Easy Prey

end-of-the-day meeting in Rose Marie Roux’s office, Lucas headed home. He changed into a sweatshirt and shorts, ran for forty-five minutes through the quiet Highland Park area of St. Paul. Feeling virtuous. And back home, he picked up the phone to find a message from dispatch: Call Carl Knox.
     
 
“CARL,” HE SAID. “Lucas Davenport.”
    “I got two names for you. And I’ve squeezed as hard as I’m going to—I’m already nervous enough.”
    “What’re the names?”
    “Curtis Logan, spelled just like it sounds. He says he’s an artist and he used to work in one of the art museums. He started by selling coke and ecstasy and speed to a few of the patrons, and his name got around. In certain groups.”
    “Okay. Curtis Logan.” Lucas noted it on a legal pad.
    “And James Bee. That’s B-E-E, like in bumble.”
    “What’s he do?”
    “Certified financial adviser. Hooks up with rich people through a company called RIO Accounting. Same thing as Logan, mostly handles fashion drugs. Ecstasy, speed.”
    “What are we talking about in sales? Every once in a while? Or big time?”
    “I don’t know exactly—I wasn’t doing an investigation, I was looking for a connection. But I got the feeling they’re semi-big-time. And very careful.”
    “I owe you,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah. You do. And for Christ’s sakes, don’t do anything that’ll make them think of me, when you ask about them.”
     
 
NEITHER OF THE two names was on the party list; that would have been too much to expect, anyway. But if they could get the two of them, they might be able to develop a daisy chain of peddlers-to-the-rich, and a name might still be found. . . .
    Del was still working. Lucas dialed his cellular number and pulled him out of a bar. “Got two names for you, but you’ve gotta go gentle.”
    “Like walking on cotton.”
    Lucas gave him the names—Del hadn’t heard of either of them—and said, “Call me if you get anything.”
    “Probably won’t nothing happen until tomorrow,” Del said. “I’ll get on some banks, start doing some financials.”
    “We can’t really afford a long-term look,” Lucas said.
    “I’ll do it fast as I can, but I can’t just go knock on their doors.”
    “Hear any more about Trick?”
    “No, but people are talking about a big game. Maybe tomorrow night, or the next night. I haven’t tracked it down yet, but that’d be a possibility.”
    “Call me when you get it.”
     
 
THAT NIGHT HE worked on his game, but there were no calls. A call came in the morning, though.
    “You awake, sleepyhead?” Rose Marie Roux—and the words, on other days, might have brought up a smile; they didn’t this morning, because of her tone of voice.
    “What happened?” Lucas asked.
    “Amnon Plain’s dead.”
    “Dead?” he said stupidly.
    “In St. Paul. Somebody shot him.”

12
    MONDAY. THE THIRD day of the hunt.
    There had been no premonition. Lucas was given to premonitions—mostly wrong, and usually involving a variety of plane crash scenarios, beginning as soon as he made a reservation for an airline flight. He also had premonitions involving criminal cases. Some were right. He’d been told by a shrink that his unconscious was probably pushing him to a logical connection that his conscious mind hadn’t yet made. He didn’t necessarily buy the mumbo-jumbo, but he didn’t yet deny it, either. So he paid attention to premonitions, but in this instance, he hadn’t had one. And even after he heard about Plain, he felt no foreboding about the rest of the day. . . .
    PLAIN HAD BEEN murdered in his apartment/studio at the Matrix Building in St. Paul’s Lowertown, an out-of-the-loop business district of old converted warehouses occupied by artists and start-up businesses. The Matrix was one of the oldest and least updated: All the elevators were designed for freight, and stank of decades of crushed fruit and rotten onions, paint, beer, and cardboard boxes. The hallways were littered with trash cans, most of them stuffed to overflowing. The Matrix had sold everything at one time or another: produce, hardware, dope, even wholesale leisure suits, sewn in St. Paul’s only double-knit sweatshop.
    Lately, the big product was art, mostly painting, with some light sculpture. And Plain’s photography studio.
    A half-dozen St. Paul cop cars were gathered in the street when Lucas rolled up. He dumped the Porsche in a furniture-store parking lot, flashed his badge at a clerk who stood in