“Okay. Anything else?”
“No.”
“Okay. That concludes the interview. Thank you, Miss Ruiz.” He punched the button on the tape, ran it back, listened to it, then took the cassette out of the recorder, put it back in its protective box, and slipped it into his pocket.
“Now what?” Carla asked.
“I’ve got to use the phone,” Lucas said. He went straight through to the chief.
“Davenport? What?”
“She knows him,” Lucas said. “Picked him out with no problem.”
“We’re going to take him.”
“Listen. Do it my way?”
“I don’t know if we can, Lucas. The media’s got a smell of it.”
“Who?”
“Don Kennedy from TV3.”
“Shit.” Kennedy and Jennifer were professional bedmates. “Okay. I’ll be back in an hour and a half. When are you taking him?”
“We were waiting for your call. We’ve got a couple guys here and we’ll get the surveillance people. He’s working at his desk over in the county building. We’re just going to walk over and get him.”
“Who made the call? To make the bust?”
There was a pause. Then, “Lester.”
“Outstanding. Stay with that.”
Daniel hung up and Lucas turned to Rubella. “Get the chopper cranked up. We’ve got to get back in a hurry.”
When Rubella was gone, he took Carla’s hands.
“They’ve got a case against this guy, but I don’t like it. I think they’re making a mistake. So just sit tight, okay? Watch the evening news. I’ll call every night. I’ll try to get back up here in a couple of days, if things cool down.”
“Okay,” she said. “Be careful.” He kissed her on the lips and jogged down the dusty track after Rubella.
The flight back to the Cities and the drive from the airport took two hours. Anderson was sitting at his desk, his feet up, staring distractedly at a wall calendar when Lucas arrived.
“Where’ve you got him?” Lucas asked.
“Down in interrogation.”
“His lawyer in there?”
“Yeah. That could be a problem.”
“Why’s that?”
“ ’Cause it’s that asshole McCarthy,” Anderson said.
“God damn.” Lucas ran his hands through his hair. “The usual bull?”
“Yeah. The little dickhead.”
“I’m going down there.”
“Chief’s down there.”
“We’re not getting anything out of him.” Daniel was leaning on the wall outside the interrogation room. “That prick McCarthy won’t let him say a word.”
“He smells a good one,” Lucas said. “If this goes to trial and he gets Smithe off, he can quit the county and make some real money in private practice.”
“So what’re you going to do?” Daniel asked.
“I’m going to be a good guy. A real good guy. And I’m going to get mad and read off McCarthy.”
“Not too much. You could jeopardize what we got.”
“Just plant a seed of doubt.”
Daniel shrugged. “You can try.”
Lucas took off his jacket, loosened his tie and mussed his hair, took a deep breath, and went through the door at a jog. The interrogators, the lawyer, and Smithe were seated around a table and looked up, startled.
“Jesus. Sorry. I was afraid I’d miss you,” Lucas said. He looked down at McCarthy. “Hello, Del. You handling this one, I guess?”
“Does the pope shit in the woods?” McCarthy was a short man in a lumpy brown suit. His dishwater-blond hair swelled out of his head in an Afro, and muttonchops swept down the sides of his square face. “Is a bear a Catholic?”
“Right.” Lucas looked at the interrogators. “I’ve been cleared by Daniel. You mind if I ask a few?”
“Go ahead, we ain’t gettin’ anywhere,” said the senior cop, swirling an oily slick of cold coffee in a Styrofoam cup.
Lucas nodded and turned to Smithe. “I’ll tell you up front. I was one of the people who questioned the survivor of the third attack. I don’t think you did it.”
“Is this the good-guy routine, Davenport?” asked McCarthy, tipping his chair back and grinning in amusement.
“No. It’s not.” He pointed a finger at Smithe. “That was the first thing I wanted to tell you. The second thing is, I’m going to talk for a while. At some point, McCarthy here might tell you to stop listening. You better not—”
“Now, wait a minute,” McCarthy said, bringing the chair legs down with a bang.
Lucas overrode him. “—because how can it hurt just to listen, if you’re not admitting anything? And your lawyer’s priorities are not necessarily the same as yours.”
McCarthy stood up. “That’s it. I’m calling it off.”
“I want to hear him,” Smithe said suddenly.
“I’m advising you—”
“I want to hear him,” Smithe said. He tipped his head at McCarthy while watching Lucas. “Why aren’t his priorities the same as mine?”
“I don’t want to impeach the counselor’s personal ethics,” Lucas said, “but if this goes to trial, it’ll be one of the big trials of the decade. We just don’t have serial killers here in Minnesota. If he gets you off, he’ll have made his name. You, on the other hand, will be completely destroyed, no matter what happens. It’s too bad, but that’s the way it works. You’ve been around a courthouse long enough to know what I’m talking about.”
“That’s enough,” said McCarthy. “You’re prejudicing the case.”
“No I’m not. I’m just prejudicing your job in it. And I won’t mention that again. I’m just—”
McCarthy stepped between Lucas and Smithe, his back to Lucas, and leaned toward Smithe. “Listen. If you don’t want me to represent you, that’s fine. But I’m telling you as your lawyer, right now, you don’t want to talk—”
“I want to listen. That’s all,” Smithe said. “You can sit here and listen with me or you can take a hike and I’ll get another attorney.”
McCarthy stood back and shook his head. “I warned you.”
Lucas moved around to where Smithe could see him again.
“If you’ve got an alibi, especially a good alibi, for any of the times of the killings, you better bring it out now,” Lucas said urgently. “That’s my message. If you’ve got an alibi, you could let us go to trial and maybe humiliate us, but you’d have a hard time working again. There’d always be a question. And there’d always be a record. You get stopped by a highway patrolman in New York and he calls in to the National Crime Information Center, he’ll get back a sheet that says you were once arrested for serial murder. And then there’s the other possibility.”
“What?”
“That you’ll be convicted even if you’re innocent. There’s always a chance that even with a good alibi, the jury’d find you guilty. It happens. You know it. The jury figures, what the hell, if he wasn’t guilty, the cops wouldn’t have arrested him. McCarthy here can tell you that.”
Smithe tipped his head toward McCarthy again. “He told me that as soon as I started dealing in alibis, you’d have guys out on the street trying to knock them down.”
Lucas leaned on the interrogation table. “He’s absolutely right. We would. And if we can’t, I guarantee you’d be back on the street and nothing happens. Nothing. You haven’t been booked yet. You never would be. Right now, we’ve got a good enough case to pick you up, maybe take it to trial. I don’t know what these guys have been telling you, but I can tell you that we can put you with two of the victims and a third guy who is critical to the case, and there’s some physical evidence. But a good alibi would knock the stuffing out of it.”
Smithe went pale. “There can’t be. Physical evidence. I mean . . .”
“You don’t know what it is,” Lucas said. “But we have it. Now. I suggest you and Mr. McCarthy go whisper in the hallway for a couple of minutes and come back.”
“Yeah, we’ll do that,” McCarthy said.
They were back in five minutes.
“We’re done talking,” McCarthy announced, looking satisfied with himself.
Lucas looked at Smithe. “You’re making a bad mistake.”
“He said—” Smithe started, but McCarthy grabbed him by the arm and shook his head no.