John Sandford: Wicked Prey

"Cohn would have done the killing, if he thought he needed to, but we don't know that he was the shooter. He was there, but maybe didn't pull the trigger. Then, we think we found the place where they got together before the robbery, a motel out in Queens, but they burned it down, so we got nothing. No DNA, nothing."

"Burned it down?"

"Yeah. Fire guys say somebody doused the place with a mix of gasoline and motor oil, and torched it," Lily said. "Fire kills DNA…"

"I know. But it seems kind of extreme," Lucas said.

"That's Cohn. He's Mr. Extreme. He did three years in prison in Alabama, a newbie, but he was running the place by the time he left."

"So if you don't want us to spread his face around, what do you want?" Lucas asked.

"We want to send you a bunch of photos," Lily said. "They're twelve years old, but we Photoshopped them to age him, and we added the beard. We thought some of your guys could walk them around to the local hotels and motels, see if you can spot him. And then ' see what he's doing."

"You mean, let him take a shot at another armored car?"

"You wouldn't have to wait until the last second," she said, but her tone was rich with suggestion.

"But they'd have to be making a move…"

"Yeah, well. Life in the big city, huh?" Lily said. "The thing is, if he knows he put some DNA on somebody, here in New York, he'll try to shoot his way free."

"You want us to kill him," Lucas said.

"I didn't say that. I said, he killed two of our guys, and probably three more people, along the way," Lily said.

Lucas thought about it for a moment, then said, "Send the stuff. I'll get it to the people who need it."

"Lucas ' thank you. And stay in touch."

"Interesting little conversation," Del said.

Carol routed through a call from Dan Coates, his opposite number in Wisconsin. Lucas filled him in on Justice Shafer. "We sent the file across the river, to the sheriffs' departments between us and Eau Claire, but it'd help if you goosed them along a little. You know, so you can deflect the blame when something goes wrong."

"Who'd point the finger at us? If something went wrong?" Coates asked. He was crunching on something like a carrot or a celery stick.

"Listen, if something goes wrong at the convention, with a seven-hundred-and-fifty-yard shot from a.50-cal, everybody will point the finger at you. And at me, and every other local cop. Think about it."

"I'll call everybody," Coates said. "How much you want to put on the Vikings?"

"Screw the Vikings. They're a bunch of criminals," Lucas said. "Not that Green Bay won't stink the place up."

"Let me tell you…"

They were discussing the possibilities when Del yawned and stood up and said, "I'm gonna go see that Arab dude in the sandwich shop."

Lucas took the phone away from his mouth: "Careful."

"Think about a disguise," Del said. "If you go out on the street." From the outer office, Carol called, "Why don't you drive the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile? Nobody would suspect."

Lucas said, " Del ' shut the door on the way out, okay?"

Del didn't shut the door. Carol propped herself in it, and when Lucas got off the phone, asked, "Are you serious about going out there?"

"Yeah. There are about a million people wandering around out there, and I'd like to go out and see it," Lucas said.

She nodded: "Listen, I was looking at National Geographic'"

"Didn't know you were an intellectual'"

"… and one of the guys in it, one of the photographers, this war photographer, looked like you. Attitudinally if you know what I mean. If you got some Levi's and gym shoes and, like, a long-sleeved shirt and rolled the sleeves way up over your elbows, and messed up your hair, and put some convention credentials around your neck, and borrowed a camera bag from Dan Jackson and a couple of cameras-you could make it as a photographer."

Lucas shook his head. "Pretending that you're a reporter tends to piss people off."

"Don't. Wear your official ID," Carol said. "Who looks at it? They just see the tags."

"I'll think about it," Lucas said.

She shrugged. "Do what you want-but you could look like a photographer."

He thought about Lily for a while, and the Cohn gang, and then he went on the Internet and looked at pictures of war photographers. Carol was right, he decided; he could be a photographer. Maybe. He called Jackson, said he was coming down for wardrobe and makeup.

On the way out of the office, he told Carol to print the pictures of Justice Shafer, and of Brutus Cohn, when they came in. "Call Minneapolis and St. Paul and Bloomington and get a list of firearms dealers who might be dealing dirty. Big enough so that their names would be around: somebody that a bad guy could find if he blew into town."

"You want them rated by their dirt quotient," she suggested. "Yeah. I'll go chat with them. Give me something to do," he said.

Lucas had a small Nikon single-lens reflex digital camera, given to him for Christmas by Weather, along with a couple of zoom lenses. He used it to take pictures of the kids. When Jackson backed out of the equipment closet with two Nikon cameras, and an old Domke cloth camera bag and three lenses, he knew more or less how they worked.

"What we're gonna do," Jackson said, peeling a strip of black gaffer tape off a roll, "is we're gonna tape out the Nikon and the D2x logos, which some war guys do to reduce visibility, you know? Then, not many people will know that you're shooting older cameras."

"I'm not going to be shooting them much," Lucas said.

"Gotta look like it, though," Jackson said. "Do take a few shots, you might like it. The other thing is, make your shirt kinda military. Black, or olive green, with the sleeves rolled up. Military's sort of photo-trendy."

"What do I do if somebody asks me who I'm with?" Lucas asked.

"I just keep moving and say, "BCA," and they'll nod like they know who it is," Jackson said. "Sounds sort of like BBC, NBC, CBS, ABC."

"Maybe I oughta wear white socks," Lucas suggested.

"Maybe you oughta take it seriously," Jackson said. "You could get your ass kicked, if somebody took you the wrong way."

"Lots of cops around…"

Jackson looked up. "You know, one way you'd be safe is, wear a police uniform. Nobody'll fuck with you. Nobody'll talk to you, either, other than to say hello."

"This is better," Lucas said, peering through the camera's view-finder. "I'm looking pretty good here."

"Your hair is way too combed," Jackson said. "You gotta get some Brylcreem or something, get some hair spiked up. Wear jeans. And you gotta scuff them up-you're way too neat. Way too neat. You gotta look like you slept in the jeans. Every time I see you in jeans ' What do you do? Do you dry-clean your jeans?"

"No, I don't dry-clean my jeans," Lucas said.

"Then you iron them," Jackson said.

"The housekeeper irons them, sometimes," Lucas admitted.

"Irons your jeans?" He was appalled.

"Hey'"

"Sorry'"

"You're sorta getting into this," Lucas said.

"Well, you know, it's interesting," Jackson said. "Carol was right: you do sorta look like a conflict photographer. So: let me show you how to handle the camera. It's like shooting on the range, very similar to a gun…"

Del called during the lecture, from the Middle East sandwich shop, and talking around a gyro, said, "They got a phone on the counter here, no long distance company, so they let anybody use it. They got no idea who called you, but they say they remembered one guy yelling into it, and Carol told me the guy who left the message was yelling, but this yelling guy was in a wheelchair."

"That's a relief," Lucas said. He hung up and asked Jackson, "You got any lighter lenses? This lens is big as my dick."