Easy Prey (33 page)

“Goddamnit.”

“So what do we do?”

“I'll call you back in two minutes,” Lucas said. He punched the Off button, redialed Lane's cell phone number. Lane answered, and Lucas said, “Where's Rodriguez?”

“In his office. I can see his sleeve.”

“Nothing going on?”

“A few things. My feet hurt like hell; I've got Homicide's interview notebook on the case, and I'm reading all the interviews; a nine-year-old kid tried to sell me what I believe are counterfeit baseball cards; and the St. Paul cops rousted me. That's about it.”

“No trouble with St. Paul?”

“Nah. Just checking on why I'd been standing in the Skyway for two hours, reading a notebook,” Lane said.

“Okay. Our guy's at an attorney's office. He's about two blocks from you.”

“Let me know if anything happens.”

“A Mickey Mantle rookie card's gotta be worth more than twenty, doesn't it?”

“Chump.” Lucas redialed Del. “Rodriguez is at his office.”

“So . . .”

“So let's hang for a while. Give it an hour, anyway.”

Twenty-five minutes into the hour, Del called. “He's moving.”

“Where?”

“Looks like the parking garage.”

“Goddamnit. Stay with him. If he heads to the car, I'll pick you up where you jumped out.”

Five minutes later, Del was back in the car. Lucas drove around to the parking garage exit, and as they picked up Spooner, Del's phone rang. He took it out, listened for a second, said, “Lucas's phone is on now,” and then handed it to Lucas. “I'm a fuckin' secretary,” he said.

“Your boy made the call,” Lester said.

“Yeah? When?”

“Six or seven minutes ago. He was calling from a lawyer's office.”

“Yeah, we took him there. He's out, and we're on him again. What'd he say?”

“Sounded like he was reading out of a script. He said, ‘Mr. Rodriguez, allegations have been made against you by the Minneapolis police. I will no longer be allowed to have any direct dealings with you on the mortgages on your buildings, and I wanted to inform you that in the future your account will be handled by Mrs. Ellen Feldman. ' Then Rodriguez said, ‘What are you talking about? The police?' And then Spooner said, ‘I'm not at liberty to discuss it, but you can get more information from Minneapolis Deputy Chief of Police Lucas Davenport or Mr. Tim Long, assistant Hennepin County Attorney.' Then Rodriguez said, ‘Is this about the party?' And Spooner says, ‘I'm really not at liberty to discuss it. I suggest you call Chief Davenport or Mr. Long. I'm sorry this had to happen. I felt we had an excellent working relationship. I have to go now. I hope this works out for the best.' Then Rodriguez says, ‘Okay. Well, thanks for everything, you know.' And that's it.”

“Thanks for everything,” Lucas said. “He means the phone call.”

“Pretty goddamn neat phone call, too,” Lester said. “He warns him, but there's nothing in it to hang him with. Either one of them.”

After Lucas hung up, they tracked Spooner back to the bank. He drove back slowly, well within the speed limit. When he was inside, Lucas said, “Fuck him. Let's go see Marcy.”

 
 
WEATHER WAS OUTSIDE the intensive care ward talking to Tom Black. They saw Lucas and Del coming, and Weather smiled and Del said, “Something good happened.”

“What?” Lucas asked as they came up.

“She's somewhat awake. Everything's pretty much stabilized. She's still critical, but it's looking pretty good. For the first time.”

Lucas went to the ward window and looked in. “Can we go in?”

“Let me get a nurse. They just took a guy in.”

The nurse came, said, severely, “One minute. Say hello, and out.” She gave them masks to hold over their faces, and led the way in.

Marcy's eyelids were at half-mast. When Lucas, Del, and Black loomed beside her, her eyes opened fractionally, and after a moment, the corners of her lips twitched.

“Sleeping on the job,” Black said.

“I ain't signing off on the overtime—you're still on the Homicide payroll,” Lucas said.

“If you die, can I have your gun?” Del asked.

She tried to say something, but Lucas couldn't hear and he leaned forward. Her lips looked parched, almost burnt. “What?”

“Fuck all of you,” she whispered, and she turned her head another fraction of an inch.

“She's better,” Lucas said, delighted. “She says go fuck ourselves.”

Weather said, “I can't believe cops. I never could. The bullshit gets
so
deep.” She was smiling when she said it.

Lucas squatted next to the bed, speaking through the blue mask. “You're hurting,” he said, “but you're gonna make it. We're tracking the guy who shot you.”

Her head rolled away, and her eyelids drooped again.

“Everybody out,” the nurse said.

 
 
IN THE HALL, Lucas said, “She looked pretty good, huh? She looked pretty good.”

“Pretty good,” Black said.

“I was amazed,” Del said. “She took a fuckin' .44, man. Man, she looked a
lot
better.” He hitched up his jeans, and they all nodded at each other.

“She's not out of the woods,” Weather said. “Keep that in mind. It's a long trip back.”

On the way out the door with Del, Lucas stopped, said, “Hang on a minute,” and went back inside. Weather was walking away, back to the interior of the hospital. “Hey, Weather.”

She stopped, waited. He came up, took a card out of his ID case, scribbled his cell phone number on the back of it, and said, “Keep an eye on her while you're here, okay? You know the docs better than any of us. If anything changes . . .”

“I'll call,” she said. She took the card, and Lucas headed back out.

On the sidewalk, Del said, “What?”

“Gave her my number in case anything happens with Marcy,” Lucas lied. She could have gotten to him through the police switchboard, and she
had
that number. He'd actually gone back because of a little subconscious twitch: He went back to look at her ears. She was wearing inky blue sapphire earrings, one-carat stones. He recognized them, because he'd given them to her.

He smiled on the way back to the office, and Del said, “Our girl's gonna be all right.”

“Maybe,” he said.

 
 
BACK AT THE office, Lucas put in a call to Louis Mallard at the FBI in Washington. Mallard had enough clout to extract anything from any government computer anywhere. He agreed to find and send along everything available on Rodriguez's Miami company. When he got off the phone with Mallard, Lucas walked down to Rose Marie's office.

“Need a meeting,” he said.

“Marcy's awake.”

“I know. She's gonna make it.”

Rose Marie put a finger to her lips. “Shhh. Don't hex her.”

While they were waiting for the meeting to get together, Lane called. “I got bored and walked by Rodriguez's office window. He was working on the computer in his office.”

“How many people saw you? The secretary?”

“Maybe. But I was disguised as a cool guy, which, for me, takes no effort, and I put a little shine on her, through the window.”

“Lane, you fucking--”

“Anyway, Rodriguez was signed on to E-Trade.”

“E-Trade.”

“Yeah. I bet he's scared and dumping stock.”

“Like I was saying, you're a fucking genius.” Lucas called Mallard back. “Can you get into E-Trade records?”

“If I wanted to,” Mallard said.

 
 
DEL CAME TO the meeting, along with Frank Lester; Towson, the county attorney; and Long, the assistant county attorney, just back from the Atheneum bank with a pile of paper. No public relations people.

“I wanted to make sure everybody knows what we're doing,” Lucas said. “We're looking at this guy Rodriguez, and I will tell you this, just based on feel and experience and a few things we know about him: He killed Alie'e and Sandy Lansing.”

“You're pretty sure,” Towson said.

“Pretty sure. Lansing was dealing several kinds of dope to rich people and wannabes, working for Rodriguez. Rodriguez is at the party. They have some kind of conflict, and Rodriguez kills her right there in the hallway. Maybe it's even an accident—the ME's saying it looks like her head was smashed against a doorjamb. So Rodriguez tried to stuff her in the closet and is surprised by Alie'e, who was in the bedroom. Maybe Alie'e heard the noise of Lansing's head hitting the doorjamb—or maybe she just woke up at the wrong time. Anyway, she sees something, and Rodriguez takes her out. At this point, he walks away, maybe down the hall to the next room, and goes out the window. Or maybe he just walks through the crowd and drifts away.”

“What do we have for sure?” Towson asked.

“We have the fact that Rodriguez was a punk in Detroit, came here with no money, and got rich fast. We have a guy who'll tell us that he's a dope wholesaler, and that Sandy Lansing worked for him, selling dope. I don't doubt that once we start working on that angle, now that we've got his name, we'll be able to find a few other ties between them. We've got Rodriguez at the party. We've got a guy—Derrick Deal—who knew Lansing pretty well, and thought she might be selling a little dope; and he was a guy who would do a little blackmail if it looked profitable. He almost certainly knew who her boss was, because a day after I talked to him, he was murdered in a way that was at least reminiscent of the way Alie'e and Lansing were killed: no passion, just brutal efficiency.”

“I don't see how you tie Deal to Rodriguez,” Rose Marie said.

“I don't, directly. What I'm saying is, Deal didn't know Alie'e. So if he was going to blackmail somebody for murder, it had to be somebody tied to Lansing. The only person at that party tied to Lansing, as far as we know, was Rodriguez.”

Long looked at Towson. “We'd need some kind of color chart, or maybe a PowerPoint presentation, to sell that to a jury.”

Towson shook his head. “We're not at a jury yet. We need more.”

“We're just starting on the guy,” Del said.

Long leaned into the discussion. “I got all the paper from Atheneum. Spooner's boss was looking over my shoulder, and you know what? If we push the guy, he'll tell us the loans shouldn't have been made. The goddamn things are dirty. Rodriguez was paying him off.”

“Can we crack him?” Towson asked.

“I don't know. He's sort of a nebbish, but he's scared, and if he keeps his mouth shut . . . I mean, he's got a lawyer, and if he claims that the loans were on the up-and-up and keeps going back to this minority business, and if Rodriguez doesn't talk, there's not much we can get him on.”

“We'll get some paper going on him,” Lucas said. “If he's been paid off by Rodriguez, he might have an income-tax problem.”

Towson said to Long, “Talk to the IRS.”

 
 
LESTER SUMMARIZED THE case against Tom Olson. “He had motive, he had opportunity, he had access to a car that we now know for sure was used in the Marcy Sherrill shooting--”

“How do you know that?” Long asked.

“We took the slug out of the car door. It didn't penetrate the passenger compartment, it wound up inside a plastic handle inside the door. It came from Marcy's revolver.”

Long nodded. “Okay.”

“But you haven't found the .44 that was used on Marcy,” Lucas said.

“No.”

“That's a problem,” Del said.

“Yup. Especially since he's been here, and not back in Fargo, ever since the shooting. We went through his motel room, and his car, after his parents were killed. No gun. The gun that was used to kill his parents belonged to his father: It was his father's car gun.”

“Where'd you get that?” Lucas asked.

“Olson told us. His father kept it under the front-seat cushion. We ran the serial numbers, traced it to a gun store up in Burnt River. Lynn Olson bought it six years ago.”

“You think he did his parents?” Towson asked.

“We've got this whole theory. . . .” Lester explained the multiple-personality concept, and explained the trap they'd set for Olson.

“The trap better work,” Towson said, “Because the multiple-personality theory sounds like bullshit.”

 
 
A SECRETARY STUCK her head in and said, “Lucas, you've got a call from the White House.”

The group all looked at him, and Lucas said, “What?”

“The guy said he's with the White House. He didn't sound like he was joking.”

“You better take it,” Rose Marie said.

Lucas took it on the secretary's desk. Mallard said, “I bet that impressed everybody. The switchboard lady told me you were in a meeting in the chief's office.”

“It certainly impressed the shit out of me,” Lucas said. “What's happening?”

“Your boy Rodriguez started selling out his accounts Monday morning. It'll be a couple of days before he gets the checks, but he's got a quarter million in the mail.”

“Goddamn,” Lucas said.

“I've only got one thing from Miami. Rodriguez set up the Miami company nine years ago. The attorney's name is Haynes, and as far as the guys in the Miami office know, he's straight—small time, private office, business-oriented guy. Does real estate, that kind of stuff.”

“Mallard, you're a good egg,” Lucas said.