Lucas Davenport Novels 6-10

by John Sandford

  “That’s fine, but ask anyway,” Lucas said. “One of the people-you ask will call Carmel, and tell her you’re asking . . .”

  THEN SHERRILL CAME UP with a strong tie, one that surprised everybody: Louise Clark’s phone records showed two calls to Carmel Loan’s unlisted home phone in the week before Clark was killed. Both calls were late at night.

  “I can’t think why they would be talking—why Clark would be calling her. But it’s an amazing tie,” Sherrill said.

  “It’s almost enough by itself,” Lucas said. “You know what? I want you to go over and brace Carmel about this, face-to-face. Tell her it’s part of the Clark investigation, and we just want the question answered . . . no big deal.”

  • • •

  CARMEL’S FACE WAS the color of her fabulous bloody-red silk scarf: “She never called,” Carmel shouted. “She never called.”

  “Ms. Loan, somebody called—from her house to yours. This isn’t bullshit—this is the list straight from the phone company. I brought a Xerox copy for you.” Sherrill was sitting in front of Carmel’s desk, and she unfolded the Xerox and pushed it the leather desk pad. “. . . and you can call the phone company yourself, if you don’t think this is accurate.”

  Carmel snatched the Xerox copy from the desk, looked at the two underlined phone calls. She shook her head angrily, said, “No. This is . . .” But then she trailed off, and her head swung sideways and down, a pensive look crossing her face.

  “You know what this is?” she asked finally, looking up at Sherrill. “That sonofabitch was calling me from her house. He was sleeping with me three nights a week, and when we weren’t together, he was sneaking over to her place.”

  Sherrill looked doubtful: “Well . . .” She stood up. “If you say so.”

  “That’s what it is,” Carmel shouted, shaking the Xerox copy in Sherrill’s face.

  LUCAS WAS NOT amused by the story. He shook his head, fiddled with a sport-coat button. “I’m starting to feel sorry for her,” he said. “Almost.”

  “My question is, where are you going with this? I mean, exactly where?” Sherrill asked.

  They were alone in Lucas’s office, streetlight coming on outside the single window; a soft glow lingered in the sky. A perfect summer night, a night for walking around the lakes, Sherrill thought. Lucas said, “You’re the only one who knows about the shell I found in her bedroom closet.”

  “Unless you told somebody else,” Sherrill said.

  “No. It’s just you and me,” Lucas said. He pulled out the typewriter tray on the top corner of his desk, leaned back in his chair and put his feet up. “But something happened to get that shell in there. Somebody dropped a box of shells, somebody ejected a shell and didn’t pick it up, or somebody was punching a bunch of shells into a clip and fumbled them . . . If Carmel sees me find a shell there, and if I find it in just the right circumstances, I think she’d come after it. Either her, or the shooter.”

  “You mean like . . . any shell.”

  “Sure. Any shell. Any twenty-two. Whatever happened to get that shell in the closet, Carmel will know about. If I find a shell in the closet, she’ll know she’s fucked. Especially if she hears about the scratches on the back of Rolo’s hand and our other corroborating evidence, whatever it might be.”

  “What’ll she do?”

  “Suppose I find the shell on a Friday night. Suppose everybody has left her apartment, except me, and I find the shell while I’m taking a last look around. I know where I found the original, so I’ll find this one in exactly the same place. I show it to her, and she claims I planted it, or whatever. And I say, ‘The only shells I have to plant are already fired. If we get a metallurgical match on these slugs and some of the killer slugs, Carmel, you’re all done.’ And then I tell her I know she’s involved . . . from the phone messages, or something.”

  “And . . .”

  “And I say, ‘We’ll let you know first thing Monday morning.’ Then I put the shell in a baggie, and I leave. I go home. Drive slow, give her a chance to catch me. And we put a net around the house, and I hang around . . .”

  Sherrill frowned. “You think she’d come after it?”

  “If she knows that it’ll match. And she probably knows that. If we give her the whole weekend to stew about it.”

  “Boy. The whole thing smells a little like entrapment.”

  “Look, you and I know she’s involved,” Lucas said. “If she comes after me, then we’ve got her. If you try to entrap somebody, and their response is to shoot you . . . I mean, you can’t defend yourself against entrapment with attempted murder. And, in fact, we can outline some of this to the other guys—tell them that we’re trying to lure the killer in. That we’d never use the fake shell. That way, we avoid the entrapment charge.”

  “But we won’t tell them that there once was a real shell.”

  “No.”

  “It’s getting trickier by the minute.”

  “Mmmm. Be nice if we could find a few more things to tie Clark to Carmel . . .”

  “Well, hell, we’re inventing the shell, and the whole relationship, we could invent a few ties, too,” Sherrill said. “Like . . . suppose we find out where she took a vacation, and we leak the word that Clark took a vacation there at the same time. There’s no way for Carmel to know that she didn’t.”

  “I hope this is getting through to her,” Lucas said. “I hope her leak in the department’s still good.”

  “We need to write a script,” Sherrill suggested. “When we get the warrant for her apartment, we could drop all of these little nuggets. You could say something, I could drop something, Sloan . . .”

  Lucas nodded, looked at his watch. “Good idea—think of some stuff. And I’ll think of some. But right now, I’ve got to go to the Reality Commission, we’re talking about noncertifiable minorities tonight.” He thumped the Report, which sat on one side of his desk. He was on page four hundred and thirty.

  “Noncertifiable . . . what is that?”

  “Well, you know: minorities that don’t fit into racial, handicapped, sexual-determinant, age-determinant, religious, ethnic, or national-origin groups.”

  “Jeez, I would have thought that covered everything.”

  “Oh, no. There was a case in Wisconsin of a white, Episcopalian male in his early thirties, nonhandicapped, heterosexual, English heritage . . .”

  “A perfect WASP.”

  “Wouldn’t even pee in the shower,” Lucas said. “ Anyway, he was a member of one of the animal-protection groups, and his coworkers tormented him by displaying photographs of pork chops and link sausages in the workplace, and they’d talk about going to McDonald’s for cheeseburgers. He got $750,000 from the City of Madison for emotional imperialism.”

  “Well—Madison.”

  “That explains a lot of it, of course,” Lucas said, nodding. “But apparently we need a policy. You know, covering nonreligious ethical minorities.” Then he closed his eyes, rubbed them with a thumb and forefinger. “Jesus Christ, what’d I just say?”

  CARMEL COULD FEEL the rage building. She knew what the cops were doing. They were building a “just in case” case—hoping to build a good enough story that a jury would put her away, just in case she was the killer.

  Somehow, she thought, Davenport had fastened on her as the killer. And, she had to admit, it had never occurred to her that in eliminating any possibility that she could be tied to Rinker, she’d thoughtlessly incriminated somebody to whom she could be tied. And there was no way for her to explain that Clark wasn’t the killer. How could she know?

  Carmel had tried forty-four murder cases in her career, winning twenty-one of them. That was considered an excellent average, since most involved a man found standing over his dead wife with a handgun, and when asked why he did it, had told the cops, “She was gettin’ on my ass, you know?”

  Three of the cases she’d lost still haunted her, because she shouldn’t, in her opinion, have lost them. She’d broken the state’s
case, she’d thought, and after-verdict interviews with the jurors had suggested that she’d lost only because the jurors wanted to believe the cops. They hadn’t had the evidence, but they’d convicted because the cops suggested they should.

  That could happen to her . . .

  Fuckin’ Davenport . . .

  Worse, the word was getting out. She might be going psycho, she thought, going paranoid, but she thought she could see it in the eyes of her colleagues. The questions: Did you do it? Did you help? Did you drill those little holes in Roland D’Aquila’s kneecaps?

  AN INTERVIEW with one of Carmel’s friends produced the casual information that she’d been in Zihuatanejo the November before last. “Save that,” Lucas told Sherrill. “When we shake her apartment down, we’ll drop the information that Clark was there at the same time—we’ll jump her about it.”

  “All right.”

  “What else you got?”

  “Not much—it’s really thin. Clark took a course in legal writing at the U, at the same time Carmel was at the law school . . .”

  “So they were at law school together.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Close enough for government work,” Lucas said. “Get more.”

  JOHNMCCALLUM, managing partner of the firm, stopped at Carmel’s office and asked, “What the hell is going on, Carmel? We hear the police are looking at you in connection with all these murders.” He was using the same whiny voice that had caused him to lose half of the consumer liability cases he’d once tried, Carmel thought.

  “It’s all crap, John,” Carmel said. But she could feel the blood rising in her face, and the impulse to rip McCallum’s larynx out of his throat. “The cops are trying to put pressure on me—I don’t know why.”

  “Yeah, well, make them stop,” McCallum said.

  “I’m working on it.”

  “You know the firm will stand behind you . . .”

  “Bullshit. You’d drop me like a hot potato, if you could,” Carmel said. “Of course, I can beat any charge they bring against me, and then I’d make a hobby out of suing you for damaging my career. You might get out of it with your oldest car and a pair of shoes.”

  “That sounded almost like a threat,” McCallum said.

  “Excuse me if I wasn’t direct enough,” Carmel said. “That was a threat. If the firm doesn’t back me up on this, I’ll personally take you to court and pull your testicles off.”

  “I don’t have to listen to this,” he said. His eyes flinched away from her wolverine’s gaze, and he turned to go.

  “You don’t have to listen,” Carmel said, her voice as deadly as a razor. “But you better think about it. ’Cause I’m serious, John. You’ve seen me at work: you don’t want to piss me off.”

  SHERRILL TYPED all the ties into a memo, and dropped it on Lucas’s desk. “Enough for a warrant?”

  Lucas looked down the list, and nodded. “We’ll need a photo of the cuts on the back of Rolo’s hand, and the phone records.”

  “Both office and apartment?”

  “Both. But we’ll do the office first. Seal her apartment so that she can’t get in to destroy anything, then brace her at the law firm. We’ll need a dozen guys, a crowd, to make it really inconvenient . . . look through all her paper files, and we’ll need a computer guy to copy her computer records. We’ll need to subpoena the firm’s phone records, too.”

  “Might be some court problems with that.”

  “Yeah, but we can nail them down, anyway. Let the county’s attorney’s guys argue about what we should get.”

  “When?”

  “Write up the warrant now, we’ll walk it over to the county, let them know what’s coming,” Lucas said.

  “What if they’re shaky?”

  “Fuck ’em. Besides, they don’t mind seeing us fall on our asses from time to time—and this’ll all be on our heads.”

  “So we go in . . .?”

  “Tomorrow. Friday.”

  Sherrill looked down at her memo. “This is gonna be somethin’.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  All the paperwork was done by noon Friday. Lucas took Sherrill, Sloan and Franklin to lunch, after leaving word for the rest of the search team to meet at his office at three o’clock. Sherrill, Sloan and Franklin knew about the warrant, as did Black, who’d gone to St. Paul to get photos of Roland D’Aquila’s self-inflicted scratches.

  “Why don’t we just go?” Sherrill asked as they settled into a booth at the Gray Kitten. A waitress hustled over, dropped four menus on the red-checkered vinyl tablecloth and moved on.

  “Because I want it later in the day,” Lucas said when the waitress was gone. “I want people starting to go home. I want the process harder for her to stop. And maybe she’ll be a little more tired this way. She went to work when? Seven this morning?”

  Another cop drifted by, a uniform guy on his day off. He was wearing grass-stained shorts and a t-shirt with a moose on the front. He smiled at Sherrill: “Hey, Marcy.”

  “Hey, Tobe,” Marcy said. “You look a little scuffed up.”

  He looked down at his shorts, nodded and said, “ Softball.”

  “Good, good,” she said, and her eyes drifted back to Franklin. After a moment, Tobe said, “Well, see ya,” and drifted away. Lucas glanced at Sherrill, who smiled, well-pleased.

  “She got there at seven o’clock,” said Franklin, who’d been working with the surveillance crew. “First light in her apartment was five forty-five.”

  “So we go into the office at three o’clock, and put a man on her apartment door at the same time,” Lucas said. “We stay at her office until about five, and then we move the act over to the apartment. I want both the office and the apartment taken apart. Everything in the computers, all records showing phone calls, money spent, safe-deposit numbers, everything.”

  “We’ll need a new warrant to get into the safe-deposit boxes,” Sloan said.

  “By that time—Monday—we’ll either be done with her, or completely fucked,” Lucas said. “Although we ought to get the warrant anyway. If there’s something in one of those boxes, it’ll put a little more pressure on her.”

  “You really think she’ll come after you?” Franklin asked. He didn’t know about the cartridge that Lucas had found; he knew only that Lucas would drop one, and pretend to find it.

  Lucas shrugged. “I think she’ll do something. If we do this right, she oughta feel pretty cornered by the time we’re done—and the only way out of the corner will be to get that shell back.”

  The waitress came back and they ordered. And when the waitress was gone, Franklin asked, “Has anybody here ever been on one of these things, when everything went just like you thought it would?”

  They all thought about it for a few seconds, then Lucas shook his head, and Sherrill said, “Never happen.”

  • • •

  AT THREE, the surveillance team put Carmel at her office. Lucas sent two men to camp out at her apartment door— “Nobody goes in without my say-so. And if there’s anybody inside when you get there, they don’t leave until I see them”—and led the rest of the group in a ragged line three blocks across downtown to Carmel’s office. Another two drove over, in a van, to carry any items seized as part of the search.

  Carmel was in the office of another partner when Lucas presented the search warrant to the secretary, and started feeding men into Carmel’s office. Lawyers started coming out of adjoining offices, and one of them yelled, “Hey, what are you assholes doing?”

  “A search,” Sherrill said, facing off.

  “You got a warrant?”

  “We’ve served it,” Sherrill said.

  “You’re assholes,” the lawyer shouted, and then another one started to boo, and five seconds later, the office was a raucous cacophony of boos, catcalls and hisses. A few seconds later, Carmel pushed her way through the crowd and faced off with Sherrill.

  “Out of the fuckin’way,” she said.

  “I’ll let you in, but
you are not to touch anything or interfere in any way,” Sherrill said. “If you do, I’ll throw you out.”

  “Yeah?” Carmel pushed closer to her. They were chestto-chest, not quite touching.

  “Yeah,” Sherrill said. She didn’t budge. “And if you touch me, I’ll knock you on your ass and haul you downtown on an assault charge.”

  Carmel almost faltered: “Never stick,” she said.

  “Tell that to your teeth when you’re digging them out of the back of your throat,” Sherrill said. She waited another beat, then stepped aside. “Don’t touch, don’t interfere.”

  Carmel stepped past her, and a few of the lawyers in the hall started cheering: “Go, Carmel.” Inside her office, Carmel spotted Lucas, who was standing, hands in pockets, watching a computer technician slip copy software into the floppy slot on Carmel’s computer.

  “What is this?” she hissed.

  “We’re searching your office, looking for any information or physical articles concerning your involvement in the murders of Hale Allen and others. When things are under control here, we’re moving over to your apartment.”

  “My apartment?” Her hand went to her throat.

  “Your apartment. Right now, it’s sealed. You can be present when we enter it, if you wish.”

  After a long moment of astonished silence, Carmel said,

  “You’re nuts.”

  “No, but I’m afraid you are,” Lucas said. “We’ve got quite a bit of the picture with you and Louise Clark.”

  “I have nothing to do with Louise Clark. Nothing. You can ask . . .”

  “You just went to Zihuatanejo at the same time by accident?”

  “What?” Carmel sputtered. “I never saw her in Zihuatanejo. I’d never go there with a . . . a secretary. I went there by myself.”

  Lucas now took a long moment to look her over. Then, half-turning away, he said, “Sure.”

  ONE OF THE VICE GUYS found Louise Clark’s name in Carmel’s Rolodex, lifted it out, put it in an evidence bag. Another found a long paper record of the D’Aquila drug trial, and bagged that, too. The lawyers in the hallway began chanting, “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,” and one of the senior partners came down and tried to quiet them. They didn’t quiet. The chanting got louder, and the partner grinned slightly, shrugged and went upstairs, the approval as explicit as they’d ever get from that particular partner. Two minutes later, another group of lawyers arrived, from another firm in the building, and joined the chanting.