Chapter 23
Edie Lamb was Lucas’s putative boss. She’d found Lucas with his feet on his desk, reading a C. J. Box novel, and when she asked, he said, no, he wasn’t doing anything.
“Would you mind doing something? We’ve got things to do around here.”
“Depends on what you got,” Lucas said.
Lamb took a chair: “Every year, around this time, I have to kick your ass. You get down in the winter and you freeze up.”
“Winter’s not a happy time for me,” Lucas said. “Everything closes in.”
“Come see me in my office in fifteen minutes,” she said, and heaved herself out of the chair.
Lucas was an independent agent, and some members of the Marshals Service were unhappy about that. Some other members weren’t—and those members included the director, the deputy director, the general counsel, the associate director for operations, and so on.
Using his badge, and some peculiar circumstances, Lucas had built strong allies in the U.S.
Senate, and the Senate paid the Service’s bills.
If a serious bureaucratic problem flared up, Lucas was happy to call his Senate contacts for a chat.
Sometimes, not always, the chats paid off for the Service.
Lamb was the U.S. Marshal for the Minnesota district, and something of a friend.
Fifteen minutes after she caught him with the Box novel, Lucas was in her office, where he told her about being disinvited from the FBI coverage of the Sokolovs.
They were chatting about what he might do next.
The hit team was somebody else’s problem, although their freedom continued to nag at him.
Lamb, in her office, had produced an FBI report of a man named George DeWitt Horn Jr. “Horn is assessed by the FBI to be in the Alexandria area at a…hmmm…sixty percent confidence level,” Lamb said, peering at the FBI report.
“In other words, he probably isn’t,” Lucas said. “The FBI always cheats on those assessment levels.”
“Yeah, but if he is, and you tracked him down, that’d be a nice feather in our caps. Especially since the FBI can’t find him.”
Horn had murdered three young women in the Chicago area, according to DNA samples taken from their bodies and matched to Horn’s DNA, a sample that had been taken after his first conviction for child molestation.
When a task force comprising FBI and local cops broke into his cubicle at a transient hotel, they found nothing but a full-color photocopy of Horn’s asshole taped to one wall, and a photocopy of his right middle finger taped to another.
The task force surmised that Horn had seen them coming; he was in the wind, with no known car.
He had been born and raised in Alexandria, Minnesota, a small city a hundred and thirty miles northwest of Minneapolis.
He was known to have gone back several times since graduating from Alexandria Area High School, Iowa Lakes Community College with an AAS degree in wind energy and turbine technology, and from Lino Lakes Correctional Facility in Minnesota on the molestation change.
“If I went to Alexandria this week, I’d most likely freeze to death,” Lucas said.
“As far as I know, this office has nothing going in Miami or Los Angeles, so it’s Alexandria or nothing. I really would like to catch this asshole.” She held up a photo of the asshole that Horn had left for the FBI.
“Jesus, put that back in the file. I don’t want to look at it,” Lucas said. “I’ll make some phone calls, I know a couple of guys out there.”
“I hoped you’d say that. If you go, you could take Shelly with you. She bagged that guy in Grand Marais.”
“Good. Let me make my calls.”
· · ·
Lucas spent the day working phones, getting nowhere.
He took a call from Jon Duncan at the BCA, who said that BCA agents and local cops had raided three Russian-run dating services, and returns were spotty.
Lucas also checked with two marshals who worked with the Special Operations Group in Louisiana to see if they had anything really good.
They didn’t; but they had good gossip, which was mostly why he called them.
Sherwood called to say that the CIA lab had looked at the two Sokolovs’ DNA, and had confirmed that Bernie was Leonid’s son. “There’s probably some kind of deep psychological trauma there, that we’ll never find out about,” Sherwood said.
“Not until you get Bernie to a black site.”
“We don’t have those anymore,” Sherwood said. “Cost-cutting measures.”
Lucas went home early, did a three-mile run during which he froze his face, shot one basket with a basketball that had frozen solid behind a bush in the backyard, ate dinner with Weather, watched a movie, sent the kids to bed, and then suggested that he and Weather go upstairs and fool around for a while.
“Almost too late, but not quite,” Weather said, checking her watch. “Let’s get up there. Time’s a-wastin’.”
· · ·
The next morning, he was eating a late breakfast while reading the Wall Street Journal on his laptop when he took a call from a number that rang a bell, but that he didn’t recognize.
“This is Lawrence Bell…”
“That’s why your number rang a bell,” Lucas said. “The guy with the whorehouse…”
Bell: “Not a whorehouse. Mother of God, I don’t know why I make this call.”
“So…what’s up, Larry?”
“Lawrence. Your BCA and Minneapolis police raided me yesterday,” Bell said.
“I heard.”
“They found nothing, of course. Only me and a lonely cleaning woman.”
“Good for you, Larry. Well, take it easy…” Lucas began.
“Wait, wait, wait. Something happened last night,” Bell said. “I don’t know what it is, but something happened.”
“Happened?”
“With these people who interest you,” Bell said. “The ones in touch with the Old Country.”
“Let’s start from the beginning,” Lucas said. “Where were you when you heard something happened?”
“I have breakfast with…friends. I don’t tell you who they are, because it would hurt them, and they don’t know much.
But they knew something happened last night.
Somebody was asked to take a girl to a dance club in the northeast. Maybe this Nightshade club.
These people who send the girl, they are the people who interest you.
My friends say she made a delivery. We thought maybe drugs, but that seemed unusual.
Drugs, you can find them laying on the street, why the big secret?
My friends, they didn’t know where she came from, or what she delivered. ”
“What girl?”
“They don’t know. A girl,” Bell said.
“Who sent her? Exactly?” Lucas asked.
“Nobody knows this. People talk, other people hear things. A pretty girl was taken to a dance club in the northeast. Maybe this Nightshade. That’s all.”
Lucas worked on him for another two minutes, but Bell had nothing but a further request: “The Minneapolis police were on the raid yesterday. One of them was…a friend…but he didn’t act like a friend.
He didn’t want to know me. He was difficult, he wanted to tear my house apart.
I’m afraid he might come back on me, trying to lay down some tracks that say he’s not a friend of ours. Can you help that?”
“You could move out of Minneapolis,” Lucas suggested.
“I own this house,” Bell said. “I fixed it, I would not get my money back.”
“This friend…was he slipping the old pink piccolo to your girls for free?” Lucas asked.
“What is this piccolo, what are you talking about?”
“Was he screwing your girls? And not paying?”
“He…Yes. Sometimes. He provided coverage for us,” Bell said. “You know, if there were rumors in the police department, if there was some interest in us, we might get a warning.”
“What’s his name?”
“Cordell Shea. He is this big pussy hound,” Bell said.
“Okay. I know a deputy chief over there,” Lucas said. “I’ll have a chat with her, maybe cool things off. Maybe. I’ll get back to you.”
“I could be a source, for a long time, for your chief, if I’m not driven out.”
“I’ll tell her that,” Lucas said.
· · ·
Lucas called Sherwood, who, without saying hello, went with, “I knew it. You got something that the FBI doesn’t.”
“Where was Bernie last night?” Lucas asked.
“Clubbing.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know,” Sherwood said. “I spent it in my lonely hotel room, alone, since your girlfriend Jane was sincere when she said she doesn’t go to dinner with spies.”
“Find out if Bernie was at the Nightshade. It’s a low-rent dance club and cocaine dispensary on Fourth Street. Call me back.”
“Give me thirty seconds. Maybe a minute.”
· · ·
A minute later, Sherwood called back: “Goddamnit, he was at the Nightshade for two hours. What happened? What have you got?”
“Our Russian friends, the ones with contacts back in Europe, supposedly sent a girl there to deliver something to somebody. A rumor, but an interesting one.”
“What did they send?”
“They said not drugs, since you could probably buy them over the bar. I’m thinking…”
“A new burner,” Sherwood said.
“Yes. He may have a new phone, which would mean that he probably knows the feds found his old burner,” Lucas said. “That means he probably was talking to his handlers last night.”
Sherwood: “I gotta make some calls.”
“We’re pretty far down the road from a rumor that something was sent to the Nightshade, to him having a phone. If he did get one, we can probably get a look at this chick on the club’s videos, since they’ve all got them.”
“Yeah, but she could be anybody. A messenger,” Sherwood said.
“The big question is, if he got a phone, what’d he tell the handlers?
That we’re onto him? Is he gonna get picked up by the hit team?
If that team had gone into this club last night…
there were two agents there that Bernie knew about, but there were four more outside.
This team is gonna include a countersurveillance expert, he’d spot the extra agents in one minute.
They’re about as inconspicuous as a car full of refrigerators.
What would they do, would they kill them?
We could have wound up with six casualties. ”
“Is Bernie going out tonight?” Lucas asked.