Easy Prey

Still got to have it on him, unless somebody took it. In his briefcase.”
    “All right. Then what happened?”
    “I watched the ramp exit while Pat ran back to the Skyway and watched his office,” Winter said.
    “When he showed up in his office, then I was gonna call Nancy back,” Stone said, picking up the story. “But he never showed up in the office. I was in the Skyway, so we know he didn’t go out that way.”
    “Aren’t there other Skyway exits?”
    “Not open this late,” Stone said. “Only open my way. You can only get out of the building three ways: the Skyway past me, the parking ramp, and the front door—that has a push bar. The other ground-floor doors are locked.”
    “We thought maybe he’d stopped in the can,” Winter said. “I showed my badge to the lady in the ramp’s pay booth, and then I got my keys out and started jingling them like I was looking for my car, and walked up the ramp until I saw his car, to make sure he’d parked. Then I walked back out and Pat still hadn’t seen him. So I sorta strolled over to the door and looked in—I didn’t have a key, so I couldn’t get in at that point—and I saw this lump way down on the floor. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I got the lady in the pay booth to let me inside, and . . . You saw him.”
    “How long from the time he drove in the garage until you saw the lump?” Lucas asked.
    “We’ve been trying to figure that out. We were talking on cell phones, so you can probably get the exact time from the calls, but I figure it was about ten minutes,” Winter said.
    “I think it might have been a little longer,” Stone said. “I think it might have been ten minutes before you walked up the ramp, then another few before you came back out, then walked down and looked in the door. . . . Maybe twelve or thirteen minutes.”
    “You can tell from the phone calls,” Winter repeated. The two cops were anxious to get out from under, Lucas realized. And he couldn’t see what else they might’ve done.
    “All right,” Lucas said. “You done good, guys.”
    Stone glanced at Winter, relieved. Lucas went back to the circle of cops around Rodriguez’s body.
    “Where’s his briefcase?”
    “Up there.” He pointed up, at the railing around the second floor of the atrium. “He set it down before he took the dive—if he took a dive.”
    “He’s a big guy to have somebody throw him over without a fight,” one of the St. Paul cops said.
    “Goddamn TV was all over him. He was about to lose his ass,” another one said.
    Lucas said, “I want to look in his briefcase.”
    “Crime-scene guys working it,” one of the St. Paul cops said. “Take the elevator.”
    Lucas went up, found a crime-scene cop probing the briefcase. “Papers,” he said. “This thing.” He held up a plastic box in his latex-covered hand.
    “What is it?” Lucas asked.
    The crime-scene guy turned it in his hand. “Zip disk, two-pack.”
    “How about a receipt? You see a receipt in there?”
    The cop dug back into the briefcase and came up with a slip of paper. He held it away from himself, in better light: “CompUSA. Zip disk. Two-pack.”
    Lucas walked back downstairs. The St. Paul chief of police was coming down the hall, two steps behind Del. Del lifted a hand, and the St. Paul chief said, “He jump?”
    Lucas said, “I don’t know, but I’d send a guy down to get his computer. I think he came down to clean out his disk drive. Maybe changed his mind when he walked up to the railing.”
    They all looked up at the railing. The St. Paul chief said, “Woodbury is out at his apartment. They say there’s no note.”
    “Didn’t have time to write one.” Lucas looked at Del. “You wanna ride out to Woodbury?”
    Del looked down at Rodriguez’s body, then up at the railing, and said, “Might as well. Elvis has left the building.”
    As they stepped away, the St. Paul chief said, “If he jumped . . . he took a lot of problems with him.”
     
 
ON THE WAY out to Woodbury, Del called the Woodbury cops and got directions. Rodriguez’s apartment was in one of his own buildings. “The Penthouse suite,” the cop said, deploying a capital P. “That’s what I’m told.”
    “Find out who was watching his phones tonight,” Lucas said. “Find out if there was a call.”
    Del checked. “Not a single call at his apartment today,” he said.
    “Goddamnit.”
    Rodriguez’s building was a routine-looking apartment with a pea-gravel finish over