Wicked Prey

Chapter 14

Lucas woke at 5 a.m. after three hours of sleep. He came up feeling depressed, a mental cloud hanging overhead; a darkness. He shaved carefully, let a hot shower beat on his shoulders and back, getting in the mood to talk to the press. Thinking it over. And Benson ' gone. If he'd been in the room, would he have done any better? Why had they opened the door? Benson hadn't been ready, his vest undone, the shotgun dropped '

Weather, who would have been up in a half hour anyway, had rolled out and was brushing her teeth when he got out of the shower. He toweled off and then wrapped his arms around her and squeezed and said, halfheartedly, "Naked man attacks helpless housewife."

She gave him an elbow and grumped, "Back off," and, "You better get going," and a moment later, "I still can't believe it." She'd known Benson, from another case.

"I' ah, never mind," Lucas said, and he went and got dressed, a somber suit for a somber day.

The press conference was set for six, to catch the earliest news programs, especially locally and on the West Coast, where the unknown woman might have come from. That gave him time to eat breakfast before he headed out, time to again work through what he was going to say. Del and Shrake and Jenkins and Neil Mitford, the political operator, and Rose Marie Roux, the state public safety commissioner, would all be there, Rose Marie speaking for the governor, and both Mitford and Roux working the reporters off-camera.

Lucas ate Egg Beaters and bacon, with coffee, heard the paper hit the front porch and went and got it, glanced at the headlines. The killings had been too late to catch the paper, although they'd be all over the television broadcasts-one cop, one innocent woman, and one masked intruder, all dead in one of the most expensive hotels in the Cities, right in the middle of the convention.

The press conference, Lucas thought, on the way in, might not be entirely friendly. He took his truck instead of the Porsche, for the reduced flash, and wondered whether he'd screwed up. If they really believed that a murder gang was operating in town, maybe there should have been two cops in each room? And fewer rooms, if necessary? They simply hadn't had the manpower, with the convention in town-and maybe they hadn't had the faith that anything would really happen. Maybe he'd been a bit perfunctory in his briefing of Benson and the other guys.

But they were supposed to be pros-they were supposed to know how to handle a deal like this. They all knew that a cop had been killed in Hudson. Why had Benson unlocked the door? The killers had been able to kick the safety bolt, but wouldn't have been able to kick the cross lock, if the door hadn't been opened '

No answers yet: maybe he'd get some from the crime-scene people.

Rose Marie Roux, his boss, was getting out of her Buick when he pulled into the BCA parking lot. She waited for him, squinting against the early morning sun, and when he caught up with her, said, "The governor's going to call Benson's folks this morning."

"All right."

"You good?" she asked.

"Aw ' you know."

She nodded. She'd been a cop before she was a lawyer, and a politician. "Let a little of it out, when you're talking to the cameras. Get angry. Makes better tape-you'll get better distribution on the pictures."

He half-laughed-snorted-and said, "Pretty fucking pathetic when you have to pull that bullshit."

"Modern times," she said.

Nelly Cassesford from Channel Three was walking up the sidewalk from the Channel Three van, carrying a cable of some sort. She saw Lucas and Rose Marie and slowed down to wait for them.

"We need to get started right on time, because we're up to our necks in convention stuff," she said. She was a slight, dark-haired woman with warm brown eyes. "Lots of trouble last night, lots of tape."

"We're good," Lucas said. "Did you talk to your guys about getting this out to LA?"

"Yup. Larry Johnston called them last night. They like that LA connection with the woman, don't care so much about the convention, so you'll get some time. Did you talk to everybody?"

Lucas nodded. "Yeah. I just hope they don't kiss us off."

"They won't. This is great stuff-manhunt. Woman-hunt. Unknown killers. Good-looking femme fatale. Appeal to the public for help." She didn't say, "Dead cops," which was good.

There were four cameras and a cooperative light setup in the BCA conference room. Del, Jenkins, and Shrake, all looking tired and ruffled, were clustered in the back of the room, and Mitford was talking to a St. Paul political reporter. He spotted Lucas and Lucas went that way, and Mitford asked, "You all set?"

"Yeah. You gonna say anything for the governor?"

"No. I'll leave it to you," Mitford said. "You know he'll be calling Benson's folks…"

"Rose Marie told me," Lucas said. He glanced at his watch. Three minutes to six. Time to do it.

Rose Marie went first, the usual political platitudes about tragedy and a life dedicated to government service. Then Lucas went on, and he did let it out, as Rose Marie had suggested, and though it felt a little calculated, he found it pretty easy to do.

"A murder gang is operating in the Twin Cities and they've killed two police officers and an innocent woman, and we need to take these people off the street right now," he said through his teeth. "We're distributing photos of two of the people involved. We don't know who the woman is, but we believe that she's in St. Paul and that she may have come from the Los Angeles area. If you see her, or if you know where or who she is, we need to find her. She may have been involved in the death of a young and innocent Spanish man whom she seduced and then possibly murdered in Washington, D.c'."

Let it out. From the intent expressions of the reporters, he figured it was working; gonna be good tape.

When he was done, he bounced a few questions, and then said, "We'll keep you up on this. I understand that the governor will have a comment later. He personally knew and valued Agent Benson and he'll be talking to Benson's folks this morning."

He saw Rose Marie nod and he was done.

When the reporters were heading out, Del asked, "What next?"

Lucas said, "We've got about a million cops out there. Let's get some guys, and get these pictures to every one of the cops. Tell them, you know, if they're standing around, to talk to people-shop owners, bank tellers, whatever, ask if they've seen these guys. Maybe something will pop up. Maybe we'll get lucky."

"I hate it when we have to get lucky."

Cohn and the other three had done some drinking over the night, a couple of bottles of blended whiskey, ginger ale, and ice cubes, an old-fashioned way to get hammered, and also to overfill the tank. Lane woke at seven o'clock, hungover, and had to pee so bad he was almost afraid to move. He first thought about McCall, and the dread of a close-by death hung on him. He coughed, and stirred and pushed himself up and staggered off to the bathroom in his underwear.

The apartment had two bedrooms, with Cruz in one, and Cohn and Lindy in the other, with Lane bagged out on the floor of the living room. Now he hung over the toilet, letting it all run out, coughing, finally dried up, pulled up his underpants, and went back to the living room.

Needed a cigarette, but he'd quit smoking three years earlier. Still needed one, but he was used to the random flashes. He'd wait it out: turned on the TV and hit the mute, went in search of the local weather station.

Saw Cohn's face, and then, in a blink, Cruz's. "Holy shit."

He yelled, "Rosie. Rosie, get in here. Rosie…" He was fumbling with the remote, finally brought up the sound, but Cruz's face was gone and he shouted, "Rosie," and caught, on the TV the last part of a pitch for help: "… see her or Brutus Cohn, do not attempt to apprehend them, but call nine-one-one immediately. They are heavily armed and considered extremely dangerous."

The woman turned to another camera and said, "St. Paul police are braced for another day of trouble…"

Cruz stumbled into the living room, dressed in a cotton nightgown, took in Lane, looked at the TV, said, "What?" and then Cohn stuck his head out, and Lane said to Cruz, "They just had your picture on TV along with Brute's. They got a picture of you."

"Oh, shit'" She looked unbelieving, shaking her head, asked, "Are you sure?"

"Sure I'm sure," Lane said. He picked up the remote and started clicking through the channels. The apartment was a model, so they had only basic cable service, and after he'd run up to CNN, he ran back down, and at the bottom, on Channel Three, caught another shot of Cruz, a poor shot but identifiable enough, with the anchor in the background: "… Davenport said that the woman may come from the Los Angeles area, because the phone used to take the photo listed a large number of calls to a phone from the three-two-three area code in Los Angeles; that phone has not been found…"

"He took my picture with a cell phone," Cruz said, unbelieving. "He took my picture."

"Who?" Cohn asked.

Cruz ran into the bedroom and came back a moment later with another phone, flipped it open and pushed a speed dial, let it ring, hung up, pushed the speed dial again, and then, a third time, said, "It's only five o'clock out there…" and then somebody answered.

She said, "We're busted. Get out of there. Get the files and anything else you need, take them out to your car, move my car, and burn it. Burn it' I know, but they've busted us, and it's bad. Get out. They could be there anytime. We're seeing it now, on TV here, so you might have a couple hours. Get over to Ellen's ' just don't let her see it. Don't let her see it and when everything slows down, get down south. I'll meet you at the beach. Yes. Yes. Maybe an hour. Don't push it any further than that' G. G."

She hung up and Lane said, "I was right-about where you were from."

She looked at him and shook her head, then said, "The fucker took my picture with a cell phone. I never saw it. He tried to take one once, and I told him I hated that, I made him stop before he took it. He took one anyway."

"Who?"

"The guy who gave me the names of the moneymen," she said.

"This changes everything," Cohn said. "Now we need to do the big one."

Cruz shook her head: "Are you nuts? We needed four guys with me outside, and then Spitzer went, and then McCall' we've got two guys and…" She flipped a hand at Lindy. "Y."

"Fuck you, Rosie," Lindy said.

"Everything's changed," Cohn insisted. Lane was flipping through the channels. "I need to bury myself deep and I need more money to do that. And now, so do you, Rosie. They've got your picture. There are four cops dead, counting the ones in New York. They'll never give up. You need to go to Argentina or ' India ' or something. You can't stay here, babe."

Lane was looking at her, and he bobbed his head. "I don't know how much money you got, but'"

Cruz spoke slowly, as though they were stupid: "We-don't- have-enough-people. We don't have enough! Is that hard to understand?"

Cohn said, "We don't have enough if we have a mob scene."

She stared at him for a minute, then said, "What's the option?"

"We have to get on top of them. We kill one: we never give them a chance to resist. We pop one the minute we've got them, let them look at the body and think about being dead. I can hold them myself, that way. Even if we get twenty or thirty people. Jesse does the boxes, Lindy is the desk clerk, you're on the radios."

Cruz said, "No," and Lindy said, "I can't do that," but Cohn, ignoring Lindy, said, "Rosie, just think about it."

Cruz went back to her bedroom, which had a tiny bathroom with a tight shower, and got cleaned up and let the water run over her head, and shampooed and conditioned and didn't think about it, until she was toweling off.

She'd killed three people in her life, after some long consideration, and with great care. Before this benighted trip to the Twin Cities, five others had been killed in the series of robberies she'd done with Cohn and his gang. None of the killings had been cold. All had been necessary, and in some way, self-defense, with the exception of the two cops killed in New York. Spitzer had simply gotten nervous and pulled his trigger, and Spitzer had paid.

Now the body count was out of control. Four dead in the Twin Cities, counting McCall. Another in the hotel would be five.

But the cops had her photo, Laura was out of the Venice place, she thought, and the fire should already be cleaning up after them. She could change her face a bit, go blond ' but she had to be far gone. Someplace like New Zealand, she thought. Some careful money, checks coming in from Ireland, a full-time straight job for a while '

Laura was still clean.

Five dead, best case. Hard to think about.

But Cohn had put his finger squarely on one critical fact: if they went in shooting, they could do it with three.

A cold front was headed down from Canada, and this might be the last day of summer: but it was another good one, a good day for shorts. Don Johnson, the perverted mailman, wearing shorts and a wrinkled blue shirt, climbed out of his truck with a bag on his shoulder and started up the suburban driveway, his second block of the morning.

Letty and Carey were in a Channel Three van driven by a tough nut named Andy Cramer, who Letty had thought was an Australian but turned out to be a South African. Cramer wedged the van into the curb in front of the postal truck and hopped out, slid back the side door and picked up his camera, and Carey took the microphone and they walked up the driveway behind Johnson, who looked back at them, and then at the house, wondering what was going on. Letty sat in the open door of the van and watched: Carey had said she wouldn't do it if Letty got involved.

"Mr. Johnson!" Carey called. "Mr. Johnson."

Johnson was befuddled. "Me?"

Cramer said, for Johnson's benefit, "We're running," and Carey shoved the microphone at Johnson's face. "Mr. Johnson, we've been told by a sixteen-year-old girl that you have repeatedly forced yourself on her sexually."

"What-what-what?" Johnson held a handful of mail between his face and the camera lens. He was horrified and, Carey was pleased to see, frightened. Guilty-guilty-guilty.

Carey: "She tells us that she can identify your intimate areas by a variety of birthmarks and also by a bite mark she left on your hip, which left a scar, when you were forcing her to perform oral sex on you."

"Get away, get away…" Johnson tried to run around them and Cramer tracked him with the camera, stayed with him.

"Do you deny this, Mr. Johnson? Are you willing to speak to the police about these charges?"

"Get away, get away," Johnson shouted. "This is the mail, I'm delivering the U.s. mail here…" A few letters slipped out of his hand and he slapped at them, trying to catch them.

Carey bored in: "Did you force this girl to perform oral sex?"

"I did no such thing…"

"Did you force the bathroom door, naked, while she was in the shower and press your body against hers?"

"No-no-no…"

"… Get into her bed naked after forcing the bedroom door?"

"No-no…" Johnson was trying to get back to his truck, but Cramer blocked him and growled, "Don't touch the camera, mate."

Carey put the knife in: "Are you going back to her house, Mr. Johnson? Are you going to continue seeing this girl's mother?"

"No, no, no…"

Carey turned to Cramer and said, "Turn off the camera."

He dropped the lens toward the ground and Carey put her face close to Johnson's, and he flinched away, a line of sweat on his upper lip, and she said, "We're friends of Juliet. And we're really from Channel Three. If you go back to see Juliet's mother, if you ever talk to Juliet again, we'll put this tape on the evening news, I swear to God."

Cramer said, in a working-class British accent, "You heard the phrase, tossing the salad?"

Johnson drew back from Carey. "Maybe."

"You're gonna be the designated salad-tosser at Stillwater state correctional institution if you go back on Juliet," Cramer said. "When you get out, if you get out, you're gonna have to walk up and down every neighborhood you'll ever live in, and knock on the doors and tell the people you're a registered pervert. Keep that in mind." He reached out with his free hand and pinched one of Johnson's nipples, hard.

Johnson squealed, "Ah," and jerked back.

"And I'll pinch your other nipple," Cramer said. "If you get out."

They retreated to the van. Cramer put the camera inside and they slid the doors shut, and left Johnson standing in the driveway, in a puddle of dropped political advertisements.

Letty said, "Harsh." But she was smiling.

"If the station ever finds out what we did, we might get fired," Carey said.

"You forgot to mention that," Cramer said, but he didn't seem worried.

"You would have come anyway," Carey said. To Letty: "So Juliet's good-she's got a place to stay."

Letty asked Cramer, "What was that thing about a salad?"

But when Letty called Briar, the other girl began sobbing. "I'm at the hospital. I've been at the hospital all night. Randy got hurt."

"How?"

"Some asshole threw him in front of a car," Briar said. "He got run over."

The image in Letty's mind almost made her laugh, but she pushed the impulse away and asked, "How bad? Are you okay?"

"I'm okay…" and Briar unraveled the whole story, starting with their failure to track down a methamphetamine salesman, on to the purchase of a pint of rum, Randy and Ranch getting loaded, the decision to stop at the cafe in St. Paul, still hoping to find George, the crank salesman, the argument, and the fight.

"So ' this guy was sort of protecting you, right?" Letty asked. "Randy was threatening to beat you up, and this guy threw Randy in front of a car?"

"Well, I didn't need that, I didn't ask him for that, Randy wasn't' Randy's really hurt, Letty. He's all bruised, you should see it, and his foot's broken. I can't go home now. Who'd take care of him? He can't even cook."

"Juliet-I've got to talk to you," Letty said. "Is there someplace to eat there, at the hospital?"

"The cafeteria…"

"Which hospital?"

"Regions. I can see the Capitol out the window."

"We're going to come there. I'll meet you in the cafeteria in half an hour," Letty said.

Letty persuaded Carey to drop her at the hospital; she'd catch the bus home. "She wants to talk to me alone. I'll tell her about Don."

Carey was skeptical: "This whole other thing that you were planning-that won't work if she just goes home."

"I've got another plan," Letty said. "Once she's home, and she's safe, and Don's not there, I'll get her to talk to the police about Randy," Letty said. "I asked Lorenzo at the station, he said that if she told the police about Randy, they wouldn't even have to have a trial. He's on parole, and they'd put him back inside, for drug use and prostitution and maybe assault. They might have a trial on some of those, but they'd put him away first."

Lorenzo the Lawyer covered legal affairs for the news department.

"That's enough for you?" Carey asked. "That he goes back to jail?"

"If that's what I can get, that's what I can get," Letty said. "It'll take care of the problem for a couple of more years."

"I'll drop you," Carey said. "Don't forget to tell her about Don."

"I'll tell her," Letty said.

"Letty?"

"I'll tell her."

Letty told her, but Briar, scared and sad and also, Letty thought, somewhat interested in Whitcomb's new disability, said she couldn't go home right away.

"I mean, I love it about that fucker Don," Briar said. "But Randy does love me somehow ' I know, I know what you're going to say, but I can feel it'"

"He treats you like a goddamn dog," Letty shrilled.

"Not anymore; he really needs me now."

"What if he starts in again?" Letty asked. "What if he gets his stick out?"

"He won't. He won't."

"Ah, God. Juliet, he'll put you out there again," Letty said. "You'll be trolling for old fat guys again."

"You just don't believe," Briar said, and then, "I gotta get back. He's really hurt."

When Briar got back to Whitcomb's room, she found him scratching on a piece of printer paper with a ballpoint. "Where the hell you been?"

"I got your ice cream," she said, and passed the carton to him, with a plastic spoon. He took it, and she asked, looking at the paper, "What are you doing, honey?"

"Making a plan. I been fuckin' off, no help from you and Ranch, but we're going after that Davenport bitch when I get out of here. No more fuckin' off."

Briar looked at the plan: a list of words in handwriting so cramped, with letters so tiny, that they were illegible.

"You don't have to read. It's my plan. You do what you're told."

Lucas jammed the Porsche in a slot in the short-term parking lot, ran into the underground ramp, carrying his overnight bag, flashed his ID across the counter at the Northwest Airlines ticket agent, said, "Plane leaves in twenty minutes, I gotta be on it'"

With his ticket in his pocket, he jumped the security line, and one of the TSA security guys got him a ride on a handicapped transporter, and the driver ran him out to the gate.

The gate attendant was standing at the door, the plane already loaded. She smiled at him as he hustled down the ramp and on board, and a flight attendant said, "Cut it close," and she smiled and shook her head, and he was in his seat.

Breathing hard.

He'd gotten the call no more than forty-five minutes earlier, that the Los Angeles cops thought they had a positive ID on the woman. Her name apparently was Elena Diaz, and she had an address in Venice, which the cop said was on the West Side, whatever that meant. More details coming; a couple of intelligence guys were going over to take a look, and a request for a search warrant was being considered.

"Have I got time to come out?"

"Nothing's going to happen for at least a couple of hours, maybe longer," the LA cop said. "Got to get our shit together, figure out what we're doing."

Lucas made a call, found out about the flight, called his housekeeper, got her to pack for him, and dashed across town and out to the airport.

Not until the plane turned down the runway did he remember how badly they frightened him, and here he was, strapped to a rocket, and then the plane blasted off and he was in the air, no books, no magazines, no pills.

Three and a half hours to LAX.

When he crawled off the plane at the other end, he turned on his cell phone and it lit up. He first returned the calls to Los Angeles, to the cop's cell phone. The cop answered, and Lucas identified himself, and the cop said, "There's been a fire…"

"Ah, shit."