Lucas Davenport Novels 16-20

by John Sandford

  “I want a cut,” Anderson said. “Of the Connie Bucher money. Not much. Enough to take me to Europe for a couple of years. Let’s say…a hundred and fifty thousand. You can put it down to consulting fees, seventy-five thousand a year.”

  “Amity…” Leslie said, and there was a cold thread in the soft sound of her name.

  “Don’t start, Leslie. I know how mean and cruel you are, and you know I like it, but I just don’t want to deal with it tonight. I spotted the Bucher thing as soon as it happened. It had your names written all over it. But I wouldn’t have said a thing, I wouldn’t have asked for a nickel, except that you managed to drag me into it.”

  After a moment of silence, Jane said, “What?”

  “I got a visit from a cop named Lucas Davenport. This afternoon. He’s an agent with the state police…”

  “We know who he is. We’re police consultants on the Bucher murder,” Leslie said.

  Anderson was astonished; and then she laughed. “Oh, God, you might know it.”

  But Jane cut through the astonishment: “How did he get to you?”

  “He hooked the Bucher murder to the Donaldson case. He’s looking at the Coombs murder. He knows.”

  “Oh, shit.” Anderson couldn’t see it, but she could feel Jane turn to her husband. “He’s a danger. I told you, we’ve got to do something.”

  Leslie was on his feet and he moved over in front of Anderson and put a hand on her head and said, “Why shouldn’t we just break Amity’s little neck? That would close off that particular threat.”

  Anderson hit the button on the switchblade and the blade clacked open. She pressed the side of the blade against him. “Take your hand off my head, Leslie, or I swear to God, I will cut your cock off.”

  Jane snorted, amused, and said, “A switchblade. You know, you should take off about four inches, just to make him easier to deal with.”

  “I’ll take off nine inches if he doesn’t take his hand off my head,” Anderson snarled. She could feel the heat coming off Leslie’s thighs.

  “Fuck you,” Leslie said, but he moved away and sat down again.

  Anderson left the blade extended. “One good reason for you not to break my neck: Davenport will then know that the thieves are close. And when they investigate either my death or disappearance, the police will unlock the center drawer of my desk, where they will find a letter.”

  “The old letter ploy,” Jane said, still amused, but not as amused as she’d been with the switchblade.

  “It’s what I had to work with,” Anderson said. “About Davenport. He’s working on the Bucher case and now on Donaldson and Coombs, but he’s also working on a sex scandal. There was a story in the paper this morning. Some state legislator guy has been screwing some teenager.”

  “I saw it,” Leslie said. “So what?”

  “So Davenport is running that case, too, and that’s apparently more important. He was interviewing me and he had to run off to do something on the other one. Anyway, I heard him talking on his cell phone, and I know the name of the people involved. The girl’s name.”

  “Really,” Jane said. “Is that a big deal?”

  “It could be,” Anderson said, “If you want to distract Davenport.”

  11

  SANDY THE INTERN was sitting next to Carol’s desk when Lucas came in. He was running a little late, having taken Sam out for a morning walk. He was wearing his grand-jury suit: navy blue with a white shirt, an Hermès tie with a wine-colored background and vibrating commas of a hard blue that the saleslady said matched his eyes; and cap-toed black tie-shoes with a high shine. His socks had clocks and his shorts had paisleys.

  Sandy, on the other hand, looked like she’d been dragged through hell by the ankles—eyes heavy, hair flyaway, glasses smudged. She was wearing a pink blouse with plaid pants, and the same scuffed shoes she’d worn the day before. Somebody, Lucas thought, should give her a book.

  She stood up when she saw him, sparks in her eyes: “He’s innocent.”

  Lucas thought, “Ah, shit.” He didn’t need a crusader, if that’s what she was morphing into. But he said, “Come on in, tell me,” and to Carol, “I’ve gotta be at the Dakota County courthouse at one o’clock and it’s a trip. I’m gonna get out of here soon as I can and get lunch down there, with Virgil.”

  “Okay,” Carol said. “Rose Marie called, she’s got her finger in the media dike, but she says the leakers are going crazy and she doesn’t have enough fingers. The governor’s gone fishing and can’t be reached. Kline has issued a statement that said the charges are without foundation and that he can’t be distracted because he’s got to work up a budget resolution for a special session in July.”

  “I bet the papers jumped on that like a hungry trout,” Lucas said. “You’re in a news meeting and you have the choice of two stories. A—President of the Senate works on budget resolution. B—President of the Senate bangs hot sixteen-year-old and maybe her mother, too, and faces grand-jury indictment. Whatta you going to do?”

  “You think he did them both at the same time? I mean, simultaneously?” Carol asked.

  “I don’t want to think about why you want to know,” Lucas said. “Sandy, let’s talk.”

  SHE SAT ACROSS the desk from him with a four-inch-thick file. “Lots of people have sex when they’re sixteen,” she ventured. “Probably, now, most.”

  “Not with the president of the Minnesota Senate,” Lucas said. He dropped into his chair and leaned back. “When did you get in?”

  “I came back last night, about midnight. Then I stayed up reading until five…I had some luck down there.”

  “Start from the beginning,” Lucas said.

  She nodded. “I went down and found the Polk County Courthouse. Des Moines is in Polk County. Anyway, I went to the clerk’s office, and there was this boy there—another intern. I told him what I was looking for, and he really helped a lot. We got the original trial file, and Xeroxed that, and then we discovered that Duane Child—that was the man who was convicted of killing Toms—we found out that Child appealed. His attorney appealed. They claimed that the investigation was terrible, and that the trial judge let a lot of bad information get in front of the jury.”

  “What happened with the appeal?” Lucas asked.

  “They lost it. Child is in prison. But the appeals court vote was six to three for a new trial, and the three judges who voted for it wrote that there was no substantial evidence, either real or circumstantial, that supported conviction.”

  “So…”

  She held up a finger: “The main thing, from our point of view, that Bill showed me…Bill is the other intern…is that when they appealed, they got the entire police investigative file entered as evidence. So I got that, too.”

  “Excellent!” Lucas said.

  “Reading through it, I cannot figure out two things: I cannot figure out why he was indicted, and I cannot figure out how he was convicted,” Sandy said. “It was like all the cops testified that he did it and that was good enough. But there was almost no evidence.”

  “None?”

  “Some. Circumstantial,” she said.

  “Circumstantial is okay…” Lucas said.

  “Sure. Sometimes. But if that’s all you’ve really got…”

  “What about connections between the Toms murder and the others?” Lucas asked.

  “That’s another thing, Mr. Davenport…” she began.

  “Call me Lucas, please.”

  “That’s another thing, Lucas. They are almost identical,” she said. “It’s a perfect pattern, except for two things. Mr. Toms was male. All the others are female. And he was strangled with a piece of nylon rope, instead of being shot, or bludgeoned. When I was reading it last night, I thought, ‘Aha.’”

  “Aha.”

  “Yes. The killers are smart enough to vary the method of murder, so if you’re just looking at the murders casually, on paper, you’ve got one woman clubbed to death, one woman shot, one woman dies in a fall
, and one man is strangled,” Sandy said. “There’s no consistent method. But if you look at the killings structurally, you see that they are otherwise identical. It looks to me like the killers deliberately varied the method of murder, to obscure the connections, but they couldn’t obscure what they were up to. Which was theft.”

  “Very heavy,” Lucas said.

  “Yes. By the way, one of the things that hung Duane Child is that he was driving an old Volkswagen van, yellow, or tan,” Sandy said. “The night that Toms was murdered, a man was out walking his dog, an Irish setter. Anyway, he saw a white van in the neighborhood, circling the block a couple of times. This man owns an appliance company, and he said the van was a full-sized Chevrolet, an Express, and he said he knew that because he owns five of them. The cops said that he just thought the van was white, because of the weird sodium lights around there, that the lights made the yellow van look whiter. But the man stuck with it, he said the van was a Chevy. A Chevy van doesn’t look anything like the Volkswagen that Child drove. I know because I looked them up on Google. I believe the van was the killers’ vehicle, and they needed the van to carry away the stuff they were stealing.”

  “Was there a list of stolen stuff?”

  “Yes, and it’s just like the list Carol showed me, of the stuff taken from Bucher’s house. All small junk and jewelry. Obvious stuff. And in Toms’s case, a coin collection which never showed up again. But I think—and Carol said you think this happened at Bucher’s—I think they took other stuff, too. Antiques and artworks, and they needed the van to move it.”

  “Have you read the entire file?” Lucas asked.

  She shook her head. “Most of it.”

  “Finish it, and then go back through it. Get some of those sticky flag things from Carol, and every time you find another point in the argument, flag it for me,” Lucas said. “I’ve got to do some politics, but I’ll be back late in the afternoon. Can you have it done by then?”

  “Maybe. There’s an ocean of stuff,” she said. “We Xeroxed off almost a thousand pages yesterday, Bill and I.”

  “Do as much as you can. I’ll see you around four o’clock.”

  BEFORE HE LEFT, he checked out with Rose Marie, and with Mitford, the governor’s aide. Mitford said, “I had an off-the-record with Cole. He doesn’t plan to do any investigation. He’s says it’ll rise or fall on the BCA presentation. They could possibly put it off for a couple of weeks, if you need to develop some elements, but his people are telling him they should go ahead and indict. That they’ve got enough, as long as the Barths testify.”

  “Everybody wants to get rid of it; finish it, except maybe the Klines,” Lucas said.

  VIRGIL FLOWERS was waiting in the parking lot of the Dakota County courthouse. Lucas circled around, picked him up, and they drove into the town of Hastings for lunch. Like Lucas, Flowers was in his grand-jury suit: “You look more like a lawyer than I do,” Lucas said.

  “That’s impossible.”

  “No, it’s not. My suit’s in extremely good taste. Your suit looks like a lawyer suit.”

  “Thanks,” Flowers said. “I just wasted thirty bucks on it, and you’re putting it down.”

  They went to a riverside café, sitting alone on a back patio with checkered-cloth-covered tables, looking toward the Mississippi; ordered hamburgers and Cokes. “Everything is arranged,” Lucas said, when the waitress had gone.

  “Yes. The whole package is locked up in the courthouse. The jury starts meeting at one o’clock, Cole and Conoway will make the first presentation, then they’ll bring in Russell from Child Protection to talk about the original tip. Then you go on, testify about assigning the investigation to me, and you’ll also testify about chain-of-custody on the evidence that came in later, that everything is okay, bureaucratically. Then I go on and testify about the investigation, then we have the tech people coming up, then they get the Barths. After that, they go to dinner. They reconvene at six-thirty, Conoway summarizes, and then they decide whether they need more, or to vote an indictment.”

  “Does Conoway think they’ll vote?”

  “She says they’ll do what she tells them to do, and unless something weird happens, they’re gonna vote,” Flowers said.

  “Okay. You’ve done a good job on this, Virgil.”

  “Nice to work in the Cities again,” Flowers said, “but I gotta get back south. You know Larry White from Jackson County?”

  “Yeah. You’re talking about that body?”

  “Down the riverbank. Yeah. It was the girl. DNA confirms it, they got it back yesterday,” Flowers said. “The thing is, she went to school with Larry’s son and they were friendly. Not dating, but the son knew her pretty well since elementary school, and Larry doesn’t want to investigate it himself. He wants us carrying the load, because…you know, small town.”

  “Any chance his kid actually did it?” Lucas asked.

  “Nah,” Flowers said. “Everybody in town says he’s a good kid, and he’s actually got most of an alibi, and like I said, he wasn’t actually seeing the girl. Didn’t run with her crowd. Larry’s just trying to avoid talk. He’s got the election coming up, and they haven’t got the killer yet…if there is one.”

  “Any ideas? She didn’t get on the riverbank by herself.”

  The waitress came back with the Cokes, and said, with a smile, “I haven’t seen you fellas around before. You lawyers?”

  “God help us,” Flowers said. When she’d gone, Flowers said, “There’s a guy name Floyd. He’s a couple years older than the girl, he’s been out of school for a while. Does seasonal work at the elevator and out at the golf course, sells a little dope. I need to push him. I think he was dealing to the girl, and I think she might have been fooling around with him.”

  “Any dope on the postmortem?”

  “No. She’d been down way too long. When they pulled her off the riverbank, they got most of her clothes and all of the bones except from one foot and a small leg bone, which probably got scattered off by dogs or coyotes or whatever. There’s no sign of violence on the bones. No holes, no breaks, hyoid was intact. I think she might have OD’d.”

  “Can you crack the kid?”

  “That’s my plan…”

  THEY SAT SHOOTING the breeze, talking about cases, talking about fishing. Flowers had a side career going as an outdoor writer, and was notorious for dragging a fishing boat around the state while he was working. Lucas asked, “You go fishing last night?”

  “Hour,” Flowers admitted. “Got a line wet, while I was thinking about the grand jury.”

  “You’re gonna have to decide what you want to do,” Lucas said. “I don’t think you can keep writing and keep working as a cop. Not full-time, anyway.”

  “I’d write, if I could,” Flowers said. “Trouble is, I made fifteen thousand dollars last year, writing. If I went full-time, I could probably make thirty. In other words, I’d starve.”

  “Still…”

  “I know. I think about it,” Flowers said. “All I can do is, keep juggling. You see my piece last month in Outdoor Life?”

  “I did, you know?” Lucas said. “Not bad, Virgil. In fact, it was pretty damn good. Guys were passing it around the office.”

  THE FIRST SESSION of the grand jury was as routine as Flowers had suggested it would be. Lucas sat in a waiting room until 1:45, got called in. The grand jury was arrayed around a long mahogany-grained table, with two assistant county attorneys managing files. The lead attorney, Susan Conoway, had Lucas sworn in by a clerk, who then left. She led him through his handling of the original tip, to the assignment of Flowers, and through the BCA’s handling procedures for evidence. After checking to make sure the signatures on the affidavits were really his, she sent him on his way.

  In the hallway, Flowers said, “I’ll call you about that Jackson case,” and Lucas said, “See ya,” and he was gone.

  BACK AT THE OFFICE, Sandy had gone.

  “I sent her home,” Carol said, as she trailed Lucas into h
is office. The file was sitting squarely in front of Lucas’s chair, with a dozen blue plastic flags sticking out of it. “She was about to fall off the chair. She said you could call her there, and she’d come in…but I think you could let it go until tomorrow. She’s really beat.”

  “Did she finish the file?” Lucas took off his jacket, hung it on his coatrack, and began rolling up his shirtsleeves.

  “Yes. She flagged the critical points. She said she flagged them both pro and con, for and against it being the same killers.”

  “She’s pretty good,” Lucas said. “I hope she doesn’t go overboard, start campaigning to free this Child guy. If his appeal got turned down, we’d be better off working it from the other end. Find the real killers.”

  HE STARTED on the file, looking first at the flagged items, and going back to the original arrest, the interviews, and immediately saw how Child got himself in trouble: He hadn’t denied anything. He had, in fact, meekly agreed that he might have done it. He simply didn’t know—and he stuck to that part of the story.

  There were other bits of evidence against him. He’d been in the neighborhood the night of the murder; he’d stopped to see if he could get some money from his father. His father had given him thirty dollars, and Child had spent some of it at a Subway, on a sandwich, and had been recognized there by a former schoolmate.

  He knew the Toms house. He was driving a van, and a van had been seen circling the block. He had cuts on his face and one arm, which he said he got from a fall, but which might have been defensive cuts received as he strangled Toms. On the other hand, Toms had no skin under his fingernails—there’d been no foreign DNA at all.

  Child had what the police called a history of violence, but he’d never been arrested for it—as far as Lucas could tell, he’d had a number of fights with another street person near the room where he lived, and Child had said that the other bum had started the fights: “He’s a crazy, I never started anything.”