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Jimmy Russo, the St. Paul cop who’d briefed Lucas the night of the Sand murders, steamed into the operations center. Lucas saw him first and said, “Uh-oh. Here we go.”
Russo spotted them and stalked over and asked, “What are you two doing? I’m leading this thing and you’re not even talking to me.” He jabbed a finger at Lucas and said, “I didn’t even know you’d gotten involved until Durey called me and told me about this Pollard. I run my ass over there and he’s already leaving because you called him about this Hinton’s van.”
“We’re not trying to go around you,” Lucas said. “Virgil works for the BCA and I’m sorta tagging along. Not even my boss knows I’m out here.”
“Bullshit, Davenport, I’ve known you since you were on the Minneapolis cops, you don’t tag with no one.” He looked at Virgil:“And what’s this guy doing, fuckin’ Flowers, anyway? He’s usually down investigating some pigsty full of hayseeds, yokels, and retards.”
Virgil: “Am not.”
That made Lucas laugh, which made Russo angrier, and then Durey showed up and Lucas said, “We told you not to rat us out to that fuckin’ Russo.”
Durey glanced at Russo and said, “Keep me out of it.”
“How’s the Pollard situation?” Virgil asked.
“Still dead. You guys were supposed to be writing a report,” Durey said.
“We got a call about the van,” Virgil said. “We took a look.”
Lucas said to Drummin, who was listening in amusement, “Show these guys the tape.” To Durey and Russo: “There’s blood in the back of the van. We think it’s probably Hinton’s. But you got to look at the tape.”
They looked at the tape and Russo said, “No, nope, no way.”
“You know what’s weird?” Virgil said. “It wasn’t cold or raining last night, and this guy is bundled up like an Arctic breakout is coming through.”
“He’s trolling us,” Lucas said.
“Who is?” Russo asked.
“Noah Heath. He probably killed Pollard, he probably killed Hinton.”
“Noah Heath? The rich guy? The mayor’s pal? Probably?”
“That’s the guy,” Virgil said. “Of course, we’ve got no proof of that and he’s wearing the costume like the Sand killer to jack us around. But, he did it. Probably.”
Durey scratched his head right at the hairline, eyes closed, facedown, then sighed and said, “You two... please go write a report and get us up to date. We’ve got Pollard covered, we’ll cover this van, whatever it is. Get crime scene to sample the blood and get the DNA going. But we need your report.”
“You’ll have it before we go home. You can pick it up online,” Virgil said.
“Just go,” Durey said.
Russo: “Yeah, go.”
—
Lucas and Virgilspent three hours writing the report, Virgil typing while Lucas paced back and forth, sat in an office chair with his good leg on a desk, or lay on a couch.
“We look like a couple of guys in a movie, writing a screenplay,” Lucas said.
“I’ve thought about writing a screenplay,” Virgil said, looking up from the computer screen.
“Tell me about it when the movie gets made,” Lucas said. “As for this report, I think we should be more... circumspect... about Heath. If we put all this shit in there, and the report gets out, there’d be a substantial stink, and guess who’d be in the middle of the odor?”
“Nothing to be done about that,” Virgil said. “We want some serious focus on the guy.”
“Sure. But we leave his name out of the report. Call him Subject A,” Lucas said. “We know that Maggie Cooper has a leaker—but nobody knows who Subject A is, except Russo and Durey. If that leaks to Maggie Cooper...”
“Then it has to come from Russo or Durey. We’re setting a trap for our friends,” Virgil said.
