'Nope. Anderson had to call Sears. They looked up the address on their accounts computer. It's an apartment on Lyndale Street.'
'Lyndale Avenue,' Lucas said. He sat forward now, intent.
'Whatever. The thing is, the apartment's rented to a guy named Tomas Peck. Sloan and a couple of Narcotics guys are over in the neighborhood now, trying to figure it out.'
'Maybe he moved.'
'Yeah, but Peck has been listed as the occupant for two years. So maybe Hood's living with him.'
'Huh.' Lucas thought it over as she sat leaning forward, waiting for a comment. 'Are you sure you've got the right Bill Hood? There have got to be a lot of them…'
'Yeah, we're sure. The Sears account had a change of address.'
'Then I'd bet he's still living at that apartment,' Lucas said. 'We're on a roll, and when you get on a roll…'
'… it all works,' Lily said.
Lily had not gone down to look for Hood, she said, because Daniel wanted to keep the police presence in the neighborhood to a minimum. 'The FBI's all over the streets. They must have half a dozen agents going through the community,' she said.
'Isn't he going to tell them about identifying Hood?'
'Yeah. He's already talked to a guy.' She glanced at her watch. 'There's a meeting in half an hour. We're supposed to be there. Sloan should be back and Larry Hart's coming in sometime this morning,' Lily said. She was quivering with energy. 'God damn, I was afraid I'd be here for a month. I could be out of here tomorrow, if we get him.'
'Did Daniel say who the FBI guy is?' Lucas asked.
'Uh, yeah. A guy named…' She looked at her notes. 'Kieffer.'
'Uh-oh.'
'Not good?' She looked up at him and he shook his head, frowning.
'He doesn't like me and I don't like him. Gary Kieffer is a most righteous man. Most righteous.'
'Well, get your phony smile in place, then, because we're meeting with him in twenty-seven minutes.' She looked at her watch again, then at his nearly empty coffee cup. 'Where can we get more coffee and a decent Danish?'
They walked through the tunnel from City Hall to the Hen-nepin County Government Center, took a couple of escalators to the Skyway level, walked along the Skyway to the Pillsbury building. Standing on the escalator a step above him, she could look straight into his eyes; she asked if he had had a long night.
'No, not particularly.' He glanced at her. 'Why?'
'You look a little beat.'
'I don't get up early. I usually don't get going until about noon.' He yawned again to prove it.
'What about your girlfriend? Is she a night person too?'
'Yeah. She spent half her life reporting for the ten-o'clock news, which meant she got off work about eleven. That's how we met. We'd bump into each other at late-night restaurants.'
Going across the Skyway, Lily looked through the windows at the glossy downtown skyscrapers, monuments to the colored-glass industry. 'I've never been in this part of the country,' she said. 'I made a couple of cross-country trips when I was doing the hippie thing, back in college, but we always went south of here. Through Iowa or Missouri, on the way out to California.'
'It's out of the way, Minnesota is,' Lucas conceded. 'Lake Michigan hangs down there and cuts us off, with Wisconsin and the Dakotas. You've got to want to come here. And I suppose you don't often get out of the Center of the Universe.'
'I do, once in a while,' she said mildly, refusing to rise to the bait. 'But it's usually on vacation, down to the Bahamas or the Keys or out to Bermuda. We went to Hawaii once. We just don't get into the middle part of the country.'
'It's the last refuge of American civilization, you know- out here, between the mountains,' Lucas said, looking out the windows. 'Most of the population is literate, most people still trust their governments, and most of the governments are reasonably good. The citizens control the streets. We've got poverty, but it's manageable. We've got dope, but we've still got a handle on it. It's okay.'
'You mean like Detroit?'
'There are a couple of spots out of control…'
'And South Chicago and Gary and East St. Louis…'
'… but basically, it ain't bad. You get the feeling that nobody even knows what goes on in New York or Los Angeles and that nobody really cares. The politicians have to lie and steal just to get elected.'
'I think my brain would shrivel up and die if I was living here. It's so fuckin' peaceful I don't know what I'd do,' Lily said. She looked down at a street-cleaning machine. 'The night I came in, I got here late, after midnight. I caught a cab at the airport and went downtown, and I started seeing these women walking around alone or waiting for buses by themselves. Everywhere. Jesus. That's such… an odd sight.'
'Hmph,' Lucas said.
They left the Skyway and got on an escalator to the main floor of the Pillsbury building. 'You have a little hickey on your neck,' she said lightly. 'I thought maybe that's why you looked so tired.'
They sat in the dining area of a bakery, Lily eating a Danish with a glass of milk, Lucas staring out the window over a cup of coffee.
'Wish I was out there with Sloan,' she said finally.
'Why? He can handle it.' Lucas sipped at the scalding coffee.
'I just wish I was. I've handled a lot of pretty serious situations.'
'So have we. We ain't New York, but we ain't exactly Dogpatch, either,' Lucas said.
'Yeah, I know…'
'Sloan's good at talking to people. He'll dig it out.'
'All right, all right,' she said, suddenly irritable. 'But this means a lot to me.'
'It means a lot to us too. We're up to our assholes in media; Jesus, the street outside the office this morning looked like the press parking lot at a political convention.'
'Not the same,' she insisted. 'Andretti was a major figure…'
'We're handling it,' Lucas said sharply.
'You're not handling much. You didn't even get here until ten o'clock, for Christ's sake. I'd been standing around for two hours.'
'I didn't ask you to wait for me; and I told you, I work nights.'
'I just don't have the right feeling from this. You guys-'
'And if I read the newspapers right, you guys in New York have screwed more than your share of cases to the wall,' Lucas interrupted, talking over her. 'If you guys aren't deliberately blowing up some black kid, you're taking money from some fuckin' crack dealer. We're not only pretty good, we're clean…'
'I never took a fuckin' nickel from anybody,' Lily said, her voice harsh. She was leaning over the table, her jaw tight.
'I didn't say you did, I said…'
'Hey, fuck you, Davenport, I just want to nail this sono-fabitch, and the next thing I hear is that New York cops are taking payoff money…' She threw a paper napkin on the table, picked up the Danish and the carton of milk, and stood and stalked away.
'Hey, Lily,' Lucas said. 'God damn it.'
Gary Kieffer didn't like Lucas and made no effort to hide it. He was waiting in Daniel's office when Lily arrived, with Lucas just behind her. He and Lucas nodded at each other.
'Where's Daniel?' Lily asked.
'Off somewhere,' Kieffer said coldly. He was wearing a navy-blue business suit, a tie knotted in a full Windsor, and well-polished black wingtips.
'I'll go check,' Lucas grumped. He backed out of the office, looking at Lily. She dropped her purse beside the chair next to Kieffer's and sat down.
'You'd be the New York lady officer,' Kieffer said, looking her over.
