Easy Prey (20 page)

 
 
BEFORE THEY HAD him cuffed, Outer said, “I ain't sayin' shit. I want an attorney.”

“Sit on the bed,” Del said.

Outer sat, and Lucas started pulling apart Outer's duffle bag. Halfway into it, he ran into a T-shirt built like an I-beam. He shook it out, and found a Smith & Wesson 649. “Gun,” he said to Del.

“Jeez, that's too bad,” Del said. “Him being a convicted felon and all.”

“Attorney,” Outer said.

No dope. Lucas looked around the room. He checked the bathroom, but the toilet was the pressure kind, with no tank. He came back into the main room, and Del said, “He wouldn't leave it in the car.”

Outer relaxed and leaned back on the bed. “All I have is the gun, which was for self-protection and isn't even mine.”

“Get off the bed,” Lucas said.

“What?” Outer put on a perplexed look.

“Get off the fuckin' bed.”

Del took him by the arm, and Outer said, “Fuckin' cops,” and Lucas walked around to the door side of the bed, crouched, grabbed the mattress, and flipped it off the box spring. In the center of the box spring, four Ziploc bags of cocaine nestled in a line.

“That ain't mine. You put it there,” Outer said.

“Probably has our fingerprints all over the plastic, then,” Lucas said. “And when we get a blood test, we'll probably test for cocaine.”

“Attorney,” Outer said.

“Sit in the chair,” Lucas said.

Del pushed Outer down on an overstuffed chair, and Lucas sat on the box spring.

“I'm gonna make you an offer. I can't make it after you talk to an attorney, I can only make it before. We can fix it so you take a minimum plea on the dope and the gun—three years. That's what we can do.”

“Attorney.”

“Or we can call the Illinois cops, tell them where your apartment is, tell them we've busted you as a big-time dealer.” He looked at the Ziploc bags, and said to Del, “I think we can call that big-time when we talk to Evanston.”

“I think so,” Del said. “Definitely big-time.”

He looked back at Outer. “We can ask them to search your apartment. If there's dope there, if there's a gun there . . .” Lucas spread his arms and shrugged. “Well, that's another felony. And how many felonies you got in Illinois, Larry? Two? Aw, that's terrible. Illinois is a three-strike state, right? What a shame.” He leaned forward, the mean smile crossing his face. “You know how long forever is? It's a long fucking time, Larry.”

“Jesus . . .”

“We can't offer you this deal after you talk to an attorney, because your attorney might call a friend of yours in Illinois, and the apartment might get cleaned,” Del said. “If we don't make a deal right now, we're gonna have to make the call. And get you an attorney, of course.”

Outer put his head down. “You're fucks.”

“Well, you know, Larry, that comes with our job sometimes,” Del said. “That's why we sometimes offer deals to our favorite citizens. To make ourselves feel better.”

“What do I gotta do?”

“We've got two names. We know you know the guys, because we've seen you with them. We want a statement.”

“Who?”

“James Bee,” Del said. “And Curtis Logan.”

“Is that it?” Outer said. “I flip on those guys, and I walk?”

“Well, you walk out to Stillwater for a couple,” Lucas said. “But you can do a couple standing on your head. And we won't call Evanston. Until later.”

Outer seemed to brighten. “Well, shit, if that's all—I can do that,” Outer said.

Lucas and Del looked at each other, then Del looked at Outer and said, “I knew we could be friends.”

“Friends—but I want something on paper before I talk,” Outer said.

 
 
THEY CALLED A squad, and had Outer transported to the jail with instructions that he didn't get a phone call without Lucas being told. “You call, I call Evanston,” Lucas said. “I bet we can get the Evanston cops there before you can get it cleaned out.”

Del went over to the county attorney's office to find somebody who could help draw up the deal, and somebody else who could get search warrants for James Bee and Curtis Logan. Lucas walked up the stairs, heading for his office, but got hooked by a secretary: “They're gonna show film from St. Paul. They're bringing somebody in.”

“What?”

“It's on TV,” she said.

Homicide had a TV, and Lucas stopped there; a half-dozen cops were gathered around the tube. The St. Paul chief was saying, “No, no, no, we just wanted to talk to him. We don't have any indication that he had anything to do with the murder of Mr. Plain. . . .”

“Who is it?” Lucas asked.

“Brought in some vending machine guy,” one of the cops said. And as he said it, with the chief rambling on in the background, a news clip came up, two St. Paul cops escorting a man in blue coveralls into the front of the police station. He was brown-haired, slat-faced, rawboned.

“Not porky,” Lucas said. “He was supposed to be porky.”

At his office, he had a
Call me
message from Sherrill, and a note from Lane saying that the Olson family-and-friends genealogy was complete, and he'd put it on a computer disk with Lucas's name on it, in the chief's secretary's out basket.

He dialed Sherrill. “I just kicked open a motel door and arrested a dealer,” he said. “What are you doing?”

“We just bought a casket,” Sherrill said. “I'm creeped out. You know the last time I was in here--”

“Yeah. Don't think about it.” The last time she'd been at the funeral home, she'd been buying a casket for her husband. “How's Corbeau?”

“She's in the can. By herself—I checked. I think you made an impression on her this morning, and it wasn't fatherly,” Sherrill said. “My personal feeling is that she's too young for you.”

“She can't be any younger than you are.”

“
I
was too young for you,” Sherrill said.

“I was much younger when we started going together,” Lucas said, “than when we called it off.”

“Bullshit. You were rejuvenated,” Sherrill said. “Anyway, we're shopping. And I'm on the lookout for maniacs.”

“St. Paul brought in a guy,” Lucas said. He told her about it and said, “I don't think it's anything.”

“So what do I do? Stick with Corbeau?”

“Yeah. If anything heats up, I'll call.”

HE WAS WALKING down the hall to the chief's office, to get the computer disk, when Lane returned. He was walking fast, an intent look on his face.

“What?” Lucas asked.

“That genealogy. Excuse me, I meant, that
fuckin'
genealogy. I was getting everything I could on Sandy Lansing's friends, so I went by the hotel to see who she hung out with there. Everybody in the place was looking for Derrick Deal.”

“Deal? He's gone?”

“They haven't seen him since he talked to you. Or about then. They been calling his house—nobody home.”

“Huh. So I'm not doing anything. I'll go knock on his door.”

14

DERRICK DEAL LIVED in a town house in Rose-ville, eight miles northeast of the Minneapolis loop and off Highway 36. The town house, a split-entry end unit with a tuck-under garage, was one of twenty arranged around a pond full of Canada geese.

Lucas knocked on the door, waited, and got the hollow response that an empty house gives. The garage door was locked, so he walked around back. There were windows on the side of the garage and the back door, and he peered inside, but couldn't see much: a corner of the kitchen table from the back door, and on the table, what looked like a stack of bills and a checkbook. The garage was empty. He walked back around to the front, noticed that the mail slot was open just a crack; he pushed it the rest of the way, and could see mail on the floor. More than one day's worth, he thought. No newspapers, though.

He knocked again, then went next door and knocked. No answer from there, either. If you lived in a town house, you worked. Maybe check back in the evening.

As he was leaving, Lucas cranked up his cell phone, called Dispatch and asked that they find Deal's license tag, and put it out.

“Lucas, the chief has been trying to get in touch with you,” the dispatcher said. “There's a meeting going on . . . well, it's gonna start in ten minutes, in her office. She wants you to come.”

“Ten minutes,” he said. “I might be a couple minutes late. Tell her.”

As he ran the Porsche out onto the interstate, he glanced back toward the town houses. Maybe, he thought, Deal had gone to the same place as Trick Bentoin, wherever that was. But he didn't think so. Deal's disappearance was a shadow across the day.

A huge detective named Franklin was climbing the stairs toward the City Hall's main level when Lucas caught up with him. “What's going on?”

“Just gettin' a Coke and an apple,” Franklin said. “Something going on?”

“Meeting,” Lucas said. “I was afraid another body had fallen out of a closet somewhere.”

“Probably has. But not here, as far as I know,” Franklin said.

Lucas went on ahead. The chief's secretary nodded at the closed office door and said, “We've got a crowd. Alie'e's family and some friends. You're supposed to go right in.”

ROSE MARIE WAS barricaded behind her desk. To her left, Dick Milton, the department PR guy, perched on the edge of a folding chair, his jaws tight. Eight people were arrayed in visitors' chairs in front of the desk: Alie'e's parents; Tom Olson, unshaven, apparently in the same clothes he'd worn at the last visit; and three other men and two women Lucas didn't recognize.

“Lucas, come in, we're just getting started.” Rose Marie glanced at one of the men Lucas didn't know and added, “I guess we're trying to get some ground rules going here. Everybody, this is Lucas Davenport, a deputy chief, who often works as a kind of, mmm, key man in these kinds of investigations. Lucas, you know Mr. and Mrs. Olson; and this is Mr. and Mrs. Benton, and Mr. and Mrs. Packard, the Olsons' best friends from Burnt River, who're down to help out; and Lester Moore, the editor of the Burnt River newspaper.”

Moore was a gangly man with reddish hair and green watery eyes. He wore wash pants that were an inch too short, and showed a rind of pale skin between the top of his white socks and the cuff of the green pants. “I'm the ground rules problem,” he said affably.

“The problem,” Rose Marie said, “is that Mr. Moore is also one of the Olsons' good friends.” The Olsons both nodded at once, as did the Bentons and the Packards. “They want him here. But if we give him the confidential family briefing that is not available to all the press . . .”

“So will you use what we tell you in confidence?” Lucas asked.

Moore shook his head. “Of course not. I'm here as a friend, not as a reporter. We have our reporter down here right now, and she'll do our coverage.”

Milton piped up. “Suppose you think your reporter is reading something wrong, because of privileged information you happen to have.”

“We'll go with her story,” Moore said. “The people of Burnt River have the right to the information—but not necessarily at this exact minute.”

Rose Marie looked at Lucas, who shrugged. “So, you trust him or not. I'd say, go ahead and trust him now, and stop if something comes out.”

After thinking about it for a second, Rose Marie nodded. “All right. Mr. Moore stays . . . with the understanding that what is said in this room, stays in this room.”

 
 
AS ROSE MARIE briefed the group on what had been done in the past twenty-four hours, and filled them in on the murder of Amnon Plain, Lucas watched Tom Olson. Olson sat squarely and solidly in his chair, his chin down almost to his chest, staring fixedly at Rose Marie as she spoke. He really wasn't porky, Lucas thought, although an observer at a distance might think so—especially since pork was almost the default body shape for men in the upper Midwest. But Olson looked hard; he was barrel-shaped and square-faced, but you could see the bones in his cheeks and at his wrists. He
looked
like a farm mechanic: somebody used to pushing around machines, and maybe throwing bales.

The Bentons and Packards, on the other hand, had the pale, round blandness of prosperous Minnesota small-town people. They were not quite blond, but not quite brunette, either. They all spoke softly in rounded Scandinavian vowels, with perfect grammar, and finished each other's sentences. They were, Lucas thought, like two pairs of sugar cookies out of the same unisex male-female cookie cutter.

Tom Olson was the one to speak when Rose Marie finished. “So what you just said is, you didn't find out anything. There's no new information.”

“That's not at all what I said,” Rose Marie snapped. “There was a lot of negative information—we eliminated a lot of possibilities. I will tell you, Mr. Olson, and Chief Davenport will tell you the same thing, that if you don't find the killer standing over the victim and arrest him on the spot, then the elimination of possibilities is one of the most important things we do. We
will
find the killer. We know it's going to take time--”

“Oh, horseshit,” Olson said.

His mother looked at him and said, “Thomas.”

The older Olson cleared his throat and said, “The funeral is the day after tomorrow, if you can release Alie'e to us. The ME said he thought that was likely.”

“It's done, or will be in the next few minutes,” Rose Marie said.