Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15

by John Sandford

  “Like this undercover man.”

  “Who?” Sloan asked, looking at Lucas.

  “Del was here last night,” Lucas said.

  “Ah. Chasing dope?”

  Hanson looked from Sloan to Lucas and back to Sloan, and shook her head. “There was no dope.”

  SWANSON AND LUCAS quickly briefed Sloan on what they knew. While they were talking, Hanson stood up and said, “I’ll be back in a sec. I gotta pee.”

  “Meet you in the kitchen,” Sloan said.

  “Who’s got the list of the people at the party?” Lucas asked Swanson.

  Swanson took a notebook out of his pocket. “I’ve got most of it.”

  “You got anyone on there named Amnon? Or Jael?”

  Swanson said, “Yeah, somewhere. I remember the names. They’re brother and sister.” He flipped through his notebook, found the names. “Amnon Plain and a Jael Corbeau. Why?”

  “There’s a rumor that Alie’e jilted Amnon and went off with Jael, and this Amnon guy was pretty pissed about it. So let’s get them downtown.” He looked at Sloan. “Why don’t you fix it? Call me when you get them: I want to sit in.”

  “Okay.”

  “Those are both Bible names,” Swanson said. “Amnon and Jael.”

  “Yeah? What’d they do in the Bible?”

  “Fuck if I know,” Swanson said. “I just remember them from Sunday school.”

  “Let’s get them downtown. We can ask them about it,” Lucas said.

  LUCAS LOOKED IN on Rowena Cooper, the woman who’d found Alie’e’s body. Cooper was a thin, morose woman with dark hair and red-rimmed eyes; she was sitting with a chubby baby-sitter cop named Dorothy Shaw. “I just wanted to say hello,” Cooper said. “The last time Alie’e came to town, we went to a movie together. I just wanted to see how she was doing.”

  “You didn’t have a chance to talk to her earlier?” Lucas asked.

  “No, no, I didn’t get here until midnight. She’d already gone back to take her nap by then.”

  She really knew nothing else: She’d hung around the party for better than two hours, mostly because she wanted to talk to Alie’e, if only for a moment. “We shared some concerns about current fashion, and where it’s going. . . .”

  She seemed genuinely upset about the murder, without Hanson’s undertone of excitement. Lucas tried to reassure her, without much luck, and left her with Shaw.

  “Del’s on the porch,” Swanson said when Lucas wandered back into the living room.

  DEL HAD TAKEN the time to dress up; he was wearing clean jeans, sneakers without holes, and a gray sweatshirt with the sleeves pulled up over the elbows. He smelled vaguely of musk-scented deodorant, and his long hair was still damp.

  “We’re gonna have to talk to Internal Affairs. You’re gonna have to meet with them,” Lucas said. “Just to keep the record straight.”

  Del nodded. “No problem. I picked up on this party yesterday afternoon, and told Lane where I was going. So I’m covered.”

  “Good.” Lane was the other man in Lucas’s two-man Strategic Studies and Planning Group.

  Del said, “But I never told you why I was calling you . . . why I was looking for you. Did anybody tell you about Trick? Anybody call you from downtown?”

  “What trick?”

  “Trick Bentoin. He was at the party last night. He just got back from Panama,” Del said.

  Lucas took a long look at him and finally showed a small smile. “You gotta be bullshitting me.”

  “I’m not, man,” Del said, his eyes round. “I talked to him. He thought it was funnier than hell. He hardly ever laughs; he goddamn near fell down in the hallway.”

  “Ah, fuck.” Then Lucas started to laugh, and a minute later Del joined in. A uniformed cop with a solemn murder-scene face poked his head around the corner, saw who it was, and pulled back.

  “That’s gonna be a little hard to explain,” Lucas said finally.

  Narcotics and Homicide had worked together, with the county attorney’s investigators, for more than four months to build a murder case against Rashid Al-Balah. Al-Balah had killed Trick Bentoin, and had thrown his body in a bog at the Carlos Avery Wildlife Area, the traditional murdered-body-disposal area for the Twin Cities, the state claimed. The case had been a jigsaw puzzle of evidence: weed seeds in the backseat of the Cadillac, identified by a University of Minnesota botanist and unique to the bog; traces of blood in the trunk of the car, confirmed as the same blood type as Bentoin’s; a history of death threats by Al-Balah against Bentoin; a lack of any alibi. . . .

  Al-Balah had been in prison for a little more than a month, looking at a life sentence for first-degree murder.

  “What about the blood in the car?” Lucas asked.

  “Trick didn’t know about any blood,” Del said. “He said he had a deal going in Panama, this rich guy who thought he could play gin rummy, so he took off. He never heard anything about the trial. Wasn’t that big a deal in Panama.”

  Lucas scratched his head. “Well, shit. I’ll call the county attorney. He ain’t gonna be happy. He got a lot of good ink out of that trial.”

  “You know what’s worse? That asshole Al-Balah is gonna be back on the street.”

  “What’d Trick think about that?”

  “He said, ‘Leave him in there. You know he’s killed somebody.’”

  “Got that right,” Lucas said.

  DOWN THE STREET, TV lights came up, and Lucas peeked: Silly Hanson was being interviewed, posed in her black dress against her expansive lawn. After a second, the lights went down again, and a couple of different cameramen began scrambling around with portable lights. They’d have a roadside studio set up in a moment.

  “Goddamnit,” Lucas said.

  “Gonna be a circus,” Del said.

  “I know it. . . . Hanson told me she didn’t know about any drugs.”

  “What’d you expect?” Del said. “But the only guy who wasn’t putting something up his nose or into his arm was too drunk to do it.”

  “You know any of the people at the party?”

  “Only by sight. None of them knew me, of course.” Swanson stuck his head out on the porch, looking for Lucas. “Rose Marie called,” he said. “You got a meeting at six-thirty, her office.”

  “Okay.” Lucas turned back to Del.

  “You gotta talk to Internal Affairs right away,” he said.

  “When you get clear, talk to the dope guys and nail down every dealer who might have been selling to Maison or her friends. Find out where she got the shit she put in her arm last night. Did she buy it here, or did she bring it with her?”

  Del nodded. “Okay.”

  “The real problem for us is, if the media finds out you were at the party, they’re gonna want to break you out,” he said. “You get your face on the nightly news, you’ll have to find a new job. Giving out tickets for illegal lane changes.”

  “No, no, no. I ain’t going on TV,” Del said. “I gotta stay out of this.”

  “I’ll do what I can, but if the word leaks, we might need a major plane crash. And you know how the goddamn department leaks.”

  “Plane crash wouldn’t do it,” Del said gloomily, looking at the lights down the street. “Not with Alie’e Maison dead. Beautiful, rich, famous, and strangled. It’s a CNN wet dream. They’re gonna run down everybody who had anything to do with her. Once my cat gets outa the bag . . . shit. We got to find this guy.” He nodded toward the house, meaning the killer. “We got to find him quick.”

  4

  ROSE MARIE ROUX had lost thirty pounds on a new all-protein diet and now was thinking about a face-lift. “Just a couple of snips, to pull me up around the sides,” she told Lucas. Rose Marie was the chief of police. She put her fingertips on her face just below her cheekbones and pushed the skin back until it began pulling on her lips. The mayor stepped into her office, looked at her and said, “What?”

  She let go of the skin, and her face slid back to its usual shape. “Face-lift,”
Lucas said. He yawned; he liked late nights, but not early mornings.

  “I been thinking about getting some hair,” the mayor said. He was balding, but still had the remnants of a hairline. “Think anyone would notice?”

  “They look like little bushes planted into the side of a grassy hill, the hair plugs do,” Rose Marie said. “You don’t ever want anybody on a staircase above you, looking down.”

  “Ah, that’s the old-style plugs,” the mayor said. “I’m thinking about micro-implants—they’re supposed to be really natural.” They chatted about plastic surgery and micro-implants for a few minutes, aging politicians doing what they did best—schmoozing—until Lucas yawned again. The mayor stopped the chitchat in the middle of a sentence and asked, “How dead is she?”

  “Pretty dead,” Lucas said, sitting up. “Strangled. Maybe raped. Did Rose Marie tell you about the second woman?”

  The mayor’s head went back, and he gave Lucas a startled-deer look, as much as a short, barrel-chested, balding, former personal-injury attorney can have a startled-deer look. “A second woman?”

  He turned to Rose Marie, who shrugged and said, “Not my fault. A second body turned up, stuffed in a closet. I just found out.”

  “Another model?” Swiveling to Lucas.

  “No,” Lucas said. He gave the mayor a short rundown on the double murder. “Your friend Sallance Hanson says if we give her any trouble, she’s gonna call you.”

  “Fuck her,” the mayor said. “Chain-whip her if you want.”

  “Really?” Rose Marie’s eyebrows went up.

  “She gave me two hundred bucks,” the mayor said.

  “For that much, she gets a signed photograph. I sure as shit don’t run interference on a murder.” He looked back at Lucas. “Do we have any leads?”

  “Probably, but not that I know of,” Lucas said. “We’re still processing the scene. Maison had been putting some dope in her arm, heroin probably. The other woman was red around the nose, like she’d seen a lot of coke.”

  “Chamber of Commerce is gonna love that, coke and heroin,” the mayor said. “What do we tell the movie people?” The movie people were television reporters.

  “We tell them it’s probably a dope-related murder,” Lucas said.

  The mayor frowned. “Dope-related sounds bad.”

  “Everything sounds bad,” Lucas said. “But saying that it’s dope makes it simple to understand. And that’s what we need. Simple. Boring. Understandable. Nothing exotic. No orgies, no weird sex, no big money or jealous lovers, no scandal. Just a bad guy somewhere. And the movie people’ll believe heroin. There’s so much heroin in the fashion business that it was a look not very long ago. All the models had this fagged-out doper look. It won’t surprise anybody.”

  “We don’t want it to drag out: We don’t want it to become some culture thing for the movie intellectuals to get onto.”

  “That’s what I’m saying,” Lucas said. “We don’t want anything mysterious or exotic. A dope-related killing fits.”

  “Tell him about the window,” Rose Marie said.

  “Window?”

  “A bedroom down from the murder room—the room where Maison’s body was, if that was the murder room, and it probably was—had an unlocked window. Somebody could have gone out that way. Or, more to the point, might have come in. A cat burglar.”

  “With all the people in there? There must’ve been lights.”

  “Lights seem to pull cat burglars in,” Lucas said. “They get a buzz from going into a house where people are-- ’cause they’re nuts. Generally, you get a cat burglar, you get a guy who’s gonna start raping the victims. Or killing them. They’re thrill freaks.”

  “Ah, man.” The mayor shook his head.

  “It’s better to stay with the dope story,” Lucas said. “If a dealer killed her, or she was killed because of dope, everybody understands. It’s a one-time thing and she’s partially at fault. If she hadn’t been using dope, she’d still be alive. But if it’s a cat burglar, then we’ve got a serial killer on the loose, and the worst kind of serial killer—the kind who’ll come creeping into your bedroom and strangle you, even with other people in the house.”

  “Like one of those horror movies. Halloween, or the one with the guy with the fingers that are knives,” Rose Marie said.

  “No, no, no, we don’t want that,” the mayor said, waving off the idea.

  “That’s what we thought,” Rose Marie said wryly.

  “So it’s dope,” the mayor said. “Who’s running the show?”

  “Frank Lester,” said Rose Marie. “Lucas and his group will fit in sideways, like we did before. Everybody’s comfortable with that.”

  “Good. It’s Strategic Planning--”

  “Strategic Studies and Planning,” Lucas said. “And I need a woman in the group. Marcy Sherrill wants to come over from Homicide.”

  Rose Marie shook her head. “Then I got to give Homicide somebody else. Everything is too tight.”

  “We’re paying for ourselves about twenty times over,” Lucas said patiently. “And I need a woman if I’m going to operate.”

  “There’s politics. . . .”

  “Murder is down fourteen percent, and a lot of it’s because of my guys—three guys, including me—spotting the assholes,” Lucas said. “That’s politics.”

  The mayor held up his hands to stop the argument. To Rose Marie he said, “Half the people in Homicide are going to be working on this anyway, so why don’t you give him Marcy for the duration of the Maison case? When that’s done, we’ll figure something out.”

  Rose Marie sighed and said, “All right. But I want some more money.”

  The mayor rolled his eyes, then said, “Yeah, who doesn’t?” Then: “You’ll do the media?”

  Rose Marie nodded. “But you’ll have to be there, too, the first time. This is gonna be large, media-wise.”

  “Who do you think’ll come in?”

  “Everybody,” she said. “Four locals and a freelancer for CNN are already outside the house. All the other networks are on the way. And most of the picture-and-gossip magazines. People. The Star.”

  “Then we’re gonna need something more than just saying it’s a ‘dope-related killing.’” He looked at Lucas. “Do we have somebody we can throw to them? Some doper asshole they can chase for a couple of days?”

  “I can ask,” Lucas said.

  “Do that. The more they’ve got to occupy them, the less time they’re gonna spend asking why nothing’s been done yet.” The mayor touched his forehead. “Wish I’d gotten the new hair, though, you know? Like last year.”

  Rose Marie stretched the skin back from her nose. “Never too late,” she said.

  THE MEETING LASTED fifteen minutes. As Lucas was leaving, Rose Marie said, “Hey—turn on your cell phone, okay? For the duration.”

  Lucas shrugged noncommittally. On the way back to his office, he poked Del’s number on his phone’s speed-dial. Del was in the middle of the Internal Affairs interview, and when Lucas passed on the mayor’s request, he said, “I’ll see what we got, as soon as I get out of here.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “Fine. They’re a lovely bunch of people.”

  Lucas punched off, dropped the phone back in his coat pocket. Del could take care of himself. At his office, he yawned, peeled off his jacket, and locked himself in, leaving the lights off. He pulled open a desk drawer, dropped into his chair, and put his feet on the drawer. Not quite seven o’clock: He’d gone to bed a little after two, and normally wouldn’t have gotten up until ten.

  Years before—before he’d inadvertently gotten rich—he’d invented board games as a way of supplementing his police salary. The games were created in all-night sessions that now, in memory, seemed to merge with his time of running the streets. The games eventually became computer-based, with Lucas writing the story and a hired programmer from the University of Minnesota writing the computer code.

  That work led to Daven
port Simulations, a small software company that specialized in computer-based simulations of law-enforcement crises, intended to train police communications personnel in fast-moving crisis management. By the time the company’s management bought him out, Davenport Simulations were running on most of the nation’s 911 equipment.

  The simulations hadn’t much interested him. They’d simply been an obvious and logical way to make money, more of it than he’d ever expected to make. And while games still interested him, he’d lost his place in the gaming world. The new three-dimensional computer-based action/strategy games were far beyond anything he’d been able to do as recently as five years before.

  When he’d gotten rich, when he’d gotten political, he’d stepped off the streets. But in the past six months, his life had begun to shift again. He was wandering the Cities at night. Looking into places he hadn’t seen in years: taverns, a couple of bowling alleys, barbershops, a candy store that fronted for a sports book. Strip joints, now masquerading as gentlemen clubs. Putting together rusty connections.

  And he was talking to old gaming friends. He began to consider a new kind of game, a game set in the real world, with real victories to win, and a real treasure at the end, maybe using palm computers and cell phones. He’d been staying up late again, working on it. He was still in the pencil-twiddling stage, but now had a block of scratchy flow charts pinned to his drafting table. One idea a night, that’s all he wanted. Something he could use. But an idea a night was a lot of ideas.

  He leaned back in the chair, yawned, closed his eyes. In his mind’s eye, he saw Maison on the floor, her foot sticking out from behind the bed, and the woman crumpled on the floor below the closet. Maison and her friends were dopers, and dopers got killed; it happened forty or fifty times a year in Minneapolis, thousands of times a year across the country.

  As far as he was concerned, dopers were crap, and if they died, well, that’s what dopers did. That Alie’e was famous cut no ice with Lucas. Her fame was entirely ephemeral, not the result of hard work, or intellectual or moral superiority, but simply a by-product of her appearance.