Easy Prey

while, then used the equity in the two of them to buy the third, and then the equity in the three to buy another one, and kept doing that until he got where he is now. The total assessed value in twelve buildings is nine point five million, and they’re really worth twelve or thirteen. But his own money, he’s got maybe a million into them.”
    “The rents don’t cover the payments?”
    “Oh, they cover them, barely, as long as he never has a vacancy,” Lane said. “But you’re never a hundred percent in apartments—not for long, anyway. What he’s doing is, if somebody moves out, he keeps paying the rent out of the dope money until he gets another tenant. I bet he’s getting a lot of his maintenance done on the underground economy, paying in cash. So the dope money is invisible. It just goes away.”
    “And he gets paid out of Miami, and nobody looks at that up here,” Del said.
    “That’s right,” said Lane. “He files all of his taxes, he’s clean. A few more years of this, and he can sell the whole thing out. Pay some capital gains, and he’s a multimillionaire.”
    “What happens if the dope stops?” Lucas asked.
    “Can’t stop,” said Lane. “He needs a hundred percent occupancy to pay his financing costs, and the only way he can get a hundred percent is to pay the rents on the vacant apartments himself.”
    “Strange nobody noticed,” Lucas said.
    “How they gonna notice?” Lane asked.
    Lucas and Del looked at each other, thought about it for a moment, then Lucas shrugged. “I don’t know.”
    “I talked to some guys up at the assessor’s office, and they don’t know a way,” Lane said.
    And Del said, “You know what it reminds me of? The Namiami Entertainment porno houses.”
    Namiami Entertainment was a mob-related company out of Naples, Florida, that bought three porno theaters around the Twin Cities. The Cities liked them because they’d agreed to business conditions that were more restrictive than the previous owners would agree to. Namiami had done away with the jerk-off-booth peep shows, ended the sale of adult novelties, had taken down outside advertising signs, and though they still ran porno films in the theaters, had generally blended into their neighborhoods. They’d operated for years before the tax people got curious about how they managed to get seventy or eighty percent of theater capacity for their film showings; a little investigation suggested that actual capacity was more like ten percent. The theaters, it turned out, were the most excellent device for laundering large numbers of small bills.
    “So what we got,” Lucas said, “is a dead woman who dealt dope to rich people. She’s killed at a party where her dope-dealer boss happens to be, and who claims he didn’t know her. Nobody else seems to have a motive—most people barely know her. But one guy who does know her, Derrick Deal, all he has to do is think about it, and he figures out who killed her. He must’ve known Rodriguez.”
    “And he did it without even knowing that Rodriguez was at the party,” Del said. “He didn’t have our list.”
    “Right. And Derrick’s not above a little blackmail. He tries it, and gets himself killed for his trouble,” Lucas said.
    “Gotta be this guy,” Lane said. “Nothing else fits.”
    “What’d he say when we talked to him?”
    “Says he got to the party late, never saw Alie’e, didn’t know Lansing. Got bored, and left around two o’clock,” Lane said.
    “So he admits he was there pretty late.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Let’s talk to Sallance Hanson about this,” Lucas said. To Del: “Let’s go see Marcy, and then go see Hanson. See what she knows about Rodriguez.”
    “Okay.”
    And to Lane: “Find this Rodriguez. Don’t approach him, just spot him for us. Stay with him. Start tracking him.”
     
 
WHEN LUCAS AND Del walked into the hospital, a nurse saw them coming and cut them off. “There’s been a problem. They’ve had to take Officer Sherrill back into the operating room.”
    “What?”
    She looked at her watch. “About fifteen minutes ago, they decided they had to go back in.”
    “Ah, Jesus,” Lucas said. “How bad?”
    The nurse shook her head. “I don’t know. I know they were watching her blood pressure, and they were worried about it. Dr. Hirschfeld made the call about a half hour ago. She was pretty strong when she went in, though.”
    “Was she awake?”
    “No.”
    “How long will they be in there?” He