“Again,” Lucas said.
“Yeah, again. Jenkins was doing his cynical-guy act, told her that if she really thought Merion was going to share the take with her, she was crazy. She’d only get a cut if he was acquitted, and once he was acquitted, he couldn’t be tried again. Then he’d have no reason to pay her off. Jenkins asked her, does she really want to hang out with a guy who murdered his wife by beating her to death? He suggested that kind of thing tends to become a habit.”
“She bought it?”
“I’m not sure, but Daisy is going to talk to her tonight, see if she’ll do an interview.” Daisy Jones was a longtime reporter for WCCO television, known for her confessional talks with Twin Cities celebrities who’d managed to step on their dicks.
Lucas said, “Worth a shot.”
“Hey, if she says she was banging Merion after he married Gloria . . . I think we’re better than fifty-fifty.”
“Maybe, but it’d be nice to get one more thing,” Lucas said. “Anything on Cory?”
“As a matter of fact, there is.” Del stood and put two hands against the wall and stretched his bad leg, bouncing on it. He’d been shot up by elderly gunrunners the year before, and had gone through four operations, trying to get things straight. He now had so much metal in his pelvis that he carried a TSA Notification Card just to get on an airplane. Despite the lingering disability, he’d gone back to full-time in April. He sat back down again.
“I found Brett Givens working as a sign man for a real estate dealership over in Edina,” he said. “He drives a pickup, goes around putting up signs, or taking them down.”
Lucas knew Givens: “Better than working at the chop shop.”
“Yeah. Anyway, he says Cory is definitely back, because he saw him up in Cambridge last week, at Kenyon’s. He said Cory didn’t see him, because he ducked out—I think he was afraid that Cory might try to talk him into something. He likes the sign job.”
“Givens didn’t know where Cory’s living?”
“No. But he said there were random people in the bar who seemed to know Cory, like he might be a regular. He said Cory doesn’t look especially prosperous, so he might still have the safe. I thought I’d go up this afternoon, have a few beers.”
“All right. Take care. Jenkins and Shrake are out of pocket. If you need backup, call me, and I’ll either come up or get Jon to send somebody.”
Dale Cory was believed to be in possession of a safe that contained two million dollars in diamond jewelry, at wholesale prices, taken from a jewelry store in St. Paul on the night of New Year’s Day.
The store’s owner had been confident in the safety of his jewelry, because the safe he kept it in was made of hardened steel, weighed as much as a Hummer, and was kept in a room made of concrete block. He hadn’t counted on somebody backing a wrecker through the front wall of the store and the concrete block wall, throwing a cinch-chain around the safe, lifting it straight up, and then hauling butt.
He hadn’t counted on it because the idea seemed so goddamn stupid.
The wrecker had been stolen and was found behind a supermarket eight blocks from the jewelry store, where the cops also found in the fresh snow the tread marks from an eighteen-wheeler. Where it went, they didn’t know, but by the end of the week, there were rumors that tied Cory to the job. A couple of weeks later, there were also rumors that Cory couldn’t get the safe open, which made him something of a laughingstock among Twin Cities lowlifes.
The jeweler was not laughing. His safe had been so good that his insurance-loss ceiling was lower than it should have been. Much lower. He got a third of the wholesale price back from Chubb, and that was it.
He called Lucas once a week to ask about his safe.
? ? ?
DEL TOOK OFF, and Lucas started working through the rest of the caseload. A lot of it was more a matter of coordination than investigation, keeping the various suburban police departments up-to-date on who was doing what, and who was looking for whom. Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Bloomington could generally take care of themselves, and had their own liaisons.
Lucas’s current priorities included two armed robbers, one who specialized in credit union branches, and another who scouted out, and then hit, businessmen who were taking money home on Sunday nights, after business hours, when they couldn’t run it out to a bank during the day.
The credit union guy was careful, and while he claimed to be armed, he never showed a gun. Lucas thought they’d probably get him, if he didn’t move out of town, and wasn’t overly worried that he’d shoot someone: he seemed too careful.
The other guy, he thought, would eventually kill someone. He was almost certainly an ex-con, and didn’t carry a gun. Instead, he carried a pipe. He was a big guy, dealing with businessmen who so far had all been elderly. He used the pipe for intimidation. One of the old guys had fought him, and had gotten an arm broken for his trouble. Sooner or later, Lucas thought, the thief would smack somebody in the head, and then they’d be looking for a killer . . . if the cops didn’t get him first.
All of that was important; and it bored him.
So did the U.S. Secret Service. Somebody in town was passing exceptional copies of fifty-and one-hundred-dollar bills, and there was some evidence that the currency was coming in from Lebanon. The Secret Service had three agents poking around, and they generally considered the BCA to be their assistants in the matter. Sort of like secretaries, or maybe receptionists. Or maybe golden retrievers.
Lucas had been the latest designated BCA liaison, and he’d eventually handled the Secret Service information requests, which always arrived by e-mail, by referring them to his shared secretary, who was told to do the best she could. Her best sometimes involved the wastebasket.
Jenkins called: “Shrake and I hooked up for a beer, and we got to thinking.”