Secret Prey

her.’’
    ‘‘Yeah.’’ Lucas bit his lip. ‘‘They ever find her hands and feet?’’
    ‘‘Not as far as I know.’’
    SHIRLEY KNOX WASN’T A PARTICULARLY GOOD RECEPTIONIST, but she did know a cop when she saw one. As Lucas and Del climbed out of Lucas’s Porsche, she muttered, ‘‘Oh, shit,’’ picked up the telephone, pushed the intercom button, and said, ‘‘Mr. Knox—Mr. Johnson is here to see you.’’
    Out in the warehouse, Carl Knox was standing next to a foot-tall pile of illegally imported Iranian rugs. He looked up at the speaker as his daughter’s voice died away, said, as she had, ‘‘Oh, shit,’’ and then, ‘‘Wonder what they want?’’ To the man standing next to him, he said, ‘‘I’ll slow them down, you throw the rugs back in the box. If you got time, put a couple nails in the lid. Hurry.’’
    Carl Knox didn’t know exactly how it had happened, but over the years he’d become the Twin Cities’ answer to the Mafia—or to organized crime, at any rate. He’d gotten his start twenty-five years earlier, stealing Caterpillar earthmoving equipment, a line which he still pursued with enthusiasm. Half of the Caterpillar gear north of the 55th parallel had gone through his hands, as well as most of the repair parts when they broke down.
    He’d done well stealing Caterpillar. So well, in fact, that he’d piled up a couple hundred thousand unexplainable dollars, which inflation—this was back in the late seventies— began eating alive. Then he’d met a man named Merchant, who explained to him the street need for quick untraceable cash, which led Knox to becoming the Cities’ largest primelending loan shark. He didn’t actually shark himself, he simply loaned to sharks . . .
    And that led to his introduction to gambling, and it occurred to him that you could run a pretty sizable book with the computer equipment he was using to locate the Caterpillar equipment he was planning to steal . . . and pretty soon one of his subsidiary partners was running the Cities’ largest sports book. But he’d never put any hits out on anyone, and while the occasional broken bone didn’t necessarily make him queasy—especially when the bone wasn’t his own—his Twin Cities attitude toward violence was, ‘‘Damn it, that sort of thing shouldn’t be necessary.’’
    Carl Knox hustled his skinny butt into the showroom. A nice rehabbed Caterpillar 966 wheel loader was on display, with a fresh yellow paint job, just outside through the big front windows where he could admire it. As he walked in, he saw Del Capslock slouching toward the reception desk, where Shirley was concentrating on her gum chewing. Capslock was followed by another man, bigger and darker. Knox knew both the face and the name, though he’d never met him.
    ‘‘Mr. Capslock,’’ he called, a smile on his face. The smile was almost genuine, because Capslock usually wanted nothing more than information. Del spotted him, and drifted over, in that odd street-boy sidle of his.
    ‘‘Mr. Knox,’’ he said. He lifted a thumb over his shoulder to the dark man behind him. ‘‘This is Mr. Davenport.’’
    ‘‘Mr. Davenport—Chief Davenport—I’ve heard much about you.’’ Knox beamed.
    ‘‘And I’ve heard about you,’’ Lucas said.
    ‘‘What can I do for you gentlemen?’’ Knox asked. ‘‘A D9 for that gold mine, maybe?’’
    ‘‘We need you to call up your assholes and have them ask about a firebomb thrown through the window of Weather Karkinnen over in Edina,’’ Lucas said. His voice was friendly enough, and Knox presumed.
    ‘‘My assholes? What—’’
    ‘‘Don’t pull my weenie, Knox,’’ Lucas said, and the friendliness was gone—snap—without transition. ‘‘This is a serious matter, and if I have to pull down this fuckin’ warehouse with a crowbar to convince you it’s serious, I’ll call up and get some crowbars.’’
    The hail-fellow disappeared from Knox’s face: ‘‘How the fuck am I supposed to know about somebody gets a bomb?’’
    ‘‘You saw it on TV?’’ Del asked.
    ‘‘Saw it on Channel Three, they were talking about the Seed coming after your asses again. I got nothin’ to do with the Seed . . .’’
    ‘‘We’re off the Seed,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘We’re looking for a new angle. So we want you to call up all your particular jerk-offs and tell them to start asking around. You can call me at my office in say . . . four hours. Four hours