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“Who’sthey?”
“St. Paul cops, BCA, FBI. The usual. The locals will do the investigating as part of a task force, but the FBI will keep the hammer. We’ll be observing. Not investigating. Yet. I’d like you to take a look. I’m all the way over in Minnetonka, with friends, finishing up a late dinner. I might have had a few. I’d appreciate it if you could get over there, show the flag. You still in a wheelchair?”
“No. Not for months. You sound a little pissed. I mean, pissed off, not drunk.”
“I’m a little pissed both ways. Alex was a friend of mine,” Lamb said. “He’s got, had, nice kids. I talked to the FBI agent in charge, and he wouldn’t tell me anything because, I suspect, he didn’t know anything. I called the St. Paul chief and he confirmed my suspicion. I have some bare facts: the three of them were shot. Eight shots, four for Alex, two each for the boys.”
“Since he was a friend of yours, I assume he was rich?”
“That’s an insulting suggestion, Davenport, imputing to me a selection process for choosing friends that is not at all valid,” Lamb said, slurring the longer words. “I know poor people, and you’re a friend of mine, so... oh, wait,you’rerich. I’d forgotten.”
“From the way you’re avoiding the question, I assume that I guessed correctly: he’s rich,” Lucas said.
“Yes. Alex is quite well-off. Was. Why does that matter?”
“Because it suggests a motive. Somebody might have killed him because of his money. Because of his money one way or another. So, what do you think? What was he into? Cocaine, hookers, gambling...?”
“None of those. He might have smoked a little weed back in law school, but who didn’t? I don’t think anything more than that, andnot anymore,” Lamb said. “From what I could tell, his marriage is solid. No fooling around.”
“No hidden boyfriends?”
“I doubt it. He has always been... almost intolerably straight. Like me.”
Right. Lucas knew—and she knew he knew—that she’d once been caught by her then-husband getting her bourbon-fueled brains banged loose by Elmer Henderson, a former governor and now the junior U.S. senator from Minnesota.
At the time, she’d been the number three bureaucrat in the Minnesota Department of Public Safety. Henderson’s influence had later gotten her the appointment as U.S. Marshal for the District of Minnesota.
Lucas assumed that she continued to be one of Henderson’s intimate diversions. Lucas didn’t care about that. And Lucas wouldn’t admit it to Lamb, for reasons of bureaucratic self-protection, but he was immediately interested in the Sand murders. “I’m still in quite a bit of pain,” he said, piously.
“Ah, for Christ’s sakes, suck it up, Lucas. Getting shot is not optimal, and getting shot a whole bunch of times is worse, but you gotta get off your ass. It’s time.”
That was true, but Lucas let the silence stretch out. Lamb knew the game and said nothing. Lucas caved first: “I’ll take a look,” he said. “You might help clear the way. The FBI doesn’t like me much.”
“As I understand it, you haven’t made yourself likeable. Besides, I’ve already cleared the way, since I knew you’re a sucker for the big-media cases, which this will be,” Lamb said. “Can you drive?”
“Not very well. Got hit in the fibula and if I have to hit the brakes hard, it’s like getting shot again.”
“A fibula is like an appendix?”
“It’s a bone in my lower leg.”
“I knew that. I even saw an X-ray of it and it’s not the big bone, it’s an appendix, in the broader definition of the word,” Lamb said. She’d definitely had a few too many. “Your basic answer is yes, you can drive?”
“Yes. Again, with some pain.”
“Since you’re still getting a federal paycheck, show some guts and do a little work,” Lamb said. “Let me give you Sand’s address. You got a pen?”
He did.
—
After saying goodbyeto Lamb, Lucas climbed the stairs to what Weather called a dressing room and Lucas called a closet, and changed into soft cotton blue jeans, a black flannel shirt, black running shoes, a blue rain jacket and a Dog Star Ranch ballcap he’d gotten from a friend.
He went back down, climbed another set of stairs to the housekeeper’s apartment, told her he was going out, collected an umbrella from a closet at the back entry, went into the garage, unplugged his Porsche Cayenne hybrid, and climbed inside.
A rap channel on SiriusXM was playing Everlast’s “What It’s Like.” He was halfway to Crocus Circle when Weather called.
“I got a five-minute break,” she said. “You okay?”
