John Sandford - Wicked Prey

The house was quiet inside, smelled of rotten vegetables and dirty diapers and smoke. In fact, it was only half a house-an apartment. The front door led to the porch, but there was no way to get into the other side of the house.

She went back to the kitchen after the first look, got a dish rag off the sink, wiped the lock where she'd touched it, then moved through the house, looking for targets of interest. She found that there was almost nothing to see-a ratty old couch, two scarred tables, a couple of chairs, a broken-down bed in a room that may once have been a dining room, a new TV set with a cable connection. She found stairs going up to what might have originally been a bedroom, but the bedroom was empty, nothing but a half-dozen Snickers candy bar wrappers on the floor, and three or four cigarette butts.

Whitcomb had a lot of clothes, and so did the woman, most of them hung in a doorless closet, the others in a plastic-laminate chest of drawers. The woman wore cheap fashion jeans and low-cut blouses and black brassieres and thong underwear. Tucked in the rickety chest of drawers was a box of Reality female condoms. The woman, Letty understood, was a hooker.

She stopped to listen, heard nothing. Saw a flash of amber on a windowsill, checked it, found five empty pill containers. The names of the drugs meant nothing to her.

In the whole house, the only new thing was the high-def Sony television with an Xbox 360 game machine and a couple of controllers.

Then she found Randy's switch.

She knew what it was, because she'd known a man who'd beaten his children with a switch just like it, until one day, after whipping one of his daughters for some imagined moral infraction, his two older sons had taken him out into the side yard and had beaten him so badly that he hadn't been able to walk for the best part of a year.

Anyway, she knew what it was, and she took it out from behind the couch, handling it with the dish rag from the kitchen, and she looked at the blood spots. He's a pimp, she's a hooker, and he beats her with it. Letty considered breaking it into pieces, then thought, Huh, and put it back.

Took a last look around, and backed out of the house.

Pulled the door shut, got on her bike, and rode away, down the hill, toward town.

Things to think about.

Lucas talked to every manager, assistant manager, and bellman he could find, in all of St. Paul's hotels, got unanimous head-shakes, and was headed out the door of his last stop when he saw Mitford walking toward the bar with a couple of other guys. "Neil!"

Mitford turned, spotted him, walked over: "How's it going?"

"Slowly. I'm walking a picture around…" He showed Mitford the shot of Cohn, told him about the victim interviews, and about Jones's impatience with the victims.

"You told him about the money?" Mitford asked.

"He knew about the money. He knew there was something going on." Lucas shook his head. "There're going to be rumors, and when it gets out to the blogs, you'll have some damage control to do."

"It'll get swamped by all the other noise ' Listen, come on over and meet these guys. They might have some ideas."

The guys were out-of-towners, professional handlers, Democrats in town to watch the Republicans do their stuff. Ray Landy and Dick

McCollum were talking about McCain and his vice-presidential pick, the unknown governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin. They couldn't stop talking about her, veering from amazement to ridicule, watching their BlackBerrys as commentary poured in from friends, reading the messages aloud. They got a table in the tiny bar, and Landy said to Lucas: "You're an outside guy. What do you outside guys think about Palin?"

Lucas said, "I'm mostly a Democrat, so ' maybe I'm not the best judge."

"Oh, bullshit," Landy said. "What do you think?"

"I don't know anything about her. What bothers me is that it was a quick decision, I guess-that's what the papers all say," Lucas said. "They say that McCain is rolling the bones. I don't know about Palin, but I'm not sure I want to vote for a guy who'd roll the bones on a presidential election. Doesn't make him seem like a calm, rational decision-maker."

"Bless you," Landy said. "I hope everybody's thinking that way."

The three pols ordered Bloody Marys and Lucas got a Diet Coke. Mitford said, "Guys, Lucas is a big shot in our Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. He's looking into the robberies…"

McCollum was a pale-eyed man who fiddled with an unlit cigarette, twiddling it like a pencil between his nicotine-stained fingers: "You a cop?"

Lucas nodded. "Yup."

"He's handled things for the governor for a while-I asked him to look into these things," Mitford said.

The drinks came and they stopped talking until they'd all had a sip, and the waitress left, and McCollum said, "There are fifteen guys like them. Well, there were, anyway. Some of them might have taken off."

"You ever heard of anything like this before?" Lucas asked.

Both men shook their heads, and Landy said, "You hear about it at a lot lower level-but not at this level. You know, when the money gets down to the street, you'll have robberies, but they're random, small-time stuff. A few hundred here or there. That's what happens when you walk around in a bad area with your pockets full of twenty-dollar bills." He said "bad air-ee-a" in a way that suggested it was a clich`e wherever he came from.

"I never quite understood where the money was going," Lucas said.

Landy looked at Mitford, who shrugged, and Landy said, "When you're running a campaign, you've got all these people down at the bottom who need walking-around money. They want to get lunch, or buy lunch for somebody, or catch a cab, or get somebody a cab, or pay for gas, or even get some lawn signs together. These are people who turn out the vote. You can't issue a check to all of them-and a lot of them don't have money to do it on their own. I mean, any money."

"Say you're working an area with gangs," McCollum said. "There might be somebody who is, like, an officer in a gang. He can turn out a certain vote-fifty people, seventy-five people, a hundred people, maybe even a few hundred people. He needs to get around for a few weeks. Somebody might toss him a few hundred dollars, depending on what he does…"

"A couple grand, maybe," Landy said.

"And the candidate might not want his name on a check going to a gang leader," McCollum said. "So, the cash is like oil. It greases the wheel."

"Seems like a lot of money," Lucas said. "A million bucks, more…"

"It is a lot, at this level, when it's in a suitcase. Once you get down to the street, it's pretty parceled out. You might put a couple of million in a big place like Philly or Dade County, or Cleveland, but it's mostly in handfuls. Mostly, less than a grand. You know, you get two or three thousand people working informally, they need lunch and cab fare and so on ' you can go through a mil pretty damn fast."

"Inflation," Mitford said.

"Damn right. Back in "eighty-eight, I bet the dollar amounts were maybe a quarter of what you see now," Landy said. "Gas was cheap, food was cheap, everything was cheap. Now, it's more. Million doesn't go as far as it used to."

"If it's a million in Philly or Miami, what's it in Chicago or LA?" Lucas asked.

"Mmm, doesn't really work that way. Pennsylvania's in play, so's Florida," Landy said. "They could go either way, so getting out the street vote is critical. Illinois and California are pretty safe for us, so it's not that critical. Republicans won't spend much, either. There's going to be money, but' maybe not quite as intense."

While Lucas was sitting in the bar, sipping on his Coke, talking political money, Rosie Cruz was walking back toward her room from the Coke machine, and saw the cop in the lobby. The cop car was parked a few spaces down from the lobby door, andwitha bad feeling, Cruz pushed through the lobby door and walked up beside the cop, a pudgy young blond guy, who was talking to a couple of desk clerks.