Easy Prey

by John Sandford

  "According to your brilliant plan," Trick said, "I sit on my ass until you tell me to walk. Then I come in."

  "Yeah, but when you come in, you come in shining like the fuckin' sun," Del said.

  "Shining like the fuckin' sun for Al-Balah," Trick said in disgust. "If that cocksucker died this afternoon, we'd have to go over to the cathedral and light candles in thanksgiving."

  "You a Catholic?" Lucas asked.

  "Fuck no," Bentoin said. "Fuckin' bead-rattlin', genuflectin', ring-kissin' assholes."

  "Men Lucas are Catholic," Del observed. "Since you got a Frenchy name—"

  "You figured wrong," Bentoin said.

  "So what are you?"

  Bentoin looked out the car window at the cornfield going by and said, sourly, "An ex-Catholic."

  Lucas started laughing, and then Del, for the first time since Marcy was shot.

  The interview room was painted an indefinite pastel color, as though the painters had a bunch of pastels but not enough of anything, so they poured them altogether and came up with a lime-cream-rose-baby blue, which resolved itself into a pastel sludge. Al-Balah's lawyer, a pretty good three-cushion-billiards player named Laziard, was sitting on a bench with his briefcase by his left foot, reading a pamphlet about items forbidden as gifts to inmates. He looked up when Lucas came in with Del.

  "My, my, a deputy chief," Laziard said. "You must be a little worried. Hey, Del."

  "We figure you're gonna sue us for a billion dollars," Lucas said.

  "You got the number right," Laziard said genially as Lucas and Del chose spots on the benches.

  "So we thought we should show a little concern, just in case we find Trick again," Lucas said.

  "Just in case?" A wrinkle appeared on Laziard's forehead. "I thought Del had him."

  Del shrugged. "I talked to him, but I didn't arrest him. I didn't have anything to arrest him on. He told me he was checked into the Days Inn down on the strip, and when I snuck out and checked, he was. But the next day, when we went down to pick him up, he'd checked out. We just missed him."

  Lucas said, "The problem is, he might've gone back to Panama. The guys in the county attorneys office don't want to hear any of this 'Del saw him' shit. They want to see Trick."

  "What are you telling me?" Laziard demanded. "What…"

  The door opened in the back wall, and they all turned. Rashid Al-Balah stepped into the room, a guard a step behind him. Al-Balah was a shaved-head black man with a heavy face and two-day beard. He glowered at Lucas, gave a few seconds of hate to Del. The guard pointed him at a bench. Al-Balah sat down and asked Laziard, "How much longer?"

  "We're trying to figure that out," Laziard said.

  "What? What're you trying to figure out?" Al-Balah's voice was rising. "Get me the fuck outa here."

  "There's a problem," Lucas said. "Trick went away, and the county attorneys office is being a stick-in-the-mud about it. They want to actually see his ass before they do anything. I'm sure we'll find him, sooner or later."

  "Sooner or fuckin' later?" Al-Balah shouted. "I packed my shit this morning. I'm ready to go. Right now, motherfucker."

  "This is not going well," Del muttered to Lucas.

  "What? What'd you say?" Al-Balah was getting angrier.

  The guard snapped, "Cool down." Al-Balah looked at him, and the guard took a half-step forward and set his feet. "Just cool down. Keep your place."

  Al-Balah sagged on the bench. "I packed my shit," he said to Lucas. "You're supposed to get me the fuck out of here. I packed my shit up, man."

  "We're doing what we can," Del said. "I'm the guy who brought the whole thing up, you know?"

  Lucas jumped in. "I didn't actually come out here myself to talk about cutting you loose. I actually came out with a question." He looked at Laziard. "A question for your client."

  "A question?"

  "You know about the Alie'e Maison case," Lucas said to Al-Balah. "There was another woman killed the same night, the same place."

  "Yeah, yeah, I been seeing it on my TV," Al-Balah said.

  "This woman, Sandy Lansing, she was dealing. But she was just the street hookup, we don't know who was running her. We'd like to find out, and we thought you might know. You know all that shit."

  Al-Balah shook his head. "Fuck you."

  "All right." Lucas stood up. "I figured there wasn't much chance."

  "When you gonna get me out of here?" Al-Balah asked.

  "Soon as we find Trick. We've got some staffing problems with this Alie'e thing, but we can probably spring a guy on it. You know, half-time, anyway. As soon as the Alie'e thing is done with. If Trick hasn't gone back to Panama or something. I mean, I'll bet you're out by spring. Summer at the latest."

  Al-Balah almost got up this time, and the guard stepped away from the wall: "Spring? Fuckin' spring?"

  Lucas shrugged. "It's this goddamn Alie'e thing. We can't catch a break. We're working on it."

  "Richie Rodriguez," Al-Balah said. His lawyer said, "Stop!" but Al-Balah continued. "The bitch was run by Richie Rodriguez, who gots a place in Woodbury. He gotta a whole bunch of apartment buildings or some shit."

  Del looked at Lucas and said, "There's a Richard Rodriguez on the party list."

  "That's him. Richard," Al-Balah said. "You call him 'Dick' if you want to piss him off."

  "Goddamn it," Laziard said.

  Lucas looked at Al-Balah and said, "Thanks. We'll push the Trick Bentoin thing. We owe you."

  "You owe me, and you gotta get me outa here. I'm fuckin' innocent." Al-Balah was pleading now.

  "Yeah, well… more or less," Lucas said. He took a step toward the outer door, following Del.

  Laziard asked, "Will I hear from you this afternoon?"

  Before Lucas could answer, Del, who'd opened the door, said,

  "Whoa!" He reached out and, a second later, pulled Trick Bentoin into the room by his shirtsleeve.

  "Hi, guys," Bentoin said, shining like the fuckin' sun.

  "You pricks," Laziard said.

  Al-Balah was stunned, but after gaping at Bentoin for a second, he started to laugh, and a minute later, was laughing so hard that he had to lean on his attorney for support. So hard that Lucas, Del, Laziard, and Bentoin started to laugh, and finally, even the guard.

  On the way back to town, Del's phone rang. He answered, listened for a second, and said, "Yeah, he's right here. He just hasn't turned his fuckin' phone on." He handed the phone to Lucas. "It's Frank."

  Lester was calling with three pieces of news. "We're rolling on this multiple-personality idea. The Olsons were murdered, dude. The shrink called it. Mrs. Olson's head was on top of some blood spray from her old man, and from the way the spray hit her face, she was looking toward him when she was shot. When her body was recovered, she was looking straight up toward the ceiling."

  "So he was killed first," Lucas said.

  "Absolutely But the gun was next to him."

  "All right," Lucas said. "What happened to that Bloom guy we were checking out?"

  "Black checked him, and isn't getting anyplace. The guy seems really straight."

  "We got a better name," Lucas said. "A Richard Rodriguez. He's on the list."

  "How good?"

  "Very good. Have you seen Lane around there? He should be back from Fargo."

  "Yeah. He's here," Lester said.

  "Get him on the Rodriguez guy. Full bio. We'll be back in half an hour."

  "See you then."

  "How's Marcy?" Lucas asked.

  "Same, I guess. I checked this morning when I came in, and nobody's said anything else."

  "Half hour," Lucas said.

  Things were beginning to move, like watching the ice go off the river in spring. Nothing happening, nothing happening, and then boom; breakup.

  When they got back, they walked Trick over to the county attorney's office, left him, and headed back to City Hall. Lane was waiting outside Lucas's office with a wad of paper in his hand. He saw them coming, and walk
ed down the hall waving the paper.

  "He's our guy. He's a dealer, anyway. Moved here from Detroit eleven years ago, got busted a couple of times for vagrancy. Now he owns a bunch of small apartment buildings here and in St. Paul and out in Washington County, through a real-estate investment company in Miami." Lane was talking at a hundred miles and hour, and they were swirling around each other in the hall, looking at pieces of paper. "He lists himself as an apartment manager on his state tax returns. I looked at the returns going all the way back, and he showed up nine years ago at twenty-two thousand, and now he's up to ninety, but he never lists his ownership anywhere. He doesn't have to."

  "Goddamnit, this looks good," Lucas said.

  Del nodded. "Hiding the money. But I wonder why he's still selling dope if he's got the apartments?"

  "He pyramided them, I think," Lane said. "He can't stop yet. Maybe he's got a pal at the bank who knows he has another income, "cause it looks like he bought the first apartment with a cash down-payment—and nobody asked any questions—then used the equity in that one to finance the next one, paid on that a while, then used the equity in the two of them to buy the third, and then the equity in the three to buy another one, and kept doing that until he got where he is now. The total assessed value in twelve buildings is nine point five million, and they're really worth twelve or thirteen. But his own money, he's got maybe a million into them."

  "The rents don't cover the payments?"

  "Oh, they cover them, barely, as long as he never has a vacancy," Lane said. "But you're never a hundred percent in apartments—not for long, anyway. What he's doing is, if somebody moves out, he keeps paying the rent out of the dope money until he gets another tenant. I bet he's getting a lot of his maintenance done on the underground economy, paying in cash. So the dope money is invisible. It just goes away."

  "And he gets paid out of Miami, and nobody looks at that up here," Del said.

  "That's right," said Lane. "He files all of his taxes, he's clean. A few more years of this, and he can sell the whole thing out. Pay some capital gains, and he's a multimillionaire."

  "What happens if the dope stops?" Lucas asked.

  "Can't stop," said Lane. "He needs a hundred percent occupancy to pay his financing costs, and the only way he can get a hundred percent is to pay the rents on the vacant apartments himself."

  "Strange nobody noticed," Lucas said.

  "How they gonna notice?" Lane asked.

  Lucas and Del looked at each other, thought about it for a moment, then Lucas shrugged. "I don't know."

  "I talked to some guys up at the assessors office, and they don't know a way," Lane said.

  And Del said, "You know what it reminds me of? The Namiami Entertainment porno houses."

  Namiami Entertainment was a mob-related company out of Naples, Florida, that bought three porno theaters around the Twin Cities. The Cities liked them because they'd agreed to business conditions that were more restrictive than the previous owners would agree to. Namiami had done away with the jerk-off-booth peep shows, ended the sale of adult novelties, had taken down outside advertising signs, and though they still ran porno films in the theaters, had generally blended into their neighborhoods. They'd operated for years before the tax people got curious about how they managed to get seventy or eighty percent of theater capacity for their film showings; a little investigation suggested that actual capacity was more like ten percent. The theaters, it turned out, were the most excellent device for laundering large numbers of small bills.

  "So what we got," Lucas said, "is a dead woman who dealt dope to rich people. She's killed at a party where her dope-dealer boss happens to be, and who claims he didn't know her. Nobody else seems to have a motive—most people barely know her. But one guy who does know her, Derrick Deal, all he has to do is think about it, and he figures out who killed her. He must've known Rodriguez."

  "And he did it without even knowing that Rodriguez was at the party," Del said. "He didn't have our list."

  "Right. And Derrick's not above a little blackmail. He tries it, and gets himself killed for his trouble," Lucas said.

  "Gotta be this guy," Lane said. "Nothing else fits."

  "What'd he say when we talked to him?"

  "Says he got to the party late, never saw Alie'e, didn't know Lansing. Got bored, and left around two o'clock," Lane said.

  "So he admits he was there pretty late."

  "Yeah."

  "Let's talk to Sallance Hanson about this," Lucas said. To Del: "Lets go see Marcy, and then go see Hanson. See what she knows about Rodriguez."

  "Okay."

  And to Lane: "Find this Rodriguez. Don't approach him, just spot him for us. Stay with him. Start tracking him."

  When Lucas and Del walked into the hospital, a nurse saw them coming and cut them off. "There's been a problem. They've had to take Officer Sherrill back into the operating room."

  "What?"

  She looked at her watch. "About fifteen minutes ago, they decided they had to go back in."

  "Ah, Jesus," Lucas said. "How bad?"

  The nurse shook her head. "I don't know. I know they were watching her blood pressure, and they were worried about it. Dr. Hirschfeld made the call about a half hour ago. She was pretty strong when she went in, though."

  "Was she awake?"

  "No."

  "How long will they be in there?" He looked down the hall toward the emergency operating theater.

  "There's no way to tell. Until she's fixed."

  Lucas looked at Del. "I told you man, I got a bad feeling."

  Del asked the nurse, "Have you seen Dr. Weather Karkinnen around?"

  "Yes. She was down asking about Officer Sherrill just a few minutes ago. I think she's doing her morning rounds."

  "Let's go," Lucas said.

  They tracked her down in the surgery wards, talking to the parents of a child who'd had some reconstruction work after a car accident. Lucas stuck his head in the room, and Weather saw him and said, "I'll be just a minute."

  They waited in the hall, listening to the murmur of voices, Lucas pacing, until Weather came out. "I don't think it's too bad," she said. "I think it's that one leak."

  "They said she was pretty strong," Del said.

  "Well…" Weather's eyes slid away from Lucas. "She was in a lot better physical condition than most people who come in."

  "Aw, man, you're saying she wasn't that strong."

  "Lucas, this had to be done. If they'd waited, she would have gotten weaker, and that would have been worse. Hirschfeld thought he had to go in now."

  "Is she gonna make it?"

  Weather nodded once, quickly. "Yes." This time her eyes held on to his.

  Sallance Hanson knew Rodriguez only slightly. "He's quite a respected real estate investor, but he's not part of the usual… group. The group that comes to my parties. Do you think he's the one? Who killed Alie'e?"

  "We're just doing a second round on everybody," Lucas lied. He went back to Rodriguez. "I'm curious about the investor part. Our preliminary workup showed him as an employee… an apartment manager, not an investor."

  "Well, like I said, I don't know him that well, but that's not the way he talks. That's not the way he dresses, either. He's a coarse man, but he has a nice taste in clothes. So do you, by the way." She reached out, folded back the lapel on Lucas's jacket, read the label, and asked, "Where'd you get this?"

  "Barneys."

  "Really. Nice material. You went to New York?"

  "I have a friend there. I visit sometimes," Lucas said. He pushed the topic back to Rodriguez. "Why is he coarse? What makes you think that?"

  "He's just… Every once in a while, something slips out. He'll say, 'twat,' or something. A lot of guys say 'twat,' you know, when they're looking for an effect, or they're trying to shock you or piss you off. I even know one guy who tried to tell me it was a variation of twit."

  Lucas grinned. "He had to be a moron."

  "Yes, well… yes. But with Richi
e… I've heard—overheard—Richard say it sort of casually. Like that was the word he'd normally use in that place, and if he said 'woman,' it was because he was trying to be polite. He's a coarse man, with a layer of politeness that he learned somewhere. Maybe a book or something."

  "Do you know anything about his financial dealings?"

  "No, no. Nothing. Although every time I talked to him, that's what he wanted to talk about. He was always complaining about his tenants—late with the rent, or skipping out, or whatever."

  Del chipped in. "You never saw him with Sandy Lansing?"

  "I just don't remember."

  "You know Lansing was dealing drugs."

  She looked at Del for a moment, then at Lucas, then back to Del. "Look, I know… I've talked to my lawyer, and he says telling you this is no crime… I know some people at the party were using drugs. And I'd heard that you could sometimes get something from Sandy. But I didn't want to slander a dead woman."

  Del leaned back on the couch. He was wearing a black leather jacket, jeans, and a ragged thirty-year-old political T-shirt on which the words "Lick Dick in '72" were barely legible. He grinned, showing his yellow teeth. "You oughta tell that to Derrick Deal."

  "Derrick… ?" She was puzzled.

  "A guy we know," Del said. "He's in the icebox down at the morgue."

  "Right up to that point, I was trying to make nice with her," Lucas said when they were out on the sidewalk.

  "Fuck the bitch. She's one of those people who'll drive you to communism," Del said. He scratched the side of his face; he hadn't shaved in a couple of days. "'After we see about Marcy, maybe you oughta talk to your friend Bone."

  "Not a bad idea," Lucas said. "But first…" He took out his cell phone, turned it on, and punched in a number.

  Lane answered. "Yo."

  "This is Lucas. You find him?"

  "I've seen him. I took Hendrix along, Hendrix interviewed him after the party. He's got an office in St. Paul, on the street level down from a Skyway, and we can see him in his office."

  "You can see him now?"

  "No, but I can see the door he's gotta come out. I'm with him."

  "Let's get some pictures of him—we might want to take them around."