AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“That’s what I understand. Alex would occasionally tell me about people who were angry because of the sentence he gave them, but... he said they were usually resigned and not surprised.” Cooper leaned forward, hands on her knees; her fingernails were ragged, bitten down. “Here’s something that I think somebody should do. They should look at the wives and girlfriends and children of the people he sentenced. That hasn’t been done. You know, sometimes the Marshals Service...” She looked at Lucas. “...would seize what they called ill-gotten gains. Maybe that’s not what they called it, but it was like that.”
“Forfeiting the proceeds from illegal activity,” Lucas said.
“Yes. Sometimes, even with low-level crimes like possession of drugs for sale, they would do things like seize a person’s car or even a house, if they could show it was purchased with drug money. Alex would say that the man going to prison, he’s fine. He’s got housing,food, medical care, maybe even some friends inside. The people who were using the house and car might not be fine at all. They might be really screwed.”
“But the killer wasn’t a wife or child or somebody’s mother,” Virgil said. “He was an adult male. From what we could see from the video, he wasn’t a street person. We couldn’t tell exactly how prosperous he was, but he was wearing what looked like a rain suit, a hoodie and rain pants. That’s not what a low-level dealer would be wearing.”
Melton spoke up: “The other team thinks that, too—but it seems to me that the man may have been consciously wearing a disguise, to hide something. His face, of course, but maybe his hands or... some physical thing. He didn’t seem to limp in the videos...”
Lucas shrugged: “Hard to know, from what we’ve got.”
“Something to consider,” Cooper said. “The St. Paul officer who interviewed us said he thought the hoodie was from the University of Minnesota. I’m a professor there.”
“We noticed that St. Paul was interviewing your friends and students at the U. Not kicking anything loose. Not yet,” Virgil said. And, “Are you, have you gone back to work?”
“Yes. It takes my mind off these other things. I was told it would be good, if I could do it. I can.”
Melton went back to the killer: “If he’s not a street person, you think he was well-off?”
“Can’t say that, but he didn’t look poor,” Virgil said. “We’ve identified the nine-millimeter pistol used in the murders as a Glock 17. Those are not cheap, and they’re fairly big, for handguns, not easily hidden—they’re not what you usually find on the street.”
“Tool marks on the cartridge cases aren’t necessarily definitive. How sure are you about the gun?” Cooper asked.
“Fairly sure,” Virgil said. “It’s true that there are sometimes problems—usually with the interpretation by the forensics people. Mistakes that are discovered later.”
“But you don’t think a mistake has been made,” Melton said.
“We have no reason to think so,” Virgil said.
“Which brings up the question of the missing pistol,” Lucas said. “The nine-millimeter you once had.”
Cooper threw up her hands: “I told the St. Paul and BCA investigators all about that, it should be in their notes. Alex got the gun when his father died, and he didn’t want it around the house. There was a gun show across the river in Wisconsin, and he sold it there. That’s all I know.”
“Perfectly legal and easy to do,” Melton said. “Legal at the time, anyway. It’s the famous gun show loophole.”
Lucas nodded. “Why did his father have it in the first place?”
“He was in the Army, and somehow, he got to keep it. Maybe he bought it. I don’t know, maybe he stole it, though he wouldn’t have thought of it that way. This was back in the late seventies, or early eighties. He was in the Army Reserve after that, a major, and got called up for Desert Storm in 1990. He talked about it endlessly.”
Virgil looked at Lucas and said, “It wouldn’t have been a Glock. It would have been a Beretta 92.”
“If his father was in Desert Storm, and Alex inherited it, his father must have died young,” Lucas said.
Cooper nodded. “Both his parents died young, they were both sixty-two. They were killed by a drunk driver outside a restauranton Grand Avenue. Mowed down, crossing the street. Alex was already out of law school at the time.”
“Actually, I remember that,” Lucas said. “Must have been ten years ago. Fifteen?”
“Mmm... thirteen, now,” Cooper said.
Nowhere to go with that.
Cooper was peering at Lucas: “When we were talking about wives and children, and ill-gotten gains, you thought of something. I saw it on your face.”
“What I thought of is probably a coincidence. I won’t talk about it until I check,” Lucas said. “Almost certainly nothing.”
“C’mon.”
Lucas smiled and shook his head. “Maybe some other time.”
