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Cooper took a fat envelope from her shoulder bag, said, absently, “Most of the money is from my husband’s emergency stash, so nobody knows I have it.” She took a thick wad of currency from the envelope and counted out five thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. She arranged them in a neat stack, and passed them to him, and said, “Jim, don’t mess with me, okay? You know you’re talking to a potential first-degree murderer.”
Carter seemed to take a step back. He said, “I’m fine. Just fine. I won’t, I’d never...”
“Good.” She gave him her movie-star smile and stood up. “See you soon.”
—
She took thestairs again, emerged across the street from a modern office building with a strip of grass in front of it, spotted with fallen yellow leaves. Beyond it, the St. Croix was a cold gray ribbon. She walked around the corner, hurrying now, to the car.
When she was in, Melton asked, “How’d it go?”
“He’s going for a gun now. We’ll have it in an hour and a half, if it happens at all.”
“What if he calls the cops?”
“That’s not going to happen, believe me,” Cooper said. “He’s really hurting. His wife is all for it. They’ve got almost no exposure.”
“Okay. Well, this is where the rubber meets the road,” Melton said. “What do we do now?”
“He suggested we go get a sandwich. Which is one thing we won’t do. Why don’t we drive around the lake? We could stick our noses into a couple shops in Prescott, come back up through Afton.”
“That should do it. Chelsea would like her bottle.”
—
They were gonea few minutes more than the hour and a half, making the long loop through Wisconsin around Lake St. Croix, stopping on the way to change the baby’s diaper. Back in Stillwater, Melton dropped Cooper around the corner from Carter’s condo, and Cooper took a moment to compose herself, then walked into the condo.
Carter was there, with a grin. He had a gun, with a blued silencer sticking out the front, which he handled with an intimacy most people reserved for their sexual partners.
“Nine-millimeter Glock. Virtually new. Looks like it’s maybe had a hundred rounds through it. It’s safe, but no safety. Once you’ve cocked it—I’ll show you how—you just start pulling the trigger,” Carter said.
“I’m told my family was killed with a Glock 17.”
“This is a 19, a little smaller, better for a woman’s hands,” Carter said. “It’s safe, kinda quiet, and cold.” He handed her two boxes of ammunition. “Don’t forget to clean the shells before you load the magazine. Brass takes a perfect fingerprint. If you don’t clean them, and the cops pick them up, they’ve got prints and DNA. You don’t want that. Scrub them with alcohol and wear gloves while you’re doing it, and loading the mag.”
He gave a brief instruction on the specifics of the Glock, and then asked, “You got the money?”
“I do,” she said. “I didn’t know how much it would be, so I brought thirty thousand. I’ll give you all the rest of it. Twenty-five.”
She handed him the envelope, and he took it, bright-eyed, riffled the bills, and said, “Score. By God.”
Catherine Carter said, sincerely, “No cars. Nothing expensive. We’ll dribble the money out. No big purchases.”
“Good. Thank you so much,” Cooper said. She put the pistol and the cartridges in her shoulder bag. “Remember: we’re welded together, now. No profit to anyone, even remembering this transaction.”
“I’ve already forgotten it,” Carter said.
Catherine reached out and put a cool hand on Cooper’s forearm. “And Maggie: good hunting. Good hunting, dear.”
6
After talking to Cooper and Melton, Lucas and Virgil split up, Virgil to spend the rest of the afternoon combing through the financial information in the BCA file, while Lucas tracked down the deputy marshal who’d been involved in the Brickell shooting incident.
The deputy was named Duane Kowalska. Lucas got his cell phone number from the Marshals Service office and was told that Kowalska had gone to Duluth to pick up a prison inmate. He was halfway back to the Cities when he picked up Lucas’s call. “Hey, big guy? What’s up?”
Lucas: “I’ve got an off-the-wall question for you. It’s about the Brickell shoot-out.”
“Remember it well,” Kowalska said. “I got hit in the head with a car door.”
