Wicked Prey

won’t, but it really wasn’t your money, anyway,” Lucas said. “So: what can you tell me?”
    Weimer said, “I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve got one thing.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yeah, I . . .” He groaned and arched his back and flailed at it with his good hand, groaned again, and then went slack, and looked at Lucas. “It keeps twisting, like a muscle’s turning back there . . . God bless me.”
    “The one thing,” Lucas said.
    “Ah . . . I was eating in this sandwich shop and I got up to go,” Weimer said. “Left the money and the tip on the table, walked out the door, turned left, walked down this little short alley around the building to the parking lot to my car. I opened the door and bam! They got me. Just bam-bam! Like that.” He had small round hands and he slapped them twice. “So, I think they had to be watching me, to be all ready. The guys in the van couldn’t see me, because you couldn’t see into the back of the shop. I think somebody was inside the place.”
    “You saw somebody?”
    Weimer shifted again, his face going pale, and he said, “Ahhh. God, I hate this shit . . . Okay: There was a tough-looking hillbilly guy and this cool-looking woman in the front booth. They didn’t look like they should go together, but they were. I noticed her looking back at me two or three times—caught her looking. I am what I am, and my wife likes me okay, but I’m not exactly a chick magnet, okay? They don’t look at me more than once.”
    “Okay.”
    “So she was checking me out,” Weimer said, “Now I wonder if she was checking me out for this Cohn guy? Maybe she made a call when I got up to leave.”
    “You see her on a cell phone?” Lucas asked.
    “No, but I didn’t look.”
    Lucas asked, “There’s no chance that she was a Latina-looking chick, was she?”
    Weimer’s eyebrows went up: “You know who she is?”
    * * *
    LUCAS CALLED Carol, at the office, and had her check his e-mail. The photo from Washington was there. “Print it. I need it. Is there somebody who could run it over to St. John’s? Light and sirens?”
    “I saw Jenkins down the hall, reading the paper—he could take one of our cars.”
    “Get him over here. Quick as he can make it,” Lucas said.
    He tried to pry more information out of Weimer, but the lobbyist didn’t have much more: “The whole thing was quick. Professional. Bam-bam-bam. When the two of them were talking, they were totally calm and casual. Like a couple guys going out for a beer. Then, when the guy hit me for not telling about the hideout bag, he didn’t seem angry. He hit me like he was punishing a kid. Just . . . hit me.”
    Lucas went down to the cafeteria while he waited for Jenkins, got a Diet Coke, read the Star Tribune about the convention: more marches, lots of people already arrested. Finished the story, glanced at his watch, took out his cell phone and discovered that he had no signal. He walked it up the stairs, and then outside, got a signal, and called Jenkins. “I’m two minutes away,” Jenkins said. “I had to drive halfway around town to get here.”
    Lucas waited by the curb, saw Jenkins coming, waved him down. Jenkins passed a manila envelope out the window. “What a mess. You can’t get anywhere. St. Paul’s closing down the whole downtown area.”
    “Thanks for this. See you back at the office.”
    “I hope it’s serious.”
    “It is.” Lucas patted the truck on the door, and headed back into the hospital. In the elevator up to Weimer’s room, he slipped the photo out of the envelope. The quality was bad—cell phone quality—but the woman was recognizable, and, Lucas thought, somewhat hot.
    Dark hair, dark eyes, caught unaware, he thought, as though she had just turned around. She seemed to be in a nightclub, or some kind of night place—there were sparkly lights in the background, the corner of a mirror, the shoulder of another woman in what might have been a cocktail dress. The woman wasn’t looking at the camera, but off to the right; she might not have known about the picture, Lucas thought.
    * * *
    WEIMER WAS sitting, unmoving, staring at the television that was attached to the ceiling. When Lucas came in, he turned his head: “Hurts when I move. This is awful, I’m like a baby. Could you take the top blanket off? My feet are getting hot.”
    Lucas stripped the cotton blanket off the bed, wadded it up, threw it on a chair and said, “Okay. I got a picture . . .” He should have had