Easy Prey

by John Sandford

  "I could stay in a hotel. How could he find me?"

  "Something to think about," Lucas said.

  Downstairs, as Lucas was leaving, Hutton asked, "Learn anything new?"

  It wasn't meant as a double entrendre, but Lucas turned it into one. "A little more than I wanted," he said.

  On the way home, he called St. Anne's, and got Elle on the line. "I know it's cold, but I could take you for an ice cream."

  "Never too cold for an ice cream," she said. "I'll walk over, meet you there."

  The ice cream shop was across the street from St. Anne's, and was recognized as the local nun hangout. Elle was sitting with three other nuns in a booth near the front of the shop when he walked in, and she laughed and said something to one of the other women and then stood up, and led the way toward the back—a scene, Lucas thought, virtually identical to millions that had taken place in bars that night, if you took away the odor of spilled milk, and, of course, the nuns.

  "Get a break?" she asked, and added, "I told Jim to make you a chocolate malt."

  "That's fine. We've got a couple of things working. I think we've got an eye on the guy who killed Alie'e, and we've booby-trapped everybody the second guy might be going after."

  "You're sure there's a second guy."

  "I think so. And he's the guy who's bothering me. The homicide people have a candidate. Tom Olson."

  "Ohhh… no."

  "The thing is, they have a theory," Lucas said. "The theory is, the same kind of mental pressures that made him an ecstatic also made him a multiple personality, and one of those personalities is a psychotic who made a run at Jael Corbeau but got chased off, killed Plain, came back after Jael Corbeau but shot Marcy instead, and then killed his parents."

  "You say theory…"

  The malt came. He took it, shucked the straw, and told her what they had: the police shrink, the prediction on the apparent double suicide. At the end, she was shaking her head. "I would love to talk to this man. If you convict him and send him to the state hospital, I will go see him. Multiple personalities are so rare. They're rarer than… than supernovas."

  He smiled at the comparison. "Now, if I knew how rare supernovas are…"

  "On the basis of pure chance, you'd say that the chances of Tom Olson being a multiple personality are nil," Elle said. "Just like your chances of winning the lottery. But somebody will win the lottery."

  "So he could be."

  "I would really like to talk to him," Elle said.

  "If he is… disassociating, whatever that means, what's going to happen?"

  "He'll break down. He could go so far down that he essentially becomes vegetative… and might not ever recover. Probably wouldn't. He'd probably die in a bed."

  "That bad."

  "That bad."

  They made desultory small talk for a few minutes: about her fall classes at the school, about students developing a new interest in the Old Testament. "Amnon and Jael. They knew who they were," she said.

  "Terrific," he said. Then: "I've talked to Weather a couple of times at the hospital."

  Her eyes shifted away, quickly, furtively, and then back. She knew about guile, but she wasn't instinctively good at it. She had to plan. "What?" he asked.

  "Nothing."

  "Elle, God… bless me… what?"

  "God bless me?"

  "What?"

  "I can't. I don't really want to talk about Weather."

  "She called you," Lucas said. "She called and asked about me."

  Elle wouldn't look at him. "I can't talk to you. Everything that's been said by… everybody… is in confidence."

  "Aw, man, this could be a problem," Lucas said.

  Now she sat up. "Why? You don't have another relationship."

  "Some things have come up lately."

  "Lucas… if you have any chance of recovering with Weather, you'd be a moron not to take it."

  "Oh… boy," he said. "Mmman-oh-man."

  After he left Elle, he went home, turned out the fights, and sat in the dark in the living room. Tried to make sense of the Alie'e case. Tried to make sense of his relationship with Weather.

  Weather had become entangled in one of Lucas's cases, and had been taken hostage by a crazy peckerwood killer on a revenge trip. She'd talked him into surrendering, but Lucas hadn't known that. He'd set up an ambush involving a police sniper, who'd fired a high-powered varmint bullet down a hospital corridor, exploding the peckerwood's head like a pumpkin. The idea had been to get him out in the open, to get his weapon pointed in some direction other than Weather's head, and then take him out. The plan had worked to perfection.

  Except for one small item: Weather had been looking at Lucas, straining toward him, full of a kind of strange goodwill toward her captor, who'd seemed to be not an entirely bad man—that in one minute, and in the next, the man's brains were literally blown across her face, with fragments of bone.

  She was a surgeon, and no stranger either to blood or death; nor was she a sentimentalist. But this was something else, and when it was done, she'd been unable to talk to Lucas. She'd known the trouble was a kind of psychological reflex, a kind of phobia, a mental tic, but knowing it didn't help. She drifted away… went faster than that, actually. Walked away. Hurried away. Didn't hate him, nothing like that—just couldn't deal with his nearness, and the constantly played sound/sight/feel of the slug going through a man's brain three inches from her own.

  But, Lucas thought, time passes.

  Time passes. He closed his eyes in the dark. And saw the scarred face and teasing eyes of Jael Corbeau; the slightly plump, intense face of Catrin; the shoulders, the too-big nose, the feel of Weather.

  Time passes, but sometimes it beats the shit out of you as it goes.

  Chapter 20

  « ^ »

  Wednesday. The fifth day of Alie'e Maison.

  Lucas checked on Marcy. Black was slumped in a visitors chair, and when he saw Lucas, got up. He was a little shaky, unshaven. "Nothing happening, but she started to wake up. She went back down, but they say she was close to the surface. She should wake up today."

  Lucas looked in. Marcy had always been the most active person in the office, always had something rolling, something moving. She didn't look right, propped in the bed. She looked thinner, gaunt, wasted. He patted Black on the shoulder and said, "Take it easy."

  The main offices of the Atheneum State Bank were off University Avenue three blocks from the state capitol building in St. Paul, in a redbrick building with four white wooden pillars out front. The neighborhood started trending up when the porno movies moved out and the hookers had been pushed farther west, away from the state legislators. The upward trend had stalled, and now the whole strip had a shabby, going-nowhere ambiance, like a squashed paper cup outside a convenience store.

  The taps on four of Rodriguez's phones—one home, two business, and a cell—were in place, along with taps on the home and cell phones used by Bill Spooner, an assistant vice president in the commercial loans department.

  Lucas and Del drove to the bank in a beat-up city car, trailed by an assistant county attorney named Tim Long. From the parking lot, Lucas called Rose Marie. Rose Marie, who had been waiting for the call, phoned the bank president and asked him to make time for a quick talk with Lucas. She got back to Lucas and said, "He's waiting. Be a little careful: He's one of those hail-fellow types who's always ready to help a member of the legislature, and never forgets when he has."

  Lucas said to Del, "See if you can find Spooner's car."

  Del nodded. "Crunch him," he said.

  Lucas and Long went inside, spoke to the bank president's secretary. She went back into his office and popped out a minute later, followed by the president himself. "Already? I just talked to Rose Marie a couple of minutes ago."

  "Traffic was light," Lucas said.

  The bank presidents name was Reed. He was a genial man, overweight, a patriotic panoply: red face, white hair, blue eyes; red tie, white shirt, blue s
uit; an American flag in the corner, with a plastic eagle atop the staff, in gold.

  When Lucas outlined the general nature of their questions, Reed leaned back in his leather executive chair and said, "I've known Bill since we were lads. He was six years behind me at Cretin. His parents, God bless 'em—they're both dead now—used to play canasta with my parents. There's never been anything wrong with any of his accounts; he's one of our best loan officers. I was godfather for his oldest son."

  "I'm sure there's nothing wrong now," Lucas said. "We just want to talk with him about Mr. Rodriguez. Their personal relationship. Anything he might be able to tell us that could help us in our investigation."

  "I don't know that we could help much. Our financial records are confidential—"

  Long interrupted. "Mr. Reed, we know about your confidentiality requirements, and we're just trying to handle this whole matter as discreetly as possible. If you wish, we can get a subpoena for your loan records, and we can call a squad car and transport Mr. Spooner to Minneapolis for questioning. We thought this would be better. Chief Roux thought it would be better."

  "I appreciate that. Senator Roux was a good friend," Reed said. After a moment of silence and a thoughtful inspection of Lucas, he said, "Let's go talk to Billy and see what he has to say."

  Billy was a Minnesota WASP, fair-haired, once slight, but now carrying a few too many pounds. He was wearing a gray off-the-rack suit and black lace-up shoes. And he was guilty of something, Lucas thought: His eyes went flat at the introductions, and when they settled into their chairs and Lucas explained what they wanted, he said, "As far as I know, Richard Rodriguez is entirely legitimate. He has a perfect payment record."

  "That's our problem," Lucas said. "It's a little too perfect. From our review, it appears that he needs a one-hundred-percent residency rate to make his payments. We're wondering why you would give somebody a loan under those conditions."

  "A lot of small reasons, and one big one," Spooner said. "The big one was, he helped our minority loan level. In our neighborhood, we have to be sensitive to redlining issues, and as a responsible, hardworking, intelligent minority person, we decided we could go with him as long as the risk wasn't too great. The first building he was interested in was for sale at such a good price that we could have loaned him almost all of the money even if he hadn't had a down payment. But he did have a down payment. Not much, but it was all of his savings, and guaranteed that he'd stay right on top of the business. And he had the minority status, of course. That swung it. After that, with a lot of hard work, he kept his record perfect, and we were always ready to help when he wanted to expand his horizons."

  "So he got a great price on the original building," Long said. "What are the chances that he delivered part of the original purchase price to the seller, under the table, to drive down the apparent price?"

  "I wouldn't know about that," Spooner said stiffly.

  "What are the chances that he uses dope-dealing money to make up shortfalls in tenant rents?" Lucas asked.

  "Dope? Richard Rodriguez? I don't think so."

  Lucas leaned into Spooner's desk. "If we got a subpoena for your loan records and asked a state examiner to look them over, you think he'd say they met state loan standards?"

  "Absolutely. The minority status alone would bring applause from the state banking department." Spooner leaned back and relaxed a hair, the way a fence relaxes when he realizes that a cop doesn't really have anything on him.

  Lucas looked at Long and shrugged. Long dipped into his brief-case, found a paper, and handed it to Reed. "It's a subpoena for your loan records."

  Reed's face turned a little redder. "I thought we were handling this on a friendly basis."

  "We wanted to," Lucas said. "But Bill here is bullshitting us, so we're gonna have to see all the records."

  "I'm not bullshitting you," Spooner said.

  "You're bullshitting us, Billy, yes, you are," Lucas said. "And I'll tell you what. This case is part of the Alie'e Maison murder investigation. If Rodriguez turns out to be involved, because of his drug dealing, and you're helping him cover up… well, then, you're involved. That's called murder one on the TV shows. Murder one in Minnesota is a minimum of thirty years in a cell the size of your desk. You look like you might be young enough to do the whole thirty."

  "Wait, wait, wait," Spooner said. "I have absolutely nothing to do with any of this. I want a lawyer. Right now."

  "Those are the magic words," Long said to Lucas. "No more questions, and read him his rights."

  When they were done with the reading of the rights, Reed agreed to print out the loan records and Long walked out to the parking lot with Lucas. "It's the reading of the rights that scares the shit out of them," he said.

  Lucas nodded. "The question is, will Spooner make a call?"

  He made the call.

  Long went back into the bank and Lucas climbed in the passenger side of the city car. "He's driving the Lexus in the corner," Del said.

  Lucas looked down at a silver-toned car nosed in next to a power transformer. "So he's spending some money."

  "He's a banker," Del said. "He's gotta have some kind of car to impress the neighbors."

  Del took the car to the end of the block and found a spot where they could see Spooner's car. Del's phone rang twenty minutes later, and Long came on. "I'm not going to make lunch. I've got a thing I've got to do with a subpoena," he said.

  "He's moving?"

  "Absolutely, sweetheart," Long said.

  Del said, "He's moving," and a minute later they spotted Spooner pushing through the front door, carrying his briefcase, pulling on a thigh-length black trench coat. He went to the Lexus, tossed the brief-case across the front seat onto the passenger side, and rolled out of the lot. They followed, a block behind, a half-dozen cars between them, past the capitol, down the hill toward downtown St. Paul, where Del closed up and Lucas eased down in the seat.

  Halfway through downtown, Spooner took the Lexus into a parking ramp. Del pulled to the side, shoved the gearshift into park, said, "I'll catch him at the Skyway exit. Turn on your phone," and jumped out. When Spooner was out of sight, up the ramp, Lucas walked around the car and went looking for a parking meter.

  Del called ten minutes later. "Got him. He's at an attorneys office."

  "Goddamnit."

  "So what do we do?"

  "I'll call you back in two minutes," Lucas said. He punched the Off button, redialed Lane's cell phone number. Lane answered, and Lucas said, "Where's Rodriguez?"

  "In his office. I can see his sleeve."

  "Nothing going on?"

  "A few things. My feet hurt like hell; I've got Homicide's interview notebook on the case, and I'm reading all the interviews; a nine-year-old kid tried to sell me what I believe are counterfeit baseball cards; and the St. Paul cops rousted me. That's about it."

  "No trouble with St. Paul?"

  "Nah. Just checking on why I'd been standing in the Skyway for two hours, reading a notebook," Lane said.

  "Okay. Our guy's at an attorneys office. He's about two blocks from you."

  "Let me know if anything happens."

  "A Mickey Mantle rookie card's gotta be worth more than twenty, doesn't it?"

  "Chump." Lucas redialed Del. "Rodriguez is at his office."

  "So…"

  "So let's hang for a while. Give it an hour, anyway."

  Twenty-five minutes into the hour, Del called. "He's moving."

  "Where?"

  "Looks like the parking garage."

  "Goddamnit. Stay with him. If he heads to the car, I'll pick you up where you jumped out."

  Five minutes later, Del was back in the car. Lucas drove around to the parking garage exit, and as they picked up Spooner, Del's phone rang. He took it out, listened for a second, said, "Lucas's phone is on now," and then handed it to Lucas. "I'm a fuckin' secretary," he said.

  "Your boy made the call," Lester said.

  "Yeah? When?"

 
"Six or seven minutes ago. He was calling from a lawyers office."

  "Yeah, we took him there. He's out, and we're on him again. What'd he say?"

  "Sounded like he was reading out of a script. He said, 'Mr. Rodriguez, allegations have been made against you by the Minneapolis police. I will no longer be allowed to have any direct dealings with you on the mortgages on your buildings, and I wanted to inform you that in the future your account will be handled by Mrs. Ellen Feldman.' Then Rodriguez said, 'What are you talking about? The police?' And then Spooner said, 'I'm not at liberty to discuss it, but you can get more information from Minneapolis Deputy Chief of Police Lucas Davenport or Mr. Tim Long, assistant Hennepin County Attorney' Then Rodriguez said, 'Is this about the party?' And Spooner says, I'm really not at liberty to discuss it. I suggest you call Chief Davenport or Mr. Long. I'm sorry this had to happen. I felt we had an excellent working relationship. I have to go now. I hope this works out for the best.' Then Rodriguez says, 'Okay Well, thanks for everything, you know.' And that's it."

  "Thanks for everything," Lucas said. "He means the phone call."

  "Pretty goddamn neat phone call, too," Lester said. "He warns him, but there's nothing in it to hang him with. Either one of them."

  After Lucas hung up, they tracked Spooner back to the bank. He drove back slowly, well within the speed limit. When he was inside, Lucas said, "Fuck him. Let's go see Marcy."

  Weather was outside the intensive care ward talking to Tom Black. They saw Lucas and Del coming, and Weather smiled and Del said, "Something good happened."

  "What?" Lucas asked as they came up.

  "She's somewhat awake. Everything's pretty much stabilized. She's still critical, but it's looking pretty good. For the first time."

  Lucas went to the ward window and looked in. "Can we go in?"

  "Let me get a nurse. They just took a guy in."

  The nurse came, said, severely, "One minute. Say hello, and out." She gave them masks to hold over their faces, and led the way in.