“What?”
“There’s a lady here to see you. I’ve got her in the kitchen. You better come down.” Letty’s tone implied significance.
Lucas felt like he’d been hit on the forehead with a five-pound ham. “A lady? What does she want?”
“You better come down,” Letty repeated.
She turned away from the door and went back down the hallway to the stairs. Lucas got up, found his jeans and a T-shirt, pulled them on. He was barefoot but didn’t bother with shoes, followed Letty down the hall and down the stairs.
* * *
—
THE WOMAN waiting in the kitchen looked like a refugee from Ukraine, but not the Ukraine of today, more like a year after World War II. She was short, with gray hair that might once have been blond; she was elderly, probably in her seventies; and she was overweight. She was wearing a cheap raincoat, though the day was bright and warm, and carrying a plastic purse in one hand. To complete the image, she was wearing a babushka. She smelled vaguely of boiled cabbage and sausage, or looked like she should. And she looked exhausted.
Letty was standing next to her, and Lucas asked the woman, “What can I do for you?”
She made a pacifying gesture with her free hand, and said, “I’m Mary Last. My boy is Douglas Last, who the police say was driving when your wife was in the accident. But he didn’t do it.”
Lucas looked at Letty, and said, “I don’t think . . .”
Letty: “Listen to her.”
There was that tone in her voice again, and Lucas turned back to Mary Last, and asked, “Why didn’t he do it?”
“Douglas, he drank too much,” Mary Last said. “I tried to tell him. And he’s smoked since he was in high school. He ate cheeseburgers every day—every day of his life. Eggs and bacon in the morning, cheeseburgers all day, or pepperoni pizza. Even now. He never exercised. He was a fat man, and he had heart failure. The doctors said he would die in one year, maybe two, if he didn’t change. He didn’t. The food was like a drug. He was an addict. My boy, he couldn’t run a hundred feet, but the police say he ran so fast nobody could catch him and he got away. This is impossible for him to do. Impossible. You ask his doctor.”
Letty later told Weather that Lucas could have said any of a thousand things in response, but Lucas was feeling the world shifting around him. What had been simple and awful had suddenly become enormously complex and even worse.
He looked at the old lady, and said, “Sonofabitch.”
14
Lucas had been a cop for more than two decades, and as soon as the words came out of the old lady’s mouth, he knew that she was telling the truth, that she was right, Last couldn’t run a hundred feet. Weather’s crash had been set up to take Lucas out of Washington, and Mary Last’s son had been murdered. Lucas had to check, but he knew it was true.
Lucas had been in the Cities for a week and had not talked to Smalls since the accident, other than to drop him an email, telling him what had happened. Smalls had simply answered back, “Take care of your wife.”
After sending Mary Last away, Lucas called Smalls on his private cell phone. When Smalls answered, Lucas identified himself, and asked, “Do you still have protection?”
“Yes, but nothing . . .”
“Senator, I think Weather was taken out by the same guy who ambushed you and Miz Whitehead. I think they set up the guy with the DWI, Douglas Last, and then murdered him. I’ve got good reason to think this. The killers are still with us, and active, and they might be here in the Twin Cities.”
Smalls didn’t respond immediately, though Lucas could hear him breathing. Finally: “It’s best if I go away for a while. I’ve got to be back after the recess, but for the time being . . .”
“Don’t tell me where you’re going. Or anyone else. You know how to get a burner phone?”
“Of course.”
“These guys are very sophisticated. My last case, my cell phone was tracked by a bunch of dopers—everybody’s got tech now. Get a couple of burners, FedEx one of them to Kitten, don’t call anyone except her, and any business that you have to do with other people, do through her. I don’t think they can break that—not easily anyway. I’ve got a private line to her myself, so we can relay anything we need to say to each other.”
“I’ll be gone tonight,” Smalls said. “Are you going back to Washington?”
“I have to talk to Weather about that. And I have to hire some people to sit with her until this is done.”
* * *
—
AFTER HE GOT OFF the phone with Smalls, Lucas called Mitchel White, the Ramsey County medical examiner, told him about what Last’s mother had said, and asked, “Did you look at his heart?”
“Yes. He had advanced congestive heart failure. But, Lucas, he had a bullet go through his head, and the shot was fired from one inch away.”
“The witnesses said he jumped out of his car after the accident, sprinted down the street and into an alley,” Lucas said. “A sixteen-year-old kid ran after him but never saw him again.”
“I didn’t know that,” White said. “Everybody was focused on the gunshot wound. I can tell you, though, he didn’t sprint anywhere. For one thing, he weighed two fifty-two, his legs were bacon-wrapped twigs, and his heart was a lump of Jell-O.”
* * *
—
LUCAS MADE ANOTHER CALL, asked an old political friend for a favor.
He called Roger Morris, at St. Paul Homicide, and told him what he thought. “Oh boy. All right, I’m on it,” Morris said. “This shouldn’t have gotten past us. I never heard a word about his heart.”
When Lucas and Letty got to the hospital, Catrin Mattson, wearing a loose white overshirt to cover her gun, was already sitting in a chair next to Weather’s bed, reading aloud a magazine story about shoes. Virgil Flowers was slumped in the second chair, cowboy boots up on the end of Weather’s bed.
When Lucas came in, Mattson said to Weather, whose eyes were closed, “The lug is here. And your improbably beautiful daughter.”
Weather said, “We’ve got a two-lug room. And hello, Daughter.”
Lucas kissed Weather on the lips, and Mattson on the forehead, and said to Mattson, “You got here in a hurry,” and to Flowers, “What the fuck do you want?”
“Sneaky way to see your improbably beautiful daughter,” Flowers said. “The rest of you, I don’t give a shit about.”
Letty stepped behind Flowers and began massaging his shoulders. “You’re such a manly man,” she said. “You’ve even got muscles in your shoulders.”
“Of course,” Flowers said. “That’s where I keep most of them, until they’re needed. Ooo. That feels good.”
Mattson watched the massaging, made a crooked smile, and looked up at Lucas. “Rose Marie talked to the director and he came up with my leave of absence in something like eight seconds.”
Rose Marie Roux was the head of the Department of Public Safety and Lucas’s old political friend. She was the one he’d called for the favor, asking, if Mattson agreed, that she be given an emergency leave of absence to watch over Weather.
Mattson worked for the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, Lucas’s former department, as did Flowers, and she knew Weather well. The director reported directly to Roux and was unlikely to resist any of her suggestions.
The fix was in.
* * *
—
LUCAS HAD CAUGHT Mattson’s crooked smile and thought, Hmm. Catrin might have a thing for Virgil, dismissed the thought, and said, “How long . . . ?”
“They told me to stay as long as I was needed,” Mattson said, “though it’s not my kind of gig.”
“I know that, but this is complicated,” Lucas said. “I asked for you because you can handle it.”
“I could handle it, too,” Flowers said.
Lucas: “Yeah, but I worry that that’s not all you’d handle.”
Letty rolled her eyes, and said, “Oh, Jesus.”
Weather: “Since you haven’t told me anything about what’s going on, why don’t you tell all of us at the same time?”
“It’s crazy,” Letty said. “But then, we’ve all seen crazier.”
* * *