“Slim and none,” Lucas said. “She’s gonna call me back.”
SHE CALLED BACK as Lucas was in the middle of a low-voiced rant about the scrambled eggs. “How in the fuck can you screw up eggs? You just scramble them in a bowl with a little milk, and then pour them in a pan. These things are like burned yellow rubber. They even smell like burned yellow rubber. Where’d they get the fucking eggs, from a Firestone factory? Don’t even get me started on the goddamned danish. This feels like a piece of skin. Is that a prune? That looks like . . . ”
“Don’t say it. I’m gonna eat it,” Del said.
The phone rang and Lucas dug it out of his shirt pocket. “Davenport.”
“Lucas, it’s Elle. Ruth is up at that church, or whatever it is. She wants to talk to you now.”
“Elle, what the hell is going on?”
“I don’t know the details, I only am . . . aware . . . of the outline of what she’s doing. But I promised her that you were going in as a citizen, and not exactly as a cop—that your conversation would be off the record. I don’t know if you’ll be able to go along with it, but that’s what I told her.”
“Oh, boy. They’re smuggling grass, right? They’re using the money to regild the dome on the cathedral.”
Another odd hesitation, and then Elle said, “Talk to her. I don’t know what she’ll say.”
THEY GAVE UP on the breakfast and headed for Broderick, Del still driving. On the way out of town, they got hung up in a four-car traffic jam behind a lift truck taking down Christmas lights. For the first time since they’d come to town, there were cracks in the clouds, and hints of sunshine. The car thermometer said it was six below zero, and the air was almost still. Wherever a house was burning wood, the smoke from the chimney went straight up for fifty feet before fading away.
On the way, Lucas dialed the Kansas City number that Mark Johnson had given him early that morning. The answer was fumbled, and Lucas recognized it as a cell phone, being answered by somebody who was standing on a street corner. “Block.”
“Yeah, my name is Lucas Davenport, I’m with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension up in Minnesota—”
“Mark Johnson said you might call. He said you were the Tom Block of Minnesota. But better looking.”
“That’s true,” Lucas said.
Block laughed and asked, “So he told me what’s going on, with the lynching and the kidnapping.”
“Not a lynching.”
“If it was down here, it wouldn’t be a lynching, either. In Minnesota, it’s a lynching. Anyway, you think the Cashes are chopping cars up there?”
“No, I don’t,” Lucas said. “The place we’re looking at—it’s called Calb’s—doesn’t look like a chop shop. It looks like what they say it is, car body and truck rehab.”
“See any Toyota trucks up there? I mean, connected to this place?”
Lucas thought—and he’d seen one. “One,” he said. “Land Cruiser.”
“Now we’re talking. The thing is, we know the Cashes are moving hot cars. We’ve even caught their boys in a couple, but those were going to chop shops down here. There’s a rumor that they steal new Toyota trucks. Only new Toyotas. And then the Toyotas disappear, and they’re never found again. Ever. They’re gone. Never get in wrecks, never sold to wrecking services. I’ve got some numbers of insurance companies that are interested, if you want to talk to them, but I’d say we’re talking anywhere from seventy-five to a hundred trucks a year, from all over the Midwest and the plains, far east as Cleveland and far west as Denver.”
“That’s a lot of trucks.”
“We figure about five million worth. We had one guy across the river in Kansas City, Kansas, who bought a new Land Cruiser, sixty thousand dollars, got it stolen, got his insurance check, bought another one, and they stole that, the second night he had it.”
“Hmm.”
“Listen, I gotta get a bus. If you want to talk, come down, or call me this afternoon, I’ll have some open time. I can tell you all about the Cashes. I grew up with them.”
“ANYTHING GOOD ?” DEL asked.
“That was a Toyota Land Cruiser those women were hauling coffee in, right? Last night?”
“Yeah, I think.”
“They’re driving for Calb for $100 a week and they drive a sixty-thousand-dollar Land Cruiser. That’ll cause you to think.”
“Oh, boy. Tell me about it.”
Lucas told him. And as they came up to Broderick, he said, “Go on through. Let’s see if there’s anything going at Letty’s.”
As they went past Deon Cash’s place, they noticed a half-dozen cars in the driveway and yard. “FBI has landed,” Del said.
“Talk to them later.”
There wasn’t much at Letty’s house: one deputy sheriff’s car and one state fire marshal’s car sat next to the hole that used to be the house. The deputy was in his car, writing on a clipboard, and waved at Lucas. Another man was digging carefully through the basement.
When Lucas identified himself, the man climbed out on a stepladder. He was wearing rubberized coveralls, and his face was smudged with charcoal. “George Puckett,” he said.
“Figure anything out?”
“Not a thing,” he admitted. “I don’t see any signs of accelerant. The sheriff’s deputies say the fire was deliberate, but I couldn’t prove it.”
“That’s not nothing,” Lucas said. “That means that the guy probably didn’t come here to burn it down. Probably did it on the spur of the moment.”
“Might not be nothing, but it isn’t much,” Puckett said. “Wish I could help more.”
Lucas and Del walked around the scene a few minutes longer, found a patch of blood where Letty had huddled in the snow. No blood between that spot and the window, as far as they could tell, although the remaining snow was covered with soot and debris from the fire.
“Church?” Del asked.
“I guess. What else is there?”
THE MOTHERLY WOMAN met them at the door, looked hard at both of them, and without a word took them back to the kitchen, where Lewis was again working at the table. When they came in, she stood up, looked at Del, and said, “I’d like to talk privately with Lucas.”
Del shrugged, looked at Lucas, and said, “I’ll be out in the TV room.”
When he was gone, Lewis said, “Sit down.” Lucas pulled out the kitchen chair opposite her. She asked, “Want a cup of coffee?”
“No, I’m fine. So. What’s the story?”
“I wasn’t surprised to hear from Sister Mary Joseph. I’d been more or less expecting it.” She paused, but Lucas kept his mouth shut. “Anyway,” she continued, “we all talked about it, and several of our sisters have left in the past two days—people not yet too involved, so if you decide to bust us, they can pick it up later.”
He kept his mouth shut.
She said, “So we talked about it, and not one of us could figure out how we could be involved in anything that had to do with the girls. We couldn’t see any possible connection.”
“Good,” Lucas said. “The parents of the other girl are coming up here today. You could meet them, if you like.”
Her hand went to her throat. “That’s cruel.”
“Keep going with the story,” Lucas said. “What’re you doing? I’ll figure out for myself if there’s a connection.”
“We’re smuggling drugs,” she said abruptly. “We bring them down from Canada. We put on nun’s habits so that the border people don’t check too closely, and bring them across.”
“Marijuana?”
“Some. But that’s more complicated. Usually, it’s tamoxifen and ondansetron. They’re cancer drugs and we get people in Canada to buy them for us at Canadian government prices. We bring them across the border and distribute them to people who can’t afford them. Because of the way the drugs are sold in Canada, they only cost about ten or fifteen percent of what they cost in the U.S. Tamoxifen in the states costs a hundred a month, or more, and you might take it for
years. The poor tend to skip days or skip whole months and hope they can get away with it. Ondansetron is a really expensive antinausea drug. It costs two hundred dollars to cover the nausea from one chemo treatment—so a lot of people go with a cheap drug that doesn’t work as well, and just put up with the nausea. Ever been nauseous for a week straight?”
“No.”
“Neither have I, but it looks pretty unpleasant. We can buy the stuff in Canada for thirty bucks.”
“Cancer drugs,” Lucas said.
“And some marijuana. The marijuana is the cheapest way to fight nausea—sometimes, it’s the only way—and the best marijuana for our purposes comes from British Columbia. We don’t bring it across too often because of the dogs. The dogs don’t care whether we’re wearing habits or not. And if we have to, we can get it in California.”
“Huh,” Lucas said. Then: “Just, uh, for the sake of my own, uh, technical knowledge, how do you get it past the dogs?”
“We have a number of religious young men and women from Winnipeg who have grown out their hair. We provide them with what you might call “doper clothing,” and they drive vans across the border ahead of us. If the dogs are working, they’ll do the van every time, and as soon as the people see the dogs, they let us know with a walkie talkie. If there are no dogs, we’ll come across.”
“Okay. Cancer drugs.”
“Yes.”
“That’s all a little hard to believe.”
“Sister Mary Joseph said that if you don’t believe, you should ask your wife. I don’t know exactly what that means . . . is she a cancer survivor?”
“No. She’s a doctor.”
“Then she’ll know. I promise you this, Lucas, and Sister Mary Joseph would tell you the same thing—this is only for people who might die if they don’t get the drugs. People can get the standard chemotherapy, one way or another, even if they don’t have money, but the ancillary drugs and the follow-up drugs . . . lots of times, it comes down to a choice between eating and taking the drugs. I’m absolutely serious about that—that’s what it comes to. Our drug shipments involve about four thousand patients at the receiving end.”
“Four thousand—”
“And we’re growing.”
“And you weren’t involved with Deon Cash or Jane Warr or Joe Kelly.”
“No. Except that we drive for Gene Calb, and they did.”
“They never tried to cut in on your drug deal.”
“There is no money in the drugs. We don’t get any money. We don’t buy or sell anything—the whole point is that our clients can’t afford to buy it. You have to understand, except for marijuana, all these drugs are legal down here. We’re not so much smuggling the drugs, as smuggling the prices paid for them.”
They sat looking at each other for a minute, then Lucas said, “That’s crazy.”
“Want to know something even crazier? There probably isn’t any way to make it work better. Ask your wife.”
Lucas took a few seconds to think about it, then said, “My partner claims that a tiny town like this can’t have two big crime deals going on at the same time without some relationship between them. I tend to agree, but if you’re telling me the truth, I don’t see what it could be.”
“There isn’t one,” she said.
“So tell me one more thing,” he said. “Where’d you get that Land Cruiser you were driving last night?”
She blinked. “Up in Canada.”
“In Canada?”
“Yes. At an auction. We need a four-wheel drive for some of the roads here, when we’re doing our regular charity work. It’s a terrible truck, it has two hundred and fifty thousand kilometers on it, we’re always afraid it’s going to blow up. The transmission feels like . . . you’re shifting through a pound of liver. It squishes,” she said. Then, “Um, why did you want to know?”
He was a little embarrassed, and shrugged. “I don’t know. You told me that story about raising pin money by driving for Calb.”
“That’s true.”
“But I’ve looked at trucks like that and they cost sixty thousand bucks or so. So . . . ”
“What? We have the receipt.” She was getting a little warm. “We paid one thousand five hundred dollars for it.”
“Okay, okay.” Lucas stood up to go. “You’re going to go down and talk to Letty?”
“I’d be gone already, if Sister Mary Joseph hadn’t called. I’ll be going in one of our Corollas. Our expensive Land Cruiser might not make it that far.”
“All right, all right. I had reason to ask.”
“So what’re you going to do?”
“Try to find whoever is doing the killing. I don’t care about your drugs, but if you think of anything—anything— that might hook it all together, you’ve got to call me. This guy won’t stop as long as he thinks he’s in danger.” He took a couple of steps toward the TV room, then looked back and said, “When you’re taking weed across the border, you’ve got to be careful. My partner could smell it on you the other day. He’s worked with dopers a lot, and he’s pretty sensitive. The guys at the border probably are, too.”
“We were repacking that day,” Lewis said. “We’re very careful before we go across. We have no drug abusers here—zero. That’s one of our rules. The only people we allow to use drugs are survivors. Some of them are still on tamoxifen.”
LUCAS LEFT THE room, looking for Del, then turned around and went back to her. “Why isn’t there a better way to price the drugs?”
“Because the drug companies say, and they may be right—although they lie about everything else—that they won’t be able to create new drugs that everybody wants, or specialized low-profit drugs, if they don’t make a substantial profit from the ones they’re selling now. So they’re allowed to charge what they want in the United States.
“Canada’s a small part of their market, and it’s got one central bulk buyer—the government, and they make the best deal they can. So the drug companies sell to Canada for a little bit more than cost, because the market’s small enough that it doesn’t have much effect on their overall profit.”
“Why don’t we just make it legal to reimport the drugs?”
“Because then Canada would essentially become a drug-wholesaling middleman for the U.S. The drug companies won’t allow that. They’d start charging Canada the American price, to get the profit they say they need. The end effect would be that Canadians would pay more, or go without, and Americans wouldn’t pay less.”
“You know that bumper sticker about the Arabs? ‘Nuke Their Ass and Take the Gas’? Why doesn’t the U.S. just nuke the drug companies’ ass and take the drugs?”
“Then who’s going to develop the new drugs we need? The government? The people who brought you the CIA and airport security and the Bush-Gore election?”
LUCAS FOUND DEL watching Night of the Living Dead with the older woman who’d met them at the door. “You at a good part?” he asked.
“There are no good parts,” Del said. “Everything okay?”
“Okay,” Lucas said. “Let’s go.”
“At least you didn’t open fire on anybody,” the older woman said to Del.
“That’s a good thing,” Del said.
OUT IN THE car, Del asked, “You gonna tell me?”
“Yeah.” Lucas put the car in gear, sighed, and said, “We’ve gotta talk to the sheriff, and the crime scene guys from Bemidji, start looking through their paper, see if there’s anything. Gotta think about it. ’Cause it ain’t these guys.”
“So . . . what’re they doing?” Del asked.
Lucas told him. When he was done, Del said, “I actually heard rumors about them. Down in the Cities. Never made the connection with these guys. I just thought it was some kind of feminist-wicca-earth-goddess-conspiracy urban-legend bullshit. Huh.”
“Where’d you hear it?”
“My old lady.”
“Yeah? You know where Lewis said I should go for more information?”
�
��Where?”
“My old lady.”
They laughed about that for a very short time, and Lucas said, “Let’s go talk to the feds.”
17
ON THE WAY up the street, Lucas got back on his cell phone and called the sheriff’s office. He got the sheriff on the line, explained what he needed.
“That’s not a bad idea,” the sheriff said. “I’ve got three guys on duty at the schools, but that’s not critical—I could have everybody who’s in town down here in forty-five minutes.”
“That’d be great,” Lucas said. “We need the help. We’re really stuck.”
THE FBI SQUAD was led by Lanny Cole and Jim Green, the agents they’d met at Hale Sorrell’s home. Cole was standing in the yard, talking to a man in an Air Force snorkel parka, the fur-rimmed snout sticking eight inches out from the man’s face. Lucas and Del got out, and Cole came over with the parka and they shook hands.
“This is Aron Jaffe from Hollywood,” Cole said, nodding at the parka. The parka nodded back. “He’ll run the GPR search team.”
“Can you hear me in there?” Lucas asked, talking at the snorkel.
“I can hear you fine,” Jaffe said. “Only my legs are frostbitten.”
“Is the frozen ground gonna screw you up?”
“Naw. Might help,” he said. “We might see some seriously unconsolidated stuff.”
They talked for another minute, then Cole said, “The second girl, Burke—her parents are driving up here from Lincoln. They want to look at the locket, although I don’t think there’s any doubt.”
“Okay,” Lucas said. “Are you all straight with the BCA crew?”
“Yeah, we’re fine. You got anything going at all?”
Lucas shook his head. “Not much. You know about the fire last night.”
“Went up and looked at the hole this morning.”
“The girl who was hurt says the killer sounded like he was from here. His voice did, the way he spoke.”
“The Fargo accent,” said the guy from Hollywood.
Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15 Page 127
