Chapter 9
Lucas got up with Weather to eat breakfast and to make his phone calls to Rose Marie Roux, the head of the Department of Public Safety.
After giving her the details of the previous day’s shooting, she agreed to press the Twin Cities television stations to emphasize the importance of an FBI press release.
Most of the time, newsrooms threw FBI news releases into the nearest wastebasket.
With that job done, Lucas went back to sleep and got another half-hour before Sherwood called: “We should talk about the meeting.”
“Which meeting?”
“The one at FBI headquarters at ten o’clock, or ten-thirty, depending on when the plane gets here. An FBI counter-intel team is flying in from Washington.”
“Where do you want to hook up?”
“I’m in my car, sitting in your driveway.”
· · ·
Lucas Invited Sherwood to wait in the den with the morning’s New York Times, which Sherwood had already picked up from the driveway. When Lucas had cleaned up, he’d come down in suit and tie. Sherwood nodded and asked, “How many suits you got?”
“Don’t know. An adequate number.”
“That’s a good number,” Sherwood said. “This one has a nice Italian vibe.”
They got breakfast at Cecil’s, a diner not far from Lucas’s house, corned beef hash and coffee for Sherwood, French toast and Diet Coke for Lucas.
“If the FBI is taking over, why are you still hanging around?” Lucas asked. “Reporting back to Frank?”
“That’s part of it. I hate being a spectator and I figure hanging around with you might actually get me somewhere,” Sherwood said. “The feds don’t want me involved—I’ve been told that, and my side pushed back, because of my special knowledge of the Sokolovs, so I’m in, but not exactly embraced.”
“What about me?”
“The Marshals Service wants you in, so you’re invited to meetings, but I don’t believe you’ll be kept up-to-date,” Sherwood said.
“For one thing, this is a chance for the feds to one-up the Marshals Service and the CIA. For another, you’re still not cleared of involvement.
The FBI’s counter-intel guys will want to talk to you. See what you think about Russians.”
“Not much. My daughter killed some Russians out in California.”
“What?”
He explained about Letty’s investigation of Russian-involved murders and espionage, and Sherwood said, “Jesus, I heard rumors about that. I was in Syria…overseas…when it happened. Your daughter gets around.”
“Check her out,” Lucas said. “But yeah. She gets around.”
Sherwood scooped up corned beef hash and chewed, looking around the diner at the other customers, a cross section of winter Minnesotans in sweatshirts and toques, with red noses and watery eyes; no obvious threats.
“If you had to, what would you investigate next? What would you do?” he asked. “Understand, I’m not a cop. I don’t know what to do here.”
Lucas said, “I had a couple ideas. Not sure that either of them would pay off. I assume the feds have the hospitals covered…”
“I assume that, too…”
“Okay. From what Juarez said last night, one of the Russians was hurt bad and needed a hospital right away. One was wounded, but she patched him up, about as well as what he would have gotten at a hospital emergency room. The third one, the woman, was barely wounded at all, and the fourth one wasn’t even involved.
The question is, if one of them rushed the badly wounded guy to a hospital, in the Wrangler, would the other two have another backup car? A fourth car?”
Sherwood considered the question, and then said, “No. Basically, in an op like this, you’d want two cars, at a minimum.
One action car, plus a backup. A driver and a gun in each car.
In this case, they had a driver and a shooter, plus a spotter in the action car, and one guy in the first backup.
The third car, the Jeep, was a running-balls-to-the-wall disaster backup.
I see where you’re going here. They might need a fourth car now.
In case the disaster backup was spotted, in case they were seen along the way, or Juarez understood what the vehicle was. ”
“Okay,” Lucas said. He wagged his fork at Sherwood. “How would they get it? Another car?”
“They could steal one—they’ll have those skills,” Sherwood said.
“If they’re not familiar with the area, with the police culture, that’d be a serious risk.
They wouldn’t know when the theft might be discovered, and when the police might start looking for them, how hard they’d look, what resources would be thrown at a stolen car. ”
“Which, around here, would be about none,” Lucas said. “I’ve been thinking that they might rent another one, just like they did the first Jeep and the Subaru.”
“If they’re out in the sticks, no car…Lyft? Uber? Taxi?”
“That’s the kind of thing that the feds can work on. Not us, because it takes a bunch of people on phones, and we’re smaller than a bunch.”
Sherwood looked at his watch: “We should go. We can unload this at the meeting.”
· · ·
The Minneapolis-area FBI was housed in a large whitish building with what looked like a black mask around a portion of it, like the Lone Ranger’s mask, if the Lone Ranger had worn his mask on the side of his head.
Sherwood and Lucas drove separately and made the ten o’clock meeting with fifteen minutes to spare.
They were shown to a conference room, where Beard, who’d headed the Marshals Service witness protection team, was twitching in a chair at a long conference table.
A laptop computer and a projector sat at one end of the table, and a white screen hung on the wall at the other end.
Three FBI suits were in a corner, chatting, cheerful enough at the moment, because they’d been involved in the retrieval of a kidnap victim; or, at least, events could be bent to look that way.
Beard ignored Sherwood but asked Lucas, “Anything new? After the nurse?”
“No.”
“Your locals, the state whatchacallit…”
“Bureau of Criminal Apprehension…”
“Yeah, those guys. They tracked all the calls by all the phones overnight, and there were exactly two, both from me, after the plane had landed. One was while the plane was taxiing, and before we knew that there’d be a delay getting to the house, and the other was to you, to tell you we’d be running late because we lost that suitcase.
You didn’t call anyone, and neither did White, before we got there. ”
“I knew that,” Lucas said.
“I thought that was the likely case,” Sherwood said. “I’ll see about getting all the phones back, and you can keep the burners.”
“I’m afraid the goddamn FBI might want them,” Beard said. “The ones flying in.”
“We’ll see, I’ve never dealt with them,” Sherwood said.
Shelly White was escorted into the room. She pulled out a chair next to Lucas and said, “You stayed up late.”
“I did, but I didn’t actually do much. Got the doctor back.”
“I heard. I understand we’re gonna get grilled by Washington feds,” she said.
“That appears to be the case,” Lucas said. He filled her in on the interview with the doctor, and the narrowing of the search area around Orono.
· · ·
The Washington feds arrived twenty minutes later, three men and a woman, the men in their forties, the woman a bit younger, all well-dressed, three leather and one aluminum briefcases among them.
They arrived with David St. Vincent, the FBI’s agent in charge, and several more agents, all suited. The youngest one went to the projector and laptop, and after introductions, plugged a thumb drive into the computer and lit it up.
St. Vincent did a brisk PowerPoint presentation, with maps, of all the key moments in the assassination and subsequent investigation, including the interview with Juarez and the washing of phone calls by the BCA.
“We have agents and several marshals accompanying local police in a door-knocking campaign all around the Orono-Minnetonka area, concentrating on farmhouses. No results yet.”
When he was done, there were questions. Sherwood outlined what Lucas and he thought might have happened with cars. There was dissension, but everyone was interested in any possible angle, so the feds would start making phone calls to the ride services and rental agencies.
With the briefing over, Sherwood and Beard were escorted to separate rooms with two of the counterintelligence team members walking with each of them.
The other marshals from the Sokolov house were ushered into the conference room, and they all sat around and waited like hopefuls at a temp agency.
After a half hour, Sherwood came back with the woman interrogator, and she said, “Marshal Davenport?”
The woman, middle-sized, olive-complected, and dark-haired, with a unibrow and sharp eyes, led him down the hall to another conference room. On the way, Lucas said, “I didn’t think I was important enough to go third.”
“You’re not,” the woman said. “Mr. Sherwood wants you on the street.”
“Nice guy,” Lucas said.
“No, not really,” she said, as if she knew; and it made Lucas wonder what she knew.
A male interviewer was waiting for them, and the interview took twenty minutes: Lucas’s background, his past jobs, and how he’d gotten the Sokolov assignment.
“I didn’t get it, I was told I was on it by the U.S. Marshal for Minnesota,” Lucas said.
“When was that?” the woman asked. She hadn’t mentioned her name.
“Two days ago. I think that’s when she was given it, by some suit in Washington.”
The male interviewer nodded: “That checks.”
The woman said, “As I understand it then, you deny any involvement with any Russian intelligence service, or anyone who might be working with any Russian intelligence service…”
“Of course, I do,” Lucas said. “I haven’t…Oh.”
The woman, who’d looked down at her notes, looked up. “Oh?”