Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15

by John Sandford

  “Her dad . . . was weird. He came on to me a couple of times. I often thought he was a little . . . wrong. Not a killer, but he, I think . . . I don’t know.” She lifted her hands to her temples. “His relationship to Alie’e and the other girls, he tried to act paternal, but he was always looking at them. . . . If you know what I mean.”

  “Yeah. He was turned on.”

  “Yeah. And Alie’e’s mom wasn’t much of a prize, either. My mom didn’t care what I did for a living; she thought the earth owed me one, and let it go at that. But Lil was living through Alie’e . . . and I think she knew about Lynn’s interest in sex.”

  “You think Lynn might have abused Alie’e?”

  “No. Nope. I think Alie’e would have told me, and I think I would have seen it in her, the way she acted around her father. No, maybe it was just my expectations. Somebody’s a dad—you don’t think of his standing around trying to get a shot at the asses of his daughter’s friends.”

  “Happens all the time,” Lucas said. “I’ll do it. For sure.”

  “But he was creepy about it.”

  “So . . . no ideas.”

  “I told you before, I really think you’ve got to look at the people on the Internet. Those people . . .”

  “We’ve got somebody checking that, a computer guy named Anderson. If you can think of anything specific along those lines, call him. But the thing is, when he ran Alie’e’s name through Alta Vista, he got 122,000 matches. We’re trying to narrow them down.”

  “What’s Alta Vista?”

  “A search engine on the Net. You can look for names and so on.”

  “Okay. Well, I’ll think about it. You know all about her brother, Tom.”

  “We’re looking into him,” Lucas said.

  “He’s an amazing guy. From what she said.”

  “Is he nuts?”

  “She didn’t think so. She thought he was holy,” Jael said.

  “How bright was she?” Lucas asked.

  “Mmm, you’ve got to be smarter than average to make it as a model, but not a lot smarter. She wasn’t intensely bright.”

  “So why were you hanging out with her?”

  She smiled. “I thought everybody knew that.”

  “They know you were sleeping with her, but I thought there had to be a better reason.”

  “There wasn’t,” Jael said. “She was deep into herself, into feeling good. Into . . . feeling. That’s what she did best, and she spread it around. She could make you discard everything else and feel good. The sex was wonderful. Very intimate and very playful and very sexual. I mean, I can’t really explain it to you, because you don’t know what I’m talking about and you’re not in a position to find out.”

  “Did her appearance have anything to do with it? And her being famous?”

  “Probably. There was a whole package. When you were with her, you felt sexy and important and wicked and fun. And she’d make you forget everything else and just feel. That’s why she did those short pops: It was another aspect of feeling for her.”

  “So what about her boyfriend, Jax? What’d he think about all this? Sleeping with other women.”

  She shrugged. “Jax carried her bags. And slept with her every once in a while. He’s basically a remora. He’s probably back in New York right now, looking for somebody else.”

  “He is. You didn’t like him?”

  “It’s not that. I just didn’t care about him. Didn’t even think about him when he was standing in front of me. He made himself into what he is. Not my fault. He wants to carry bags and hang out with pretty women, and that’s what he does.”

  “Sounds bad,” Lucas said.

  “He doesn’t think so.” They sat in silence for a moment, then Jael said, “You and Marcy had a relationship.”

  “For six weeks or so. It was a little too intense.”

  She cocked her head. “Why would you walk away from intensity? Other people go their whole lives without intensity. They dream about it.”

  “Like I said, this was a little too much. We were headed for a disaster.”

  “You mean, like, you’d strangle her or something?”

  “No. But something was going to happen, and we’d wind up hating each other,” Lucas said. “We didn’t want to do that. Risk it.”

  “She’s still sort of hung up on you,” Jael said. “You know what would’ve been fun? For the three of us to go away. You and me and Marcy.”

  She said it so conversationally that Lucas was neither embarrassed nor surprised. He said, “I’m a little too Catholic for that. Marcy would be, too, if she was a Catholic.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Jael said. “Not Marcy, anyway. I think she might be interested in the idea.”

  “Really?” She’d said it with some certainty, and now he was surprised. He looked a question at her.

  “No, no, we weren’t playing. We hardly had a chance to talk,” Jael said. “But you can sort of pick out people who like to feel. Marcy’s one of us.”

  “You mean, a little gay?” Lucas asked.

  “No. That’s not what I mean. You’re one of us. I could tell from talking to you, and the way you look at women.”

  “I gotta stop talking about this,” Lucas said.

  “Sure,” she said.

  “It really makes me nervous.”

  “That’s the Catholic part,” she said. “You’ve probably been fighting it all of your life.”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “YOU KNOW, ” SHE said later, “I’m a little scared.”

  “I know. You should be.”

  “The way Plain was killed. He probably never had a chance even to say anything.”

  “The guy is nuts. But he’s not some great force. We just haven’t been able to find him. We will.”

  “Soon, I hope. I don’t like being cooped up. I’m thinking of heading out to New York, as soon as I can get Plain taken care of.”

  “You could leave that to your father.”

  She shook her head. “Dad . . . couldn’t handle it.”

  “So New York’s an idea,” Lucas said. “But you wouldn’t have any protection.”

  “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 s
ay 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 lights, 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.

  20

  WEDNESDAY. THE FIFTH day of Alie’e Maison.

  Lucas checked on Marcy. Black was slumped in a visitor’s 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 president’s name was Reed. He was a genial man, overweight, a patriotic panoply: red face, white hair, blue eyes; red tie, white shirt, blue suit; 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 kids. 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.”