IN THE END, Lucas got out of town a little before noon, drove too fast going home, and would have pulled into his driveway right at eight o’clock if a couple of TV trucks hadn’t been blocking it.
He parked in the street behind the last TV truck and a pretty blond woman hopped out and he said, “Oh, shit.”
Jennifer Carey and he had a relationship that went back a couple of decades. More than that: Lucas was the father of Carey’s first daughter, who was now in high school. Carey had married another man long ago, who had more or less adopted Lucas’s daughter, not counting private school fees and college tuition, all of which was fine with Lucas.
But Carey still had the mojo on him. She couldn’t read him as well as Weather could, but was still better than fifty-fifty on when he was lying. She was walking straight at him with a microphone thrust out at his face, and a trailing cameraman.
Another woman popped out of the lead truck, Annie McGowan, who was now anchoring at Channel 11. She rarely was on the street with a cameraman, but she was now, because she also had an edge on Lucas. Lucas did have one advantage: the two women were not friends and a catfight was possible. Then he could arrest them both for assault, send them down to the Ramsey County jail, and go to dinner.
He got out of the car, fists on his hips, saw Letty jogging across the lawn. She came up and slapped hands with Carey. Letty had interned at Carey’s TV station for three years, as a high school student, under Carey’s watchful eye. Letty nodded at McGowan and asked Lucas, “Where’s Pilate?”
“I don’t know,” Lucas said, as the microphones came up. “The two best possibilities are that he’s out in the woods somewhere in the UP, or that he made it across the Mackinac Bridge before we got the roadblocks up and is hiding out in Detroit.”
“Do you think he’ll surrender when he’s caught?” Carey asked.
“Depends on how it happens. He’ll run as far as he can. If he’s cornered and doesn’t have any options, he’ll quit. Fundamentally, he’s a coward. When we caught up to them in Michigan, he organized his disciples for a fight, then when the fight started, he snuck out the back door and ran. Abandoned his so-called friends. Some of them were actually dying for him and he was sneaking away into the woods.”
McGowan held up three fingers and asked, “Do you think he’ll surrender when he’s caught?” and then counted the fingers down one-two-three, which would allow her editors to cut her question in, before Lucas’s response. When she’d built in a little space for her editors, she turned to Letty, with her enormous black eye, and asked, “Do you agree with your father? When you tried to save your friend, this Pilate beat you up.”
“That’s all he’s good at,” Letty said. “Beating up women. He kicked my friend Skye to death, over in Wisconsin, and the guy they crucified in South Dakota was just a nice, gentle boy. Pilate is an enormous . . . I can’t say it on TV, but he is one. A vicious one.”
Carey held up three fingers and asked Letty, “Do you agree with your father? Pilate attacked you . . .” then counted down one-two-three.
Lucas answered a few more questions, and declined to answer some that he thought might be legally sensitive.
“I can’t actually answer all your questions, because I’m being deposed tomorrow at the BCA. We’ll send copies to all the departments involved in the case. Copies of the depositions should be available through the BCA, whenever the authorities . . . think they should be.”
He let the women get a couple of reverse shots over his shoulder, showing their faces in close-up, asking the questions they’d already asked, and then he called it off. “I gotta go say hello to my wife and get something decent to eat. I haven’t had anything all day.”
When the cameras and microphones were off, McGowan said, “I can see your handiwork in that witch Daisy Jones getting the Honey Potts interview.”
“Jeez, Annie, try to be a little more understanding of an enterprising colleague,” Lucas said.
“I was a little annoyed myself,” Carey said. “You really set that up?”
“I was out of town when she did that interview,” Lucas said. “My hands are clean.”
“How about your cell phone?” Carey asked. “Is that clean, too?”
“Jennifer . . .” Lucas began. Then, “Listen, you guys have been here, when I wasn’t, and you hang around the courthouse. What are people saying about the Merion case?”
“I’ve heard that your old basketball buddy Park Raines started sniffing around for a deal about five minutes after that baluster came out of the ground,” McGowan said.
Carey said, “I gotta say, he’s one eminently fuckable attorney. In my opinion.”
“You’re right,” said Letty.
Lucas: “Hey! Not in front of the old man.”
“And he’s even better than he looks,” McGowan said, with a moment of silence following. Then, to Lucas, “Anyway, the baluster sealed the deal. I’ve even heard that Martin Bobson might take the case away from his boy prosecutor and give it to somebody more serious.”
Carey: “Somebody must have briefed you on what balusters are.”
“Fuck you,” McGowan said.
“Why would you fight with each other?” Lucas asked. “It’s Daisy’s tire treads that are running across both your chests.”
They both said, at the same time, “Fuck you.”
Letty said brightly, “Everybody’s feeling scrappy tonight, huh?”
? ? ?
THE TV TRUCKS LEFT, and Lucas pulled the SUV into the garage and dropped the door.
Weather was inside reading Microsurgery Letters, and said, “I hope you won’t get in trouble for talking to those people.”
Lucas kissed her on the forehead and said, “You know, I don’t care anymore. About getting in trouble with anybody.”