Wicked Prey

Chapter 17

Lucas woke up tired but clear-eyed, and looked at the clock: 9 a.m. Perfect. He always felt better when he slept past 8:59. The eight o'clock hour was, in his opinion, when farmers get up, and God bless them, they were critical to the economy, and so on and so forth, but he was not a farmer.

Not only that, he had ideas when he slept late, and now he turned over on his stomach and got another fifteen minutes. When he popped open his left eye and looked at the clock, and then realized that he'd been sleeping on a crooked wrist and that his hand had fallen asleep, he straightened out on the bed and stretched and shook out the hand and yawned and picked up the bedside phone and dialed Del.

Del, panicked, snatched up the phone and said, "Jesus Christ, her water broke," and Lucas said, "Ah, shit. Well, talk to you in a couple of days, buddy."

So then he called up Jenkins, who asked, "You know what time it is?"

Lucas said, "Nine twenty-one. Get Shrake, meet me downtown in an hour. By the way, Del's old lady's water broke."

"That whole concept, Del having a child, is a little frightening," Jenkins said. "See you in an hour."

Lucas rolled out of bed, headed for the bathroom, turned around when the phone rang. The caller ID said it was Jenkins again. "Yeah?"

"You know, we gotta think about a baby present. Or a whole bunch of them, or whatever you do."

"I'll get Carol to organize it," Lucas said. "See you in fifty-nine minutes."

Lucas made calls from his car, the first to the Minneapolis FBI office, the next to the Ramsey County attorney, and then to the Ramsey County public defender. He made a stop at the Ramsey County jail and spoke to Justice Shafer for one minute; got up and said, "You might be able to help us, Justice, and get your ass out of this crack. I'll get back to you. Talk to your lawyer. Do what she says."

"I didn't do nothing," Shafer said.

Lucas's office was on the second floor of the BCA building, which had cost a bit more than eighty million bucks and was only six years old, so even the government-gray carpet was still in good shape. He had one of the larger offices, overlooking a parking lot and the evidence collection garage on the ground floor. It had come with the standard new-building desk, but it was a desk that positioned him with his back to the door, which he disliked, with a conference table so stark in its design that it would have shocked a Scandinavian architect.

On the grounds that he had a bad back, he'd brought in a personal business chair, and then, the soil having been prepared, a simple dark-maple desk and conference table, with comfortable chairs, that allowed him to face the door; and an old, but not antique, coat-rack, and a few metal file cabinets so he'd have a place to put his feet. He had pictures of Weather, Sam, and Letty on the wall, along with framed shots of the University of Minnesota hockey team, where he'd been a defenseman who wasn't quite good enough to turn pro. A hockey stick was mounted above the hockey photos. Also, stuck casually to the exposed side of one of the metal file cabinets, a shooting range target with five.45-caliber bullet holes in the ten-ring. Like he did it every day '

Carol was sitting at her desk outside the office.

"Del's wife has gone into labor and you're supposed to organize baby gifts," Lucas said. "I don't know if you take up a collection or what."

"Don't worry about it. Give me fifty dollars."

He gave her fifty dollars, said, "That seems like a lot," and she said, "You're rich, you can afford it," and then Shrake showed up and she said, "Give me twenty dollars."

Jenkins was a minute behind Shrake, and they scattered themselves around the chairs in Lucas's office.

"I just talked to Shafer again," Lucas said. "Diaz called him on his cell phone, which we didn't pay too much attention to because we already had the number. B. That means that Shafer can call her back. If we can get some FBI backup here, they've got choppers with location-finding equipment that can get pretty close to where she is, if Shafer calls her, and she answers."

"What if she tossed the phone?" Jenkins asked.

"Then we're out of luck. But, if she still has it, and answers, we can get it narrowed down to a couple of blocks. Then we can saturate the area, dig them out," Lucas said. "I talked to Shafer and he'll call them. Actually, he'll ask her for a meeting. Maybe we can suck them in."

"When?"

"The choppers are out at the airport, backup for the convention, so the feds have to retask," whatever that means," Lucas said. "That's gonna take a couple hours, but the AIC says he'll push it and says he can get it. We'll know by noon and we can be up in the air by one."

Jenkins looked at his watch: just ten-thirty. "We might want to jack up the SWAT guys," he said.

"Most of them are out in the city, working with the street teams," Lucas said. "I talked to Sandy, he's going to pull back whoever he can. We'll at least have a few."

"Like we were saying, Shafer ain't no wizard. You think he can do this?" Shrake asked.

"We're gonna drill him," Lucas said. "I could only talk to him a minute, because the public defender wasn't in the house. I talked to the PD this morning and he says a deal can be done. The prosecutor is willing to go along because, basically, you know, we don't have a case. And they got all those demonstration arrests in their hair and they just as soon get rid of Shafer if they can."

They all sat for a minute, then Jenkins said, "What do you think we ought to get for Del's kid? It's gonna be a boy, right? Something blue?"

"It's Del's kid; you gonna get him a blue gun?" Shrake asked.

"Let Carol do it," Lucas said. "But I like the blue gun idea."

"Now what?" Jenkins asked.

"Let's go over to the jail. Get Shafer going."

Jennifer Carey picked Letty up and asked, "How'd it go with Juliet?"

Letty shook her head. "She's not going to leave him. Says he's hurt, so she can't go. At least not until he gets better, which means never, because he'll get on top of her and make her do what he wants."

"Ah, boy. I don't know, Letty," Jennifer said. "Maybe we should talk to Lucas, explain the situation, tell him that our biggest worry is that he'll do something irrational."

"Let me ask you something," Letty said. "What would you do if suddenly, someday, in a couple of weeks, Randy just disappeared and was never heard from again? Or maybe, he's found in an alley with four bullet holes in his heart. Would you do anything about it? Ask any questions? Talk to Dad?"

Jennifer shook her head: "Couldn't tell you that until I got there. You know about Lucas and me; we almost got married, except that

I knew I couldn't deal with him. He's too ' harshly ' smart. He's too intense. He's like Weather-he's like you. Not like me; I'm all over the place. But I don't think cops should kill people. I mean, murder people. People get trials, they get lawyers."

Letty sighed. "Let me think about it for a couple of days. I'm so confused." A little song and dance, she was thinking as she spoke: a little song and dance, because Jennifer Carey was no longer to be trusted. I don't think cops should kill people.

Bullshit, Letty thought.

A public defender met Lucas, Jenkins, and Shrake at the jail, with an assistant from the county attorney's office, and they cut the deal: no harm, no foul. Nobody gets charged, nobody gets sued for false arrest. Shafer expresses his good citizenship by cooperating with the police.

Outside the jail, on the sidewalk, Shafer said, "She's a pretty good lawyer. Got me outa there, slicker'n snot on a doorknob."

"Yeah, right," Jenkins said. "You ride shotgun; that little lump in the back of your head is Shrake's pistol."

"Hey, I'm out," Shafer said.

"Yeah. One inch. You'll be back in just as fast, if we need you back in."

They got together with the FBI team in a temporary office on Wabasha Street, six blocks from the convention center. The FBI'S local agent-in-charge, Wilbur Rivers, told Lucas that the choppers were gassed and ready to go, and could be in the air over Minneapolis or St. Paul in twenty minutes. "The problem might be that she's out in Burnsville, or Stillwater, or somewhere. We won't be able to get close enough during a short phone call. We'd be able to identify the cell, but not where the signal's coming from-so we need some talk time."

"The call to LA came from a St. Paul cell, so there's a good chance she's here," Lucas said. "If we were willing to risk it, we might even want to bring both choppers here."

"Your call," Rivers said.

Lucas looked at Jenkins and Shrake, who shrugged, and so he said, "Screw it. We're already set, let's go with it. One each in Minneapolis and St. Paul."

They'd made Shafer sit in a corner while they talked, and Rivers looked at him and asked, "You think he can pull it off?"

"We talked to him on the way over. He keeps it simple. He says he got a call from his daddy, and his daddy says the sheriff has been asking about him, because the Secret Service says he's up here with a big gun. That the Secret Service thinks he's going to do something bad. So he's heading back down I-35, going home."

Shrake said, "I actually called him on his phone, in the car, and we pretended I was his daddy, and we ' got him talking. I think it'll work, somewhat. Maybe not perfect."

"Well, even if it doesn't work, we'll get a shot at the phone, if she stays on long enough," Rivers said. "You want me to put the choppers up?"

"Let's do it," Lucas said.

Cohn was hungover, lying on a couch with his forearm over his eyes. Cruz had found a police report about the fight in the bar, about a crippled man being thrown in front of a car. Randy Whitcomb had been hit by one car, and run over by another. He was listed in good condition at Regions Hospital.

"Dumbest thing I ever heard of," Lane had said. "Wish I'd been there to see it, though."

"Felt good, after McCall. Didn't do any harm, doesn't look like," Cohn said. "They don't know who did it."

But Lindy was scared, Cruz was worried, and Lane was talking about bailing out. "I'm not hurting that bad, financially," he explained to Cohn. "I got the farm, I got the business, they do okay. Nothing great, but I like it."

Cohn said, "Goddamnit, Jesse, the only reason you keep them running is because you got money packed away from the jobs. You put more goddamn money into those businesses than you ever get out-you keep saying you need this tool or that tool and that'll get you over the top, but it ain't the tools you need. You need customers, and you ain't got them. If you don't do these jobs, you ain't gonna have a business, either."

Lane sulked: "I always got the farm. That does make some money."

"Okay, it makes some money. But you're not a farmer, Jesse. You don't mind going out there and shoveling a little horse poop and tellin' Roy to plow the south forty, or whatever he does, but you don't want to do that every day. Sittin' up there on the John

Deere in that hot sun, rolling up and down those rows every fuckin' day…"

"Air-conditioned," Lane said. "Got Sirius radio. Outlaw Country."

"Fuck Sirius radio," Cohn said.

Cruz asked, "What about Lindy?"

Lindy said, "I'm not doing it. I don't stick up places. I don't even know how to hold a gun. I'm gonna pee my pants just thinkin' about it. I'm not doing it."

"All you have to do is be a desk clerk. You've even done that," Cruz said.

"They'll wind up with a picture of me, and I'll be right out there in some fuckin' African jungle with you and Cohn." She started to cry. "I just wanna go back to B-B-Birmingham."

Lane jumped in on her side: "If you make her do it, I ain't going. She'll screw it up. No offense, Lindy, it's what you're saying your own self. If she screws it up, we could all go down. I'm telling you, this whole thing is running off the tracks."

Cohn asked lazily, "Does that mean you'll do it if she doesn't go?"

Lane never got a chance to answer, because Cruz's cell phone rang. She had three cell phones in her purse, all with different rings, and she looked at her purse and then back at Cohn and said, "Uh-oh." "What?"

"Nobody's got that number," she said.

She went to the purse and took the cell phone out, looked at the LCD screen and frowned. "Who is it?"

"Says it's Shafer, but that can't be right." She clicked on the phone and said, "Hello?"

"You know who this is?" Shafer asked.

She did: "Yes. How did you get this number?"

"It's the only number on my phone, from when you called me before," Shafer said. "Listen, my daddy called me. He said the sheriff came around and they're looking for me. He said the Secret Service called the sheriff from St. Paul and they say that I'm up there with my.50-cal and they think I'm going to shoot McCain."

"Justice…"

"So I'm going home. I'm headin' out," Shafer said. "I got to get this straight with the sheriff."

"Justice, damnit, we might need you," Cruz said.

"I want to talk about it, face-to-face," Shafer said. "From what my daddy says, you've been lying to me. They say Bill is in jail somewhere."

"You sit right there," Cruz said. "I'm coming to talk to you. Give me an hour."

"Well, I don't know…" There was an odd pause, and then Shafer said, "My daddy said the sheriff was looking for me, and that the Secret Service, you know…"

"Sit right there," Cruz said, and she punched off the phone, turning it in her hand, staring at it.

Cohn asked, "That was the gun guy?"

"Yeah." She told him what Shafer had said, and then, "There was something not right about it. He was talking in whole sentences, and loud. He usually mumbles around. Then there was this minute, there, when he ran out of things to say, and I could feel like something was going on, off the phone. You know? Then he repeated everything he said the first time, in the same words. And then…" She frowned.

Cohn asked, "What?"

"He said his daddy called to tell him that the sheriff was looking for him, down in Oklahoma ' But when I was recruiting him, he told me his father had abandoned them years ago. That he hadn't seen him since he was a kid."

"You think the cops got him?" Cohn asked.

They all looked at one another, and then Lane said, "We need the guy, right?"

Cruz: "He's the cherry on the ice-cream sundae. People spot him down Seventh Street, and every cop in the area will be down there. Every one."

"And they'd spot him," Cohn said.

Cruz cracked a smile: "I can guarantee it. I was going to call nine-one-one every two minutes, to tell them where he was. But he didn't sound like himself."

Lane asked, "So ' the cops got him?"

Cruz shook her head: "I don't know."

Cohn studied her for a minute, then rolled up from the couch he was lying on, carefully tied his shoes, and said, "I know how we can find out."

Lucas listened to Wilbur Rivers talk on the telephone, then Rivers took the phone away from his ear and said, "The conversation was too short to narrow it down much, but the woman was calling from a St. Paul cell, and the tech thinks the signal was coming from south of Seventh Street, between St. Peter and Sibley. North of the river. That's as close as he could get it."

Shrake scratched his chin and said to Lucas, "That's probably thirty or forty blocks, total. Lot of condos in there. Apartments above some of the stores."

"But it's manageable," Lucas said. "We can handle that. We just grind it out. Talk to the guys at the City Hall, the tax assessor's office, nail down the highest possibilities, work those first."

"Gonna need some more guys," Shrake said.

"That could be tough," Lucas said. "Everybody's on the streets. We need investigators. Not uniforms. I'll talk to Harrington, see if they can spring me a couple of guys."

"Harrington's up to his ass in alligators," the FBI agent said. Harrington was the St. Paul chief of police.

"We can handle it," Lucas said.

"You might not have to," Rivers said. He handed Lucas the phone. "Tell Mark to play the call for you."

Lucas listened to the replay, said, "Thanks," to the tech, handed the phone back to Rivers and said to Shrake and Jenkins: "She's on her way to the motel. She says she'll be there in an hour. We gotta run."

Neither Cruz nor Cohn had been in a hospital for years, and they talked about possible hospital security, about bullshitting their way in, about what to do if they were kicked out' but when they got to Regions, they found a reception desk, asked a volunteer lady, got a room number and directions.

"What if he starts screaming?" Cruz asked, as they went up in the elevator. She basically liked Cohn's idea; it appealed to her sense of humor.

"I'll strangle the little motherfucker," he said. "Brute…"

"I'm going in money-first," Cohn said. He held up a pack of hundred-dollar bills. "Pimps are always willing to talk about money."

They found Whitcomb's room, a double, with Whitcomb on the window side. The near bed was empty, and the hooker they'd seen the night before was sitting at the end of Whitcomb's bed, reading a Betty & Veronica comic book. She looked up, saw them, then recognized Cohn and stood up, her hand to her mouth, and said, "Ohhh."

"Shut up," Cohn snapped, and her mouth snapped shut.

He looked around the divider curtain as Whitcomb turned toward them. Whitcomb frowned, and Cohn held up the money and said, "Two thousand bucks."

"You fuck," Whitcomb said, finally recognizing him. Whitcomb looked clean and very white, in a hospital gown, tucked in with white blankets.

"Call me a fuck again and I'll throw you out the fuckin' window," Cohn said, and they both looked toward the window. Then Cohn held up the money again. "Two thousand bucks, hundreds, in cash."

Whitcomb said, "For trying to kill me?"

"No, asshole. I could have walked away from that," Cohn said. "But I felt bad, you being handicapped and all. I also need to borrow your woman for an hour."

They both looked at Briar. Then Whitcomb asked, "What has she got to do?"

"Entertain a pal of mine. He likes young pussy. A guy up here from Oklahoma. I don't know any entertainers locally. I saw you last night, looked you up in the paper, and here I am. Two thousand for my friend, and to keep your mouth shut if the cops catch up with me."

Briar said to Whitcomb, "Randy, I need to stay by you."

Whitcomb said to Cohn, looking at the money in Cohn's hand, "Just a quick one-time job?"

"Just a little ' friendship," Cohn said, letting himself smile. "He'll think it's funny." He turned to Briar. "You'll like him. He's a nice guy. Clean."

Briar said, "Randy…"

Whitcomb said, "Shut up." To Cohn: "Where is this guy?"

"He's in a motel in Bloomington ' but the thing is he likes the schoolgirl look. You know, a ponytail." He turned to Briar. "Could you pull your hair back in a brown ponytail?"

Whitcomb took the money, then flipped the hospital blanket back and pushed himself up. To Briar, he said, "We're getting out of here. Unfold my chair and tell the nurse we're going."

"Randy, you can't-you're hurt."

"My foot's hurt. The rest of me is okay. Now shut the fuck up and get that fuckin' nurse in here."

Whitcomb's van rolled out of the parking garage and Cruz fell in behind them. "We're late," she said. "The checkout took too long."

Cohn said, "Worth the wait. She doesn't look that much like you, but with the ponytail, she's about the right height, the right coloring, the sunglasses…"

"She's about thirty pounds heavier than I am," Cruz said.

"That's disguised by her dress, at least some."

"I don't know."

Cruz grinned at her: "I don't know, either, but, either some cops get a surprise, or Shafer does."

They gathered in an empty motel room, seven of them, including four BCA SWAT guys in armor. Lucas said, "All right. We don't know exactly what she looks like, so wait until I call. As soon as she knocks on the door, we rush the stairs, both guys come up, put the guns on her, and then we pop the door and we've got her three ways. You gotta remember, maybe she's got a gun in her hand, planning to hit Shafer as soon as he opens up. So take care." "If the other guys are with her?" one of the SWAT'S asked.

"You don't take any chances," Lucas said. "You order them on the ground and you keep your weapons on them. I don't think the whole bunch will come over-that'd be too conspicuous. But there might be one in the car, maybe another one comes up the stairs with her. Take care: they've already killed four cops, so a few more won't make any difference to them."

Lucas and Shrake would be in Shafer's original room. Shafer would wait in the motel room they were gathering in, and as a precaution, they'd handcuffed him to a bed rail, which pissed him off. "I'm like one of you guys."

"It's for your own safety," Lucas said. It wasn't, but they were like magic words and temporarily shut him up.

Jenkins and one of the SWAT guys would rush the front stairs, another of the SWAT guys would literally block the second stairway: they'd wedge an office chair between a down-railing and the door, so the door couldn't be opened. The SWAT guy was there just in case.

Two more SWAT guys were waiting in a minivan in the parking lot. They would block and then check the woman's car after she got out.

"If she comes in," one of the SWAT guys said.

"She's coming; she bought it," Lucas said.

An hour and twelve minutes after the phone call, another minivan rolled into the parking lot, and slowly down the line toward the office, and parked in a handicapped slot.

"Dark-haired woman in a minivan," one of the parking-lot SWAT guys called to Lucas. "But she parked in a handicapped slot. She's got a handicapped tag in the window."

"Watch her. That's a known behavior, and they grabbed Weimer from a van," Lucas said. "She might want to keep the van close so she can run."

"She's out," the SWAT guy called. "Dark hair, ponytail, sunglasses, she's got a scarf over her head ' big purse. She's looking the place over. I mean, she's really looking the place over. She's going in…"

"That's her," Lucas said. "Everybody, set. Block the back door."

Juliet Briar, who thought Randy loved her, who thought she wouldn't do this anymore-she thought about Letty, who suggested that maybe she could become a nurse, and overnight, caring for Randy, she'd almost thought of herself as a nurse-and here she was, and she knew the guy was going to want a blow job, because that's what you gave guys for their birthdays. She felt the gorge rising at her throat, cast her head down, and walked toward the stairs.

Randy couldn't see any further than the two thousand dollars. Randy couldn't see her at all, if there was money around.

At the top of the stairs, she lingered, just for a second, then walked down the carpeted hall which smelled like smoke and beer and maybe a little pee. Found the number, took a breath, knocked.

A man appeared at the end of the hallway, wearing a helmet, carrying a gun, and he screamed at her, "On the floor. On the floor, on the floor'"

"What?" Her hands came up, in surrender.

"On the floor…"

And the door popped open and another man was there with a helmet and gun, pointed at her face. "On the floor…"

Across the road, across a chain-link fence, behind a fast-food joint, Cohn and Cruz watched two guys in armor first block, and then rush, Briar's minivan.

"There you go, sugar bun," Cohn said.

"Cops," Cruz said. She put the car in gear. "Don't call me sugar bun."

The cops all stood around and looked at the weeping Briar, and Lucas said, "They were looking at us. They sent her in, and they were looking at us." He laughed, a sour sound. "Man: we took it right in the shorts."