John Sandford - Silken Prey

Lucas would sit in his office chair for a while every day, and stare out his window, which overlooked a parking lot and an evidence-deposit container, and run his mind over the Grant case. He didn’t really care about Grant’s jewelry, but the phone call plagued him.

He kept going over it and over it and over it, how somebody else could have worked it, and then one day he thought, Kidd could monitor the security cameras. And he thought, No way Kidd could get his shoulders through that bedroom window. And Lucas thought, Had there been a twinkle in Kidd’s eye when, speaking of Lauren’s previous career, he’d said, “Insurance adjuster”?

He thought about Lauren, and he thought she was far more interesting than an insurance adjuster. She seemed more interesting than that. . . .

He looked up her driver’s license and found she’d taken Kidd’s name when they married. Without any real idea of where he was going, he idly looked up their marriage license, and found that her maiden name had been Lauren Watley.

Then he checked her employment records. . . .

And there, back, way back, he found that she’d worked as a waitress at the Wee Blue Inn in Duluth, where the owner was a guy named Weenie.

• • •

LUCAS KNEW ALL ABOUT Weenie. He was, at one time, Minnesota’s leading fence and criminal facilitator. Everybody knew that, but he’d never been convicted of a crime after an arrest for a string of burglaries as a teenager, and a short spell in the youth-offender facility.

Never arrested because he only dealt with high-end stuff, the stuff taken by the top pros; he didn’t deal with guns or anyone who routinely used violence. Just the good stuff. If you needed to change two pounds of gold jewelry into a stack of hundred-dollar bills, Weenie could do it for you, for twenty percent. If you needed to cut open a safe, he knew a machinist who could do that for you.

And Lauren had worked as a waitress for . . . fifteen years, sometimes, it seemed, under the name LuEllen. Fifteen years? Lucas laughed: that was not possible.

Not possible. He knew her that well.

What was possible was that Weenie provided her with an employment record, wrote off her salary while sticking the money in his pocket. In the meantime, she was off doing whatever she did. . . .

Lucas wasn’t exactly sure what that was, but he now had an idea . . . an itch that needed to be further scratched.

• • •

A MONTH AFTER the shoot-out with Dannon, on a crisp, bright, dry December day, Lucas got in his 911 and aimed it north on I-35, and let it out a little. He went through Duluth at noon, stopped at the Pickwick on the main drag, ate meat loaf and mashed potatoes, and then cruised on up to Iron Bay, a tiny town off Lake Superior.

Iron Bay had once been the home for workers at a taconite plant, and when the plant went down, so did the town. At one time, a house could be bought for ten thousand dollars, and many had been abandoned. The town had seen better days since, but it was not yet a garden spot.

Lucas threaded his way through a battered working-class neighborhood, and finally pulled into the driveway of a small ranch-style house. A heavy old man named James Corcoran came to the door, sucking on a cigarette, and said, “That car is a waste of money, in my opinion. You shoulda gone for the Boxster. All the ride, half the price.”

“Got hooked on the looks,” Lucas said, checking out his car. “A Boxster is nice, but you know . . . a 911 is a 911.”

“Come on in,” the old man said. “You want a beer?”

“Sure.”

• • •

THEY SAT IN THE living room and Corcoran, who’d once been the town’s only cop, said, “So, Lauren Watley. I do remember that girl and I hope she’s all right.”

“Married to a millionaire artist,” Lucas said.

“Good for her, good for her,” the old man said. “Her dad was one of the bigger jerks in town. Smart guy, engineer at the factory, but when he lost his job, he packed up, put it all in the car, and took off. Never looked back, as far as I know. Took every last cent, too. Janice Watley woke up one morning and didn’t have enough cash to buy cat food.”

“How old was Lauren at the time?”

“Don’t really know,” Corcoran said. “Junior high school, I guess. After her old man took off, the family went on welfare, and child support, but hell, that was nothing. Then, we started having some break-ins around town. Whoever was doing it knew what was going on, who had what, and where it was. For a long time, it was only money. But then, there was a guy here who ran the only thing in town that was worth a damn, a payday loan company. He had a coin collection, and it disappeared. Probably worth fifty grand.”

“You thought Lauren was doing it?”

“You know, it was one of those small-town things,” Corcoran said. “Everybody knew what their situation was over there. They had no money. Janice couldn’t find a job . . . hell, nobody could find a job after the plant went down. So they were hurting. But they weren’t hurting enough. They found the money for a used car. They paid cash for things . . . and the feeling was, money was coming from somewhere.”

“But there was no proof.”

“No proof. Lauren got to be in high school, and then this coin collection disappeared. The owner’s name was Roger Van Vechten. He sued the insurance company, because they only wanted to give him thirty thousand, and he wanted fifty. But that was later. Right after the coins disappeared, I happened to be in Duluth, for something else entirely, buying something, I can’t remember what . . . anyway, I see little Lauren coming out of the Wee Blue Inn. You know the guy there . . .”

“Weenie . . .”

“Yeah. Dead now,” Corcoran said. “He was the biggest fence in the Upper Midwest. Everybody knew it. The question was, what was Lauren doing coming out of the Wee Blue Inn? I thought I knew the answer to that and followed her back to Iron Bay, and we got to her house and I braced her. Made her turn her pockets out. She had two dollars and some change. I checked the car . . .”

“You had a warrant?”

Corcoran laughed, and then started coughing. When he recovered, he said, “Oh, hell, no. That was a different time, up here. I just did what needed to be done. Anyway, I checked her, and she was pissed, but she didn’t have a thing. Said she went down there to apply for a waitress job. I said, ‘Lauren, you ain’t no waitress.’ And she said, ‘Jim, you never been poor.’ She called me ‘Jim,’ when everybody else her age would have been calling me ‘Mr. Corcoran.’ She was fifteen and all grown up.”

“I’ve known women like that, girls like that,” Lucas said, thinking of his Letty.

“But that wasn’t the kicker,” Corcoran said. “The kicker was, we had some rednecks out here who made a connection down in the Cities, and got the local cocaine franchise. One day, I borrowed a couple deputies from the sheriff and we raided them, and we got a half-kilo of coke and eight thousand dollars in cash. I locked it up in the evidence cage at the police department, which was on the side of city hall. That night, somebody cracked the back door on city hall, slick as you please, broke through the drywall into the police annex, cut the lock on the cage, and took the cash and the coke. I know goddamned well it was Lauren and I didn’t have one speck of evidence. I just looked at her and I could see it in the way she looked back at me: she thought it was funny. She was getting back at me for bracing her.”

Lucas smiled, and said, “Yeah, I can see her doing that.”

“You got something on her?” Corcoran asked.

“Exactly what you got,” Lucas said. “A belief.”