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“We’re okay,” Cooper said. She glanced at Pelz and said, “I hired Ben to provide extra security. He’ll be here until we lock up, and after that, we won’t open the door to anyone. Even if we know them.”
Virgil: “Good. Though I never heard Binky called Ben.”
“Binky?”
“You had to tell them, didn’t you?” Pelz said.
“We’re old pals from the St. Paul cops,” Virgil said. “He taught me about golf, I taught him about police work, how to read without moving his lips, and women.”
“You might have missed some essential information about women,” Melton said.
Pelz: “I desperately want to shoot somebody, but I don’t know where to start.”
Cooper, with gravel in her voice: “I desperately wish to shoot someone, too, if we could only find him.” And she looked like it, eyes staring and fixed for a moment, before she broke free from the thought.
That put a temporary cloud over the conversation, but they talked for a while longer, and Virgil asked Cooper if she knew anything personal, that might be useful, about Bob Dahl or Noah Heath, of Home Streets.
“Bob is kind of a weenie, a suck-up, but that might go with the job. Noah’s a trust-funder. I don’t think he’s ever really had a job. He’s got this rich-man shell, but underneath it, he’s... what?”
She looked at Melton, who said, “Obsequious.”
“Neither one is particularly likeable, but I have to say, Noah has done a lot of good in the community, over the years,” Cooper said. “He’s made a hobby of doing good, which is better than spending his money on crap, I guess.”
“Are you going to give him a hundred and fifty?” Lucas asked.
“No. He stays at a hundred thousand. He will get that as soon as I’m satisfied that Home Streets is a real thing. Alex thought it was, Tom disagreed, but I want to know. On my own.”
“So there’d be no advantage, to him, in... attacking Alex. Or you, last night.”
She shook her head: “I don’t believe so.”
—
Back outside, withthe list of beneficiaries from Sand’s will, Virgil said, “We need to talk to Sandy, see what she’s got on the Home Streets guys.”
“You know, if it was Homey Streets, it’d be like a rap boy-band,” Lucas said.
“There’s something wrong with your mind,” Virgil said.
—
Sandy Hayward startedout as a hippie and never grew out of it. She was a soft, thin woman with an easy-smiling face, blond hair usually frizzed-up, dangly jade earrings that she made herself, body-hugging dresses in shades of beige with unnecessary frills; hot librarian glasses.
A vegetarian hippie with multiple cats and a hipster boyfriend who led the Twin Cities in man-bun hair styling, she’d originally been hired by the BCA, at the urging of Lucas, to do computer-based research. She enjoyed nothing more than tracking down people she called rat-fuckers.
Her wide and growing knowledge of federal and state data systems, and her willingness to sidestep what she saw as unnecessarybureaucratic restrictions on data access, made her a valuable resource.
The BCA had paid her not much, as a part-timer, until she threatened to quit, and now she was a full-timer with a small glass-enclosed office, an excellent salary, three computer screens, and two printers, one for text, one for photos. She was in her office, her feet on a waste basket, eating an apple, when Lucas and Virgil walked in.
She looked up and said, “Well, there goes the morning.”
“It’s almost afternoon,” Lucas said. “What do you have on the Home Streets boys? Besides the Internet shit you gave us yesterday?”
“I got quite a bit, actually.”
She kicked her feet off the waste basket, turned and poked a key on her computer. The screen lit up, and her fingers rattled across the keyboard and a file came up. “I will give you an oral summary. If you want a printed version, I would have to do some redaction so it couldn’t be used as evidence.”
Virgil: “Uh-oh.”
