Wicked Prey

pieces, then thought, Huh, and put it back.
    Took a last look around, and backed out of the house.
    Pulled the door shut, got on her bike, and rode away, down the hill, toward town.
    Things to think about.

8
    LUCAS TALKED TO EVERY MANAGER, assistant manager, and bellman he could find, in all of St. Paul’s hotels, got unanimous head-shakes, and was headed out the door of his last stop when he saw Mitford walking toward the bar with a couple of other guys.
    “Neil!”
    Mitford turned, spotted him, walked over: “How’s it going?”
    “Slowly. I’m walking a picture around . . .” He showed Mitford the shot of Cohn, told him about the victim interviews, and about Jones’s impatience with the victims.
    “You told him about the money?” Mitford asked.
    “He knew about the money. He knew there was something going on.” Lucas shook his head. “There’re going to be rumors, and when it gets out to the blogs, you’ll have some damage control to do.”
    “It’ll get swamped by all the other noise . . . Listen, come on over and meet these guys. They might have some ideas.”
    The guys were out-of-towners, professional handlers, Democrats in town to watch the Republicans do their stuff. Ray Landy and Dick McCollum were talking about McCain and his vice-presidential pick, the unknown governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin. They couldn’t stop talking about her, veering from amazement to ridicule, watching their BlackBerrys as commentary poured in from friends, reading the messages aloud. They got a table in the tiny bar, and Landy said to Lucas: “You’re an outside guy. What do you outside guys think about Palin?”
    Lucas said, “I’m mostly a Democrat, so . . . maybe I’m not the best judge.”
    “Oh, bullshit,” Landy said. “What do you think?”
    “I don’t know anything about her. What bothers me is that it was a quick decision, I guess—that’s what the papers all say,” Lucas said. “They say that McCain is rolling the bones. I don’t know about Palin, but I’m not sure I want to vote for a guy who’d roll the bones on a presidential election. Doesn’t make him seem like a calm, rational decision-maker.”
    “Bless you,” Landy said. “I hope everybody’s thinking that way.”
    * * *
    THE THREE POLS ordered Bloody Marys and Lucas got a Diet Coke. Mitford said, “Guys, Lucas is a big shot in our Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. He’s looking into the robberies . . .”
    McCollum was a pale-eyed man who fiddled with an unlit cigarette, twiddling it like a pencil between his nicotine-stained fingers: “You a cop?”
    Lucas nodded. “Yup.”
    “He’s handled things for the governor for a while—I asked him to look into these things,” Mitford said.
    The drinks came and they stopped talking until they’d all had a sip, and the waitress left, and McCollum said, “There are fifteen guys like them. Well, there were, anyway. Some of them might have taken off.”
    “You ever heard of anything like this before?” Lucas asked.
    Both men shook their heads, and Landy said, “You hear about it at a lot lower level—but not at this level. You know, when the money gets down to the street, you’ll have robberies, but they’re random, small-time stuff. A few hundred here or there. That’s what happens when you walk around in a bad area with your pockets full of twenty-dollar bills.” He said “bad air-ee-a” in a way that suggested it was a cliché wherever he came from.
    “I never quite understood where the money was going,” Lucas said.
    Landy looked at Mitford, who shrugged, and Landy said, “When you’re running a campaign, you’ve got all these people down at the bottom who need walking-around money. They want to get lunch, or buy lunch for somebody, or catch a cab, or get somebody a cab, or pay for gas, or even get some lawn signs together. These are people who turn out the vote. You can’t issue a check to all of them—and a lot of them don’t have money to do it on their own. I mean, any money.”
    “Say you’re working an area with gangs,” McCollum said. “There might be somebody who is, like, an officer in a gang. He can turn out a certain vote—fifty people, seventy-five people, a hundred people, maybe even a few hundred people. He needs to get around for a few weeks. Somebody might toss him a few hundred dollars, depending on what he does . . .”
    “A couple grand, maybe,” Landy said.
    “And the candidate might not want his name on a check going to a gang