The lying had already begun.
He added to it.
WEATHER CALLED AT SEVEN, an hour earlier than usual. She'd heard about the shooting after she'd finished her morning work in the operating theater, and called in a panic. Lucas had kept his cell phone on a bedside table.
'I'm fine,' Lucas lied. 'But I gotta get into the office. There's gonna be a political shit storm starting about ten o'clock. Soon as the politicians finish their double-latte grandes.'
'Were you involved in the shooting? Were you in there?' she asked, still scared.
'Yeah, I was right there,' Lucas said. 'It's a goddamn mess, Weather. I don't want you to think about it. I gotta talk to everybody on the face of the earth in the next two days, covering our asses and getting the story right. I don't want to have to worry about you, too.'
'You sound… hoarse.'
He was, from the anesthesia. He said, 'I spent all yesterday screaming at people. I need a couple of cough drops.'
She asked, 'What about Sloan?'
'He's bummed. I gotta get to him, too,' Lucas said.
'Take care of yourself-don't worry about everybody else,' Weather said.
'Hey, I'm fine,' he lied. When he hung up, he was satisfied that he'd pulled it off.
Then Weather called Sloan's wife, worried about Sloan's state of mind, and Sloan's wife said, 'We stayed for the operation, but Lucas was pretty groggy when he came out of it. They said everything went okay…'
'What operation?' Weather asked.
Lucas was talking to the docs about getting out and was being told 'No,' when Weather called back.
'LUCAS…' she wailed.
'Ah, shit…'
Trapped like a rat.
SLOAN AND JENKINS lied about Biggie's death.
Jenkins gave the blow-by-blow. He was a superb liar: 'He had his back against the wall. I made a move and he fired at me, six feet away, right through the doorway.'He talked with his hands and eyes as much as with his words. 'Goddamn, I'm lucky to be here. Sloan came in low, right under Biggie's shot, and shot him twice. It was all so fast, not even Biggie knew the gun was empty. I mean, we're talking Bam! Bam-Bam!
Everybody bought that.
And why not? All the bullet holes were right there. Besides, the re-construction of events suggested that Biggie's.45 had killed three people and wounded three more, including Lucas.
SHRAKE'S DESCRIPTION OF Chase's death had Chase pointing his weapon at the second woman's face, ready to pull the trigger. The rescued woman was incoherent for two days after the shootings and kept talking about Chase rolling the other body's eyes back and forth with his fingers.
Nobody wanted to know much more about Chase.
LUCAS TOLD THE absolute truth about Taylor and Grant, and blood analysis proved it.
Later analysis also indicated why the shootings weren't more deadly than they were. O'Donnell's guns, used by Biggie and Taylor, were loaded with target loads and cast slugs, apparently homemade by O'Donnell himself, for shooting close range at metal plates. They punched holes in the victims but didn't expand, and most didn't penetrate as deeply as combat loads would have. The third gun, a 9mm that did have combat loads, was used by Chase and had only had two or three rounds fired.
SLOAN, DURING ONE OF his visits, reconstructed Grant's-or Rogers's, or whoever he was-movements after O'Donnell disappeared.
'He killed O'Donnell and dumped him, planted the evidence, and drove up to the airport and left the car where we'd find it,' Sloan said. 'Then he took a shuttle back to Mankato and a cab back to his place, and went to work the next day. We know about the cab and shuttle for sure. That night, after work, he actually drove to Chicago, made the call to us, and drove back. The next day, he's back at work again.'
'Risky…,' Lucas said.
'Yeah. He took risks. And there's no way to prove he drove to Chicago, but we checked the stewardesses, and nobody remembers him on a flight. Also, he had an oil change at a Jiffy Lube a week and a half ago and got a mileage sticker on his window. He's driven almost two thousand miles in that time.'
'That's good,' Lucas said. 'You know, if he'd faked a suicide with O'Donnell…I don't know that we ever would have broken it out. He got too complicated for himself.'
THE CRIME-SCENE PEOPLE believed that Angela Larson was killed in O'Donnell's workshop; they found traces of blood, with indications that somebody had tried to clean it up with commercial liquid cleanser; the cleanser had actually ruined the blood for DNA analysis, but chemical analysis of the concrete dust on Larson's feet matched the concrete of O'Donnell's garage floor. O'Donnell, according to the security hospital records, was working the night that Larson was killed but was not working the night that Peterson was kidnapped. Was he involved? Lucas didn't think so. He thought O'Donnell was probably Grant's-or Rogers's-last line of defense, and had been carefully set up.
THE BIGGEST, MOST complicated lie-if it was a lie, and many people would have denied that it was-appeared in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune four days after the shootings, under the byline of Ruffe Ignace.
LIKE THIS:
The Twin Cities were saturated with media. Reporters were looking for explanations, going to funerals, interviewing people who didn't know anything.
Rose Marie called Lucas and outlined the problem: 'The media want a public execution. The legislature is behaving with its usual courage, so there'll probably be one. The only candidates are the Department of Human Services, and us. Some of the DHS guys are semipublicly wondering why you were driving down there to pick up Grant? Why didn't you call the sheriff and have him grabbed earlier in the day?'
They talked about it for an hour, and then Lucas called Ignace. Ignace came into the hospital on the evening of the day after the shooting, armed with six steno pads and half a dozen pens.
'We want to tell the truth before too many innocent people get hurt,' Lucas said piously.
'Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm here for,' Ignace said.
'You gotta cover me,' Lucas said. 'I'm not supposed to be talking. So… you've got multiple sources, okay?'
Ignace said, 'That's fine with me. I've already talked to a couple of people. I haven't gotten much, but I can use them. So, saying I had multiple sources wouldn't exactly be a lie.'
Not exactly.
LUCAS LED HIM THROUGH the chain of events, from the discovery of Pope's body, to O'Donnell's disappearance, to the call to the Cancun clinic, to the attack on Millie Lincoln and Mihovil, through the fight and the evacuations of the wounded to the various hospitals.
IGNACE TOOK a full day to write the story. It said, in part:
'… spent days looking for O'Donnell but couldn't find him,' according to one investigator. 'We decided we had to look at other staff members. We had the feeling that O'Donnell was another red herring, like Charlie Pope. We also decided that we couldn't really trust the hospital personnel records, so we began researching the records on
