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“How about gun deals?” Virgil asked. “Made any recently?”
Carter was indignant. “You guys ever spent any time in a federal cage? Locked up? Gives me the creeps just thinking about it. I go out on the street here, breathe the free air. I gotta tell you, I’m never doing anything that might get me sent back. Never. No fuckin’ way. I’m trying to get my civil rights back, so maybe I can get back with the guns. Until then, I won’t touch one. I swear.”
“Please, just leave us alone. We’re trying to get on,” the woman wailed.
—
“There’s fifteen minutesI won’t get back,” Virgil said, when they were on the street. Virgil looked back at the condo. “By the time we left, I wanted to give him money.”
“A sad sack,” Lucas said. “You notice his feet?”
“Size fourteen?”
“At least. And about a hundred pounds too heavy for the killer. So: he’s out?”
“He’s out,” Virgil said. “We should go talk to Cooper—see if she’s moved back into her house.”
In the condo above them, the Carters watched them walking away. Catherine put her arms around Henry’s waist and gave him a big squeeze. “They bought it. I promise you,” she said.
“Let’s grill a couple of steaks and then go roll them bones,” Carter said, and he laughed aloud, something he’d started to do since meeting with Cooper.
—
Lucas and Virgildrove back to town, talking about Cooper and Melton on the way, and how long the threat against Cooper might last, if there actually was a threat. “I appreciate your cynicism, but I decided before I went to sleep last night that Ms. Cooper didn’t set us up,” Lucas said. “I mean, how would she ever have convinced the shooter to come back? If the guy’d been caught last night, he’d have had a hell of a time convincing anybody that he wasn’t the Sand killer.”
When they arrived at Cooper’s home, they were met at the door by a very large man, ten years older than Lucas. He had gray hair, a two-day stubble, a Navy tattoo spreading out from under a tee-shirt, a peanut butter sandwich in one hand and a 9mm in the other.
Lucas: “Jesus Christ. What are you doing here, Pelz?”
Virgil: “Hey, Binky.”
Pelz had spent thirty years as a St. Paul street cop, and though in theory a devout Catholic, he hadn’t been known for his acts of Christian charity.
He pulled the door all the way open, swallowed some sandwich and said, “I’m guarding some bodies. They told me to shoot first and ask questions later, but I had a peanut butter sandwich in my hand when I saw you two mooks coming up the walk and I couldn’t rack the slide.”
“At least the sandwich is well protected,” Virgil said. “Is Ms. Cooper here?”
“Yeah, she and Ann are upstairs in the office looking at documents. They said you might show up. How you guys doin’? Virgil, you need to eat more. Davenport, word is around that you got your ass shot off.”
They talked about the New York shooting as he led the way through the house to the stairway going up to the second floor. Lucas noticed as they walked through that there was no sign of the recent violence. The Persian carpet where the bodies had fallen had disappeared, to be replaced by something less Persian and more Craftsman.
Virgil hadn’t been in the house and as they climbed the stairs, muttered to Lucas, “Dark house. Good place for a murder. If you’re Agatha Christie. Or any kind of novelist.”
“Shh.”
The office contained a business-sized walnut desk and, to one side, a long walnut table with two comfortable-looking business chairs. The women were sitting on opposite sides of the table, with stacks of paper between them.
Melton looked up when they walked in and she said to Cooper, “The cops,” and Cooper turned to look.
Cooper said, “We’re going over the estate stuff.”
“We were hoping you’d have the list of beneficiaries,” Virgil said.
“We do,” Cooper said. “They were all carefully identified in the estate documents, so we have names, addresses, and phone numbers, as of the last update, which was two years ago.”
Melton had started digging through the paper when she saw them, produced a page with a printed list and handed it to Lucas.
“That’s great,” Lucas said. “How are you guys doing? Since last night?”
