Chosen Prey (42 page)

"What if Qatar didn't do it?" Swanson asked.

"He did," Lucas said.

"I think we're in trouble," Marshall said. Marshall had begun to brood. "I'm not sure we should have taken him when we did," he said. "We could have thrown a net over him, done a full-court press. Sooner or later, he would have fucked up."

"By the time we might've done that, he'd already have spotted us," Lucas said. "And the longer we went with a full team on him, the more innocent he'd look."

MARSHALL STAYED IN town over the weekend. He got permission to enter Qatar's house under the warrant, and spent most of the time taking the house apart. He unscrewed every power outlet, dug through all the loose fiberglass insulation between the ceiling joists, looked up and down the chimney, and took the flue mechanism apart.

He called Lucas late Sunday afternoon. "You know what I got?"

"Something good?"

"I got a face full of glass splinters from the insulation, and I'm covered with soot. I look like I just crawled out of a Three Stooges movie, if somebody'd only hit me with a cream pie. There ain't nothing in the house."

"My fiance is about to make some meat loaf with gravy and Bisquick biscuits," Lucas said. "Why don't you drag your sorry ass over here--we'll throw your clothes in the washer and give you something to eat."

"I'll do that," Marshall said.

MARSHALL LIKED THE food, and Weather liked Marshall.

"You know what we really wanted for Laura was not revenge," he told her. "All we wanted was justice. I don't think we're gonna get it. I think we're gonna get a lot of bureaucracy and treatment programs, and Qatar's probably gonna sue everybody in sight and get them all running around like chickens, and nobody's gonna want to hear about Laura. Nobody misses her but me and her folks and her family. She hadn't done anything; hell, she might've turned out to be a cook or something, though I think she woulda been better than that. But nobody misses her. If we could just get a little justice for her . . ."

"HE WAS JUST like all the good old guys back home," Weather told Lucas after Marshall left. Weather had grown up in a small town in northern Wisconsin. "They want to keep everything simple and right. I really like that, even if it's a fairy tale."

"Problem is, it is a fairy tale . . . at least mostly," Lucas said.

EARLY MONDAY MORNING, Lucas took a phone call at home from the county attorney's secretary: "Mr. Towson would like to talk to you as soon as possible, along with Marcy Sherrill. What would be a good time?"

"I'll come down right away--is he in now?"

"He's on his way. Would nine o'clock be okay?"

"That's fine. You'll call Marcy?"

Randall Towson, his chief deputy, Donald Dunn, and Richard Kirk, head of the criminal division, were waiting in Towson's office when Lucas and Marcy arrived. Towson pointed them at chairs and said, "The Qatar case. You know J. B. Glass is handling it?"

"I heard," Lucas said, and Marcy nodded.

"He's pretty good. We're wondering what the reaction would be if we talked to them about a plea--guilty to one count of second-degree with confinement at the mental hospital instead of Stillwater. He'd have to do his time if he were ever found competent."

"Uh, I think people would be pretty unhappy."

Kirk said, "But the guy's gotta be crazy, and our priority has to be to get him off the street. If we get the judge to do an upward departure, and he gets twenty, by the time he got out he'd probably be past it as a killer."

"Oh, bullshit," Lucas said irritably. "Most of them might stop killing when they get older, but not all of them do. He could come back out and start killing again in a month. If you get him twenty, and if he only had to do two-thirds of it, he'd be out when he's about fifty-one, fifty-two. If we take him on a first-degree, he has to do a minimum of thirty. Then I'd feel pretty safe. He wouldn't get out until he was in his late sixties."

"We'd do that, if we didn't feel a little shaky on the case," Dunn said.

"You gotta take some risks sometimes," Lucas said. Cops hated the conservative prosecution policies: The county attorney's office had a near one-hundred-percent conviction rate--which looked terrific on campaign literature--mostly because they prosecuted only the sure things. Everything else was dealt down or dismissed.

"We're not just risking a loss," Kirk pointed out. "If we lose him, he kills somebody else."

"But I'll tell you what," Marcy said. "If you go to J. B. with that kind of an offer, he's gonna smell blood. He'll turn you down. If you make an offer, it's gotta be tougher than that."

Towson shook his head. "How can we make it tougher? If we go up one notch to first degree, the way the mandatory sentencing works now, he'd go down for the max--same thing he'd get if he fought it. Without a death penalty, we've got nothing to deal with except dropping the degree of guilt."

"Why don't you talk to Wisconsin?" Lucas asked. "They have a couple of counts on the guy, they think. Work out a deal where if he takes one count of first degree over here, he serves his time, and Wisconsin drops out. If he doesn't agree, he goes to trial in both states. One of us'll get him."

Towson was drumming on his calendar pad with a yellow pencil. "That's an option," he said to Dunn. "Weak, though."

"The problem is, I've looked at the Wisconsin cases, and they've got less than we do. About the only thing that connects him to Wisconsin is that he was at Stout."

"And Aronson's pearls and the method of the murders and the fact that they were buried together. There's really a lot there," Lucas said.

"Tell you what," Towson said. "We won't make any move on a deal until we're through looking at everything. If you've got anything else, roll it out. And maybe J. B. will make the first offer."

"Who's handling the preliminary?" Lucas asked.

"I am," Kirk said. "We're just gonna sketch the case, put Whitcomb up and get a statement about the jewelry, and that pretty much ought to do it. You coming?"

"Yeah, I want to look at him again," Lucas said. "He's a strange duck."

MARSHALL WAS BACK for the preliminary hearing, dressed in a brown corduroy suit and fancy brown cowboy boots, his hair slicked down.

"You look like Madonna's boyfriend," Marcy told him.

"Aw, shoot, you get off my case," he said. He didn't quite dig his toe into the tile.

The hearing was routine--Qatar in a dark suit and tie, but his face drawn and white, his eyes ringed as though he'd been weeping--until Randy Whitcomb was rolled in.

Randy, strapped into a wheelchair, looking out at the chamber under a lowered brow, scanning the rows of press people and gawkers, finally found Lucas and fixed his gaze. Marcy, sitting next to Lucas, whispered, "Is he looking at you?"

"Yeah. And he looks pissed," Lucas whispered back.

Kirk took Whitcomb through the preliminaries.

Yes, Randy said, he'd bought the pearls from a man who said he was from St. Pat's. Yes, he'd bought the diamond rings from the same man. He'd sold the pearls on the street, he said. He didn't know who had them now.

"Do you see the man who sold you the jewelry here in the courtroom?" Kirk asked.

Randy looked around for a full minute, scanning up and down each row, then said, "No. I don't see him."

Kirk took a step back. "Look at this man here at the defense table."

Glass, Qatar's defense attorney, surprised as anyone, struggled to his feet, but before he could object to Kirk's direction, Randy leaned toward the microphone and said, "I never seen him before in my life."

A moan swept the courtroom. Marshall said, "What happened?" and Marcy said, "The little jerk."

Lucas didn't say anything, because he could feel Randy staring at him and knew he wasn't finished. "How do you like that, asshole?" Randy bellowed into the microphone. He pointed at Lucas and yelled, "You cocksucker, how you like them apples?"

The judge was beating on his desk, but Randy kept shouting, and finally the judge told the bailiff to wheel him out. Randy went, screaming all the way, and Lucas stood up and said, "We gotta find out what happened. We gotta get the little sonofabitch. Where's Lansing? Did anybody see Lansing?"

Lansing was in the hallway. As soon as Lucas and Marcy stepped outside, Randy, whose outburst had subsided, began screaming again: "You keep that motherfucker away from me; you keep that motherfucker away."

Lansing came over and said, "You heard him."

Lucas reached forward and pinched a piece of Lansing's coat lapel between his thumb and forefinger. "It's not up to me to give you advice, but I will, because you're so young and dumb. You better find out what happened, or you could be looking at the end of your legal career. You cut this deal, and we've got the case hanging on it. We're all in shit city now--you not the least of us."

Lansing swallowed and stepped back. "I know. I'll find out what happened."

"Get back," Lucas said.

MARSHALL CAME OUT and said, "Well, shit. That really put the dog amongst the cheeseburgers."

"What's happening in there?" Lucas asked. He took a step back toward the door.

"They're talking about bail," Marshall said. "They're gonna give it to him."

Chapter
28.

"SOMEBODY CALLED RANDY last night and talked to him," Lansing said. He was on the phone from his office in St. Paul. Lucas and Marcy had just gotten back from a meeting with the county attorney, where Kirk and Towson began laying the lines of a deal offer for Qatar. "Randy's not the most coherent guy, but the basic story is, whoever talked to him told him that the word on the street is that you turned him. That you own him, that you're running him, and that you're going around town bragging about it. It's supposed to be all over town."

"That's bullshit," Lucas said.

"Who've you talked to?"

"Outside of this office, nobody. My social life is my fiance, and we haven't been going out that much. I have been nowhere, I've talked to no one."

"How about other people?" Lansing said.

"I'll ask around, but it smells like bullshit."

"Randy doesn't think so."

"Get Randy on the line with some of his pals--or if he doesn't have any, some of his acquaintances. Have him ask," Lucas said.

"Well . . . let's see what happens."

"I'll tell you one thing that happens. The deal he made was predicated on honest testimony. He either lied to us in his statement--and I know he didn't do that, because he picked the pictures out without having seen them before--or he perjured himself this morning. You can tell the little cocksucker two things for me: First, I never talked to anybody; and second, he can kiss his ass goodbye. He's on the train to Stillwater, and when he gets out, he'll be ten years older than I am now."

"Wait a minute, wait a minute. . . ."

"I'm not gonna wait a minute. I'm gonna take a couple of days off, and if Randy decides he wants to change his mind, he'll have to change it with somebody else. I'm finished with him. He can rot in fuckin' Stillwater."

Marcy, who'd been listening, said, "Wow. Really?"

"Really. If anything urgent happens, call me on my cell phone. I'll keep it on, but don't call unless you've got no choice."

"Marshall took off?" she asked.

"Yeah. His head must have been about to blow up."

"I don't know. He just shook his head and that was that. He was a hell of a lot calmer than you were. More like he was amazed. You want to put a team on Qatar? Just to make sure?"

Lucas shook his head. "He's got to wear an ankle bracelet, he doesn't have any access to money, and J. B.'s already told him we're whipped. Why would he run? What would he run with?"

"All right. See you when? Wednesday?"

"Or maybe Thursday. I want to take a little time with Weather. . . . Goddamnit."

LUCAS SPENT THE evening thinking about the phone call from Lansing--and about the phone call to Randy. He and Weather ate in, Weather watching him, and when they were done she said, "I'm going to let you brood," and got out her laptop to do some office catch-up. Lucas wandered around first the house and then the garage, cleaning nothing out of the Porsche, then the yard, and back into the house again, working through it. Weather fired up a DVD movie, but he couldn't focus. "You haven't figured it out yet, whatever you're figuring out?"

"I hope not," he said.

They finally went to bed at midnight, and just before she went to sleep, Weather asked, "Are you really going to stay home all day?"

"Nah. Probably not. May go for a run in the Porsche. Knock around a little."

"I'll try to get home early. Why don't we go out to the marina and take a look at my boat?"

"Okay."

She went quickly and softly to sleep, as she often did. Lucas lay awake, waiting for the phone to ring. He thought it might ring sometime after three o'clock, but it didn't. He never heard Weather leave, and when he opened his eyes, it was eleven in the morning.

He ate breakfast, went out and got in the car, took it out on the Interstate across the river to Wisconsin, jumped on his favorite blacktop road to River Falls, and let the Porsche engine out of the box. For the next hour he looped along the backroads, surprised that the golf courses were already open, looking for but not seeing any more snow in the woods--it had melted away in a week. Sometimes, after a long winter, the snow stayed back in the trees into May. Not this year.