and around the corner, and outside to the parking lot to the truck. From the door pocket, he retrieved his own prepaid cell phone and punched in the first of the numbers he’d taken from Kline’s prepaid cell phone when he searched Kline’s apartment. When Sanderson appeared at the emergency room door a moment later, he tapped the “call” icon. A phone rang, but she made no move to answer it.
He punched in a second number and, as she walked up to her car, let it ring. Nothing. He put in the third number, and on the fourth ring, a man answered with a soft southern accent.
“Hello?”
“I must have the wrong number,” Lucas said. “Is this Jimmy?”
“No, this ain’t Jimmy,” the man said, with an amused chuckle. “This is the custodian who just took Jimmy’s phone out of the trash can at Newark airport.”
“I’ll have to kick Jimmy’s ass,” Lucas said.
“What do you want me to do with the phone?” the custodian asked.
“Keep it,” Lucas said. “It’s a prepay. When it runs out, you can pay for more.”
Sanderson was in her car, backing out of the parking space, but one thing that Lucas knew, as sure as sin and taxes, was that if somebody called a woman on a cell phone, she’d answer it. Or at least look at it. Was it possible she really wasn’t part of the Kline-Turicek-Gold Buyer phone circle?
She took a left onto the road, heading down to I-35, and he followed, several cars back. She drove slowly across the Cities, all the way to her apartment, into her parking garage, and out of sight.
“Goddamnit,” Lucas said aloud.
Was it possible that she really was innocent?
No, he decided. It wasn’t. He did a U-turn and headed back home.
Edie Albitis got into town just before midnight. She’d tried calling Turicek fifteen times on her second phone, hadn’t gotten an answer. As the plane rolled across the tarmac at MSP, she tried Sanderson. Sanderson, she thought, was probably the weak link in the whole chain, the one most likely to cough them up. She’d talked to Turicek about it, and he’d suggested that she probably wouldn’t screw up and talk until he and Albitis were safely in their respective bolt-holes in Lithuania, Ukraine, or Georgia. That had changed now, with all the attention from the cops.
She tried to get Turicek, failed, knew she couldn’t get Kline, who was still in the hospital and apparently didn’t have his prepaid phone with him, and so she went to Sanderson, who’d just walked in the door when she called, the phone ringing from where she’d left it, on the floor next to the living room couch.
“Yes?”
“It’s me,” Albitis said. They didn’t use names on the phone.
“Oh, my God, have you heard?” Sanderson cried.
“Heard what?”
“Ivan’s dead.”
“What?” Albitis freaked; if it hadn’t been for her lap belt, she might have leaped out of the airplane seat.
Sanderson told her about it, and Albitis listened, openmouthed, as they taxied up to the Jetway.
“All right,” Albitis said. “I’ll call you back in five minutes. I have to think.”
It wasn’t so much that she had to think, but she couldn’t talk with the guy in the next seat leaning over her. Once inside the terminal, she found an empty space next to a window and called Sanderson back. She said, “Okay, you’ve got this cop threatening you. That means he suspects, but he doesn’t
“I’m sitting here shaking like a leaf,” Sanderson said. “You should have seen poor Ivan’s head. There was hardly any skin left on it. Like his nose had almost been scraped off.”
“Okay, okay, I don’t want to hear that,” Albitis said. “I really don’t.”
“I had to
“Enough. I’m going to the office to pick up today’s packages. I’ll sleep there, on the floor. The last of the packages come in tomorrow. I’ll pick them up, and then, we’ll just wait. We’ll have all the gold, and the cops’ll have no clue. We’ll split it up, and we’re done.”
“Will you call me?”
“I’ll call you three times a day…. Anything you hear, call me, but only on the cold phone, okay? Only on the cold phone. They’re probably monitoring your cell.”
“Oh, God, this agent said I’m going to prison for life, I’m an accessory to murder because I won’t help them.”
“Just stay cool.”
When Lucas got home, Weather was asleep, but Letty was still up. “Mom said to tell you she saw the autopsy stuff on your desk, and she says she’s got a bad feeling about it. Something’s not right. She says she can’t imagine how Rivera got shot, if it happened the way you said it did.”
Lucas frowned and said, “Did she say why?”
“No, she says she just couldn’t imagine it,” she said. “You know, if it was the way you said.”
Lucas went to his desk, found the autopsy file, and thumbed through it. Letty, munching on a PowerBar, came to look over his shoulder.
“You don’t have to see this,” Lucas said.
“I already did,” Letty said. “I couldn’t figure out what she meant, either. Maybe we should go wake her up.”
“Is she cutting tomorrow?”
“She’s got a nose … rhinoplasty.” Weather had outlawed the phrase “nose job” in the Davenport household.
“So we let her sleep,” Lucas said.
He looked through the photos, of both the crime scene and the autopsy, along with the autopsy notes.
“You see it?” Letty asked.
“No, because I’m going to have to imagine it, and I can’t do that with you crunching the PowerBar in my ear,” Lucas said.
“Chill.”
Lucas looked at the photos, closed his eyes. Simple enough. Rivera walked up the front steps, cocked his gun, made sure the safety was off, got his guts up, and kicked the door. He landed with one foot inside, saw the two men off to his right, turned that way. One of them went for his gun and he fired twice and the third man, whom he hadn’t seen, who was standing next to the picture window to his left, peeking through the drapes, that man swivels with a gun and shoots….
He looked at the pictures.
Closed his eyes. The man on the left shoots…
He shoots…
Lucas opened his eyes and said, “Houston, we’ve got a problem.”
“I’m Letty,” said Letty. “You had a stroke, or something?”
Lucas spent a restless night working through it, realized he should have seen it a lot sooner. He’d sensed it, back at the shooting scene, but hadn’t been able to put his finger on the problem. But better late than never.
Weather’s alarm went off at six o’clock. He usually slept right through it, but this time he rolled out of bed with her, shaved, gave her a good scrub in the shower, which might have grown interesting if they’d only had more time, but they were both in a hurry. He took the time to say, “Thanks for the tip on the autopsy.”
“That’s something?” she asked.
“I’m afraid it is.”
