Wicked Prey

“Congratulations. Jeez, whoever would have even believed it, Del.” He passed the phone to the other two, who gave Del the raft of shit that he’d expect, and both congratulated him, and Lucas took the phone back and Del said, “I gotta get some sleep. I think I’m more beat up than my old lady.”
    “I doubt it,” Lucas said.
    “What’re you doing?”
    “House-to-house,” Lucas said, deliberately discouraging him. “You wouldn’t be interested.”
    “I’m going home,” Del said.
    * * *
    AT THE apartment, another jeweled train went by, and they gawked, and Jenkins said, “These aren’t even the rich ones. The rich ones are staying up there. These ones have to walk in.”
    Lucas called the association president, whose name was Dan Eller, and Eller buzzed them up to his apartment on the twenty-fourth floor and met them at the door. He was bald, mustachioed, genially overweight, and retired.
    After Lucas explained, Eller said, “The problem is, we have rentals here, too, and those people are coming and going all the time.”
    “How about the people on the floors? Who knows who?”
    “I can help you with the condo levels, but I don’t know about the rentals,” Eller said. “I mean, I know a couple people, maybe they could chain you up with more.”
    “You haven’t seen anybody who looks like these guys . . . ?”
    “No, and I’m around the building a lot,” Eller said. “Pretty much on every condo floor every day. We’ve been having roof and drainage problems, and, it’s gonna cost to fix, so I’ve been politicking.”
    “People have rented out their condos, though, right?”
    “Yup. A few. People have cabins up north. They stay up there and make money down here on the convention.”
    Eller gave them a list of names—“most of them are older, they’ll be home”—and also the name and phone number of his opposite number in the other apartment building. “That building’s all rentals, but they set up an apartment association, and Ken runs it. More like a tenants’ union than a condo association.”
    * * *
    THEY DECIDED to start at the top, and rode the elevator up, and when they got off, Jenkins stopped, and when Lucas and Shrake looked back, he said, “You know what? We look exactly like a bunch of flatfeet.”
    Lucas looked at them, and himself, and sighed and nodded. “All right. You two guys do this building. I’m gonna go talk to this Ken guy in the other building.”
    “This is feeling kind of weak,” Shrake said, turning around to look at the empty hallways. “I got that empty-tank feeling.”
    “Maybe it’ll go away when you do some actual work,” Lucas said.
    * * *
    BUT IT was the worst kind of police work, Lucas thought, as he took the elevator back down. The kind of stuff done as a last resort, talking to people who you had no reason to suspect knew anything at all. Or maybe, he thought, like church bingo; sort of dull and hopeless, but somebody was going to win. Just not you.
    On the street level again, another two glittery couples brushed past, aiming up the hill. Four cops went down the street on horses; horses seemed to be everywhere. The cops looked him over, but the last cop lifted a hand and said, “Davenport,” and Lucas waved back, and pushed into the lobby of the apartment building.
    Ken Jacobsen, who lived on the eighteenth floor of the second tower, looked at the photographs and shook his head. He’d been cooking liver and onions, and the apartment was fragrant with the gravy. “Let me give you some names, people to talk to.”
    “Are you around the building much?”
    “Off and on,” Jacobsen said. “But we’re not directly responsible for the buildings. We’re not owners, so it’s not quite like it is in Dan’s condo.”
    As Lucas was going out the door, Jacobsen said, “Hey: let me make a call, here. I’ll see if the Hassans are still in the building.”
    The Hassans were two cell-phone-equipped Ethiopian janitors: their English wasn’t good, but was good enough that Lucas was sure that they hadn’t seen Cohn or Diaz.
    “Terrorists?” one of the Hassans asked.
    Lucas nodded. “If you see them, call nine-one-one.”
    “Nine-one-one,” said the second Hassan. “We will do.”
    * * *
     
    LUCAS TALKED to two widows and a widower, and was growing depressed, looking into their tiny apartments, when a call came in from one of the Minneapolis detectives: “We got a hit. A good one.”
    “Good one?” Lucas asked, the evening