across the river. Rodriguez's office was in the Windshuttle Building, hooked by Skyway to Galtier Plaza. Lucas dumped the Porsche in the Galtier parking garage and found Lane and Del loitering in the Skyway.
'He's down there now, talking to his secretary. See the Temps office? Look one window to the left, the guy in the pink shirt. That's him.' Lane handed Lucas a pair of miniature Pentax binoculars, and Lucas looked down through the Skyway windows at the man in the pink shirt.
Rodriguez was ordinary. At six-two or six-three, he had thinning brown hair and a gut. He didn't look Latino; he looked like an everyday Minnesota white guy. He was intent on the secretary's computer screen. He said something to her, looked at a printer, looked back at the computer, tapped the screen, then turned back to the printer as a piece of paper rolled out.
As he turned back and forth, Lucas got a good view of his face. 'You're sure this is the guy?'
'This is the guy,' Lane said.
'He looks like a city councilman.' Lucas turned to Del, 'What'd the BCA say?'
'He had a fairly heavy juvenile record in Detroit, burglary mostly. They think he was running dope early on, just deliveries on his bike, then got his nose into it. He didn't do much in the way of sales Then he just disappeared. They never tried to find out where he went, they were just happy he was gone. They did some assessments on him when he was in juvenile care. They say he's smart, but as far as they can tell, he never went to school after the fifth grade.'
'All right,' Lucas said. He handed the glasses back to Lane and said, 'You go home, relax, have a couple beers, visit your girlfriend, whatever. But I want you back on this guy tomorrow morning at nine o'clock, wherever he is, and you can plan to stay on him every day, all day, until we take him down.'
'Good.' Lane nodded. 'Where're you guys going?'
Lucas looked at Del. 'We better go talk to Rose Marie.'
Rose Marie had just broken free of a press conference when Lucas and Del arrived. They could see her through the glass door of her outer office, waving her arms around, as the receptionist shook her head in sympathy. Lucas pushed through the door. Rose Marie nodded at them, turned back toward the receptionist to finish what she was saying, saw Del's 'Lick Dick' T-shirt, did a worried double-take, lost her thought, and asked, ''What?'
'We gotta talk.'
Inside her office, with the door closed, Lucas said, 'I think we got the Alie'e killer. I'd say maybe eighty-five percent.'
Rose Marie looked from Lucas to Del and back to Lucas and asked, 'Who?'
'A guy named Rodriguez.' They laid it out for her. At the end, she said, 'So we know who it is, but we can't convict him.'
'That's pretty much it,' Lucas admitted. 'When you make the leaps, you can convince yourself that he's the guy but a jury, I don't think so. One thing, he doesn't look like a dope dealer. He looks like a washing-machine salesman.'
'What if he isn't the guy?'
'We put together a case. If we can put together a solid enough case to convince ourselves maybe we'll have a chance. Or maybe we'll stumble over something,' Lucas said. 'I mean, we convicted Rashid Al-Balah and he didn't even do it.'
'So we brace the loan officer from the bank.'
'As soon as we do it, he's gonna go out the back door, make a phone call, and Rodriguez will know we're on his ass,' Del said.
'Good thought. We ought to have Rodriguez tapped,' Lucas said. 'If we can get him talking about it'
'Do we have enough for a tap?' Rose Marie asked.
'Probably,' Lucas said. 'We can get that going this afternoon. The best thing that could happen to the county attorneys office is to have something to distract from the Al-Balah story, when it breaks. If we can hang Rodriguez for Alie'e, Al-Balah moves to page nine.'
'Al-Balah has already broken,' Rose Marie said. 'The county attorney's guys decided it'd be better to get out there first with the news, put some of their own spin on it.'
'Still'
Rose Marie nodded. 'I'll get them started on a tap.'
Then Rose Marie laid out the situation with Tom Olson. He was out of the hospital, but was being tailed by relays of Homicide and Intelligence cops, who would stay with him twenty-four hours a day. Alie'e's funeral had been delayed until the elder Olsons' bodies were released, so they could all be buried togetherand that might be a while yet, because the situation in the Bloomington motel room was so complicated.
'If Olson's the guythe one who's going after everybodyelse, in revenge for his sisterwe think he might go after Jael Corbeau again, or the other woman, Catherine Kinsley.'
'Or that Jax guy.'
'Jax checked out,' Rose Marie said. 'He's gone to New York, but says he'll be back for the funeral. He's probably shopping for the right outfit to wear when he throws himself in her grave.'
'So we're just watching?' Lucas asked.
'No. We've had these family briefings every day, and we're going to continue them. In fact, Olson's coming here in'she looked at her watch'about twenty-five minutes. We're going to try to point him at Kinsley. We'll talk a little about Alie'e's relationship with her. Kinsley and her husband are going up north to their cabin, which is way the hell out in the woods. You can't even find them with a map. We'll have a team at her house, waiting, if Olson goes that way.'
'How about Jael?' Lucas asked.
'We think he's less likely to try her, because he tried once, and she ran him off,' Rose Marie said. 'But we'll have a team there, too. I'd appreciate it if you'd stop by and talk to her. She's scared, and she'd like to have you around.'
'All right,' Lucas said. 'And listen, I know Angela Harris is a smart shrink, but I saw Olson's face when he came running across the grass to tell us about his folks. And man, I don't know about this multiple-personality stuff, but that was real. That was so strong that if his personalities were gonna dissolve, or whatever they do, that would have happened right then. I mean I've never seen anything like it. Ever.'
'We're keeping that in mind, of course,' Rose Marie said. 'But its what we've got, right now.'
'So we're set?' Del asked, stepping toward the door.
'If everything went exactly rightexactly rightwe could have both these guys in twenty-four hours,' Rose Marie said. 'If the bank guy calls Rodriguez, if Olson goes for Kinsley'
'There's gotta be at least one time in life when everything works,' Del said. 'One time.'
'Bullshit,' Lucas said. Out in the hall, when they were away from Rose Marie, he added, 'She says they're keeping in mind that it might be somebody else, but they're not. They just put all their chips on Olson.'
'And we put all of ours on Rodriguez,' Del said.
'Yeah, but there's a major difference,' Lucas said.
'What's that?'
'We're right. They might not be.'
Chapter 19
Del went off to coordinate with the county attorney's office on the wiretaps and the subpoena for Rodriguez's bank records. Lucas went down to the Homicide office and spent an hour looking over the typescript of the Rodriguez interview, and talked to Frank Lester and Sloan about the multiple-personality idea.
'Everything I know about it I learned from TV,' Sloan said. 'But you gotta admit, the guy looks good. He's got motive, he had access to the shooting car, he could get close enough to take his parents out'
'When he came running after us, after he found the bodies he looked like his head was trying to explode,' Lucas said. 'He was trying to pull the hair out of the sides of his head; I've never seen anything like it. Then he dropped in his tracks.'
