Lucas Davenport Novels 6-10

by John Sandford

  “We gotta get off the street,” LaChaise said.

  “I know, I know.” Martin looked at the door, shook his head. “No way we’re going through that. And the garage door will be locked. We could try pulling the fire escape down.”

  “The whole city would see us climbing up there,” LaChaise said. Then: “Run downstairs and see if there’s anybody in the laundromat.”

  Martin nodded, trotted down the stairs, fought the jammed door for a moment, then disappeared outside. A second later he was back. He shoved the door shut and called up, “Nobody.”

  LaChaise crushed one of the boxes, pushed others in front of the door, until he had a clear patch of wall.

  “What’re you doing?” Martin asked, hustling up the stairs.

  “This,” LaChaise said. He hit the wall with the claw side of the hammer. A square foot of old plaster cracked and sprayed out, showing the laths beneath.

  “Jesus, sounds like dynamite,” Martin said, looking back down the stairs.

  “Nobody to hear us,” LaChaise said. “And Harp don’t come up this way, so he won’t see it.” He hit the wall again, a third time and a fourth. “Why don’t you go down to the bottom and keep an eye out. This could take a few minutes.”

  LA CHAISE BROKE A six-inch hole through the wall, alternately beating it with the head of the hammer, smashing it, then digging the hole out with the claw. When the hole was big enough, he reached through and popped the locks on the door. They pushed inside, and found an empty apartment.

  “Nobody around,” Martin said, after a quick reconnaissance. “But his car’s downstairs. The Continental. Maybe he ran out to the store.”

  “Give us some breathing space,” LaChaise said. “We gotta be ready, though. Shouldn’t cook nothin’ until we got him.”

  Sandy had followed Martin through the apartment. The place had once been four tiny apartments, she thought, re-modeled into one big one. A hallway divided the new unified apartment exactly in half—that would have been the old main entry hall.

  The place felt empty. More than that. Vacated. She looked in the refrigerator: it was nearly bare. She stepped back down the hallway and looked into the master bedroom—she’d peeked in when they first entered, but this time, she pushed in and looked around. A small leather suitcase was lying empty at the end of the bed. The apartment was cold, she noticed. She went back to the living room and checked the thermostat. It was set at fifty-five.

  She said, “I think they went on a trip.”

  “Huh?” LaChaise looked at her. “Why?”

  “Well, there’re holes in the closet where they took a whole bunch of clothes out at the same time. And there’s a suitcase sitting on the floor like they decided to take a different one, but didn’t put the first one back. And the thermostat’s set at fifty-five, like you’d turn it down before you went somewhere.”

  “Huh,” said Martin, nodding. “It feels like they left.”

  Martin noticed the two telephone answering machines, sitting side by side. “He’s got two answering machines,” he said. “I wonder if he left a message.”

  He picked up one phone, and dialed the number posted on the other: the phone rang twice, then a man’s voice said, “Leave a message.” Nothing there. He hung up, picked up the second phone and dialed the first. And Harp’s voice said, “We’re outa here. Back on the twenty-sixth or so. I’ll check the messages every day.”

  “He’s gone,” Martin said to LaChaise. “He says they’re gone until the twenty-sixth.”

  LaChaise made him redial, listened to the message, then looked at Martin with a broad grin. “Goddamn. We landed on our feet,” he said, when he’d hung up. He looked around the apartment: “This place is six times better than the other one. This is great. And we got a Continental. A fuckin’ luxury car . . .” He started to laugh, and whacked Martin on the back. Even Martin managed to crack a smile.

  ROUX AND THE mayor met Lucas in Roux’s office, and heard about the laughing incident.

  “I didn’t believe it was me, until I saw the tape,” Lucas said. “I don’t know why we were laughing. We just about had a goddamned disaster on our hands, and instead, it was all done with. I guess that’s why.” The explanation sounded lame.

  “The St. Paul cop getting killed—that’s not a disaster?” the mayor asked.

  “We didn’t know the cop was dead. And we thought we were going to get a whole goddamned family shot up. When Butters ran in there, when he blew through that door, I thought we were out of luck.”

  “The TV people are wondering why there weren’t enough people out there in the first place. Enough to take him as soon as he showed,” the mayor said.

  “Normally, it would have been plenty. Except that he saw us coming and he had a machine gun. And he didn’t care if he died. All that—that changes everything. We’re lucky only one guy got killed; it could have been three or four. If he’d had some combat experience, he might’ve waited until the entry team was halfway into the house, and then took them on at close range.”

  “Anyway, that’s all St. Paul’s problem,” Roux said. “And as far as Lucas is concerned, the laughing thing, I think I can clear it out.”

  The mayor’s eyebrows went up. “How?”

  Roux said, “You know Richard Small—TV3? He was on the stakeout last night. He wouldn’t leave, and Lucas let him keep his shotgun. I talked to him this morning and he figures Lucas and Del are his war buddies now. I’ll call him about the laughing incident, and why they were doing it—out of relief, or hysteria, and how unfair this is, some horseshit like that. He just about runs TV3. If he goes on the air with another perspective, we can turn it around. And he’ll do it. When I talked to him this morning, he was still jacking shells in and out of the shotgun.”

  The mayor looked from Lucas to Roux. “Do it,” he said, nodding. “Emphasize the fairness thing, and how he’d be setting the record straight on his combat buddy.”

  And to Lucas: “You gotta keep your ass down and out of sight.”

  “I’m trying,” Lucas said.

  HOMICIDE HAD BEEN turned into a war plans room: file cabinets and desks pushed into corners, two tables shoved together with a six-foot plastic map of the Twin Cities spread across it. Sherrill was there, wearing her .357 in a belt clip.

  “You okay?” Lucas asked.

  “Yeah. We got the arrangements going on Mike. I’m all cried out.”

  “We got one of them,” Lucas said.

  “Not the one I want, not yet,” Sherrill said, shaking her head. “We got Kupicek’s guy. I want the third man, the one we don’t know yet.”

  Anderson wandered in, spotted Lucas, and stepped over: “I got a lot of new paper, if you want it.”

  They talked about the paper for fifteen minutes, what the Tennessee cops were doing, the Wisconsin cops, about the death of Elmore Darling. “We’ve got more pictures of Sandra Darling, we’ll put those out. But I don’t know, I don’t know if she’s with this LaChaise, or we’re gonna find her dead in a ditch somewhere.”

  “She’s with him,” Sherrill said.

  “Why do you think that?” Lucas asked.

  “I don’t know. I just think she’s with them. If they were going to kill them, why not kill both of them? I bet she’s screwing LaChaise. Or maybe the second guy. I bet she helped set up the funeral home thing with the second guy . . .”

  “Bonnie and Clyde,” Lucas said.

  “More like Dumber and Dumbest,” said Sherrill.

  LA CHAISE, MARTIN AND Sandy Darling were riveted by the images on the television. The pictures came up from a winter street, with a woman in a long wool coat and fur hat talking into a microphone.

  “. . . rushed the wounded officer to the hospital, but he died seconds after arrival. As that was going on, Chief Davenport and Lieutenant Selle were seen laughing as they stood over the body of the attacker . . .”

  Her voice rolled on over a videotape, taken from a high angle, a uniformed cop and a guy in street clothes, sta
nding over what looked like a pile of clothes in the street. Had to be Butters. And the cops were laughing, no doubt about it.

  “. . . police were refusing to disclose the identity of the officer or officers who actually shot Butters, saying that information would be available after LaChaise and his gang members are caught, but nobody has denied that Deputy Chief Lucas Davenport took part in the gunfight and was himself wounded. At the moment, a police spokeswoman said, the threat to the officers’ families will not allow full disclosure . . .”

  “Look at the fuckers,” LaChaise said.

  Martin frowned as the tape of Davenport and Selle was run again. The picture seemed wrong. “They don’t look too happy,” he said.

  “They’re laughing,” LaChaise shouted at him. “They’re laughing.”

  LaChaise paced in front of the TV, snarling at it, beating his hands together, palms open, the angry claps snapping into the room. He went to the window shades, looked down at the street, listening, then stalked back to the television.

  “That cop who was laughing. They said it was Davenport, right? The guy on our list?”

  As if to answer his question, the television reporter said, “The chain of events started last night, when Chief Davenport put a surveillance team on the home of his daughter by TV3 correspondent Jennifer Carey, who now lives with TV3 executive vice-president Richard Small . . .”

  She went through the story, ending with the tape loop of Davenport and Selle laughing over Butters’s body.

  “We’re gonna mow those fuckers down,” LaChaise brayed at Martin.

  Martin said, “Dick, we gotta take care. We can’t go off half-cocked, if we want to get anything done.”

  LaChaise stalked around the apartment, kicking walls, then looked at Sandy: “Why’n the fuck don’t you do something useful? Go cook something.”

  She got up, wordlessly, and went to the kitchen and started looking through the cupboards. She found canned food, but not much else. She dumped a couple of cans of Dinty Moore beef stew in a pot, put it on the stove and started a pot of coffee.

  “If we’re gonna stay here for more than a couple of hours, we’ll need food,” Sandy said, as she brought the stew out to the living room. The men were on the couch, still watching the television. As they ate, a TV3 television reporter was delivering a eulogy on the dead cop. He was cut off in mid-sentence. An anchorman came up, quivering with the urgency of his message.

  “In Wisconsin, Dunn County sheriff’s deputies raided the home of Dick LaChaise’s sister-in-law and her husband, Sandy and Elmore Darling. According to first reports, Elmore Darling was found shot to death in the kitchen of the couple’s rural home, and his wife, Sandy, is missing.”

  A five-year-old snapshot of Sandy Darling filled the screen. Sandy screamed, “Elmore.”

  LaChaise grinned. “You put on a few pounds,” he said, pointing at the picture.

  She had her hands to her face: “They killed Elmore.” She looked from Martin to LaChaise. “My God. They said Elmore’s dead. They killed Elmore. Elmore’s dead.”

  “Could be bullshit,” Martin said, his voice even, almost uninterested. “They maybe got him in jail. Don’t want anybody to know.”

  “I don’t think so,” LaChaise said. The TV anchor was going on, then Martin said, “Guess not.”

  “No, no . . .” Sandy said, riveted to the screen.

  “You didn’t much like him anyway,” LaChaise said.

  Tears started down her cheeks: “I didn’t want him dead. He wasn’t supposed to die.”

  LaChaise shrugged. “Shit happens.”

  Martin: “I wonder if the cops killed him?” His voice was flat, with no real emotion; he was only curious.

  LaChaise thought for a minute, then said, “Must’ve. Who else would do it?”

  He looked at Sandy, who backed away from the TV and collapsed in a chair. “Nobody was gonna kill Elmore,” she said. And after a minute, “Who’d kill Elmore?”

  STADIC WAS WALKING down the hall to his apartment, shell-shocked, his mind running at two hundred miles an hour. He was digging for his keys when the cell phone chirped at him. He pulled it out of his pocket. “Yeah.”

  LaChaise, without preamble, asked, “What happened to Butters? And Elmore?”

  “Jesus Christ, where are you?” Stadic said, his voice hushed. “You know what’s going on?”

  “We’re at a friend’s,” LaChaise said. “We seen it all on TV. Who killed Butters?”

  “Davenport, of course. I told you . . .”

  “We thought it might be him. What happened to Elmore?”

  “I don’t know about that. I thought you did it, when I heard.”

  “We didn’t do it,” LaChaise said. He pulled his lip. “Maybe the Wisconsin cops.”

  “Or the guys from Michigan,” Stadic suggested. “There’re a couple of Michigan guys running around over there. They are very pissed about this Sand guy, you cuttin’ his throat.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s what you get for working in the fuckin’ joint,” LaChaise said. “Try to find out who did it.”

  “Okay,” Stadic said. “But listen—the wives up in the hotel . . . I hear they’re getting antsy. They want out. Davenport’s girlfriend is going back to the University of Minnesota hospital.”

  “What’s her name? We never got any insurance on her.”

  “ ’Cause they’re not married and you didn’t say what you wanted the information for. Her name is Weather Karkinnen and she’s a doctor over there. In surgery.”

  “Who else? Who’s leaving the hotel?”

  “Jennifer Carey, the TV news reporter. She’s the mother of Davenport’s daughter . . . She’s going back to work, but there’ll be guards all over her and they’ve got locked security doors and stuff. She’d be hard to get at.”

  “All right. Find out about Elmore, if you can.”

  LaChaise hung up, pulled at his lip again, thinking. After a minute, Sandy said, “What?”

  “Davenport killed Butters . . . and the women are gettin’ unhappy about being locked up. They may be going back to work.”

  “Probably got guards all over the place,” Martin said. “Tell you what: let’s get Harp’s car, and go on out to a supermarket and buy some food. Maybe dump the truck: hate to see it go, but I think we better.”

  Sandy was sitting in the chair, folding into herself, not hearing any of it.

  Elmore was dead.

  The guilt was almost too much to bear.

  13

  WEATHER KARKINNEN LAY on the hotel bed and fumed: the television had gone into a news loop. The anchorpeople leaned into the cameras with the usual end-of-the-world intensity, but had nothing new to say. Weather looked at her watch: two o’clock.

  Lucas had said he’d drop by at noon, then called to cancel. He told her about the laughing incident, which she hadn’t yet seen when he called, but saw later. The television stations were showing it every twenty minutes or so, and it had been picked up by the national news channels.

  Lucas said the laughter had been hysterical, or on that order. She only half-believed it. She’d lived with him long enough to feel the satisfaction he got from confrontation, and the deadlier the confrontation, the better. A death wish, maybe; sometimes when he talked about his world, she could barely recognize it as the same place she lived. They would drive across town, and she’d see good houses and nice gardens and kids on bikes. He’d see whores and dopers and pedophiles and retired cat burglars.

  At first, it had been interesting. Later, she wondered how he could put up with it, the constant stench of the perverse, the lunatic, the out-of-control. Even later, she understood that he sought it out . . .

  She looked at her watch again: two-oh-three. Screw it. She wasn’t going to sit around anymore. This LaChaise might be extraordinarily bad, but he could hardly have an intelligence system that would tell him where she was—if he even knew to look for her, which she doubted.

  And even if he did know where to look for he
r, once she was in a crowd, she’d be just one of a million and a half women wrapped in heavy winter coats, faces obscured by scarves. Then nobody could find her—not the FBI, not the Minneapolis cops, nobody—much less some backwoods gunman.

  “All right,” she said. She looked at her watch a third time. She’d had to delay a surgery scheduled that morning, but there was a staff meeting at four, and she could make that. And she could set up for tomorrow. The operation in the morning wasn’t much—remove some cancerous skin, and patch the wound with a graft—but it would get her going again.

  She found her sweater, pulled it over her head, and was checking her purse for money when the knock came at the door. She opened it, and instantly recognized the blonde in the hall, and the small girl with her.

  The blonde smiled: “Hi. I’m Jennifer Carey . . .”

  “I know who you are,” Weather said, smiling back. “Lucas has talked about you. Come in. And hi, Sarah.” She and Sarah were old friends.

  Jennifer was tall, lanky, a surfer girl with degrees in economics and journalism. She noticed Weather’s sweater: “Breaking out?”

  “Definitely. I can’t stand it here anymore,” Weather said. “I’m going crazy.”

  “I’ll give you a ride, if you want one,” Jennifer said. “Unless you’ve got a car.”

  “Lucas brought me in, I’d like a ride. I understand you’re working outside.”

  “Yeah. Sloan’s wife is here, she’s taking care of Sarah for me. But there’s no point in letting Lucas have all the fun, chasing around with his gun.”

  “Daddy shot a man,” Sarah said solemnly, looking up at Weather.

  Weather sat on the bed so her eyes were level with Sarah’s. “I don’t think so, honey. I talked to him a couple of hours ago, and he said another policeman did the shooting.”

  “On TV, they said he did,” Sarah said. Her wide eyes were the same mild blue as Lucas’s eyes.

  Weather said, “Well, I think they might be wrong on this one thing.”