Wicked Prey

hall.
    Peterson was waiting behind the door, which was broken around the knob, but still hung from its hinges. “Nothing. If they were here, they cleaned up.”
    “Ah . . .” Lucas said. “But—they might be coming back. We gotta have somebody wait for them. Close the door the best you can, settle down inside. Give me a guy who can watch things from the lobby, and keep those guys down in the garage.”
    “Oughta wait for the crime-scene crew,” Peterson said. “We shouldn’t wait inside.”
    Lucas shook his head: “I don’t have time to lay it all out for you, but we decided that they’re probably planning to go through with this job, whatever it is. There’s reason to think that they’re staying. This apartment”—he gestured around the empty rooms—“could mean anything. If they stayed, they’ve got to be close to pulling the trigger on whatever they’re doing. They could be planning to stop here on the way out. As far as they know, it’s still good.”
    Peterson shrugged. “On your head.”
    “Yup. It is. Have your guys check every inch of this place. We can’t afford to miss anything.”
    “I’ll stay in touch,” Peterson said. “Been easier if we’d finished it here.”
    * * *
     
    LUCAS RODE back down with the SWAT guy designated to hang in the mail room, left him there like Third Class Mail, and collected Shrake and Jenkins.
    “Dumpster dive,” he said, on the way down to the garage.
    “Man, I’m wearing some high-end threads,” Shrake said. “Why don’t you ever get me when I’m wearing jeans?”
    “Maybe it’ll be the first bag; maybe it’ll take one minute,” Lucas said.
    “Fat chance. We’re gonna smell like rotten bananas, rotten tomatoes, or rotten eggs,” Shrake said. “It’s always one of those.”
    “Not always,” Jenkins said. “Sometimes there are baby diapers, and then you smell like baby shit.”
    “I don’t believe they brought a baby with them,” Lucas said. “You can sniff all the bags, and we can skip the baby-shit ones.”
    “Terrific . . .”
    * * *
    THE BAG wasn’t first, second, or third, but they thought it might be the fourth, a regular black-plastic garbage bag with a pull-tie, and filled with fast-food remnants and pizza boxes and an unused box of plastic garbage bags. Why would anyone throw away a perfectly good box of trash bags, unless they were cleaning out an apartment, and had no further use for them? They took a closer look, and among other things, found a receipt for a wrench and a shovel and a box of garbage bags from a Home Depot in Hudson, Wisconsin.
    “Sonofabitch. That’s one block from the motel where the Hudson cop was shot,” Lucas said. “I mean, one block. The store’s right there.”
    “So this is them,” Shrake said, emptying the last of the trash on the floor. “What else is in here?”
    A few things: receipts in paper sacks. A receipt for two golf shirts at Macy’s, size extra large, $69 each; a receipt from a sandwich shop on Wabasha Street a couple of blocks south of Macy’s; a receipt for a box of bonbons from the St. Andrews Hotel. All paid in cash. A pizza box from Perruzi’s, a higher-end Italian place down the street from the convention center. “It’s all right here, right downtown, except for the stuff from Hudson,” Shrake said.
    “I gotta think the job is, too,” Lucas said.
    “Got some cash pickups at the bars, by the O’Meara armored cars. That’s about the biggest cash deal downtown,” Shrake said. “The O’Meara warehouse is pretty well protected . . .”
    Jenkins shook his head: “Maybe they finally broke, and took off.”
    * * *
    THEY LEFT the SWAT team in place: “You have to plan to stay until daylight,” Lucas told Able Peterson. “They may pull the job, whatever it is, and duck back here.”
    “Why?” Peterson asked.
    “Get their shit together,” Lucas said. “Maybe they’ve got a car stashed in the parking garage.”
    Peterson was skeptical, but agreed to stay—which was what Lucas wanted in the first place. Cohn wasn’t coming back, but he might be around somewhere, and Lucas wanted the SWAT guys in his hip pocket, not out wandering around St. Paul.
    He’d left Peterson, heading downstairs, when his phone rang: took it out, saw that he’d missed three calls, all from Weather, while he was in the underground ramp—no reception there—and answered: “Weather?”
    “Lucas: where have you been?” She sounded frightened.
    “Working—out of range, in