Wicked Prey

Chapter 1 1

Between the time Lucas got the call about Letty, and the time he got home, he'd bumped and stumbled over what might be critical information about the Cohn gang. His initial dismay about Letty had dissipated; but it all came back as he got closer to home.

Her bicycle was in the driveway, so she was home, and by the time he went through the connecting door between the garage and the kitchen, he was steaming.

Weather, Sam, and Ellen the housekeeper were in the kitchen when he went through. He snapped, "Where's Letty?" and Weather looked at his face and asked, "What happened?" and Letty said from the living room, "I'm in here."

She'd been waiting. Her voice had a hard edge to it and Weather stood up and asked again, "What happened?" and Lucas started for the living room.

Letty and Juliet Briar had ridden around in the Channel Three van for a while, and Letty borrowed a hundred dollars, fifty each from Frank and Lois, promising to pay them back "as soon as I can steal it from Dad." She gave the money to Briar and said, "Now you're covered. You don't have to go around making dates."

Juliet said, uncertainly, "Randy might make me tell."

"You don't have to tell," Letty said. "You can make something up."

"What if he asks me what the guy was like?" Briar asked.

"Well' make something up. See that guy walking across the street?" Letty pointed through the windshield and they all looked at a guy wearing a blue seersucker suit with a white shirt and a red bow tie. "The bow tie guy was your date."

"He has a southern accent," Lois said.

"He has a southern accent and he took you to a hotel room at the Radisson, on the twelfth floor, but he wouldn't let you look at the number, and then he took you back out and wouldn't let you look at the number when you were leaving," Frank said.

"Randy doesn't care about that," Briar said.

"But it's a good detail, and it makes it sound more real," Letty said.

"He only gave you seventy-five dollars," Lois said. "But he went in the bathroom and you stole the rest."

"You don't understand," Briar said. "Randy might make me tell the truth."

"You don't understand," Letty said. "You fib."

She was insistent, and Briar looked away and bobbed her head and said, "Okay."

Frank looked back from the driver's seat and said to Letty, "We need to get out and have a secret talk where Lois and Juliet can't hear us."

Letty frowned. "What?" He repeated himself and she asked, "Why?"

"Because." He pulled over to the curb, said to Lois, "I'll leave everything running, be back in a minute."

He got out and Letty followed, and they walked a way down the street, where they could see a bunch of cops in riot gear, apparently waiting for something to happen that was out of sight. Two more cops, on horses, were riding slowly toward the riot cops.

"Listen, you know about the problem I had," Frank said. "Everybody in town does."

"I heard something about it," Letty admitted.

"I've known a few of these girls ' sometimes, a lot of times, with the younger ones ' they don't think for themselves. They're so ' screwed up ' that they think what they're told to think. When Juliet says that Randy will make her tell-she knows that if Randy pushes her, she'll tell the truth. Then, maybe, she gets beat up. I don't know. I don't know what kind of deal you got going…"

"But she's got the money," Letty protested. "All she has to do is tell a little lie…"

"She can't," Frank said. He looked desperately embarrassed. "She does exactly what people tell her, because when she doesn't, she's learned that she'll get beat up. So, back there in the car, you got a little sharp with her, and she agreed. Because you made her agree."

"I didn't'"

"Yes, you did," Frank said. "These people, sometimes, they can't resist a push. When she gets alone with Randy, if he smells a rat and pushes her, she'll tell the truth."

Letty scuffed along, then looked back at the truck. "Poop." She turned, and started back, and then said, "Frank, thank you. You're a great guy for telling me this. You know, after, your problem."

Frank blushed and when they got back to the van, Letty popped the back door and said, "Juliet, let's walk."

They got out of the van and started walking up the hill and generally back toward the Radisson hotel. Juliet asked, "Do you want the money back?"

Letty, surprised, said, "No, of course not. That's your money. You got it from a fat guy named Stan with a southern accent who was wearing a blue-striped suit and a red bow tie."

Briar's head bobbed and Letty continued: "Frank told me that you might have a little trouble lying to Randy."

Juliet looked away. "I can't do it. Or maybe, I can, if he doesn't find out. But if he guesses, he can make me tell."

Letty said, "How much trouble have you had with the cops?"

Briar shook her head. "I've never had any trouble."

"You've never been arrested?"

She shook her head and then smiled, proud to show off her expertise. "Randy told me how to do this. Taught me. It's not hard. You gotta watch out for the undercover, but the undercover usually operates up where all the whores hang out. I ask' guys on the street. I pick them. If somebody picks me, I'm supposed to get pissed ' Keeps off the undercover. Randy, if Randy gets arrested for two more years, they'll put him back in prison."

"Okay. Well. I asked you because I've been in trouble with the cops," Letty said. "I even shot one. Twice. I mean, I shot him two different times, a couple days apart. I used to get busted by the highway patrol because I'd drive around when I was too young…"

Briar was looking at her openmouthed. "You shot a cop?"

"Yup. You can look it up on the Internet. My name is Letty West and you can look it up," she said.

"Okay," Briar said. "But we don't have an Internet."

Letty hooked her arm with Briar's. "Now. When I was in all that trouble, all the time, I had to tell a few fibs. Well, lots of fibs. The way I did this is, I made a little box in my mind, and I put the truth in that, and then I made the box small. So I knew what the truth was. But then, I imagined, you know, another truth. What might have happened. What people would rather have had happen. So, if the highway patrolman saw me downtown, and asked me if I was driving, and I was, I'd just say, "No, my mom brought me." That was a better truth for everybody, see? Then I didn't get in trouble, and he didn't have to give me a hard time ' Way back in my head, I knew what the truth was, but the fib was at the head of the line. That's what everybody wants to hear, anyway. Randy doesn't want to hear that I'm talking to you-he wants to hear that you, you know…"

"Gave a guy a blow job," Briar said.

"Yeah. Okay?"

"Okay." Another helpless head bob.

"So let's go sit on that bench, across the street," Letty said, pointing at a bench in a riverfront park. "We can practice. I'll teach you how to lie to Randy. Like I lied to the cops. You can tell me about blow jobs."

She really did sort of want to know.

Lucas, talking with the women at the hospitality committee, felt the ice going out: the break.

Lucy, the third woman, had said, "Raphael is dead."

Lucas and Dickens, the Secret Service agent, looked at each other, and another look passed between the three nervous women, and then Lucas said, "Who's Raphael?"

Cheryl Ann, the second woman, said, "Raphael Sabartes, this Latino guy'"

"Spanish," Fumaro said. "From Spain."

Lucy said, "He was part-time tech support back in the Washington office and he died. In June. June twenty-first, midsummer's day. They said alcohol and pills. The cops did. The police."

Lucas's eyebrows went up: "You think different?"

"Well, it was a lot of pills," Lucy said. "A lot of pills. Couldn't hardly have been an accident."

"Police said it could have been an accident," Fumaro said. "You're drinking, you can't get to sleep, so you take a pill. The pill makes you confused, and you don't think you've taken the pill, so you take another one. And so on."

"Thirty pills?" Lucy said. "He took thirty pills by mistake?"

Cheryl Ann said, "Then there was his girlfriend."

Dickens: "What about the girlfriend?"

"Very pretty Latina, Mexican, I think, but older than Raphael," Cheryl Ann said. "Raphael was about twenty-five; this woman, I think, might have been in her thirties."

Lucy snorted. "She'd never see forty again, if you ask me. She took care of herself, but she was no spring chicken."

"Raphael liked her," Fumaro said.

"Raphael loved her," Lucy said. To Lucas: "I don't think Raphael was very sexually experienced."

"He was sort of odd-looking," Cheryl Ann confirmed.

"Like a Picasso," Fumaro said.

"So this good-looking older woman who shares his heritage ' well, some of it, anyway, she can speak Spanish ' she eats him up," Lucy said. She leaned toward Lucas: "Then he died, and she never even came to the memorial service."

Lucas said, "He could have put together these rooms and names and organizations?"

Cheryl Ann snapped her fingers: "Like that. You know what? He was moody, that's what we told the police, he was moody, but we never saw him happier than after he hooked up with this woman. Why would he commit suicide?"

Lucy said, "What if she broke it off with him that night? That could be a reason…"

Dickens had taken a chair; now he leaned back and put his hands behind his head, stared up at the ceiling, thinking, then said, "You know what?"

Lucas: "What?"

"Just between you and me, the biggest street-money guy, I happen to know, is named Chuck Prince. He works for America-United Aerospace Association, which is a lobby group for all the big air-defense manufacturers. He probably has four times as much money with him as all these other guys ' why didn't they hit him? I know he's in town."

Fumaro reached forward and called up a form. "He registered with us on twenty-nine June."

Cheryl Ann said, her voice hushed and conspiratorial, "They don't know about him. Because Raphael was dead. They killed him too soon. Holy shit. It's just like in Clue. Colonel Lesbo did it, with the poison in the drink at the hotel."

Dickens ventured a smile. "Lesbo?"

Cheryl Ann said, "The three of us saw them once-just once-at the Hamilton, in the bar, which is a weird place for Raphael, now that I think about it." The other two women nodded.

"They saw us and we saw them, and we stopped to say hello and look her over and I got a very definite lesbian radio wave from her," Cheryl Ann said. "Not that I'd really know."

"You'd recognize her again?" Lucas asked.

"Maybe-but you know what? There's a photograph of her," Cheryl Ann said. "He took a picture of her with his cell phone, sent it to himself at the office, and printed it out, and pinned it up on the wall of his cubicle. After he died, we took the stuff off the walls and put it in a box and gave it to the police, when they came around. They might still have it."

"What about the body?" Dickens asked.

"I think the Spanish embassy shipped it back to Spain," Fumaro said.

Lucas said, "Time to call the cops, I guess. were these District cops, or are you over in Virginia, or what?"

"Right in the District," Fumaro said. "The guy who came to get the box was Detective Sams."

Lucas wrote it down and went home to confront Letty.

Letty was standing in the living room with her arms crossed, one foot all but tapping, a pose that Lucas recognized from encounters with more women, over the years, than he cared to remember. Before he could say a single word, Letty said, "I'm trying to get to be what Jennifer calls a Real Fuckin' Reporter, and I do not want to hear about this story."

"What story?" Weather asked.

Lucas, fists on his hips, looking at Letty but talking sideways to Weather: "Your daughter here is running down hookers, in St. Paul, and I won't tell you what kind of questions she's asking them, because it embarrasses me."

Weather said, "Hookers?"

Lucas said to Letty, "I'm putting my foot down. I let you run all over me, but this time, by God, you are not going to go around this town looking for hookers. I mean, do you have any idea what those people could do to you? Of course not. You're a teenager and you don't have a single fucking idea what you're getting into…"

"I do have a fucking idea because I tracked down one of these girls-on my own-and she's no older than I am…"

"Watch your language," Lucas said, getting loud. He knew he was about to start waving his arms, so he put his hands in his pockets, afraid that he might frighten her.

"You started it," she said.

"Technically, you said "fuck" first," Weather told Letty. Ellen came in from the kitchen, carrying Sam: "What the heck is going on here?"

"Letty's interviewing hookers," Weather told her. "Hookers?"

"Aw, for Christ's sakes," Lucas said. To Letty: "You, young lady, are grounded."

That wasn't the end of it, of course. Lucas had never grounded anyone before, so the term "grounded" had to be defined. He couldn't actually restrict her to the house, because she had to go to school the next week, and there was some slack there, and he actually approved of the idea of Letty working with Jennifer Carey. Besides, he wasn't a jailer.

When everything was hashed over, Letty had negotiated it down to one restriction: she was not allowed to go downtown on her own, and anytime she went out of the house, she had to tell somebody specifically where she was going. If she violated the deal, she'd be restricted to the house for the rest of the week, including the weekend.

"All right. It's not fair, it's not right, but you're the dictator," she said.

Lucas said, "What do you mean it's not right? You're going around…"

"I'm reporting the news," Letty snarled.

Weather jumped in: "Both of you shut up. A deal's a deal. All right? All right."

Ellen said, "Hookers? In St. Paul?"

"Aw, for Christ's sakes…"

Letty stomped off to her bedroom to mope, but she didn't stomp as hard as she might: she had no intention of keeping the agreement.

Lucas, on the way home, had called his secretary and told her to chase down the Washington cop, Sams, who'd looked into Raphael Sabartes's death.

"It's Sunday," Carol said. "I might not be able to get him."

"Try," Lucas said. "Have we heard anything at all about this Justice Shafer guy?"

"No…"

"Of course not," Lucas said. "If we had, you'd have called me instantly."

"Right."

"So find Sams."

As it turned out, Sams was working nights, and was due to come on at 11 p.m. Lucas called the number Carol got, and left a note with Sams's supervisor that he'd be calling right at 11 o'clock.

The rest of the evening was fairly tense, with Letty trudging up and down the stairs between her room and the refrigerator, stopping only once to say, "All my friends say it's unfair."

"All your friends are teenagers," Lucas said.

Letty said, "You told me one time that you had a beer in a hockey bar when you were fourteen."

"That was different," Lucas said.

"How was that different?"

"There were adults around," Lucas said.

"Huh, great. Adults giving a fourteen-year-old a beer," Letty said.

Weather said, "Shut up, shut up, shut up, both of you, shut up."

On her last trip down, she went to the refrigerator, got a bottle of water, and on the way back through the family room, where Weather and Lucas were watching the news, stopped and gave Lucas a kiss on the forehead, and went on her way.

"I think you're okay," Weather said.

At ten o'clock, eleven Eastern, Lucas called Sams, got him, gave him the history, and told him about the interview with the women at the hospitality committee.

"Well, they might be right, but we couldn't prove it," Sams said. "No sign of violence, the kid was lying on his back on his bed, his shoes off, his hands crossed on his chest. Bottle of rum in the kitchen, glass by the bed."

"But no note."

"Nothing," Sams said. "We never did find the woman. We didn't know where to start, because nobody knew her name."

"Find any DNA in the apartment?"

"There might have been some semen stains, but we didn't run it-I mean, it didn't come from the woman," Sams said. "We didn't do a full process, because ' there didn't seem to be any reason to. Everything in the apartment was pretty neat and clean."

"No references to the woman ' cell phone, date book?"

"Okay, here's one thing. The kid's cell phone had a lot of calls on it to one number, and the number was in the three-two-three area code. That's LA. Pretty much downtown LA. We ran the phone down, and it was a dead end-one of those over-the-counter pay-as-you-go phones. We called it, but it was out of service. It never came back, as long as we called it."

"So you don't even know that it's the woman's phone," Lucas said.

"Nope. We don't. But: I talked to his uncle, from Spain, because his folks don't speak English, and we figured out between us that he'd never been to California, and as far as anybody knew, he didn't know anybody from there. But he was calling the number six times a day for two months."

"So it's gotta be her," Lucas said. "He was in love."

"I think so. Now that you're asking, I'd have to say it was all a little odder than we thought at the time. She was just flat gone, and she shouldn't have been that gone."

"These committee women I talked to, they said you might have a picture of her," Lucas said.

"We do have that," Sams said. "When I got your note, I went and looked. The thing is, it was just odd enough that the ME didn't want to rule it as a suicide. He left the cause of death open. Means of death was a load of sleeping pills with alcohol. Anyway, we've still got all the evidence, what there was of it."

"Could you scan that photo and send it to me?" Lucas asked.

"Sure. Keeps me off the street-I'll do it tonight."

While Lucas was talking to Sams, Jesse Lane and Rosie Cruz were sitting at the back of Spor's, an upscale deli off West Seventh Street, two blocks from the convention center, watching Shelly Weimer finish a corned-beef sandwich with a mound of yellow sauerkraut.

"The guy is a pig," Cruz said.

"He ain't all that neat, is he?"

Weimer was sitting across the shop under a poster of Albert Einstein. He went after the sandwich like a starving man, hunched over it, eyes scanning the shop, pieces of bread and strands of sauerkraut falling like shrapnel on the tabletop and onto his jacket and shirt and lap.

Lane and Cruz worked slowly through their hot dogs and French fries, not much to talk about, until Lane asked, "You're from LA, right?"

"We don't talk about where people are from," Cruz said. Her voice was soft and pleasant, her eyes amused.

"Well, everybody knows where everybody else is from' if Brute's from anywhere. Most of the time, he isn't, but he used to be from Birmingham."

"I like my privacy," Cruz said.

"Sure. But, I figure you're from LA. You look California. You act California."

Now she was interested. "How do you act California?"

Lane checked Weimer, then turned back. "You know. Me "n"' Tate were talking. When we're done with a job, and you're heading out to the airport, you dress like California. Light and cheerful. Lacy.

We don't dress like it in the middle of the country. Then, whenever we go to a restaurant, you pick at the food like you never seen it before. Like that hot dog. You ain't gonna finish it, are you?"

"It's not so good," she said.

"It's a good hot dog," Lane said. "I haven't had many better. But you guys, in California, you don't eat hot dogs. You eat' fruit. Fruit drinks. Yogurt. And you eat fruit, I've seen you do it. If you wanna get nasty, you eat a Fat Burger, or you go to In-and-Ou. We all eat McDonald's out here. It's the food that makes me think California. You look big city, but in New York, they eat everything. In Dallas, they eat a lot of Mexican and a lot of ribs, and they don't really give a shit about anything else. You don't look like Chicago or Denver. You don't eat like Dallas or New York. You're LA."

"You know a lot about LA?" she asked, implying that he didn't.

"A fair bit," Lane said, not taking the bait. He studied her for a minute, then said, "Marina del Rey. Or maybe you got more money than that. Laguna Beach."

"You're so full of shit, Jesse." She patted his hand. "But you're a nice guy."

Jesse leaned forward and said, "You didn't blink an eye when I said Marina del Rey, which means you know where it is. How'd you know that, if you weren't from LA?"

She shook her head and said, "Okay, Jesse, you got me. I'm from Marina del Rey."

He said, "Okay. So where in the fuck are you from?"

Cruz said, "He's moving." Weimer was up and brushing off his jacket and pants as he waddled between tables, headed for the door. Which was good for Cruz, because Weimer's move covered the shock of the conversation: she had a house more or less across the street from Marina del Rey, in Venice. Nobody had ever gotten close, and here this shitkicker from Alabama figured her out, because she ate fruit.

On her cell phone, she said, "He's coming."

Weimer beeped the rental car, an Audi A6, and punched himself lightly over the heart, where the sauerkraut was threatening to back up. He walked between the Audi and the minivan beside it, edged open the door-the van was parked too close and he didn't want to dent it. As he lifted a leg to pivot onto the front seat, he heard a metallic slide… and a heavy hand grabbed his coat collar and yanked him straight back inside the van, smashing his calves against the edge of the doorsill, one shoe popping off his foot, and then the door slammed.

The whole thing was so quick that he yelped, "Hey! Hey!" and then there was a gloved hand over his mouth, and a man said, "If you yell, if you make a fuss, I cut your fuckin' throat."

"Don't hurt me," Weimer said, when the hand lifted back. "Don't hurt me. Take my wallet."

"Where's your room key?" Cohn asked.

A moment of silence, then Weimer said, "Oh, Jesus. You're them."

Cohn backhanded him across the face, hard. "Don't take the Lord's name in vain," he said. "Where's the card?"

"In my wallet," Weimer said. "My back pocket."

"Better be."

Cohn pulled a fabric shopping bag over Weimer's head, tied it with a string. Weimer said, "Don't choke me, don't choke me, I'm cooperating."

Cohn tied the knot, said, "Put your hands by your side," and when Weimer did it, he grabbed Weimer's feet and twisted them, which rolled Weimer onto his face. Weimer felt the wallet slip out of his pocket, and then, "Got the key. Let's go," and the van started to move.

Weimer was at the Embassy Suites, twenty blocks away. "Anybody else in your room?" Cohn asked. "No."

"Better not be, because we don't want no one seeing our faces, you know? If you got a girlfriend, or something, and she sees our faces, well, too bad for her."

"There's nobody but me," Weimer said.

"Where's the money?"

Another moment of silence, then Cohn hit him again, hard, this time in the left kidney. The pain was excruciating, and Weimer groaned, and Cohn said, "You only got two kidneys."

"It's under the bed. But it's a platform, you gotta pull the headboard back a little."

There were cops all along the streets, but they made a wide circle to the hotel, no problem. They parked on the street, and McCall took the card: "See you in five."

Inside the hotel, he rode the elevator up to seven, put on his gloves when he saw the hallway was empty, entered the room, closed the door and turned on the light, wrenched the headboard off the bed, saw the briefcase, a square leather one, like a lawyer might carry, pulled it out, clicked it open-a third full, maybe, less than they'd gotten before. A lot less. Not so many hundreds and fifties, lots of twenties and tens.

He started to leave, then thought about what Weimer had said: "You're them."

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

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

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

Weimer said, "I had to try."

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

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

As they pulled away, Cohn slid the door shut and asked, "How'd we do?"

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

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

"If it's what I think, we already got more than three million…"

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

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

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

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

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

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