Lucas Davenport Novels 16-20

by John Sandford

“Where did this guy come from?” Lucas asked.

  “Who knows,” Del said. Sounding pleased, Del added, “Treacherous little minx, isn’t she?”

  “Siggy is gonna kill her.”

  “Especially if that little knob on her tummy isn’t Siggy’s work,” Del said.

  Lucas handed him the glasses. “If it’s not Siggy’s, then we’re probably wasting our time sitting here. Siggy’s never coming back. She’s way too smart to do that to him. He’d kill her with a goddamn chain saw.”

  “Not a complete waste of time,” Del said. “I’ve never seen anybody get laid on a kitchen table, except in that baseball movie. I don’t think it really happens—but if it does, I’d like to see it.”

  “I meant, waste of time in terms of life, liberty, and the Minnesota way,” Lucas said.

  “Fuck that,” Del said. Talking to the guy across the street: “Go for it, guy.”

  Lucas asked, “How’s your old lady?”

  “Better. Must’ve eaten something that made her sick,” Del said. He took the glasses from Lucas and put them up to his eyes. “You can’t guilt-trip me outa watching this. This is purely professional.”

  At home that night, Lucas told Weather about the break.

  “It’ll lead to something, for sure?” she asked.

  “It feels that way in my gut—it’ll lead to something,” Lucas said. “I need to take a really close look at this housekeeper, and maybe Austin herself, and maybe these two friends of hers, McGuire and Robinson, who wanted to start the Internet site. The guy has contacts in the trucking industry, and that’s one place you can for-sure get good fake driver’s licenses—and he may have had access to her apartment, and to her computer, since he was a computer guy. So . . . it feels good.”

  “How’s Heather?” she asked.

  “Life with Heather is getting complicated,” Lucas said. He told her about the new man, and she was enthralled.

  “You think he wanted to do it on the kitchen table . . . ?”

  “I don’t know—they didn’t, but they pulled the blinds in the bedroom, which is the first time that’s been done, so something happened in there.”

  “Kitchen table would probably hurt your hip bones, your shoulder blades, the back of your head, your elbows . . .”

  “Depends on which way you were facing, I suppose,” Lucas said, and he picked up that morning’s Star Tribune and turned to the comics pages.

  She had to think about it and then said, “Lucas! God!” But, like most women, she valued a little vulgarity from time to time.

  Dan jackson showed up with the huge camera and a giant Domke photographer’s satchel at eleven o’clock the next morning, and sat in Lucas’s office until Lucas got back from the convention security coordination committee. Lucas rolled in fifteen minutes later, yanked off his necktie and threw it at a photograph of the BCA Shooters, the Y-League second-place basketball team a year earlier; the tie caught and hung up on the picture frame.

  “Should I ask?” Jackson asked.

  “Fuckin’ morons.” Lucas dropped in his chair, shook a finger at Jackson. “They’re doing estimates on how much damage we might get from protesters at the convention. They chose ‘not much’ because that was what they’re budgeted for. It’s like New Orleans: How big will the hurricane be? Well, not very big, because we can’t afford it.”

  “Be some good photography, though,” Jackson ventured.

  “Yeah? Talk to the newspaper guys about that,” Lucas said. “Most of the trouble takes place at night. Nothing like running around in the nighttime with a goddamn strobe, taking pictures of people committing crimes, with no backup.”

  “Hmph. I may have to reconsider,” Jackson said.

  “Reconsider your ass off.” Lucas stood up, turned in a full circle, dropped back in the chair, exhaled and said, “Screw it. They know what I think.”

  “Not necessarily good to be right, when all the big shots are wrong,” Jackson observed.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Lucas said. He leaned forward: “So. You get it?”

  Jackson patted the Nikon. “It was a snap.” He chuckled. “You get it? It was a snap?”

  “Dan . . . when can I get the snaps?”

  “Right here,” Jackson said. He reached into the back flap of the photo bag and pulled out a set of 5x7 color prints. “I got all your women, and five from here in the office. They all look equally candid, I think—shouldn’t be any bias toward our gals. None of our people have accounts at the bank, so they shouldn’t be contaminated that way.”

  Lucas thumbed through the prints. Ten women with hair that ranged in color from blond to dark brown, looking generally past the camera, but nearly frontal; and side views as they passed. “These are great. Great. I’ll recommend you for the four-to-midnight shift at the convention.”

  “You’re a prince.”

  Emily wau, the banker, was waiting when Lucas came through the door. “More pictures, huh?”

  “Yup. A bunch of suspects. Secret camera. Just like on TV. Do you have a conference room?”

  They did. Lucas turned on the lights and spread the photos over the conference table, all mixed up. “Just let your eyes roll across them . . . look at all of them before you focus on one,” Lucas said. “Then . . . whatever.”

  Wau took her time: five minutes to look at ten women, including Alyssa Austin, Helen Sobotny, Denise Robinson, Leigh Price, Martina Trenoff, and the BCA dummies. At the end of the five minutes, she touched her lips with her index finger, like a schoolmarm signaling, “Shhh,” scanned all of them a last time, and said, “Nope.”

  “Nope?”

  “I don’t remember any of them,” she said. She said it confidently, and Lucas felt his heart sink.

  “Ah, man.”

  “Something happened the other day, somewhat related, that made me think of you,” Wau said. “I was standing by the door, and we’ve got this thing we do, whenever somebody comes in. We say, ‘Welcome to Riverside.’ This man came in and he said, ‘I remember you, you opened my account.’ And I remembered him. I didn’t even think— I said, ‘You’re Jim!’ and he said, ‘That’s right. I’m flattered.’ So we were both happy. Later, you know, thinking about you, I looked up when he opened his account. It was the end of December. Right after Christmas.”

  “So you do remember the people,” Lucas said.

  “Well, I remembered him, when I saw him,” she said. “And he was nobody spectacular, just a guy.”

  “Poop,” Lucas said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “We’re not done, yet,” Lucas said.

  They weren’t done yet, but where to go? When he’d walked into the bank, he would have given 3-2 odds that they’d get an ID. A thought popped into his head: What if Wau were involved? What if . . . horseshit. It ain’t Wau.

  He sighed, looked back at the bank, and headed for the car.

  Had to be somebody close to Frances. Had to be.

  Sitting in the apartment, looking across the street at Heather Toms’s place, listening to the Doors doing “Love Me Two Times.” Heather was not in, and Lucas got his feet up, and closed his eyes, and ran back through the faces of the women. Nothing there. Thought about Austin, and what she’d said about insanity, about how it was nothing more than an extreme version of everyday quirks. . . .

  Good theory, he thought. Lucas had a theory of his own, sociological, rather than psychological.

  Some people, he believed, looked at the world and saw a clockwork: events happened and triggered off other events, people did what they were programmed to do, and the results came out the other end: love, hate, war, murder, children, whatever.

  Other people, Lucas among them, looked out the window and saw nothing but chaos: accident, chance, stupidity, intelligence, avarice, idealism, all rubbing against one another in an unpredictable stew.

  How could Heather Toms, he thought—as Heather came through the door of her apartment carrying an oversized shopping bag from Neiman Marcus—how could a nice suburba
n girl like Heather Toms ever expect to wind up as the loving wife of a murderous Lithuanian gangster, mother of his children, secret lover of one of the gangster’s underlings?

  For Christ’s sakes, she’d been a cheerleader at Edina, one of the toniest high schools in the metro area. How could she . . .

  The answer, of course, was that she couldn’t have predicted any of it. If she’d stopped somewhere for a cappuccino, she might not ever have met Siggy. Now she’d be married to an insurance agent or a cop or a finance guy . . .

  The problem with this view of life, this philosophy, was that it suggested that what happened to Frances Austin, and what happened to the other murder victims, was not the result of a cold calculated plan by anybody at all. The whole thing could have been set off by accident, by a bump in the dark, by a burglar . . .

  But then . . . three killings?

  Nope. It might be chaotic, but there were threads in the chaos. He was just pulling the wrong one.

  Across the street, Heather was looking at herself in the mirror, holding up an outfit. Then she turned her head, walked to the door. Her mother was there, said something, and Heather disappeared down the hall, leaving the door open, and was back a moment later with the toddler.

  She put him on the floor and went back to posing.

  Lucas watched in the binoculars and thought, Huh. She supposedly had no money. Her mother supposedly paid half her rent, out of her Social Security and pension.

  And that maternity stuff she’s looking at cost at least a grand.

  A light went on: the guy she’d met at the door, the underling, had delivered more than a good time: he’d brought money from Siggy. Dollars to doughnuts; and Heather was flush again.

  There was contact.

  She wants to look nice.

  Bet Siggy is coming . . .

  17

  The next morning, instead of pushing the Austin file, Lucas sat in Rose Marie Roux’s office in the Public Safety building and they shouted at each other about the Republican convention. Roux was working on a matrix of all possible outcomes of the street demonstrations, from minor disturbances to full-blown call-out-the-National-Guard riots— not to determine staffing levels, but to propose differing political postures for the governor and his pals, depending on what happened.

  “If we really had a disaster, there’d be some fallout for us, too,” she said, solemn as a priest. “Wouldn’t just be St. Paul.”

  “If there’s a disaster, another Seattle ’ninety nine, there’ll be fallout for everybody,” Lucas said. “Forty thousand demonstrators showed up in Seattle and that was for the World Trade Organization. How many people know what the WTO is? And we’re gonna get the Republican Party and the most unpopular president since Richard Nixon.”

  “The biggest horse’s ass since Richard Nixon.”

  “I can’t stand it when you guys say that,” Lucas said, his voice rising. “Somebody says, ‘The black bloc is coming, the anarchists, we’re gonna have a riot,’ and one of you political guys says, ‘The president is a horse’s ass,’ like that’s an answer. Do you think it makes any difference to Gepetto’s, if some goddamn ratshit anarchist throws a firebomb through the dining room window, if the president’s a horse’s ass? Don’t tell me about him being a horse’s ass, ’cause I don’t give a shit. Tell me how you’re gonna keep the firebomb from going through the window.”

  “A giant horse’s ass, a horse’s ass of biblical proportions.” Rose Marie was goading him, and he knew it, and that infuriated him even more.

  “. . . And that’s what Gepetto wants to know, too. He’s full every night, he’s turning tables as fast as he can push food at people. He doesn’t give a shit whether the Republicans come to town. What he wants is police protection . . .”

  “. . . You’re shouting again . . .”

  ". . . and when Gepetto asks, ’How’re you going to protect me?,’ all you guys got is, ‘The president’s a horse’s ass.’ That’s a really great answer.”

  “There is no Gepetto,” Rose Marie said. “The place is owned by Tommy Reed.”

  “I know who it’s owned by. Does that make any difference? Do you—”

  His cell phone went off, and he pulled it out and looked at the screen: Dakota County sheriff’s department: “Yeah? Davenport.”

  “This is Dick Pratt down in Dakota. A guy walked in the door early this morning with Frances Austin’s purse,” Pratt said. “No cash, but all of her ID is there. Credit cards, driver’s license. He remembered the story, drove it in. He found it in the ditch a couple miles north of the body.”

  “Anything good?”

  “Maybe,” Pratt said. “You got a guy named Frank connected to her? Heard that name?”

  “Uhhh . . . yeah. Somewhere.”

  “Figure out where. There was a letter in her purse, handwritten, we think it’s her handwriting, with a felt-tip pen. Water got to it, in the ditch. The paper’s falling apart and a lot of the note is one big ink stain—but we can read the top part of it. Addressed to Frank, it looks like she was breaking off a relationship.”

  “That’s good,” Lucas said, standing up, focusing now. “That could be critical. We were told that she didn’t have a boyfriend. You’re sure it’s her handwriting?”

  “Pretty sure. There was another thing in there, a list, and the handwriting looks the same to me. We’ll have a handwriting guy give us an opinion. But who else’s would it be? That kind of a letter?”

  “Goddamnit.”

  “And you got a Frank?” Pratt asked.

  “Someplace in the notes. I’ll find it. The letter’s in really bad shape?”

  “Yeah. Our guys got it flat, and got it dry, but it was in the water too long. Even the part we can read is smeared. ‘Frank,’ is pretty clear, though. It looks like she folded it and refolded it about a million times, like she hadn’t sent it. Like she was thinking about it.”

  “I’d like to come down and take a look,” Lucas said.

  “If you want, I can have our guys take a high-res photo of it and e-mail it to you. You could have it in two minutes, save you a trip.”

  “Let’s do it,” Lucas said.

  He rang off and Rose Marie asked, “Catch a break?”

  “Maybe. I’ve got to get back to the office.”

  “Nice screaming at you,” she said.

  Halfway back to his office, Lucas realized where he’d heard the name Frank. He was so startled by the realization that he pulled the car over and dug out the notebook, to check.

  Yes: Martina Trenoff made him write the name down. Frank Willett was a trainer at one of Alyssa’s clubs and, she’d said, one of Alyssa’s lovers. Karate, she’d said. Model, bicycle racer, rock climber, surfer, one of those guys who you can’t figure out how they made a living.

  The rest of the way back to the office was a fantasy, a story that Lucas made up as he drove: a guy with no money, fucking both an heiress and the heiress’s daughter, who was, come to think of it, also an heiress.

  But the mother, in addition to being a little goofy and believing in astrology and probably tea leaves, also had a tougher, business side. In addition, she’d had a number of lovers, and might not have been interested in a long-term relationship with somebody like a bicycle racer/ model/surfer guy.

  She might like fucking him, okay, but long-term, she’d want somebody with status in the community, somebody with . . . good shoes. She’d mentioned the artist, Kidd—a perfect match for her. As an artist, he’d certainly be goofy enough, and hell, he was in museums. That’s what she’d want, not some guy who walked around thinking about his next pair of sunglasses.

  The daughter, on the other hand, young, inexperienced, not all that great-looking, might be a bit more influenced by a guy with big muscles and a surfer’s outlook.

  And if the guy were looking for money . . .

  From there, that one thing, that relationship, all kinds of other things might have fallen out.

  She tells him she’s going to break it
off: they argue in the kitchen, there’s some pushing, she reaches for a knife, he takes it away from her and sticks her. Wonder what kind of truck he’d have, whether there’d be transmission fluid in the truck bed? No doubt in Lucas’s mind that the guy would have a truck, if he was a surfer, a bike-racer, a rock-climber, all that.

  Or, how about this: the daughter finds out that he’s fucking both her and her mother: goes to Mom with the story, there’s an argument that turns violent, one of them yanks out the knife in a fit of passion, or jealousy, or even self-defense and . . . zut.

  “Finally,” he said aloud. The whole Frank thing made everything clear: this was no big cosmic mystery, it was just some of the same old bullshit. An argument about sex and love, some hysteria, and a murder.

  Why were the others killed? Because they knew about the relationship? Was Frank there the night of the chicken dance?

  He thought about Austin for a moment.

  Not Austin, he decided. She was tough, but unless she was totally nuts, there was no way that she could have produced all the tears that came with Frances’s death—and he’d seen her face when they told her that the body had been found. Until that moment, Lucas thought, she’d had some hope that Frances might still be alive.

  Not Austin.

  At the BCA office, he ran halfway up the stairs, until his bad leg bit back at him, and he nearly fell. Limping into the office, he nodded at Carol, who asked, “What’s happening?” and came to stand in the door while he punched up the computer.

  “Got a break, maybe,” he said. “Found Frances Austin’s purse, got a breakup note out of it. Breaking up with a guy named Frank.”

  “Old-fashioned name, Frank,” Carol said. “Don’t see many Franks anymore. If they’d gotten married, it would have been Mr. Francis and Mrs. Frances Austin.”

  Lucas was listening to her prattle and he pulled up the e-mail, then frowned and looked up and asked, “What’d you say?”

  She shrugged. “Nothing. I was just going on.”

  “You said Frances and Francis—are they spelled the same?”

  “No, but I don’t know which is which.”

  “I bet no one else does, either,” Lucas said. He ran his hands through his hair, said, “Holy shit. Holy shit. Go get me Dan Jackson, on the run, and tell him to bring that big fuckin’ camera. Holy shit, the Frances Austin who went to the bank could have been a man.”