Wicked Prey

by John Sandford

  Lucas said, "Let me ask you this-how'd the caller know you were looking for Cohn?"

  "We didn't make any secret about it," she said. "We put out posters, we sent some guys to Birmingham to look up his old acquaintances, his relatives, dear old Mom. They got some TV time, it was sort of a thing, you know, a modern Jesse James. Got some attention down there."

  "You want him pretty bad," Lucas said.

  "Yes, we do."

  "Send me what you got," Lucas said. "I'll spread it around to the TV stations."

  "Ah-don't do that," Lily said. "He's very careful. You could almost call that his MO. If he suspected we were onto him, he'd be gone in a minute."

  The problem, she said, was that New York really had no solid proof that he'd been involved in the armored car robbery. They had DNA that they believed had come out of the struggle between the cops and the shooter, but they didn't know whether it was Cohn's DNA, or DNA from somebody else in the gang.

  "Cohn would have done the killing, if he thought he needed to, but we don't know that he was the shooter. He was there, but maybe didn't pull the trigger. Then, we think we found the place where they got together before the robbery, a motel out in Queens, but they burned it down, so we got nothing. No DNA, nothing."

  "Burned it down?"

  "Yeah. Fire guys say somebody doused the place with a mix of gasoline and motor oil, and torched it," Lily said. "Fire kills DNA…"

  "I know. But it seems kind of extreme," Lucas said.

  "That's Cohn. He's Mr. Extreme. He did three years in prison in Alabama, a newbie, but he was running the place by the time he left."

  "So if you don't want us to spread his face around, what do you want?" Lucas asked.

  "We want to send you a bunch of photos," Lily said. "They're twelve years old, but we Photoshopped them to age him, and we added the beard. We thought some of your guys could walk them around to the local hotels and motels, see if you can spot him. And then ' see what he's doing."

  "You mean, let him take a shot at another armored car?"

  "You wouldn't have to wait until the last second," she said, but her tone was rich with suggestion.

  "But they'd have to be making a move…"

  "Yeah, well. Life in the big city, huh?" Lily said. "The thing is, if he knows he put some DNA on somebody, here in New York, he'll try to shoot his way free."

  "You want us to kill him," Lucas said.

  "I didn't say that. I said, he killed two of our guys, and probably three more people, along the way," Lily said.

  Lucas thought about it for a moment, then said, "Send the stuff. I'll get it to the people who need it."

  "Lucas ' thank you. And stay in touch."

  ***

  "Interesting little conversation," Del said.

  ***

  Carol routed through a call from Dan Coates, his opposite number in Wisconsin. Lucas filled him in on Justice Shafer. "We sent the file across the river, to the sheriffs' departments between us and Eau Claire, but it'd help if you goosed them along a little. You know, so you can deflect the blame when something goes wrong."

  "Who'd point the finger at us? If something went wrong?" Coates asked. He was crunching on something like a carrot or a celery stick.

  "Listen, if something goes wrong at the convention, with a seven-hundred-and-fifty-yard shot from a.50-cal, everybody will point the finger at you. And at me, and every other local cop. Think about it."

  "I'll call everybody," Coates said. "How much you want to put on the Vikings?"

  "Screw the Vikings. They're a bunch of criminals," Lucas said. "Not that Green Bay won't stink the place up."

  "Let me tell you…"

  They were discussing the possibilities when Del yawned and stood up and said, "I'm gonna go see that Arab dude in the sandwich shop."

  Lucas took the phone away from his mouth: "Careful."

  "Think about a disguise," Del said. "If you go out on the street." From the outer office, Carol called, "Why don't you drive the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile? Nobody would suspect."

  Lucas said, " Del ' shut the door on the way out, okay?"

  ***

  Del didn't shut the door. Carol propped herself in it, and when Lucas got off the phone, asked, "Are you serious about going out there?"

  "Yeah. There are about a million people wandering around out there, and I'd like to go out and see it," Lucas said.

  She nodded: "Listen, I was looking at National Geographic'"

  "Didn't know you were an intellectual'"

  "… and one of the guys in it, one of the photographers, this war photographer, looked like you. Attitudinally if you know what I mean. If you got some Levi's and gym shoes and, like, a long-sleeved shirt and rolled the sleeves way up over your elbows, and messed up your hair, and put some convention credentials around your neck, and borrowed a camera bag from Dan Jackson and a couple of cameras-you could make it as a photographer."

  Lucas shook his head. "Pretending that you're a reporter tends to piss people off."

  "Don't. Wear your official ID," Carol said. "Who looks at it? They just see the tags."

  "I'll think about it," Lucas said.

  She shrugged. "Do what you want-but you could look like a photographer."

  ***

  He thought about Lily for a while, and the Cohn gang, and then he went on the Internet and looked at pictures of war photographers. Carol was right, he decided; he could be a photographer. Maybe. He called Jackson, said he was coming down for wardrobe and makeup.

  On the way out of the office, he told Carol to print the pictures of Justice Shafer, and of Brutus Cohn, when they came in. "Call Minneapolis and St. Paul and Bloomington and get a list of firearms dealers who might be dealing dirty. Big enough so that their names would be around: somebody that a bad guy could find if he blew into town."

  "You want them rated by their dirt quotient," she suggested. "Yeah. I'll go chat with them. Give me something to do," he said.

  ***

  Lucas had a small Nikon single-lens reflex digital camera, given to him for Christmas by Weather, along with a couple of zoom lenses. He used it to take pictures of the kids. When Jackson backed out of the equipment closet with two Nikon cameras, and an old Domke cloth camera bag and three lenses, he knew more or less how they worked.

  "What we're gonna do," Jackson said, peeling a strip of black gaffer tape off a roll, "is we're gonna tape out the Nikon and the D2x logos, which some war guys do to reduce visibility, you know? Then, not many people will know that you're shooting older cameras."

  "I'm not going to be shooting them much," Lucas said.

  "Gotta look like it, though," Jackson said. "Do take a few shots, you might like it. The other thing is, make your shirt kinda military. Black, or olive green, with the sleeves rolled up. Military's sort of photo-trendy."

  "What do I do if somebody asks me who I'm with?" Lucas asked.

  "I just keep moving and say, "BCA," and they'll nod like they know who it is," Jackson said. "Sounds sort of like BBC, NBC, CBS, ABC."

  "Maybe I oughta wear white socks," Lucas suggested.

  "Maybe you oughta take it seriously," Jackson said. "You could get your ass kicked, if somebody took you the wrong way."

  "Lots of cops around…"

  Jackson looked up. "You know, one way you'd be safe is, wear a police uniform. Nobody'll fuck with you. Nobody'll talk to you, either, other than to say hello."

  "This is better," Lucas said, peering through the camera's view-finder. "I'm looking pretty good here."

  "Your hair is way too combed," Jackson said. "You gotta get some Brylcreem or something, get some hair spiked up. Wear jeans. And you gotta scuff them up-you're way too neat. Way too neat. You gotta look like you slept in the jeans. Every time I see you in jeans ' What do you do? Do you dry-clean your jeans?"

  "No, I don't dry-clean my jeans," Lucas said.

  "Then you iron them," Jackson said.

  "The housekeeper irons them, sometimes," Lucas admitted.r />
  "Irons your jeans?" He was appalled.

  "Hey'"

  "Sorry'"

  "You're sorta getting into this," Lucas said.

  "Well, you know, it's interesting," Jackson said. "Carol was right: you do sorta look like a conflict photographer. So: let me show you how to handle the camera. It's like shooting on the range, very similar to a gun…"

  Del called during the lecture, from the Middle East sandwich shop, and talking around a gyro, said, "They got a phone on the counter here, no long distance company, so they let anybody use it. They got no idea who called you, but they say they remembered one guy yelling into it, and Carol told me the guy who left the message was yelling, but this yelling guy was in a wheelchair."

  "That's a relief," Lucas said. He hung up and asked Jackson, "You got any lighter lenses? This lens is big as my dick."

  "You wish."

  Chapter 3

  Jenkins and Shrake were chipping golf balls at a cup in a corner of the atrium, using an old MacGregor eight iron that had been in the evidence room since sometime in the eighties. Shortly after the turn of the millennium, somebody had gotten tired of looking at it and had thrown it away, and Jenkins rescued it from a trash can.

  When they hit the ball, it would go "chock," and then "chink" if it hit the glass at all, or "tock" if it hit the wall's baseboard.

  Lucas watched for a minute, then said, "I need an assistant."

  Shrake, without looking up from the ball, said, "Take Jenkins. He's a born assistant." He chipped it and the ball clinked off the side of the glass.

  "Take both of them," said a dark-haired woman from the DNA lab. She was sitting at a table with a New York Times and an egg-salad sandwich. "That clinking sound is driving me crazy. It's like water dripping on my forehead."

  Shrake said to Lucas, "I've got a date. If I go out with you, God only knows when we'll get back. Jenkins ain't doing shit."

  "Not entirely true," Jenkins said.

  Shrake said to Jenkins, "I'll cancel your debt on this game, today's game, if you go with him."

  Lucas asked Shrake, "You're not still dating Shirley Knox?"

  "Yeah, he is," Jenkins said. "He's in love."

  "Aw, for Christ's sakes, Shrake, she's in the Mafia," Lucas said.

  Shrake chipped again, but this time missed the cup entirely, and the ball tocked against the baseboard. "You made me jerk at the ball," he said.

  "Honest to God, it's driving me nuts," the woman said. "I can't stand that sound."

  "She's not in the Mafia," Shrake said. "I asked her. She said no, she wasn't, and I believe her."

  Lucas said to Jenkins, "He's lost his grip. She's in the fuckin' Mafia."

  "His grip was never that good in the first place," Jenkins said.

  "Have you tried talking to him about it?" Lucas asked.

  "I did. I says, "Shrake, the chick is in the Mafia," but then he says the woman could suck a golf ball through a water hose. So-how do I answer that?"

  "Aw, for Christ's sakes," the DNA woman said, "I heard that. Am I invisible or something?"

  Jenkins turned to her and said, "Shut up." Then to Shrake, "Cancel today's debt and half of the rest and I'll go with Davenport."

  "Done," Shrake said, and Jenkins asked Lucas, "Where're we going?"

  "See some gun guys," Lucas said.

  "Thank God," said the woman with the egg-salad sandwich.

  ***

  They took Jenkins's new Ford CVPI, for which he'd had to get a special authorization from the head of the agency. "I can't believe you bought another one of these things. It's like riding in a Boston Whaler. You'd lose a drag race to a John Deere," Lucas said.

  "Not once I get this baby rolling," Jenkins said, and, "You won't see anybody doing moonshiner turns with one of those cheap-ass front-wheel drives. The tranny would be all over the street. This baby…" He patted the dashboard. "Which way we going?"

  ***

  The first stop was a shop on Arcade at East Seventh, a hole-in-the-wall with a hand-painted steel sign that said, "Terry's Sports." Inside the front window, behind a steel mesh screen, was a pump twelve-gauge shotgun with the butt cut down to a pistol grip.

  "Seven-Eleven special," Jenkins said, as they walked past it.

  "I could never figure out why it's a federal crime to saw the barrel off a shotgun, but it's okay to cut off the butt," Lucas said. "Same effect-you can carry it under your jacket."

  "Lawyers," Jenkins said. "They make laws, they got no idea."

  ***

  They rattled the door and the owner buzzed them in; the shop smelled of cigarette smoke and gun-cleaning solvent. Terry was a nervous, dried-out man of fifty, the fingers of his right hand stained amber with nicotine. He nodded when they came in, recognized them as cops, and said, "Officers."

  "How much you want for the cop killer in the window?" Jenkins asked, getting the interview off on the right foot.

  "Self-defense gun," Terry said with a placating smile, showing teeth as yellow as his fingers. "Sell them mostly to women."

  "Right," Lucas said. He took the photos of Justice Shafer and Brutus Cohn out of his pocket, unfolded them, with Cohn's picture on top. "You seen this guy?"

  Terry looked at the picture for a long five seconds, then shook his head. "Can't say as I have."

  "How about this guy?" Lucas shuffled the papers, and put the Shafer head shot on top.

  Terry looked at it for a couple of seconds, then an extra wrinkle appeared among the set on his forehead. "What'd he do?"

  "Never mind that," Jenkins said. "You seen him?"

  "I did," Terry admitted. "About a week ago. He was here maybe twenty minutes. I didn't think he was gonna buy anything, and he didn't."

  "Was he looking for anything in particular?" Lucas asked.

  "He was looking for some.50-cal rounds in bronze," Terry said. "I told him I could get it, good lathe-cut stuff. He asked how much, and I said, "Eighty bucks for ten rounds," and he said that was a little high. Then he looked at a Bushmaster Mbled, and went on his way. Haven't seen him since."

  "Didn't buy any ammo?" Lucas asked.

  "Nope. Didn't buy a thing," Terry said.

  Lucas said, "We're local guys, and I gotta tell you, you'd be better off dealing with us if you're not telling the truth. The Secret

  Service and the ATF are chasing all over looking for this guy. With the convention in town, I don't have to tell you why. You don't want to be the one who sold him some ammo and then get caught lying about it."

  "Didn't sell him anything, with Jesus as my witness," Terry said, holding up his right hand as though taking an oath. He looked satisfactorily worried.

  Lucas nodded. "All right. Gonna have to talk to the ATF though, so you'll probably be hearing from them. Maybe the Secret Service."

  "How much you want for the cop killer in the window?" Jenkins asked again.

  "Six hundred dollars," Terry said. " Lot of handwork in a self-defense gun. There is a police discount."

  ***

  Out on the street, Jenkins said, "Ten percent. I'd almost be willing to do it, to get the piece off the streets, but the little cockroach would make another one."

  "First stop, and Justice Shafer is right there," Lucas said. "That's a hell of a coincidence."

  "That happened to me one time," Jenkins said. "One-stop shopping."

  "When did it happen to you?" Lucas asked.

  "Well, it didn't exactly happen to me, but it happened to a guy I knew," Jenkins said.

  "Never happened to me," Lucas said.

  Back in the car, he got on the phone to Dan Jacobs at the security committee. "I don't want to yank your weenie when everybody else is, but I've got some news about your pal Justice Shafer."

  Lucas told him about Terry's, and Jacobs said, "That's pretty interesting. The Secret Service and the ATF are doing research on him, down in Oklahoma, and they're getting worried. Some of these gang guys say Shafer's never been accepted because he's sort of a pussy-never proved himse
lf."

  "Uh-oh."

  "I'll call them with this. They'll send a guy around to talk to ' Terry?"

  ***

  Their second stop was a two-man weapons outlet in a warehouse district in Eagan, south of the Twin Cities core, a concrete-block building filled with hunting knives, compound bows, crossbows, samurai and fantasy swords, a barrel half-full of Louisville Slugger baseball bats, a shelf of lead-weighted fish-whackers, and a rack of used guns; but mostly knives. To one side, a customer in camo cargo pants was methodically pounding a six-inch target with carbon-fiber arrows, on a four-lane archery range.

  The two owners, who were brothers, named Jenkins-they agreed with Jenkins that they weren't related-both checked the photographs, and swore they'd never seen either man. Lucas asked, "What's the advantage of the crossbow over the compound bow?"

  The customer, who was shooting a compound bow, said over his shoulder, "You don't have to know nothing to shoot a crossbow."

  Jenkins asked one of the Jenkins brothers, "If I were to ask you where I could get a switchblade, you wouldn't know, would you?"

  The Jenkins brother looked puzzled: "Well, sure. Right here. What do you want?" He walked down the counter and tapped the top of a case. Inside, a half-dozen switchblades nestled on red velvet.

  Jenkins was taken aback: "Switchblades are legal?"

  "Well, sure, in Minnesota," Jenkins said. "You can order them on the Internet."

  "I didn't know that," Jenkins said. "Is there a police discount?"

  ***

  The fourth and fifth dealers hadn't seen either Cohn or Shafer, but the sixth one, their last stop of the day, had seen Shafer. The dealer, Bob Harper, worked out of his house. "He said he'd heard of me down in Oklahoma, a boy named Dan Oaks outa Norman. He thought maybe I'd have some premium.50-cal, but I didn't. Wouldn't have sold it to him anyway."