'All right – if there was a leak, it was us. If there was a leak. .. but damn it, I would have leaked to her myself, if I'd known she might call. Do you have a recording of the voice?'
There was a brief pause, as if Mallard were contemplating the stupidity of the question. 'Of course,' he said.
'I want to hear it,' Lucas said. 'I know the suspect personally, I've spoken to her in the past week. Maybe I could nail it down.'
'Which leads to my second question,' Mallard said. 'What's her name?'
'Jesus…'
'I've got to have it. This is turning into something. As long as your case was nothing more than an intuition, it was one thing. Now it's another.'
'She's a well-connected defense attorney here in town. A millionaire, probably.
And I know she gives money to the politicians – U.S. senators, congressmen, you name it. If you fuck this up, they could find us both buried in the back yard.'
'Three people here will have the name. That's all. If we're buried in the back yard, the other two guys'll be buried under us, I guarantee it.'
Lucas sighed, hesitated, and said, 'All right. Her name is Carmel Loan. I can't tell you how nervous this makes me.'
'The woman who called yesterday identified herself as Patricia Case.'
'I'll check around, but I've never heard of her,'
Lucas said. He picked up the St. Paul phone book, thumbed through it to Case.
'Could be some kind of code,' Mallard said. 'Although that's pretty far fetched.'
' Tennex Messenger Service is far-fetched… did you get a location on the pay phone?'
'Yeah, just a minute. Uh, it's at 505 Nicollet Mall.'
'Five-Oh-Five,' Lucas muttered, as he ran his ringer down the Case listing in the phone book. He said, half to himself, 'There aren't any Patricia Cases listed in the St. Paul phone book. I don't have the Minneapolis book here at the house.'
'We already checked, and there aren't any Patricia Cases. We also checked the
505 number, and got some department stores. There's a Nieman Marcus.'
'That's an easy two-minute walk from Carmel Loan's office,' Lucas said. 'I can check, but it might be the closest pay phone to Carmel's office.'
'Interesting,' Mallard said.
'Please don't let anything out about Carmel,' Lucas said urgently. 'Not yet.'
'Nothing will come out of this end. I swear to God.'
'One more thing,' Lucas said. 'When are you going to hit this place? The office suite? Go in and talk to the people?'
'We'll give it another day, anyway.'
'Call me the night before. I'm three hours away: I'd like to be there when you do it.'
'No problem. Anything else?'
'One other thing… one of the victims, Rolando D'Aquila, used to be a heavy drug-dealer. The word from our drug people is that he bought his coke out of St.
Louis, a Mafia connection down there. Not Colombian or Mexican, but old-line
Mafia. And this shooter, his woman, she seems to tie in down there.'
'Damn,' Mallard said, 'I'm letting something happen here that I've never let happen before.'
'What's that?'
'I'm getting my hopes up.'
Then for two days, nothing happened. Carmel didn't get a call-back. She stayed close to the magic phone, but she never heard from Rinker. Was there a problem with the contact phone? Was it tapped?
The FBI was equally frustrated. There were no more calls to Tennex: nothing. At the end of the second day, Mallard called Lucas back. 'We're going in tomorrow, if nothing happens to slow us down. We want to get in before the end of the week.'
'I'll get a flight out tonight.'
'We can cover that, if you want,' Mallard offered.
'No thanks, I'll do it from here.'
'All right. Anything new?'
'I sent one of my people, Marcy Sherrill, down to St. Louis to schmooze their organized crime people. There's nothing going on up here.'
'If SherrilPs the one I remember from the meeting, she oughta schmooze pretty well.'
'One of her many talents,' Lucas said. 'See you tomorrow.'
Lucas called his travel agent, got a business-class ticket on the nine o'clock
Northwest flight into National and made a reservation at the Hay-Adams. He liked the Hay-Adams because, the half-dozen times he'd stayed there – even the first time – the doorman said, 'Nice to see you again, sir.'
Then he called Donnal O'Brien at D.C. Homicide and said, 'Hey, Irish.'
'Jesus Christ, the outer precincts are heard from,' O'Brien said. 'How'n the hell are you, Lucas?'
'Good. I'm coming to town tonight. I'd like to get together tomorrow, if you've got the time.'
'Want me to get you at the airport?'
'I'll be really late,' Lucas said. O'Brien had four kids to take care of. 'I'll get a cab down to the Hay-Adams. I'll do my thing with the Feebs tomorrow morning, and make it over to your shop by when? Three o'clock?'
'I'll plan on three. Maybe go out for a couple beers, huh?'
'See you then,' Lucas said.
The flight to Washington was a nightmare: nothing wrong with the plane, the flying conditions were perfect, and the trip was on schedule, but airplanes – winged planes, not helicopters – were the only really phobia that Lucas was aware that he had. He dreaded getting on one, sat rigidly braced for impact from the time the plane backed away from the departure gate until it nosed into the destination gate, and was never really convinced that he'd survived until he was walking through the terminal at the other end.
As they came into Washington, he had a postcard view of the Washington Monument.
He ignored it. There was no point in looking at the view when you were only seconds away from flaming death. Somehow, the plane got down, and the stewardesses suppressed their panic well enough to smile at him and thank him for flying Northwest.
The Hay-Adams was excellent, as usual. The White House, framed in the window over the desk, looked like an expensive 3-D photo reproduction, of the kind found in commercial aquariums – until you understood that it was real.
He slept very well, having been properly welcomed back.
Mallard arrived at ten o'clock in the morning in a blue Chevy, followed by another blue Chevy carrying three more agents. Lucas was waiting just inside the door, and when he saw Mallard step out of the car, pushed through to the sidewalk: 'Nice hotel,' Mallard said, looking up at the Hay-Adams facade. 'I once got to stay in a Holiday Inn with suites. I didn't get a suite, but I walked past the door to one.'
'If you guys treat me right, I'll let you stand in the lobby while I have dinner tonight,' Lucas said.
'You're all heart,' Mallard said. He was wearing a blue suit with a dark blue necktie with tiny red dots on it. He had a stainless-steel cup full of coffee in the Chevy's cupholder. He took a sip and said, 'If you want some, we can stop at a Starbuck's.'
'I'm fine,' Lucas said. 'Why all the troops?'
'There are five of them – the two receptionists, the two women on the switchboard, and the manager -so I thought there ought to be five of us.'
'Yeah? Well, if they charge, go for the lead one,' Lucas said, as he got comfortable in the lumpy front seat. 'If you can turn the lead one, the rest of them usually follow.'
'You'd be dead in an hour, in Washington,' Mallard said. 'In Washington, the leaders are at the back of the stampede.'
The office suite was off Dupont Circle, a nondescript granite building that might, on close inspection, pass as ordinary. Lucas, Mallard and the other three agents went into the building like a mild-mannered rugby scrum – a
