or we'll be back in your faces."

"Who was it?" Donna asked.

"We spent some time interviewing the Macks, who… described who was talking to whom last weekend."

"I knew it," Donna said to her husband. To Lucas: "It's the Macks who were closest to those two. The Macks. The word is, you steal something good around the Cities, the Macks will get rid of it for you. They're the whole… heart… of everything that goes on there. If somebody at Cherries was in it with Shooter and Mikey, it was the Macks."

Ron Howard bobbed his head. "That's like it is," he said. "Shooter and Mikey practically lived at Cherries. And if somebody was stupid enough to kick a guy to death by accident, it probably was Mikey."

"And if you were looking for somebody who might dream up a deal like robbing a hospital, it'd be Lyle Mack," Donna Howard said. "He's always thought he was a big operator."

"How about Joe Mack?" Shrake asked.

"Joe… is a little simple. He pretty much does what he's told. But he's not a mean guy. He wouldn't kick anybody to death," she said. Now IT WAS LATE and bitterly cold and getting colder, but because Anthony Melicek lived only ten minutes from Lucas's house, across the river in Minneapolis, they decided to drop in, see what was what. See if another finger pointed at the Macks.

Melicek lived in an apartment in an old house not far from the Metrodome; the navigation system in the Lexus was pretty good, but the addresses were so cut up that Lucas took them down the street at ten miles an hour, looking for street numbers. They were getting close when Shrake said, suddenly, "Hey. Whoa. Stop. Back up."

"What?" Lucas looked over at him. Shrake was looking out the passenger-side window, back behind the truck.

"This guy we just passed. I want to look at him. He's right over there. Back up."

Lucas backed up a hundred feet, and Shrake popped the door and hurried across the street. There was little light, but Lucas saw him talking to a black man in what looked like jeans and a tight black jacket. There was a staggering tussle for a moment, and Lucas popped his door, ready to run over, but then Shrake yelled, "Open the back door. Open the back door."

He had the guy in an arm-bar and was hustling him across the street. As they came up, Lucas realized the man was not wearing a tight black jacket. He wasn't wearing anything at all above his waist.

"Jesus."

"Better get him to the ER," Shrake said. "He's fucked up."

Shrake was in the backseat with the man, who began shaking violently, and Lucas did a U-turn and Shrake took off his coat and put it on the man and said, "We need to move right along." And he said, "Sit up, take a deep breath, take a deep breath, come on, man, deep breath, now don't do that…"

"Ah, jeez, don't let him barf," Lucas said.

"Better hurry."

Hennepin General was ten or twelve blocks away, and Lucas ran all the lights going in, piled up to the ER and ran inside. A nurse looked up and asked, "What?" and Lucas said, "I'm with the BCA. We need a gurney in a hurry, we got a guy in bad shape out in my truck."

The ER people piled out and put the man on the gurney and a couple of docs came and took him away. Lucas left his name and office number, and told the nurse where he'd picked the guy up. Shrake added, "He's got some bad shit inside him. He didn't even know he wasn't wearing a coat." THEY WERE BACK outside and Lucas said, "That's your good deed for the year."

"If he hadn't walked under that light… he walked under that light and I thought, Man, that's skin," Shrake said. "I kind of didn't believe it, but I had to look."

"I'll put you in for something. A medal, or something. Or we could get the guys to chip in, buy you one of those family packs of Cheetos."

"I'm countin' on ya," Shrake said. MELICEK CAME to the door in a pair of yellowed Jockey shorts, a brown T-shirt, and red velvet bedroom slippers. He was a short, fat man with a receding hairline and a brush mustache. A cigarette hung from his lower lip, and he was scratching his stomach. He looked at Lucas and Shrake and said, "Just what I needed. Makes my day complete."

He stepped back, a mute invitation, and Lucas followed him in, Shrake a step behind. Melicek had one room, plus a bathroom with an old cast-iron tub visible through an open door. A bed was stuck along one wall, an easy chair next to it, facing a flat-panel TV There were two kitchen chairs at a table next to a refrigerator; there was no stove, but a microwave sat on a sink counter. The place smelled like pizza, tobacco, marijuana, bananas, and wallpaper mold. A single window looked out over a porch roof to the street.

"Mike Haines and Shooter Chapman," Lucas said.

"That figures. The dumb shits finally got themselves shot by somebody, huh?" He took the easy chair, and pointed the cops at the kitchen chairs.

"Smoke a little dope, there, Mr. Melicek?" Shrake asked.

"Yeah, but not enough to worry guys like you," he said. "I don't know anything about what Mike and Shooter were doing. I talked to them last week, we had a couple beers."

"You still run with the Seed?"

"Not right at the moment. Me and my ex-wife used our home equity loan to buy new bikes. Then everything went in the toilet, and U.S. Bank got the house and the bikes, and my ex-best friend got the wife. Maybe U.S. Bank is starting a gang. They got enough bikes."

"What do you do for a living?" Shrake asked.

Melicek snorted. "What does it look like? Nothin'. I was doing assembly until that shut down, then the unemployment ran out, so now I'm on welfare."

They thought about the perils of negotiating a capitalist economy for a moment, then Lucas said, "Three guys went into the University Hospitals and robbed the pharmacy, got away with maybe a half-million in drugs. Mike and Shooter were two of them. What we're asking around is, who is smart enough to figure out how to do that, and also mean enough to shoot his own pals?"

Melicek tilted his head and said, "The same guy who is smart enough to figure out I talked to you guys, and mean enough to come over here and kill my ass."

"We're talking to a lot of people-in fact, we got your name from other members of the Seed, who said you were friendly with Haines and Chapman."

"Well, I didn't do it," Melicek said. "If I had a half-million in drugs, you think I'd live in a shithole like this for one more minute?"

"Maybe… if you were being smart about it," Shrake said.

"If I was that smart, I wouldn't be living in a shithole like this in the first place," Melicek said. He squinted at Lucas: "Who'd you talk to about me?"

Lucas shook his head.

"It was that fucker Lincoln, wasn't it?"

Lucas took out his notebook, wrote, "Lincoln," and said, "Thank you."

"Hey, I didn't tell you anything…"

They pushed him, not getting much more than "Lincoln," and finally Lucas asked, "What exactly is your relationship to the Macks?"

"I'm one of their beer drinkers," he said.

"You think the Macks could have had anything to do with the robbery?"

Melicek opened his mouth to answer, thought better of it, and shut his mouth again.

"I take that as a big 'yes,'" Lucas said.

"I'm a little pissed about Mikey and Shooter. They weren't bad guys, you know, under it all," Melicek said. He was leading up to something.

"Come on, spit it out," Lucas said. "You know you want to."

"You know that picture the cops put out on the robbery? To the TV stations?" Melicek asked. "They say the witness saw him?"

"Yeah?"

"It sorta looks… not exactly, but if you talked to them, you oughta know as good as I do… it sorta looks like Joe Mack. At least, to me it does."

Shrake and Lucas looked at each other, then Lucas said, "The guy we met, who said he was Joe Mack, had a skinhead cut and a clean shave."

"What?"

"Just about bald," Lucas said.

"Then he got that way since the weekend," Melicek said. "Last time I saw him, he, well, he looked like that drawing."

Shrake said, "If you weren't short, fat, and male, I'd kiss you on the lips."

"Hey, that's okay," Melicek said. "I can live without it."