Wicked Prey

Chapter 12

The news about Weimer got to Lucas through the Secret Service. Dickens heard about it from a St. Paul cop on the security committee, and suggested that the cops call Lucas. A St. Paul lieutenant named Parker called at eight o'clock, and Ellen, the housekeeper, brought the phone to the bedroom and said, "St. Paul police. They say it's important."

Weather was already at work, and Ellen said that Letty was up and waiting for a ride to Channel Three.

"Tell her I'll be ready in fifteen minutes," Lucas said. He took the phone: "Yeah. Davenport."

"Don Parker at St. Paul. We had a robbery last night, and we've been told you're tracking them."

"Lobbyist guy?"

"That's what I'm told," Parker said. "He's not talking much, said they took his travel money, but said it was the same deal as two other ones he heard about. Anyway, he's at St. John's."

"Hurt?"

"Peeing blood. Probably get out tomorrow, depending. They rabbit-punched him a few times. Took him for a ride in a van, robbed his room. There's something going on there."

"I'll go talk to him," Lucas said.

"Dick Clay is working it for us, but he's back in the house already ' if you need anything."

Lucas hung up and thought, All right: the motherfucker's still in town.

Lucas got cleaned up and headed out to the kitchen, where Letty was reading the newspaper and eating toast. They were a little reserved after the fight the night before, and Lucas had a quick microwave oatmeal with milk and a banana, then they loaded into the Porsche and headed north and west toward Minneapolis.

Letty said, finally, looking out the side window, "Can't wait until I get my license."

"You'll be lucky if you get a license at all, after a stunt like yesterday's," Lucas said.

She turned back to him and said, "You want to let it go, or do you want to argue? I mean, I'll argue if you still want to."

"Let it go," Lucas said.

"Okay. Like I said, I can't wait until I get my license." She reached out and ran a hand over the dashboard. "Take this thing out on the highway and blow the coon-farts out of it."

Lucas laughed and said, "You should live so long as to get your hands on this car, sweetie. I'm thinking Hyundai. Used."

"You should live so long as to see me driving a Hyundai," she said.

She got him laughing, and though he could feel the manipulation, it felt kinda good ' because that's what daughters were supposed to do. Then they were across the bridge and into town and down to the station, and he waved and she was inside and he headed back to St. Paul.

Shelly Weimer was propped up in a bed, a fat man with a pencil-thin mustache in the St. John's Intensive Care Unit, a saline drip running into one arm. He was reading the Wall Street Journal, holding it up with one hand, while the other hand took the drip. He folded the paper when Lucas walked in, and asked, "Who're you?"

"I'm with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension," Lucas said. "Lucas Davenport."

"I'm really hurt," Weimer said, and the hand holding the newspaper trembled with the effort of speaking. He reached out, slowly, and dropped it on a service tray.

"I'm sorry," Lucas said.

"Kept hitting me in the back, in the kidneys. Hit me even after they had the money." He groaned, as if to emphasize the money.

"You didn't see any faces?"

"No. The guy who was hitting me was wearing a mask," Weimer said. "The driver I couldn't see at all' You're Mitford's guy."

"Not exactly. We talk," Lucas said.

"But you know the score."

"More or less. You had a shitload of illegal money stashed in your room and a guy named Brutus Cohn and one of his gang members grabbed you in an alley and threw you in the back of a van, and put a bag on your head, got your room key and took the money. And beat you up."

Weimer nodded, shifted in bed, winced, and said: "That's it, in a nutshell. I didn't know his name was Brutus Cohn, and you might want to go easy on that "illegal money" thing. Since you know all of that, why haven't you picked him up?"

"We're looking, we haven't found him," Lucas said. "He's ditched himself somewhere-could be headed out of town by now. But, we're looking. Got his face all over national TV."

"Won't get my money back," Weimer said.

"No, it won't, but it really wasn't your money, anyway," Lucas said. "So: what can you tell me?"

Weimer said, "I've been thinking about it, and I've got one thing."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, I'" He groaned and arched his back and flailed at it with his good hand, groaned again, and then went slack, and looked at Lucas. "It keeps twisting, like a muscle's turning back there ' God bless me."

"The one thing," Lucas said.

"Ah ' I was eating in this sandwich shop and I got up to go," Weimer said. "Left the money and the tip on the table, walked out the door, turned left, walked down this little short alley around the building to the parking lot to my car. I opened the door and bam! They got me. Just bam-bam! Like that." He had small round hands and he slapped them twice. "So, I think they had to be watching me, to be all ready. The guys in the van couldn't see me, because you couldn't see into the back of the shop. I think somebody was inside the place."

"You saw somebody?"

Weimer shifted again, his face going pale, and he said, "Ahhh. God, I hate this shit' Okay: There was a tough-looking hillbilly guy and this cool-looking woman in the front booth. They didn't look like they should go together, but they were. I noticed her looking back at me two or three times-caught her looking. I am what I am, and my wife likes me okay, but I'm not exactly a chick magnet, okay? They don't look at me more than once."

"Okay."

"So she was checking me out," Weimer said, "Now I wonder if she was checking me out for this Cohn guy? Maybe she made a call when I got up to leave."

"You see her on a cell phone?" Lucas asked.

"No, but I didn't look."

Lucas asked, "There's no chance that she was a Latina-looking chick, was she?"

Weimer's eyebrows went up: "You know who she is?"

Lucas called Carol, at the office, and had her check his e-mail. The photo from Washington was there. "Print it. I need it. Is there somebody who could run it over to St. John's? Light and sirens?"

"I saw Jenkins down the hall, reading the paper-he could take one of our cars."

"Get him over here. Quick as he can make it," Lucas said.

He tried to pry more information out of Weimer, but the lobbyist didn't have much more: "The whole thing was quick. Professional. Bam-bam-bam. When the two of them were talking, they were totally calm and casual. Like a couple guys going out for a beer. Then, when the guy hit me for not telling about the hideout bag, he didn't seem angry. He hit me like he was punishing a kid. Just' hit me."

Lucas went down to the cafeteria while he waited for Jenkins, got a Diet Coke, read the Star Tribune about the convention: more marches, lots of people already arrested. Finished the story, glanced at his watch, took out his cell phone and discovered that he had no signal. He walked it up the stairs, and then outside, got a signal, and called Jenkins. "I'm two minutes away," Jenkins said. "I had to drive halfway around town to get here."

Lucas waited by the curb, saw Jenkins coming, waved him down. Jenkins passed a manila envelope out the window. "What a mess. You can't get anywhere. St. Paul's closing down the whole downtown area."

"Thanks for this. See you back at the office."

"I hope it's serious."

"It is." Lucas patted the truck on the door, and headed back into the hospital. In the elevator up to Weimer's room, he slipped the photo out of the envelope. The quality was bad-cell phone quality-but the woman was recognizable, and, Lucas thought, somewhat hot.

Dark hair, dark eyes, caught unaware, he thought, as though she had just turned around. She seemed to be in a nightclub, or some kind of night place-there were sparkly lights in the background, the corner of a mirror, the shoulder of another woman in what might have been a cocktail dress. The woman wasn't looking at the camera, but off to the right; she might not have known about the picture, Lucas thought.

Weimer was sitting, unmoving, staring at the television that was attached to the ceiling. When Lucas came in, he turned his head: "Hurts when I move. This is awful, I'm like a baby. Could you take the top blanket off? My feet are getting hot."

Lucas stripped the cotton blanket off the bed, wadded it up, threw it on a chair and said, "Okay. I got a picture…" He should have had a bunch of pictures, a photo panel, and asked Weimer to pick one, but that, he thought, would be a pain in the ass. "I don't want you to say yes' or "no" unless you're sure. Take a look."

He passed the photo over and Weimer looked at it for a second, or two, then nodded and said, "Hell yes. That's her. Who is she?"

Lucas took the photo back and said, "I don't know. But I will find out."

"Beat the shit out of her, for me," Weimer said. "Do that, and I'll get you a personalized autographed picture from the next president."

Lucas said, "You know who it's going to be?"

"Doesn't matter," Weimer said. "Either one. We're covered both ways."

AS soon as he could use his cell phone, on the way out of the hospital, he called Carol and said, "Jenkins is on the way back. Grab him, get Shrake, see if you can shake Del loose, he's wandering around town somewhere, doing his homeless act' Meet in the office in twenty minutes."

In the car, he called Mitford, the governor's man, and said, "We're meeting in my office in twenty minutes to talk about the people pulling these robberies. You might want to come by."

"The cop thing yesterday ' is that going to break it open?" Mitford asked.

"Maybe, but maybe not," Lucas said. "The money is getting to be less important, in a way."

"All right. I'm over at the X. I can be there in twenty, if I can get through town at all."

"You're the guy who wanted to have the convention here," Lucas said.

"Hey, I think it's a great success and another sign that Minnesota is marching into a future that gets brighter and brighter minute by minute. See ya."

They gathered in Lucas's office, and Lucas kicked Carol out, despite her curiosity, and said to the cops, "You all know Neil'"

Then he told them about it, about the money in briefcases and satchels, about the robberies, about the killing of the cop in Hudson, about Lily Rothenburg's story of the cop murders in New York, and about the Latina-looking woman and the dead kid in D.c.

"We're dealing with murder as a policy. They've killed at least four people and that's only the ones we know about," Lucas said. "They're a murder gang, and they're here, and we need to run them down."

"I didn't know," Mitford said.

"Nobody did-not really. We're coming in the back door on this," Lucas said. "Now, we've got to start pushing some buttons. I want to put this woman's face out there. One of those "Do you know this woman?"' deals on national TV. I can go back to Lily on that, and she can help: she's already plastering the place with Cohn's photo."

"What about me?" Del asked. "I've spent a lot of time getting tight with these protesters. I'm doing the sheriff's office some good, and the St. Paul cops."

"Stay with it until we get something we can use-and then I may have to pull you off," Lucas said. "My feeling is, the big convention trouble is about over, after the arrests yesterday. Maybe more on Thursday, the big McCain day, but' if we need you, we need you."

Del nodded: "Okay."

Shrake: "The question is, where are they? After the trouble in Hudson, they know we're papering the motels. So where are they staying? Out-state? Or have they taken off?"

"Condos," Jenkins said. "There are probably six hundred condos around town with nobody in them and the developers have been renting them out to the Republicans, to the media, to anyone who wants one. If they knew about that'"

"They would," Lucas said. "They've got good intelligence."

"Then that may be the answer," Jenkins said to Lucas. "Your pal

Ralph Warren, you know, with all his connections everywhere ' maybe they went through him. He had a couple hundred empty condos."

"Yeah, well. He's dead," Lucas said. Warren hadn't been a pal, and though Lucas had tried to keep him alive, he'd failed.

"Even if he's dead, there's still gotta be a business manager somewhere," Jenkins said. "Somebody's got to be running the company."

Lucas jabbed a finger at him: "I'll buy your idea. You and Shrake start running down condo managers, the ones with vacancies."

"Maybe we should hold off on the woman's picture for a couple of days," Del said. "Maybe we can spot her without the TV. If we spook her, and she takes off ' it's one thing we've got that they don't know about."

Lucas thought about it, then said, "Okay. A day. If we come up with anything, we can stretch it out. After that, we're going with the TV. I'll get Carol to print up photos of Cohn and this woman for you guys to take around town."

He turned to Mitford: "At night' they've been hitting these guys at night, because it's easier to locate them, and it's easier to operate without letting their faces be seen. We need the names of the four or five biggest money dealers that you still see out there, and we'll put somebody in their rooms. See if we can ambush them."

"I don't know if they'll go for that," Mitford said.

"They'll have to do their deals somewhere else. Maybe they can rent two rooms. But that's what we need, Neil. We got four dead."

Mitford nodded: "I'll make some calls."

Letty had twenty dollars from Lucas when she walked in the door at Channel Three that morning. The receptionist buzzed her through the security gate and she walked back past the studios, where the Bob & Jane morning show was unwinding. She nodded to the weatherman, who walked by, on his way to do a thirty-second bit, shaking peanuts out of a cellophane bag, and said, "You've got something stuck to your cheek."

He said, "What is it?"

"Peanut skin?" She brushed it off. "Gone now."

"Thanks."

She went on her way, turned into the greenroom, where people waited for their turn on Bob & Jane, got two sweet rolls, and ate them on the way back to Jennifer Carey's office. She'd had breakfast, but not much-she and Lucas were both light eaters in the morning. She realized on the way over that since she planned to give the twenty dollars to Juliet, she'd better get a couple of sweet rolls when she could.

A coffee niche, for employees only, was located down the hall from Carey's office. She stopped there, looked around, stepped inside, and picked up the coffee donation can and peeled off the plastic lid. Three or four dollars. Not worth taking.

She needed eighty dollars more, although a hundred would be better, she thought-enough to convince Whitcomb that Juliet had been working.

Down the hall, she found Carey poking at her computer. Carey looked up and said, "Hi, good-lookin'," with just enough forced cheer that Letty instantly knew who'd ratted her out. It might have been Lois, but it had gone through Carey to Lucas.

"You ratted me out," she said.

Carey started to deny it, and then gave it up: "You're too young. You don't think so, but you are. When I was your age, I thought I was twenty-eight, too, but I wasn't."

"How old were you when you shot your first cop?" Letty asked.

"Letty that's not fair." Carey was a hockey mom, and sometimes acted like one.

"How old were you when you first drove your drunk mother home from the bar?" Letty asked.

"Letty…" Carey was getting flustered.

"How old were you when you first stole money to get something to eat?" Letty was all over her now.

"For Christ's sakes, I gotta do what I think is best," Carey said. "You're fourteen."

Letty leaned into it: "I know how old I am. When it comes to trouble, I am twenty-eight. Try not to forget that the next time you turn me in."

Carey rolled her eyes: "I don't want to fight with you."

"I'm done," Letty said. "But I need a ride to St. Paul and I need a camera in the park. I talked to some street kids-not prostitutes, just skaters from St. Paul-who are going to skate in one of the marches. It'll make a good snip of film."

"I'm going over in fifteen minutes," Carey said, eager to make peace. "The cameras are already over there, so ' we'll hook you up."

Letty smiled: "I'm not really mad at you. Everybody thinks they're doing the right thing. You're not, but I appreciate it anyway."

Carey had her personal reporting rules that she'd been passing along to Letty. Like, before you go out on a job, always pee first. Even if you don't feel like you have to. A woman can never find a comfortable place to pee when she needs one. Check your makeup and your hair; there's never a place to do that when you need one- a little too much hairspray is better than too little.

Letty went out in the newsroom to chat with some of the producers, keeping one eye on Carey's office. When Carey came out and looked around, Letty waved at her, and Carey called, "I'll be right back," and she headed down toward the bathrooms. Letty ambled over to her office as she watched her go, and when she was sure that Carey was in the bathroom, she stepped into the office and pulled Carey's purse out from under her desk.

Carey never had any idea how much money she had or what she'd spent it on. She was one of those people who believed that if she had checks, she must have money. She made a good salary, and her husband was rich, so money, at least the kind you spend during the day, meant almost nothing to her: Letty popped the purse and took a peek into Carey's billfold. Must be a thousand dollars in fifties, Letty thought. She took two of them, decided that the thickness of the currency seemed not at all diminished and took two more. She put the billfold back in the purse, put the purse back as she'd found it, and ambled back out of the office and over to the people she'd been talking with earlier.

When Carey came back from the bathroom, she called, "Let's do it," and Letty went to join her.

The skaters were gathering in Mears Park in St. Paul's Lower-town, an area of older brick warehouses converted to lofts and condos and small, marginal businesses. Letty pointed them out and Carey looked them over, from the front seat of her SUV and then said, "You know, you do have a natural eye for this. I told your dad that last night."

"Maybe I'll be an economist," Letty said. "TV is starting to seem so superficial."

Carey made a rude noise and said, "Let's get a truck over here. You go get your friends lined up."

Carey called a Channel Three van, and let Letty out to talk to the skaters while she took her SUV to a parking garage up the block. Letty got her cell phone out and called Juliet Briar: "Where are you?"

"Still at home. Randy's sleeping," Briar said.

"Tell him that a guy called for a date, and that you'll walk down," Letty said. "I got some money."

After a moment's silence, Briar said, "Okay."

"Call me when you get out."

The leader of the skate gang was named Marv, a burly, cheerful busted-faced guy with a shaven head and jeans so old that they looked like paper. He was wearing a T-shirt that said, "Mathews Solocam, Catch Us If You Can," that was washed thinner than the jeans.

He held out a fist and they bumped knuckles and he said, "How are you, babe?"

"Don't call me babe," Letty said, but she said it with her happy face, and she asked, "So who's who?"

There were seven guys and one girl among the skaters, and all of them desperately wanted to be on television. As Marv introduced them, Letty kept looking at the girl, with her dry, underfed, feral face, thinking that she was the one; but she had to keep Marv and the others happy, too. A management problem.

After the introductions, she said, "Listen, we've got a van coming with a camera. I'll want to talk to Marv, and then to Jean, because she's a girl, and we don't have that many girl skaters, and then maybe whoever ' but I'd like to see some runs, if you got anything that's good."

One of the kids, a too-tall teenager with a bandaged hand, said, "We were jumping barrels…"

"That's terrific, that's great," Letty said. "Why don't you guys get set up with the barrels and we'll get shots of you skating, and then I'll do a couple of quick interviews."

Carey came back and Letty explained the situation to her, off to the side, and said, "Take a look at Jean's face. Isn't that a great face?"

Carey looked at her, then said, "You really are going to be good at this. That's acom' great comface."

The van showed, and the kids gathered around the cameraman, whose name was Mike, not really believing that it was going to happen. So the kids did their tricks and Mike even lay on the ground behind a trash barrel that they were jumping and had a kid jump over him, which got everybody laughing.

Briar called and said, "I'm out, I'm walking down the hill."

Letty: "I'm doing an interview in Mears Park. You know where that is?"

"Yeah. I can come there."

Letty did a quick stand-up with Marv and a longer one with Jean, then they all bumped knuckles and the skaters took off. Letty did a couple of shots alone, putting up some background, and then she saw Briar standing on the sidewalk, watching.

Off-camera, she walked over to Carey and said, "I've got somebody you need to meet."

"Who?"

"Come on," and she grabbed the older woman's elbow and pulled her over toward Briar.

They got hot dogs and talked for half an hour. Letty dug harder into Briar's passivity; to her way of thinking, if she could replace Randy Whitcomb as Briar's boss, she would be making progress.

Carey, on the other hand, was fascinated by Briar's story and her relationship with Whitcomb. "He can't possibly love you. He treats you like an animal," Carey said. "He loves himself, he doesn't love you. I mean, he doesn't, Juliet."

"You don't know him," Briar said defensively.

Letty pushed: "She's right. He doesn't love you. If you think he does-well, you're wrong."

Briar flinched, and put her head down, and said, "Okay," and Carey looked at Letty and said, "Get off her back, Letty. Jeez."

"I'm just backing you up," Letty said.

"I'm discussing," Carey said. "You're pushing her around."

"Letty's okay, she's a friend," Briar mumbled.

"Going home is out of the question?" Carey asked.

"As long as Don is around," Briar said. "He won't leave me alone, and Mom doesn't believe me when I tell her about him."

"You're sixteen?" Carey asked.

"Almost seventeen. Next month," Briar said.

"And Don's a mailman. So he's got to be quite a bit older."

"He's forty, I think," Briar said. "He's ' an asshole."

"I don't want to embarrass you," Carey said, "but I've got to ask. What does he do?"

"Well, you know, he grabs me, he feels me up, he comes in the bathroom when I'm taking a shower-he's got a nail thing that he can push in the doorknob, and open it even when it's locked. He gets naked and he comes out and grabs me, and rubs himself on me. He's come into my bedroom naked and gotten in bed, and when I tried to get out, he's, you know, held me…"

"Hasn't raped you?"

"No, but he will, if I go back," Briar said. "He came into my bedroom naked and got in bed with me, when I was asleep, and when I woke up, he was all over me. He was trying to push my head down by his cock, and I bit him right here"-she touched her hip bone-"and he bled all over and was screaming at me ' Mom pretended like she didn't hear."

"You've seen him naked," Carey said. "Does he have any identifying marks, you know, around his penis, or on his butt? You know, something you couldn't have seen if he wasn't naked?"

Briar thought for a minute and then said, "Well' he shaves. You know, he shaves his cock and his balls. He does have a big brown spot, like a football shape, where the hair should be."

"Great!"

"And when I bit him, I bit a piece out of him," Briar said, with satisfaction. She smiled with the memory. "That's why he was bleeding so much. I bit out a piece and spit it on the floor. Not a big piece, but you know, enough that he was really bleeding."

"So he'll have a scar," Letty said.

"Oh, yeah."

"How long ago was that?" Carey asked.

"Last spring. I ran away in June ' and met Randy."

"Okay, then. We can handle Don," Carey said. "We can get rid of him. If we get rid of him, could you go back home?"

"Maybe," Briar said. She was twisting her hands, and then she said, "Maybe Randy doesn't love me. But you know what? He needs me. He needs me to take him around, and to rub his shoulders and his back, and clean him up. In my whole life, he's the only person who ever needed me. Who ever wanted me around. Except Don, I guess."

Letty leaned forward: "You want to be needed, become a nurse. Not a hooker. God. Juliet."

Briar looked doubtful, and Carey said, "Let's get rid of Don for a start. When we get rid of Don, and Juliet has a place to stay, then maybe we can make some progress."

Carey got up, and Letty said to her, "I need to walk with Juliet for one minute. I swear to God it won't be any longer than that. I'll be right back."

"What don't you want me to hear?" Carey asked.

Letty said, "Come on, Juliet. I'll be right back, Jen."

Down the sidewalk, Letty pressed seventy dollars into Juliet's hand. "Is that enough?"

"That should be," Briar said, and showed a little sparkle. "He hasn't caught me yet."

"He won't catch you," Letty said. "I can get some more money. We'll meet tomorrow-I'll call you. Remember what I said?"

"Yup." Briar showed a little grin. "Lie like a motherfucker."

Carey had been watching from a distance, and when Letty walked back to her, she said, "All right-that was interesting, but there's no story. I mean, nothing I would feel right about doing now. She's really too young to say "yes' to it."

"I don't want to do a story, either," Letty said. "I wanted you to meet her because I need to tell somebody the rest of it. I can't tell Mom or Dad-Mom would freak out and she wouldn't know what to do. And Dad ' well, that's the problem."

"What?" Carey asked.

"Juliet's pimp, this Randy. His name is Randy Whitcomb. Dad arrested him, and beat him up once-that's why he got kicked off the Minneapolis police that one time."

"That guy!" Carey said. "I remember that."

"Yeah. Then Randy got paralyzed and he blames Dad for what happened. So now he's trying to get back at Dad. By getting at me."

Carey's mouth dropped: "What?"

Letty filled in the rest of it, about Randy watching her in the park, tracking her to the McDonald's. "You know what Dad'll do if he finds out?"

Carey said, "He'll' oh, shit."

"He could get caught-they've had this long feud," Letty said.

"So what're you doing with Juliet?"

Letty shook her head: "First, tell me how we get rid of this mailman guy? Don."

"Get a camera, you know, we've got guys who'll do it for me," Carey said. "We get a camera and ambush Don and ask him about rolling around with an underage girl, talk to him about the amount of jail time he'll get. When he denies it, we tell him that she described his physical characteristics ' and then we tell him that we're more worried about her than about him doing jail time, so that if he moves out, and never comes back, there's no story. But the minute he comes back, or makes one single threat, or even a phone call, we make him into a movie star, off he goes to prison."

"Simple," Letty said.

"Not simple, but effective. There was this chick who used to work for a Lutheran social services group; she'd take underage hookers away from their pimps. I helped her out a couple of times, this way. We could do it with Whitcomb, too. Back him off Juliet, back him off Lucas, tell him he goes back to prison…"

Letty was shaking her head. "I actually thought about that. He's on parole. I figured that we could send him back, because she's underage. Then Juliet told me about him being paralyzed, and ' He can't do it. They don't have sex because he can't. He makes her work the street, and sometimes he makes her have sex with another guy, and he watches, and gets all worked up ' but she could walk away if she wanted to. Just leave him. He can't drive, either. So, everything she's been doing' I mean, it looks voluntary. The other thing is ' I'm not positive she'd testify against him."

"Ah, man."

"We need to get him," Letty said. She held Carey with an intense stare, and Carey felt almost unable to move out of it. "For sure. Randy is crazy. I've talked to Juliet a lot, about Randy, and he's crazy. If we don't get him, maybe he'll try to shoot Dad. Or me. Or Mom, or somebody But he's crazy and he's getting crazier, so we've got to get him."

"How?"

"What I'm trying to do is…" Letty looked away from Carey, up into the tree branches, away from Carey's eyes.

"What?"

"I thought I might get Randy to ' do something to her," Letty said.

"What?"

"When he gets mad, he makes her get down on her hands and knees, naked, and then he beats her with this stick," Letty said. "I've seen the stick-it has blood on it. He hasn't done it for a month and ' I mean, I don't know how evidence works, fingerprints and all that. But if he finds out she's been lying to him, and he beats her with that stick, and she calls me, and we call the cops ' He'll go back, right? Her blood will be on the stick, fresh, and her back will have the marks, and his fingerprints will be on the stick?"

Carey stared at her for a long fifteen seconds, then said, "Juliet is supposed to be your friend."

"My dad is my friend," Letty said.

"But Juliet'" Carey's jaw worked. "Letty, that's appalling. What you're thinking. That's the coldest thing I ever heard of."

"You do what you gotta do," Letty said, her eyes cutting back into Carey's.

Carey recoiled: "Not that."

"Look," Letty said. "She's gonna get beat, sooner or later. All we're doing is taking advantage."

"You're setting her up," Carey said.

"I'm taking care of Dad. Okay? That's what I'm doing. So let's take care of Don, and get Juliet a place to go if ' this other thing happens."

"Letty! I can't do this. This is awful," Carey said.

"It's already going. There's nothing you can do to stop it that wouldn't help Randy, and hurt Juliet and Dad and me." Letty stepped back and said, "So make your pick. Who do you help?"

Lucas, bored, called Jenkins and Shrake, and found them, bored, getting nowhere. He got some names from them and hit a dozen condo buildings himself, running down the presidents of the condo associations, getting head shakes and uh-uhs from each of them: nobody had seen anybody who looked like Cohn or the woman in the cell-phone photograph.

One of them said, "You might be on the right trail, though. We've only got twelve units here, and two of them are rented out. Bought on spec, can't be sold-might be foreclosed. Same thing all over town, so there's lots of space to hide out."

Lucas had stayed in touch with Mitford all afternoon, and on the last call, Mitford said, "I have six names for you. If they're going to hit again, there's a good chance it'll be one of these six guys. They've got the most money and they all got early reservations-before this Sabartes guy died in D.c."

"All six?"

"Well, I actually got eleven names, but five got reservations too late," Mitford said. "You shouldn't need those."

"All right. E-mail me the names: we'll set up with them this evening."