He called Del: “You working early tomorrow?”
“Three to eleven. I think I cracked the McDonald’s thing.”
“Three to eleven? Meet me at my office at seven o’clock. I’m gonna want you to handle something for me. Take an hour or two.”
“See you then.”
HE TOOK A CALL from John McCord, the BCA superintendent. “Why do you need a lawyer?” McCord asked. “What’d you do?”
“I haven’t done anything, yet. But I gotta figure out a maneuver, and I need a guy.”
“I can’t get you one tonight—I tried, but he’s not answering his phone. Rose Marie said you’re on the way back, so I’ll get him to your office the first thing. What time?”
“Eight? Seven thirty or eight?”
A moment of silence. Then, “Have you ever gotten here at eight in your life?”
“Just get the fuckin’ lawyer, John.”
HE CALLED JENNIFER CAREY, an ex-girlfriend who worked at Channel Three. She was also the mother of his first daughter. He called her at home.
“What’s up?” she asked. “You still in Duluth? I saw some tape on you.”
“That’s what I’m calling about. I’m going through Hinckley right now, headed your way. I gotta see some of your film, the stuff you showed on the five o’clock. It’s kind of urgent.”
“Come on in,” she said. “I’ll go down and get it.”
HE SLOWED DOWN when he got into the heavier traffic, followed I-35 through the northern suburbs, and turned west on I-95 into Minneapolis.
At Channel Three, Carey let him in the back door, so he wouldn’t have to go through the ID-and-name-tag routine, kissed him on the cheek, and took him to her office. She had the clip on tape, and ran it.
“We put some time into this, almost two minutes,” she said. Much of the clip consisted of old pictures of Burt and Melodie Walther, apparently collected from friends and neighbors, along with film of people gathered outside the Walther home.
“ . . . neighbors and a few family members gathered across the street as Hibbing police and agents of the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension processed the crime scene in this modest Iron Range neighborhood where Burt Walther reportedly claims a Soviet spy ring has been operating since World War Two . . .”
The tape lingered on a blond woman whom Lucas recognized as Janet Walther. A few seconds after the camera picked her up, a blond boy stepped into the scene, and she grabbed him and hugged him.
Her son? When she’d spoken of her son, she’d left Lucas with the mental picture of a child, of an elementary-age kid. This boy was high-school age, tall, slender, in good shape. Handsome, as the laptop lady said. This kid, Lucas thought, might have run him up and down those hills.
“Is this a story?” Carey asked, from the chair beside him, as Lucas leaned toward her monitor. She had excellent instincts.
“Of course. A really good one, too,” he said. “I’d hold on to this tape, if I were you.”
“What is it?”
“You are absolutely gorgeous when you’re pregnant,” Lucas said. “How many is this? Four? It really agrees with you.”
“Lucas . . .”
“Could you run the tape one more time?”
HE GOT HOME at eleven thirty, found Weather and the housekeeper, Ellen, in the kitchen, eating cheese crackers and drinking beer.
“I knew you guys hit the bottle when I was gone,” he said, dragging his bag in from the garage. “How’s Sam?”
“Sam’s fine,” Weather said. “Throw your dirty clothes in the wash, don’t leave them on the floor.”
He threw dirty clothes in the wash, caught up on the family news, told them that he might have to go back to Range in the morning.
“I thought it was all done,” Weather said. “Channel Seven said that they’re ‘bracing for a tidal wave of federal officers.’ That’s a direct quote.”
“I’m not quite done,” Lucas said. “Had something come up . . .”
He explained as he stuck his head in the refrigerator. Lettuce and grapes. Cheese. A couple of bottles of beer. He picked up a carton of one-percent milk, opened it, tried to sneak a gulp or two, behind the cover of the open refrigerator door.
“I can make you an egg sandwich or an omelet,” Weather offered. “Or we have some instant oatmeal . . . Hey! Are you drinking out of the carton?”
A SHORT, RESTLESS NIGHT. He got up with Weather, in the early red light of dawn, dressed, ate cinnamon-and-spice instant oatmeal, kissed a noisy Sam, and headed downtown.
Del was waiting at the office. “What’s going on?”
“We’re going to the post office to see if we can find a package with a knife in it.”
He explained as they headed downtown in the Acura. “What I need from you is, I need you to walk the knife around to everybody. We need to get it photographed, we need to get it to the lab, we need to get the bloodwork going—we need to make sure that there even is some blood on it. I gotta head back north as soon as I talk to the lawyer. I really do need to know if there is blood on the knife before I get up there.”
“So I’ll walk it around,” Del said. They were headed into downtown St. Paul, snarled in the early-morning rush. “I figured out the McDonald’s thing, but we’ll need some surveillance cameras. And some auditors. Even then, it’s gonna be weird.”
“Tell me.” And Lucas thought, Should I really rush this thing on the kid? Maybe I should wait—but what if the kid disappears? Or somebody executes him? Or he kills himself?
Del was saying, “There’s this guy named Slattery who delivers bulk goods to the Bruins’ warehouse—the food. The warehouse is the central supply center for the stores in their chain. But this guy is also delivering for other stores in the area.
“Then there’s a guy named Jones who works in the warehouse. As the truck is unloaded, he zaps the cartons with a product-code reader and manually counts the cartons and enters the manual count in a computer. So then we have two records of the stuff coming in—the product code list and the hand count. But the thing is, they go through the same guy . . .”
“Jones,” Lucas said. Could the old man have been crazy enough to use his own great-grandson as an executioner? A high-school kid?
“Yeah. Jones. You listening?” Del looked at him suspiciously.
“I’m listening.”
“I know that hamburger theft isn’t one of your major interests, but I’ve been bustin’ my balls . . .”
“I’m listening,” Lucas said. “Really.” And if it really was Roger, why didn’t he take his fuckin’ raincoat? Lucas wondered. It was raining like a sonofabitch.
Del continued. “What happens, I think, is that Jones reads a box with his hand reader, but the box stays on the truck. He also adds the box to the hand count. So the box just seems to vanish.”
Lucas forced himself to pay attention: “Vanish.”
“Like smoke. The Bruins were looking for theft from the warehouse, or collusion between somebody in the warehouse and one of their own stores. Or, maybe, somebody just selling burgers without ringing them up, but the thefts were too big for that. Anyway, they were looking for something that happened after the burgers got to the warehouse. The thing is, the stuff never got inside.”
“A fuckin’ box of hamburger patties,” Lucas said. “Who gives a shit? What could be in it for this guy? Jones, Slattery, whoever . . .”
“They’re stealing enough for maybe a thousand sandwiches a week,” Del said.
“A thousand . . .”
“Yeah. And there must be a third guy, who’s running one of the McDonald’s stores outside the Bruins’ chain. Probably another privately owned store, and he’s selling the stuff off the books. I haven’t figured that out, and that’s why we need surveillance.”
“Still . . .”
“You paying attention?” Del was annoyed. “Your eyeballs are rolling around like a couple of fuckin’ marbles.”
“I’m paying attention.”
“We
’re talking a hundred and fifty or two hundred thousand a year—they’re also stealing buns, fries, the whole thing.”
Now he paid a little more attention. “Two hundred thousand dollars . . . in fuckin’ hamburgers?”
“Yeah. Why do you think the Bruins are so pissed? This is like a major heist, dude, and you’re sittin’ there pulling your weenie. I need some goddamn help.”
“All right. Let’s take it from the top . . .” He tried to stop thinking about Carl Walther and Roger Walther, one or the other of them running him up and down the hills of Duluth.
AT THE POST OFFICE, the superintendent of mails said that he didn’t care what the problem was, they weren’t getting any mail from him. “I’ll get the guy who’s sorting it—he ought to be just about done—and I’ll have him deliver it up there first. I’ll have him make a special stop. That’s as far as I can go.”
“Well, Jesus, we’re right here. And he’s right there,” Lucas said.
“Hey—we’re talking federal law. You ain’t coming in here and taking the mail out. You’re not even supposed to be here.”
“We’re cops,” Del said.
“I know—that’s the problem,” the superintendent said. “You’re not postal employees. See the sign?” He pointed. The sign on the wall said POSTAL EMPLOYEES ONLY.
Del said, “Next time you have a massacre, who you gonna call? A mailman?”
Lucas jumped in: “Wait, wait, wait . . . we’ll just follow the truck.”
THEY WOUND UP following a mail truck back through traffic to the BCA building.
“That was really helpful about the fuckin’ massacre,” Lucas said.
“Fuck the guy,” Dell said.
“You been in that hamburger place too long.”
“No shit.”
THE CARRIER, a cheerful man with an out-of-fashion brown ponytail, dumped twenty pounds of letters and cartons at the BCA mail-room, and said, “Have at it.”
There were only half a dozen candidates, and one of them, wrapped in what looked like grocery-bag paper, with six feet of Scotch tape, had Lucas’s name on it.
“Probably a bomb,” Del said.
“Wish you hadn’t said that,” Lucas said.
Del pulled on a vinyl glove and picked it up. “I’ll get the lab to unwrap it, and I’ll call you at your office. We oughta know in ten minutes,” he said.
31
A CHUNKY MAN in a suede sport coat was looking at an NFL schedule poster outside Lucas’s office; Chuck Miles, one of the state’s more competent attorneys.
“Chuck: good to see you. Come on in.”
Lucas took him into his office, sat him down, and explained the situation.
“ . . . so we have a witness who is providing us with material evidence, but we don’t know who she is. How do we prove we just didn’t make it all up?” Lucas asked.
“Okay. We can get an affidavit from you now, about what you know about the woman. What the witnesses up north said, about the hut she lived in, about when she called you, both times. What she said. About the computer and how that paid off. About where she called from, what she says about cutting this kid, about the knife. We specify in the affidavit that you have not looked at the kid to see if he was cut, nor have you taken any DNA from him. Then, we go look at him. If he’s been cut in the right area, on the left arm, and if the DNA from the knife is his, we might get the whole thing into court, especially since we’ve got independent corroborating evidence of this woman’s existence, in the shack. Plus, the witness from Catholic Charities who has actually seen her.”
“But you’re not sure we’ll get it in. Into court.”
Miles shook his head: “No. There are options, different approaches, possibilities. Some of it depends on what judge we get . . . But I can’t guarantee anything. I can guarantee that there’ll be an appeal, no matter what happens.”
“How about if we use the knife to push him into a plea? Say, cooperation on the spy ring, plus a plea of guilty to something, with our agreement that there might have been an element of self-defense in the killing. And, say, we don’t fuck with his mother, as long as she’s not shown to be directly involved.”
“Now that’s something we might pull off,” Miles said, brightening. “If we could offer him no more than a few years in the youthful offender lockup, until he was twenty-one, or twenty-five, plus cooperation . . . I can see a defense attorney buying that.”
“Of course, we might be giving a multiple murderer four years in prison, then turning him loose to do it again.”
“Life in the big city,” Miles said.
THE AFFIDAVIT TOOK an hour, Lucas dictating to a secretary with Miles looking over her shoulder, and asking questions. After getting the legal angles worked through, Lucas called Harmon with the FBI, and found him in Washington. “Getting people together. We’ve got the Duluth guys up there holding everything down. We’re sending in a counterespionage team to do the cleanup.”
“You sound a little more cheerful.”
“Yeah, well . . . against the odds, it became something.”
“About the kid . . .”
“If it’s the kid, we could probably crack him. Our interrogators could. That’s if he knows something. He’s the age where they’re easy to manipulate,” Harmon said.
“But you don’t want in on the criminal investigation? I mean like, today?”
“You’re going so well . . . keep going. I’ll tell the local guys you’re coming back.”
Del called from the lab:
“Yellow-handled switchblade in a plastic bag. The package was addressed with a computer-printed address label. She made the label with a piece of typing paper Scotch taped to the package, and the evidence guy here says we’re not going to get anything on her off the package, and he’s willing to bet we’re not going to get anything on her off the knife, either. She was pretty careful.”
“How about the blood?”
“It’s blood, all right. All gummy down in the grooves. We’ll have it typed before you get up there, and we’ll see if the kid has a blood type on record. You going right now?”
“Yup.”
“Call you on the way.”
“Hey, Del?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m really fascinated by that McDonald’s stuff.”
“Fuck you, pal.”
MORE CALLS. He arranged for a search warrant and called Dannie Carson, a BCA investigator who had been working in Brainerd on an old case involving the killing of a hooker, and asked her to meet him in Hibbing. “We’re gonna get some DNA evidence and look at a kid for murder,” he said.
He called the Hibbing police chief, explained about the phone call from the laptop woman, the knife, the search warrant, and the need for somebody to take a DNA sample.
“You sure it’s Carl? He always seemed like a pretty good kid to me,” Hopper said in a worried tone.
“He was over there, giving her a hug. He looked like her. If it’s not her kid, it’s somebody she knows pretty well.”
“Of course, it could all be bullshit, this call from the woman.”
“Yeah, it could be. But I don’t think so. The knife will tell us, the DNA. If you got a DNA guy handy . . .”
“We use the pathologist over at the hospital. Be on your ticket, though. He isn’t cheap.”
“Tell him today at two o’clock. And we’d like you to send a car along with us.”
And Lucas called Nadya: “Be ready to go.”
NOW THINGS WERE running: Lucas was out of the building, heading north again. Listening to Tom Petty and Mary Jane’s Last Dance, Lynyrd Skynyrd, That Smell. Cop songs. Closing-in music. Fast up I-35, fast through a hundred and fifty miles of aspen and birch and cattails and pine trees and small lakes with boats . . . cutting into Duluth, the big lake opening out below him, snatching Nadya off the blacktop at her hotel, heading north up into the Range . . .
“I think this is amazing,” Nadya said, when he picked her up.
“I th
ink so, too,” Lucas said. “But it feels right.”
DANNIE CARSON WAS a large woman, not fat, but big as a door: wide shouldered, wide hipped, like a female tackle. She was also intensely personable, and one of the best interrogators Lucas had ever met. Sympathy gushed out of her, and not many suspects could resist it.
She met him at the Hibbing police station: “What’re we doing?”
“Pick up the kid, bring him here, get him a lawyer. Look at his arm. If he shows any kind of scar, we arrest him on suspicion of murder and do the DNA test. Short and sweet.”
Hopper, the chief, said, “Is this the end of it?”
“Can’t tell. Still don’t know what happened to Roger.”
“Well, things are really pretty screwed up around here—Janet Walther’s pretty popular, and this guy up in Virginia . . .”
“Spivak.”
“Yeah, the TV is saying the case against him is really thin and that he was even assaulted by the Russians, much less helping them.”
“I’m gonna let the FBI worry about all of that,” Lucas said. “I’m just gonna worry about the kid.”
“The kid’s in school,” Hopper said. “I checked. I didn’t let on why, and told the principal to keep my call under her hat.”
“What is this hat?” Nadya asked.
AT TWO O’CLOCK, they headed for Janet Walther’s frame shop in a three-car parade—the chief, followed by Lucas, Nadya, and Dannie Carson in Lucas’s Acura, and a squad car with two cops. Walther was alone in her shop, and angry when she saw Lucas; Hopper took off his hat when they walked inside, and Nadya followed quietly behind.
“What do you want now?” Walther demanded.
“We’ve got a search warrant for your son,” Lucas said. “A warrant to search his person for bodily injuries, and to take a blood sample for DNA studies. We came to invite you to come with us. If you don’t wish to come with us, we’ll leave a police officer with you, to make sure you don’t try to warn Carl that we’re coming.”
Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15 Page 166
