Easy Prey

by John Sandford

  "You can count on it," Rose Marie said. She followed him into the outer office, shook hands, then stepped back inside and closed the door. "You think it was Tom Olson?" she asked Lucas.

  "The thought crossed my mind," Lucas said. "He's heavyset. We know he's got a temper. We know he's distraught. We know that he might be a little bit of a nut."

  "Or maybe a lot of a nut," she said.

  "Maybe the photo spread set him off. I've never seen anything quite like it before."

  "Not outside a men's magazine."

  "Not even in men's magazines. It was a lot artier than that shit. And decadent. It had this weird end-of-time feel to it, that might have fed straight into his paranoia."

  "So what're we going to do?"

  "We're doing some research on him. And I'm going to put Sherrill with Jael Corbeau—somebody tried to break into her house the night before last, and the guy was sorta porky."

  "Okay. Sherrill for as long as she can stand it, but when she needs a break, I want somebody else with Corbeau. She doesn't get killed in Minneapolis. And we better get somebody with Catherine Kinsley, too."

  "The problem is, nobody's looking for Trick," Lucas said.

  "Don't worry about Trick."

  "We've got to get Al-Balah out. There's gonna be a lawsuit, and we've got to at least keep our heads up on that," Lucas said.

  "Sure. If you happen to stumble over Trick, that's fine. But the priority has got to be Alie'e, and keeping people alive. This thing in St. Paul is almost like a good break. We get some time to work without everybody breathing down our necks."

  "They'll all be back here tomorrow morning."

  "That's twenty-four hours."

  Back in his own office, Lucas called Sherrill on her cell phone. She'd heard about Plain, and Lucas told her to get with Jael Corbeau: "A bodyguard job?" she complained. "Why can't you pull somebody in?"

  "Look, it's a high-danger point right now. We don't have anybody to chase yet, but somebody killed Plain and somebody may be stalking Jael. I want you with her. I don't want you looking like a cop. I want you to girl around with Corbeau a little. Her brother's dead, but if you could get her out in the open, making arrangements for the funeral…"

  "You mean, like bait?" Sherrill asked.

  "Not a word I'd choose," Lucas said.

  "Hmm." She was thinking about it. "That doesn't sound so bad, when you put it that way. Maybe pull this guy right in."

  "Yeah. So get over there. She's expecting you."

  When he sot off, he walked down to Homicide, found Frank Lester, and told him that the chief wanted somebody with Kinsley. "Might as well," Lester said, "since nobody's getting dog shit."

  "Nothing at all?"

  " Nothing."

  Lucas called Del. "I called your office a couple of times," Del said. "I think I'm gonna need a couple of search warrants."

  "What happened?"

  "The other guy, Curtis Logan, is on vacation somewhere—maybe Vegas. So I hung around James Bee last night, staying out of sight, and at one point he hooked up with Larry Outer. You remember Outer?"

  "Vaguely. Wasn't he involved with that Chicago bunch?"

  "Yeah. I thought he'd gone away, but I followed Bee down to this pie place on Grand Avenue, and who does he hook up with, but Outer. After a while, they go out to Outer's car, and they talk for a couple of minutes, and then Bee goes back to his own car. Outer's car has Illinois tags, which I got, and I tracked those, and they gave me an apartment in Evanston. I'm willing to bet that Outer is dealing with Bee, and if we stop him on some bullshit, we're gonna find some coke in his car. And if we find some coke in his car, even a little bit, then we can probably get a search warrant for his apartment, and if they find anything there, that'd be three felonies in Illinois. And Illinois is a three-strike state."

  "You're such a clever fuck."

  "Not only that—when I pulled Outer's sheet outa the NCIC, there's a misdemeanor warrant on him for skipping out on child support in Cleveland. He ditched some chick and her lad."

  "A vicious criminal. A mad dog."

  "No doubt. So we can take down Outer without having to go through any perjury bullshit on a search warrant. When we get him, we've got him in an armlock, unless he's willing to have somebody kick his door in Illinois. So he gives us Bee, and we use that to get a warrant, and we hit Bee's apartment and maybe his office, and get a list. And maybe that gets us back to Alie'e's." He rubbed his eyes. "Convoluted as hell, but it's what we got."

  "And for Logan, we have to wait until he gets back from Vegas."

  "Unless Outer can give us him along with Bee."

  "So it all hangs on Outer," Lucas said.

  "Yup."

  "You have any idea where he is now?"

  "In a motel in Plymouth. I'm standing outside a McDonald's looking at his car, freezing my ass off."

  "You been there all night?"

  "We've been everywhere all night—we got here about ten minutes ago. Which brings me to the question What are you doing up at this time of day?"

  "Amnon Plain," Lucas said.

  "Uh-oh. What'd he do?"

  "You haven't heard the radio? He was shot to death last night."

  "No shit?"

  "Over in St. Paul. He's seriously dead."

  After a moment of silence, Del said, "Goddamnit."

  "Yeah."

  "Though it does add a certain frisson to the case."

  "A what?"

  "Frisson. It's a French word. So get me some guys over here—"

  "There's nobody to get," Lucas said. "Everybody over here is already jumping through their ass."

  "So what are you doing?" Del asked.

  Del was sitting in the front window of a McDonald's eating a Big Mac out of a bag and watching the motel across the street. "He's got the blue Olds," he said when Lucas slid into the booth across from him. "You get an okay on the warrant?"

  Lucas nodded. "No problem. It's a little old—the Cleveland cops didn't know what I was talking about, and it took about fifteen minutes to find it."

  "If it's still good, it's still good," Del said. He was red-eyed, tired.

  "You look a little ragged," Lucas said.

  "I'm buzzed on caffeine. I'm so buzzed I talked to the counter girl for ten minutes at a hundred miles an hour. Scared the shit out of her."

  "Hmm." The counter girl was keeping an eye on both of them. Lucas looked at the Olds parked across the street, nose-in to a motel door. Everything look so quiet, but fifty times a year, somewhere in the country, a cop would kick a door off a nice quiet parking lot and the guy inside the room would shoot him. "So you want to do it?"

  "Yeah." Del wadded up the bag with half the burger still in it. "Let's go."

  They left one at a time, and walked around behind the McDonald's so that if Outer happened to be looking out his window, he wouldn't see them crossing the street. At the hotel office, they showed the day manager the warrant and their badges. He wanted to call the chain headquarters in Rococco, Florida, for instructions, but they got the key to Outer's room and Lucas told the manager to stay out of sight, no matter what they said in Rococco.

  "I'll kick it, if you do the key," Del told Lucas on the way down. "I got so much caffeine, I might miss the keyhole."

  "All right."

  They stopped at the door, listened, A television was on; that was good—it'd cover the noise of the key. Lucas held the key up, and Del stepped into kicking range. When they were ready, Lucas hovered the key a quarter inch outside the lock. The idea was to slip the key quickly into the lock and turn it, and push the door. When the door hit the chain, if it did, Del would kick it. They wouldn't try to sneak the key into the lock for the simple reason that it was almost impossible: The slightest vibration would wake the dead, if the dead was a nervous dope dealer. With the quick open-and-kick, you were usually inside before the target had time to react, whether he heard it or not.

  Del nodded. Lucas got right, then jammed the key and turned the k
nob, and Del kicked the door and exploded into the room, Lucas two feet behind him, Del screaming, "Police, police. Freeze!"

  Outer was sitting on the toilet, a wad of toilet paper in his hands, his slacks down around his ankles. The bathroom door was open—he'd been watching ESPN. When Del landed on the carpet opposite the bed, his pistol pointing, Lucas backing him, Outer sat up, raised his hands, and then, in a deafening silence, said, "Ah, man. Can I wipe?"

  Before they had him cuffed, Outer said, "I ain't sayin' shit. I want an attorney."

  "Sit on the bed," Del said.

  Outer sat, and Lucas started pulling apart Outers duffle bag. Halfway into it, he ran into a T-shirt built like an I-beam. He shook it out, and found a Smith & Wesson 649. "Gun," he said to Del.

  "Jeez, that's too bad," Del said. "Him being a convicted felon and all."

  "Attorney," Outer said.

  No dope. Lucas looked around the room. He checked the bathroom, but the toilet was the pressure kind, with no tank. He came back into the main room, and Del said, "He wouldn't leave it in the car."

  Outer relaxed and leaned back on the bed. "All I have is the gun, which was for self-protection and isn't even mine."

  "Get off the bed," Lucas said.

  "What?" Outer put on a perplexed look.

  "Get off the fuckin' bed."

  Del took him by the arm, and Outer said, "Fuckin' cops," and Lucas walked around to the door side of the bed, crouched, grabbed the mattress, and flipped it off the box spring. In the center of the box spring, four Ziploc bags of cocaine nestled in a line.

  "That ain't mine. You put it there," Outer said.

  "Probably has our fingerprints all over the plastic, then," Lucas said. "And when we get a blood test, we'll probably test for cocaine."

  "Attorney," Outer said.

  "Sit in the chair," Lucas said.

  Del pushed Outer down on an overstuffed chair, and Lucas sat on the box spring.

  "I'm gonna make you an offer. I can't make it after you talk to an attorney, I can only make it before. We can fix it so you take a minimum plea on the dope and the gun—three years. That's what we can do."

  "Attorney."

  "Or we can call the Illinois cops, tell them where your apartment is, tell them we've busted you as a big-time dealer." He looked at the Ziploc bags, and said to Del, "I think we can call that big-time when we talk to Evanston."

  "I think so," Del said. "Definitely big-time."

  He looked back at Outer. "We can ask them to search your apartment. If there's dope there, if there's a gun there…" Lucas spread his arms and shrugged. "Well, that's another felony. And how many felonies you got in Illinois, Larry? Two? Aw, that's terrible. Illinois is a three-strike state, right? What a shame." He leaned forward, the mean smile crossing his face. "You know how long forever is? It's a long fucking time, Larry."

  "Jesus…"

  "We can't offer you this deal after you talk to an attorney, because your attorney might call a friend of yours in Illinois, and the apartment might get cleaned," Del said. "If we don't make a deal right now, we're gonna have to make the call. And get you an attorney, of course."

  Outer put his head down. "You're fucks."

  "Well, you know, Larry, that comes with our job sometimes," Del said. "That's why we sometimes offer deals to our favorite citizens. To make ourselves feel better."

  "What do I gotta do?"

  "We've got two names. We know you know the guys, because we've seen you with them. We want a statement."

  "Who?"

  "James Bee," Del said. "And Curtis Logan."

  "Is that it?" Outer said. "I flip on those guys, and I walk?"

  "Well, you walk out to Stillwater for a couple," Lucas said. "But you can do a couple standing on your head. And we won't call Evanston. Until later."

  Outer seemed to brighten. "Well, shit, if that's all—I can do that," Outer said.

  Lucas and Del looked at each other, then Del looked at Outer and said, "I knew we could be friends."

  "Friends—but I want something on paper before I talk," Outer said.

  They called a squad, and had Outer transported to the jail with instructions that he didn't get a phone call without Lucas being told. "You call, I call Evanston," Lucas said. "I bet we can get the Evanston cops there before you can get it cleaned out."

  Del went over to the county attorney's office to find somebody who could help draw up the deal, and somebody else who could get search warrants for James Bee and Curtis Logan. Lucas walked up the stairs, heading for his office, but got hooked by a secretary: "They're gonna show film from St. Paul. They're bringing somebody in."

  "What?"

  "It's on TV," she said.

  Homicide had a TV, and Lucas stopped there; a half-dozen cops were gathered around the tube. The St. Paul chief was saying, "No, no, no, we just wanted to talk to him. We don't have any indication that he had anything to do with the murder of Mr. Plain…"

  "Who is it?" Lucas asked.

  "Brought in some vending machine guy," one of the cops said. And as he said it, with the chief rambling on in the background, a news clip came up, two St. Paul cops escorting a man in blue coveralls into the front of the police station. He was brown-haired, slat-faced, rawboned.

  "Not porky," Lucas said. "He was supposed to be porky."

  At his office, he had a Call me message from Sherrill, and a note from Lane saying that the Olson family-and-friends genealogy was complete, and he'd put it on a computer disk with Lucas's name on it, in the chief's secretary's out basket.

  He dialed Sherrill. "I just kicked open a motel door and arrested a dealer," he said. "What are you doing?"

  "We just bought a casket," Sherrill said. "I'm creeped out. You know the last time I was in here—"

  "Yeah. Don't think about it." The last time she'd been at the funeral home, she'd been buying a casket for her husband. "How's Corbeau?"

  "She's in the can. By herself—I checked. I think you made an impression on her this morning, and it wasn't fatherly," Sherrill said. "My personal feeling is that she's too young for you."

  "She can't be any younger than you are."

  "I was too young for you," Sherrill said.

  "I was much younger when we started going together," Lucas said, "than when we called it off."

  "Bullshit. You were rejuvenated," Sherrill said. "Anyway, we're shopping. And I'm on the lookout for maniacs."

  "St. Paul brought in a guy," Lucas said. He told her about it and said, "I don't think it's anything."

  "So what do I do? Stick with Corbeau?"

  "Yeah. If anything heats up, I'll call."

  He was walking down the hall to the chief's office, to get the computer disk, when Lane returned. He was walking fast, an intent look on his face.

  "What?" Lucas asked.

  "That genealogy. Excuse me, I meant, that fuckin' genealogy. I was getting everything I could on Sandy Lansings friends, so I went by the hotel to see who she hung out with there. Everybody in the place was looking for Derrick Deal."

  "Deal? He's gone?"

  "They haven't seen him since he talked to you. Or about then. They been calling his house—nobody home."

  "Huh. So I'm not doing anything. I'll go knock on his door."

  Chapter 14

  « ^ »

  Derrick Deal lived in a town house in Roseville, eight miles northeast of the Minneapolis loop and off Highway 36. The town house, a split-entry end unit with a tuck-under garage, was one of twenty arranged around a pond full of Canada geese.

  Lucas knocked on the door, waited, and got the hollow response that an empty house gives. The garage door was locked, so he walked around back. There were windows on the side of the garage and the back door, and he peered inside, but couldn't see much: a corner of the kitchen table from the back door, and on the table, what looked like a stack of bills and a checkbook. The garage was empty. He walked back around to the front, noticed that the mail slot was open just a crack; he pushed it the res
t of the way, and could see mail on the floor. More than one day's worth, he thought. No newspapers, though.

  He knocked again, then went next door and knocked. No answer from there, either. If you lived in a town house, you worked. Maybe check back in the evening.

  As he was leaving, Lucas cranked up his cell phone, called Dispatch and asked that they find Deal's license tag, and put it out.

  "Lucas, the chief has been trying to get in touch with you," the dispatcher said. "There's a meeting going on… well, it's gonna start in ten minutes, in her office. She wants you to come."

  "Ten minutes," he said. "I might be a couple minutes late. Tell her."

  As he ran the Porsche out onto the interstate, he glanced back toward the town houses. Maybe, he thought, Deal had gone to the same place as Trick Bentoin, wherever that was. But he didn't think so. Deal's disappearance was a shadow across the day.

  A huge detective named Franklin was climbing the stairs toward the City Hall's main level when Lucas caught up with him. "What's going on?"

  "Just gettin' a Coke and an apple," Franklin said. "Something going on?"

  "Meeting," Lucas said. "I was afraid another body had fallen out of a closet somewhere."

  "Probably has. But not here, as far as I know," Franklin said.

  Lucas went on ahead. The chief's secretary nodded at the closed office door and said, "We've got a crowd. Alie'e's family and some friends. You're supposed to go right in."

  Rose Marie was barricaded behind her desk. To her left, Dick Milton, the department PR guy, perched on the edge of a folding chair, his jaws tight. Eight people were arrayed in visitors' chairs in front of the desk: Alie'e's parents; Tom Olson, unshaven, apparently in the same clothes he'd worn at the last visit; and three other men and two women Lucas didn't recognize.

  "Lucas, come in, we're just getting started." Rose Marie glanced at one of the men Lucas didn't know and added, "I guess we're trying to get some ground rules going here. Everybody, this is Lucas Davenport, a deputy chief, who often works as a kind of, mmm, key man in these kinds of investigations. Lucas, you know Mr. and Mrs. Olson; and this is Mr. and Mrs. Benton, and Mr. and Mrs. Packard, the Olsons' best friends from Burnt River, who're down to help out; and Lester Moore, the editor of the Burnt River newspaper."