John Sandford - Rules of Prey

"That's a county job. I thought your husband worked for the City of Minneapolis."

"Well, he did, but you know, people go back and forth all the time, between City Hall and the courthouse. Larry's job, he knew everybody. Every time something went wrong, they called him because he could fix anything. He used to see… the police officer who gave us the gun down in the cafeteria."

Ruiz was back on the line.

"I was over there three weeks and four weeks before," she said.

"Before you were attacked."

"Yes."

"Thanks. Listen, see you at six, but try to remember everybody you saw in the courthouse, okay?"

"Got something?" asked Sloan when Lucas hung up the phone.

"I don't know. You got the phone number where this Lewis woman worked, the real-estate office?"

"Yeah, I think so." Sloan got out his project notebook, ran down the list, and gave Lucas the number. He dialed and got the office manager and explained what he wanted.

"… So did she go down there?"

"Oh, sure, all the time. Once a week. She carried a lot of the paperwork for us."

"So she would have been down there before she was killed?"

"Sure. You people have her desk calendars, but she hadn't taken any vacation in the couple of months before she died, so I'm sure she was down there."

"Thanks," Lucas said.

"Well?" said Sloan.

"I don't know," Lucas said. "Two of the women were in the courthouse shortly before they were attacked. Even the woman from St. Paul, and it wouldn't be that common for somebody from St. Paul to be over in the Hennepin County courthouse. And Mr. Rice was there all the time. It would be a hell of a coincidence."

"One of the other women, this Bell, the waitress-punker, was busted out at Target on Lake Street for shoplifting. It wasn't all that long ago. I remember that from our notebooks," Sloan said. "I bet she went to court down there. I don't know about the Morris woman."

"I'll run Morris," Lucas said. "It could be something."

"I got her house number, maybe her husband's there," Sloan said. He flipped open his notebook and read out the number as Lucas dialed. Lucas let it ring twenty times without an answer, and hung up.

"I'll get him later," Lucas said.

"Want me to check on this welfare guy?"

"You might take a look at him," Lucas said. He turned to Rice. "Did the welfare worker have an accent of any kind? Even a little one?"

"No, not that I remember. I know he's from here in Minnesota, he told me that."

"Damn," said Lucas.

"Could be a Svenska," said Sloan. "You get some of those Swedes and Germans from out in central Minnesota, they still got an accent. Maybe this Ruiz heard the accent and thought it was something like southwestern."

"It's worth a look," Lucas said.

At the office, he called Anderson and got Morris' husband's office. He answered on the first ring.

"Yes, she did," he said. "It must of been about a month before… Anyway, she used to work out at a health club on Hennepin Avenue, and about once a week she'd get a parking ticket. She'd just throw it in her glove compartment and forget about it. She must have had ten or fifteen of them. Then she got a notice that they were going to issue a warrant for her arrest unless she came down and paid and cleared this court order. So she went down there. It took most of a day to get everything cleared up."

"Was that the only time she was down there?"

"Well, recently. She might have been other times, but I don't know of any."

When he finished with Morris, Lucas called the clerk of court and checked on Lucy Bell's appearance date on the shoplifting charge. May 27. He looked at a calendar. A Friday, a little more than a month before she was killed.

So they had all been in the courthouse. The gun had come from City Hall, through a guy who hung around the courthouse. Lucas walked down the hall to Anderson 's office.

"So what does it mean?" Anderson asked. "He's picking them up right here?"

"Picking them out, maybe," Lucas said. "Three of them were involved in courts and would have court files. Our man could be researching them through that."

"I'll check on who pulled the files," Anderson said.

"Do that."

"So what do you think?" Anderson asked.

"It was too easy," Lucas said. "This cat don't fall that easy."

Aerosmith was fine. Lucas sat back in his seat, watching with amusement as Carla bounced up and down with the music, turning to him, laughing, reaching a fist overhead with the other fifteen thousand screaming fans to shake it at the stage…

She asked him up for coffee.

"That's the most fun I've had since… I don't know, a long time," she said as she put two cups of water in the microwave.

Lucas was prowling the studio, looking at her fiber work. "How long have you been doing this?" he asked.

"Five, six years. I painted first, then got into sculpture, and then kind of drifted into this. My grandmother had a loom, I've known about weaving since I was a kid."

"How about this sculpture?" he asked, gesturing at the squidlike hangings.

"I don't know. I think they were mostly an effort to catch a trend, you know? They seemed okay at the time, but now I think I was playing games with myself. It's all kind of derivative. I'm pretty much back to straight weaving now."

"Tough racket. Art, I mean."

"That isn't the half of it, brother," she said. The microwave beeped and she took the cups out, dumped a spoon of instant gourmet coffee into each cup, and stirred.

"Cinnamon coffee," she said, handing him a cup.

He took a sip. "Hot. Good, though."

"I wanted to ask you something," she said.

"Go."

"I was thinking I did pretty well when I fought this guy off," she said.

"You did."

"But I'm still scared. I know what you said the other night, about him not coming back. But I was lucky the first time. He wasn't ready for me. If he comes back, I might not be so lucky."

"So?"

"I'm wondering about a gun."

He thought about it for a minute, then nodded.

"It's worth thinking about," he said. "Most people, I'd say no. When most people buy a gun, they instantly become its most likely victim. The next-most-likely victims are the spouse and kids. Then the neighbors. But you don't have a spouse or kids and you're not likely to get in a brawl with your neighbors. And I think you're probably cool enough to use one right."

"So I ought to get one?"

"I can't tell you that. If you do, you'd be the most likely victim, at least statistically. But with some people, statistics are nonsense. If you're not the type of person to have stupid accidents, if you're not careless, if you're not suicidal or think a gun's a toy, then you might want to get one. There is a chance that this guy will come back. You're the only living witness to an attack."

"I'd want to know what to get," Carla said. She took a sip of coffee. "I couldn't spend too much. And I'd want some help learning to use it."

"I could loan you one, if you like, just until we get the guy," Lucas said. "Let me see your hand. Hold it up."

She held her hand up, fingers spread, palm toward him. He pressed his palm against hers and looked at the length of his finger overlap.

"Small hands," he said. "I've got an older Charter Arms.38 special that ought to fit just about right. And we can get some semiwadcutter loads so you don't get too much penetration and kill all your neighbors if you have to use it."

"What?"

"Your walls here are plaster and lath," Lucas explained. He leaned back and rapped on a wall, and little crumbs of plaster dropped off. "If you use too powerful a round, you'll punch one long hole through the whole building. And anybody standing in the way."

"I didn't think of that." She looked worried.