John Sandford: Wicked Prey

"She's fine. She's great," Del said. "She looks like a goddamn rosebud. Doc says she's starting to dilate, but she's still a while out. She's got me running around like a Shriner parade."

Lucas asked, "Do they still have those?"

"They must, somewhere," Del said. "They still got Shriners." He eased into one of the visitors' chairs and put his boots on Lucas's desktop. "So what's this about a sandwich shop in Dinkytown?"

Carol explained and Del said, "I'll go over and have a chat with the guy."

"I'm not doing much," Lucas said.

"Yeah, but you go walking in the door, maybe he pulls out a shotgun and kills you," Del said. "Me, he doesn't know from Adam."

"As far as you know."

"Whatever." Del yawned then added, "I never heard of a cop getting killed by somebody who called ahead."

"Probably happened somewhere," Lucas said. "Everything's happened somewhere."

Del was a battered man in his late forties, in jeans and a Pennzoil T-shirt with grease spots on it, rough-side-out Red Wing work boots, and an old, unfashionable nylon fanny pack, worn in front. He had a cell-phone-sized digital camera hung on a string around his neck and a.38 revolver in the fanny pack. He'd been working the streets around the convention center.

"So what's happening?" Lucas asked.

"Ah, you know: kids and old people. There are some assholes out there, but most of them are hobbyists. They seem like my mom ' you know, old. They've got these recycled chants from the sixties. "Hey, hey, John McCain, how many children have you slain?"' Like that."

"With a few assholes."

"A few," Del said. "Vandals. Red-and-black flags. Slingshots. Guys who want to wreck the place for the pure pleasure of it. I could point out twenty people, if we picked them up and put them in the basement for a few days, the convention would be a sea of peace."

" Ramsey County sheriff is setting up a raid tonight, tomorrow night, pick some of those guys up," Lucas said. "Or so I'm told."

"Here?"

"No, over in Minneapolis," Lucas said. "They're pulling in some Minneapolis cops."

They talked about that for a while, and Lucas told Del about the guy with the sniper rifle, and Del shook his head and said, "That's all we need."

"You having a good time?" Lucas asked.

"Yeah, I am," Del said. "I like talking to them; pretty good folks, for the most part. Even the assholes are interesting."

"I'd like to get out there; just to see it, you know?" Lucas said.

Del was doubtful. "You look too much like a cop-or even a Republican."

"Not that."

"Well-you got that vibe. You'd have to tone it down," Del said. "Like, borrow clothes from me." Lucas shuddered: "Maybe not."

He was, in fact, a clotheshorse, this morning wearing a light checked sport coat over an icy-blue long-sleeved dress shirt, black summer-weight woolen slacks hand-knit by an Italian virgin, and square-toed English-made loafers.

Carol shouted: "Lily Rothenburg on two."

Lucas said to Del, "I got a call coming here."

Del said, "Pick it up. I ain't going anywhere, if it's Lily calling."

"Fuck you," Lucas said. He and Lily had once been a passing fashion, including a geometrical insanity in an earlier Porsche. Del knew all about it: Lucas shook his head and picked up the phone. "Lily?"

"Lucas Davenport," she said, "How's every little thing?"

"Well, we got a lot going on, so ' pretty good," Lucas said. "How about you? How's the kid? If you're divorced, I can offer you space in my garage."

She laughed and said, "From what I hear about Weather, it'd be more like the backyard. But, the kid's fine and I'm not divorced."

" Del 's here, he says hi'"

They caught up for a few minutes, then she said, "Look. We've got a problem-or, maybe, you've got a problem. We had an armored car robbery here two and a half years ago, and two guards were killed. They were off-duty cops. The robbery crew got away with a half-million dollars."

"Not that big, for an armored car," Lucas said.

"Well, there was more inside, but the thing went bad. Most of the money was behind a locked barrier inside the truck," Lily said. "The idea was, if trouble started, the guards would put the keys in a solid-steel lockbox inside the back, which they didn't have keys to, and then nobody could get at the money ' that's what they did. But somebody got pissed, we think, and started shooting, and all the shooters got were the receipts from a couple of big-box stores that hadn't been put behind the barrier yet."

"How does that get to us?"

"We think the leader of the crew was a guy named Brutus Cohn," Lily said. "We got an anonymous tip. A male caller, deep southern accent, calling from Kennedy. He said that he'd seen Cohn getting on a plane at Heathrow, in England, yesterday, going to Los Angeles. He said he knew him from Alabama, and Cohn is from Alabama. He said Cohn had grown a red beard, and Cohn is a redhead."

"So he sounds good," Lucas said.

"Yes. Anyway, this guy said he was waiting to get on his plane, when he saw Cohn. He didn't want to call from London, because he was afraid we'd identify him, and he's afraid of Cohn. So he got way back and watched Cohn going into a gate for a flight to Los Angeles. By the time we got to the LA cops, Cohn's flight was an hour out. They met the plane, and there was no Brutus Cohn. There was no way to get back to the original source, so we checked with Heathrow. Everything was right: there was the Kennedy gate, and down the way, the LA gate. But the gate was a joint gate-and the next gate down, where Cohn could also have been headed…"

"… came here."

"Right. The Minneapolis plane was on the ground for three hours before we got it straight. Our people talked to the flight crew, and there was a man in first class who probably was Cohn. He almost certainly was the guy that the source saw, and the source said he knew Cohn pretty well. The crew said he was very tall, fairly thin, muscular, red hair, and charming with the flight crew. The girls liked him, and that's Cohn, from what we hear."

"What's he doing?" Lucas asked.

"Don't know. It's possible he moved right on through the Cities, changed planes, and is gone. But it's also possible that he's up to something," Lily said. "He's a serious, ultra-violent holdup man who needs a big score so he can bury himself somewhere. He mostly worked in the south, down to Florida, north to Atlanta, west to New Mexico. Maybe California. Maybe one job in Mexico. The FBI isn't sure about all of that, but if they've got him right, there have been at least five dead in thirty to forty robberies, and one survivor shot through the chest who should've died. He's the guy who eventually identified Cohn for the FBI, from prison photographs. S. We've been looking, and waiting, and here he is. You've got that convention going on ' lots of cash there. A boatload of cash."

Lucas said, "Let me ask you this-how'd the caller know you were looking for Cohn?"

"We didn't make any secret about it," she said. "We put out posters, we sent some guys to Birmingham to look up his old acquaintances, his relatives, dear old Mom. They got some TV time, it was sort of a thing, you know, a modern Jesse James. Got some attention down there."

"You want him pretty bad," Lucas said.

"Yes, we do."

"Send me what you got," Lucas said. "I'll spread it around to the TV stations."

"Ah-don't do that," Lily said. "He's very careful. You could almost call that his MO. If he suspected we were onto him, he'd be gone in a minute."

The problem, she said, was that New York really had no solid proof that he'd been involved in the armored car robbery. They had DNA that they believed had come out of the struggle between the cops and the shooter, but they didn't know whether it was Cohn's DNA, or DNA from somebody else in the gang.