Golden Prey

by John Sandford

  “That’d be Marshal Asshole, to you, Todd,” Lucas said.

  —

  THE ST. LOUIS MARSHALS arrested six people—the sheriff, four deputies, and Shirley McDonald. They’d be back, later, to get a state judge.

  After they put the cuffs on her, Shirley had started talking about being extorted by the Turners, and still hadn’t stopped when they pushed her into a federal car and sent her north. “Them fuckin’ Turners made me do it. Todd and Scott made me suck them off, too. Ask them about that. I’m only fifteen . . .”

  It all made an interesting recording, and since the marshals read her rights to her a half dozen times, and she talked anyway, it would all hold up in court.

  Before he got in the car, Lucas took a breath test, which showed a 0.01 BAC—about what a man would get if he rinsed his mouth with whiskey a half hour before he took the test. Which Lucas had done. That level implied no impairment whatever, in case a defense attorney should ask.

  —

  THE STING at Cooter’s had begun when a widower federal judge had run into the same trap. Turner and his son had decided he might be more useful in his capacity as a judge than in his potential to pay his way out, and made a deal: the judge agreed to give them three verdicts, any three that could conceivably be seen as reasonable, and nobody would talk about young girls in motels. Three verdicts in the right corporate cases could be worth a million dollars . . .

  But they’d misjudged the judge. As soon as he got back to St. Louis, he’d contacted the U.S. attorney and made a statement about the entrapment and blackmail. He’d admitted to having been alone in a room with a girl whose age he didn’t know. He thought she might be nineteen or twenty, he said, but he made no other excuses.

  Two days later, the St. Louis Marshals office was checking around for a rich-looking marshal with a decent backstory. They found Lucas.

  —

  THE FIVE arrested men rode north in a federal van, with two deputy marshals to drive and watch over them. Duffy, the chief deputy for the Eastern District of Missouri, rode with Lucas, in the comfort of the big Benz.

  “One day ought to do it on the paperwork, but we’ll need you back for depositions and so on,” Duffy said. “We appreciate you coming down. Our own people are too well known, couldn’t take the chance that Turner might recognize them. Anyway, don’t none of us got that slick veneer you actual rich guys got.”

  “It’s only a veneer,” Lucas said. “Underneath, I’m just another really, really good-looking yet humble working cop.”

  Duffy snorted and asked, “How’s your caseload?”

  “I’m still looking.” Duffy knew about Lucas’s circumstances: a freelance deputy marshal, slipped into the Marshals Service through nothing but pure, unalloyed political influence, wielded by Michaela Bowden, the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. Lucas had kept Bowden from being blown up at the Iowa State Fair the year before.

  He’d been a marshal for three months, and had gone through brief training at Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac from Washington, D.C., most of which hadn’t applied to him because of his special status. On the other hand, he really did have to know about the paperwork, which was ample.

  “There’s some interesting stuff out there, but not really to my taste,” Lucas told Duffy. “I’m looking for something hard. Something unusual. Something I can work at and would do some serious good.”

  Duffy said, “Huh.” He looked out the window at the countryside, damp, green, shrouded in darkness. A moment later he asked, “You ever hear of a guy named Garvin Poole?”

  “Don’t think so,” Lucas said.

  “No? Then let me tell you about him.”

  “Poole? Marvin?”

  “Garvin. Gar’s a good ol’ Tennessee boy . . . maybe killed ten or fifteen innocent people, including at least one six-year-old girl, just last week, and a Mississippi cop, sometime back, and God only knows how many guilty people,” Duffy said. “He’s smart, he’s likable, he’s good-lookin’. He once played in a pretty fair country band, and he’s got no conscience. None at all. He’s got friends who’d kill you for the price of a moon pie. Some people think he’s dead, but he’s not. He’s out there hiding and laughing at us. Yes, he is.”

  3

  MARGARET TRANE nearly ran over Lucas as she trotted out of the federal building, a solidly built cop in a hurry. She grabbed his jacket lapels and said, “Jesus, Davenport,” at the same instant Lucas grabbed her shoulders and kept her upright and said, “Easy, Maggie.”

  They backed away from each other and she said, “Hey. Been a while. Was that girl down in Missouri as young as they say?”

  “She was young, she says fifteen,” Lucas said. “Sort of horrifying, if you know what I mean.”

  “I do,” Trane said. She smiled up at him—they’d always had good chemistry, even when Lucas was Minneapolis’s top violent-crimes investigator and she was stuck in precinct investigations. They’d both moved on, Trane to Minneapolis Homicide, Lucas to Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and then to the U.S. Marshals Service. “I hear things have been a little tense up in the marshals’ office.”

  “Ah, you know. It’ll work out, eventually,” Lucas said.

  “You got Bowden behind you and she’s gonna be President. That oughta help.”

  “I try not to lean on that too hard,” Lucas said. “But . . . yeah.”

  “If you want to talk to some real cops, stop by Homicide. Happy to have you.”

  They chatted for another minute, spouses and kids, then Trane said she had to run, she had a conference call on a guy who was being bad in both Minneapolis and Denver. She jogged away and Lucas went on into the federal building.

  Talking to Trane had cheered him up. Because of the way he’d been appointed to the Marshals Service, he wasn’t the most popular guy in the place. He’d been dropped in from the top, a deputy U.S. marshal who sat in the Minneapolis office but worked independently and took no orders from anyone in Minneapolis, although he occasionally took recommendations and requests for help. His most direct contact was with a service bureaucrat in Washington named Russell Forte. He and Forte had met only briefly, and had gone to lunch, and Lucas had gotten the impression that Forte was the best kind of apparatchik: efficient, connected, more interested in results than in methods or style.

  So far, they’d gotten along.

  —

  LUCAS HAD an office on the fourth floor of the sorta-modern-looking Minneapolis federal building, down the hall from the U.S. marshal for the District of Minnesota and the other deputy marshals. The arrangement was complicated and one source of bad feelings on the part of a few deputies.

  The Marshals Service had a politically appointed U.S. marshal at the top of each of the ninety-four federal judicial districts. They were appointed much as federal judges were—nominated by the President, usually at the recommendation of a U.S. senator, and confirmed by the Senate. Below them were the civil service deputies, including a chief deputy, and below him, supervisory deputies, and below that, the regular deputy marshals.

  Lucas stood outside that normal bureaucratic pecking order; and some in the Minneapolis office thought he might be a spy. For whom, he had no idea, but that was the rumor.

  —

  IN ADDITION, there was Lucas’s private office, which had been, until recently, a windowless storage room. Still, it was private. The resentment was further exacerbated by the fact that he didn’t have to put up with the bureaucratic rigors of the other deputies, the bad hours, crappy assignments. He didn’t serve warrants, he didn’t transfer prisoners.

  On top of it all, he was personally rich and arrived at work in either a Mercedes-Benz SUV or a Porsche 911. A federal judge with whom he was friendly had suggested a modest American car would be more discreet, until he was better known inside the service.

  Lucas said, “Fuck ’em
if they can’t take a joke.”

  The judge had said, “It ain’t them who’s getting fucked, m’boy.”

  —

  THE UNEASINESS wasn’t confined to the other deputies: Lucas had wanted a good badge after leaving the BCA and had grabbed the first one offered. He really didn’t mind the temporary isolation—he thought that would break down in time—but he’d surprised himself with the feeling that he was seriously adrift.

  From his first day as a Minneapolis cop, he’d worked to understand his environment. He’d eventually understood Minneapolis–St. Paul and its population of bad people. If someone told him that an unknown X had murdered a known Y, he’d usually know a Z that he could talk to, to begin figuring out what had happened.

  That wasn’t always true, but it was true often enough to give him a clearance rate that nobody in the department could touch.

  When he’d moved to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, a statewide organization, he’d struggled toward the same kind of comprehensive understanding, but this time, of the entire state of Minnesota. He’d never gotten as comfortable with the state as he had with the metro area, but he’d worked at it. As part of that, he’d developed a database of shady individuals with whom he’d pounded out private understandings. He’d call, they’d talk; if they got in trouble themselves, Lucas would have a chat with a judge, as long as the trouble was minor.

  With the help of other agents, he’d eventually put together a roster of snitches with at least a couple of names in every single Minnesota county, and for larger cities, like Duluth or Rochester, he had an entire roll call. Included in the database were several dozen cops who formed a web of personal relationships tight enough that Lucas could get help anywhere in the state, at any time.

  Even in his new job as a deputy marshal, he was taking calls from BCA agents who wanted into his database: “Who do you have in Alexandria who might know about the chicle coming across from Canada?”

  Didn’t work that way with the Marshals Service. His jurisdiction was the United States of America, including the various territories. There was no possibility of comprehending it, in any real way: he’d fallen into a morass. He could call for help from the FBI, the DEA, the Border Patrol, all the alphabet agencies enforcing the nation’s laws, but he didn’t know the individuals. He couldn’t count on them—they were just voices on the far end of a cell phone call, and would get around to helping him as their own schedules permitted. He didn’t know the bad guys at all, or who were the baddest.

  He was, as his wife, Weather, had said, out there on his lonesome.

  And he didn’t understand the “out there.”

  —

  HAL ODER, the marshal for the district, resented Lucas’s independent status. Lucas took no orders or assignments from Oder, and, to Oder, had looked like a job threat. That hadn’t eased, even though Lucas made it clear that he had no interest at all in Oder’s job.

  “I hate the shit you have to put up with,” Lucas told the other man. “I wouldn’t do it. I’d quit first. All I want to do is hunt. The bureaucratic bullshit is the reason I quit the BCA.”

  “Just hunt.”

  “That’s right.”

  “If you screw up, it’ll make this office look bad,” Oder had said.

  “I might screw up, but if I do, I’ll make it clear that it has nothing to do with you or your office, that my people are in Washington, not in Minnesota,” Lucas had said.

  “Who’s your contact in Washington?”

  “Russell Forte,” Lucas said.

  “Don’t know him,” Oder said. “Are you sure he’ll be happy to take the responsibility if you mess up?”

  “Well, he is a bureaucrat. You’d know more than me about the likelihood of his taking the blame.”

  Oder had been tapping on a legal pad with a mechanical pencil. He thought about Lucas’s comment, then said, “Look, Lucas, I know what happened when you quit the BCA, and I’m up-to-date with what happened down in Iowa. You saved Mrs. Bowden’s life and you got a badge because of it. The way it looks, she’s going to be President, and I don’t want to fight with a friend of Bowden. But I feel like I’m stuck in the middle. I don’t want to get blamed for things I don’t do. But when you fuck up, and you will, it’s inevitable with the job, I’ll get blamed. I hate that.”

  “I won’t be a problem,” Lucas promised. “You’ll hardly ever see me around the place.”

  —

  ODER HAD seemed to accept that, but, in the way of bureaucrats, he let it be known that Davenport was not really one of us.

  In an effort to further smooth things over, Lucas had offered to help out in unusual situations. The Minnesota Marshals office was perpetually short-handed, and that was how he’d wound up as a rich-guy decoy in Missouri.

  Lucas and another deputy had also run down an embezzler who’d skipped his date in Minneapolis federal court in favor of a new name and a new home in Idaho, and had recovered a chunk of the embezzled cash from an Idaho safe-deposit box, which had made everyone look good.

  He’d helped locate, with his Minnesota database, a redneck who didn’t like federal wildlife laws and had decided to eliminate wolves and eagles in his personal hunting grounds. The guy’d been busted by the Fish and Wildlife Service, but had forfeited a $2,500 bond rather than show up for trial in federal court.

  He’d told acquaintances that the feds would take him when they “pried my cold dead hands” off his black rifle, and had suggested that he was polishing up a special bullet for the U.S. attorney. Lucas and two other deputies had hauled his ass out of a bar in Grand Marais, blubbering about his rights.

  They were good arrests . . . but not what Lucas had been looking for.

  Still, he’d been useful enough that he and Carl Meadows, the chief deputy, had begun taking an occasional lunch together.

  —

  THE DAY AFTER he returned from St. Louis, a bright and cool autumn Monday in Minneapolis, he and Meadows walked over to the food trucks on Second Avenue and bought brats and Lucas told the other man about the Missouri sting.

  “That’s all good,” Meadows said, when Lucas finished, “but have you found anything to dig into? You’ve been sitting on your ass for a while.”

  “I know, but I might be on to something now,” Lucas said. “Have you ever heard of a guy named Garvin Poole?”

  Meadows frowned and looked down at his brat, as though it might hold an answer. “The name rings a bell, back a while, but I can’t place it. Maybe a Southerner? He was on our Top Fifteen list for a while?”

  “Yeah. Everything I know came out of a conversation with Jim Duffy down in St. Louis, and what I fished out of the online records this morning. Poole was an old-style holdup man down in the Southeast—Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, North Florida. Came out of Tennessee originally, but didn’t operate much there, at least not after he did four years in a Tennessee prison. He dropped out of sight five years ago. He was tentatively identified in an armored car robbery in Chattanooga, and nothing after that. Lot of his pals have been busted and questioned, but they all agree that he’s gone. Nobody knows where. Lot of people thought he was dead. Then, ten days ago, a dope counting house down in Biloxi was knocked over. The robbers killed five people, including a six-year-old girl.”

  “Yeah, jeez, I heard about that. That’s ugly,” Meadows said.

  “One of the victims apparently got off a shot before he was killed,” Lucas said. “The crime scene people found a few drops of blood, ran it through the DNA database, and got a hit—they think it was Poole.”

  “Think? DNA’s supposed to be for sure,” Meadows said.

  “Not this time,” Lucas said. “The DNA match came from the armored car robbery in Chattanooga. The truck had internal cameras that the robbers couldn’t get at. The video showed one of the robbers banging his forearm against a door frame when he was clim
bing out of the truck with a bag of cash. They got some skin off the frame, ran the DNA. They didn’t get a hit, but believe it was Poole on the basis of height and body type and the robbery technique. They couldn’t see his face, and he was wearing gloves, so there’s no fingerprints, no definitive ID. Both drivers were shot to death with .40 caliber handguns, as were the five people killed in Biloxi. Poole favors .40 caliber Glocks.”

  “Same as we carry.”

  “Yeah. Well, you, anyway.” Lucas carried his own .45, which was against regulations, but nobody had tried to argue with him about that.

  “Any federal warrants on him?” Meadows asked.

  “Old ones, but still good. Nine years ago, he and a guy named Charles Trevino robbed a mail truck out of St. Petersburg,” Lucas said. “The truck was carrying a bunch of registered mail packages after a stamp-collectors convention. Trevino was busted a year later when he tried to unload some of the stamps. He said Poole was the other guy, and there was a third guy, whom he didn’t know, who did the research and the setup. The U.S. attorney filed an indictment on Poole and a warrant was issued, but he hasn’t been picked up since then.”

  “Sounds like a smart guy who works with other smart guys, if they spotted a particular mail truck full of old stamps,” Meadows said.

  “Apparently he is a smart guy, besides being a cold-blooded killer,” Lucas said. “That’s one of the reasons he interests me. That and the little girl.”

  “You’ve got a daughter, right?” Meadows asked.

  “Three of them,” Lucas said. “One’s going to college, one’s about to go, and I’ve got a five-year-old. A son, too.”

  “Huh. Here’s a change of direction,” Meadows said. “You hear that Sandy Park got hit by a bicyclist?”

  Sandra Park was another deputy marshal. Lucas had nodded to her in the hallway.

  “What? A bicycle?”

  “Yeah. Jerk on one of those fat-tire mountain bikes, rolling down a hill, blew through a stop sign. Sandy was out jogging and got T-boned. Anyway, she’s not hurt bad, but one ankle and one knee are messed up. She’s going to be off them for a couple of weeks. She’s good with computers. If you need some backup, she knows all the law enforcement systems inside and out. I can tell her to give your questions a priority . . . if you need that,” Meadows said.