“She’s not a believer—doesn’t believe this is going to turn into anything except another pain in the ass. What she really likes is a nice run-and-shoot murder where she can put on a vest and smoke somebody out of a basement.”
After a minute, Del said, “Well, that
“Well, yeah.”
THE THIRD SCHOOL CASE, in Minneapolis, involved teacher-student, male-female contact again, but the teacher was black.
“That doesn’t help,” Lucas said.
They stopped at a McDonald’s for a quick lunch, got back to the office in the middle of the afternoon, just as Todd and Kelly Barker walked out the front door. “You do the Identi-Kit?” Lucas asked.
“Just got done—it’s a lot better than it used to be,” she said. She handed Lucas a printout of the reconstruction. He looked at it, passed it to Del, and said, “We need to dig up the people who met Fell, way back when, and show them this—I hope somebody’s still alive.”
“Well, we are,” Del said, handing the picture back to Kelly. “Must be some more. Maybe those hookers. They were pretty young. You still got their names?”
“Gotta be in my reports from back then,” Lucas said.
“You comfortable asking Minneapolis for that?”
“Man’s gotta do . . .” Lucas said. He turned back to the Barkers. “Whatever happened to the TV thing? You talk to your agent?”
“We’re waiting to hear back,” Kelly said. “I think it’s gonna fly, especially with this.” She flapped the computer likeness at them. “And especially now because of the Joneses.”
“We’re not sure of that connection yet,” Lucas said.
“All possibilities should be examined,” Kelly Barker said.
UP IN LUCAS’S OFFICE, Del asked, “What do you want me to do?”
“Check the Visa stuff under the John Fell name. We need to find out how he paid the account. If it’s postal money orders, we’re screwed, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what it is. But if he had a checking account under the same name, then it gets more interesting. More complicated . . .”
“He’d have to have an ID for that,” Del said. “Did anyone ever check to see if he went for a driver’s license under that name?”
“Yeah, we checked at the time, but he didn’t have one,” Lucas said. “I suppose we could look again. But take a close look at how he paid those bills. If he had a checking account, we could probably find out quite a bit just by who he was paying.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Maybe talk to Marcy again,” Lucas said, “And then I’m going home for a nice vegetarian dinner with my wife and kids.”
“Kill yourself now.”
“No, no, it’s fine, a nice tofu steak with quince sauce, maybe, some corn,” Lucas said. “Organic applesauce for dessert.”
“I’m having some pig,” Del said. “I’ll call you and tell you about it.”
“God bless you,” Lucas said, and Del left.
HAD TO DO SOMETHING. Right now.
On the phone to Marcy: “I’d like to come over and look at the file on the Joneses, if that’s okay with you,” Lucas said.
“What are you looking for?”
“My notes. I wrote a couple of reports; I want to see if I can get some names.”
“You’re really getting into this,” she said.
“It’s interesting,” Lucas said. “I’m not working on anything hot right now, so I thought I’d hang around this for a while. If it doesn’t bother you.”
“No, not really. As long as you don’t overreach, and keep us up to date. Come on over, the file’s on Buster’s desk.”
Lucas made it over to Minneapolis in twenty minutes, and left his car in a police-only slot outside City Hall. He’d gone in and out of the Minneapolis City Hall probably ten thousand times during his career, and always marveled at how the original architects had managed to contrive a building that was at once ugly, inefficient, cold, sterile, charmless, and purple; and yet they had. Much of it was given over to the police department, and the long hallways of locked doors didn’t make the place any more cheerful.
He walked back to Homicide through the empty corridors, peeked into Marcy’s office. Nobody home. A lone Homicide guy was reading a
“Where’s Buster’s desk?” Lucas asked.
“The one with the big-ass files sitting on it,” the guy said. His name was Roberts or Williams or Richards or Johns or something like that; Lucas knew him, but couldn’t put his finger on the name. “Marcy said I should watch to make sure you didn’t steal too much.”
“Just a few names,” Lucas said. A name popped into his head: Clark Richards. “How you been, Clark?”
“I been fine. You need help?”
Lucas looked at the five bankers’ boxes sitting on Buster’s desk: “If you got the time. I’m actually looking for my own written reports on the Jones kidnapping.”
They started going through the boxes, which were pleasantly musty, and halfway through the first one, Lucas found two brown office-mail envelopes, fastened with strings, that said “911 Tapes” on them. He opened them and found two cassette tapes.
“You have a cassette player around?” he asked.
“Yeah. Rodriguez has one in his bottom drawer.”
