“I’m ready to go,” Jackson said. He patted the camera. “I got the new D3 with the 200–400 f.4 VR AF- S. Good ISO up to 6400, I can go to 12800 if I have to, but there’ll be some noise. Twelve megapixels so we get plenty of resolution. With this baby, you can really reach out and touch somebody. Brady squealed like a stuck pig when I put in for it-with the police discount, the lens is still better than four grand, and the body’s five…”
“That’s great,” Lucas said. “… And I’ve been out shooting a little wildlife, to familiarize myself with the whole system. The white balance and auto- focus is as good as I’ve seen. I tested it against a 1DsIII, and the D3 is better. The IDs’ll give you more resolution, but I’d defy anyone to say which is which when you look at it on a computer monitor, or a sixteen- by twenty print, for that matter.”
“Terrific."
"That fuckin’ Flowers is already sniffing around, trying to borrow it,” Jackson said. “He’s still shooting a D2xs and I told him, ‘You’ll have to pry it from my cold stiff fingers.’ ”
Lucas’s head was bobbing: “That’s just what we’re looking for, and fuck Virgil. Anyway, I got a short list.” He pushed it across the desk.
Jackson fondled the Nikon and leaned forward to look at the list. “Who are these people?”
“Suspects in a series of murders, so you’ve gotta be discreet,” Lucas said. “Alyssa Austin; her housekeeper, a woman named Helen Sobotny; Leigh Price-that’s L- e- i- g- h-who works up at 3M; Martina Trenoff, works at General Mills; Denise Robinson…” He pushed another sheet of paper across the desk. “Here’s their home addresses. I need them as quick as I can get them. If you need some cover from somebody, refer them to me. Overtime’s not a problem.” He filled in the detail, and pulled up Austin’s spa website, showed Jackson a photograph of her, and driver’ s- license photos on Sobotny, Price, and Robinson.
“Nasty pictures-nasty,” Jackson said, looking them over. “Not good enough to be used on a board,” Lucas agreed. “We need civilian clothes, no particular background. If you have to shoot Austin coming out of one of her spas, then you’ll have to do something to alter the background. Full- face, side views. Full body.”
“I could Photoshop them if I had to."
"The problem is, Austin lives in Sunfish Lake and your cloak of invisibility won’t work there.” They hashed it out for a few more minutes. “I’ll do what I can,” Jackson said. “Talk to you tomorrow.”
Then Lucas was stuck: the next move was to try to identify the person who’d opened the account, without giving anything away. He signed papers for Carol, cleaned up a few more bureaucratic items, then headed for the apartment.
Halfway up the stairs, he could hear the head- banging rock. He opened the door and found Del, with his feet up, watching Toms’s apartment with the binoculars, listening to AC/DC’s “All Night Long.” Del looked back at him and said, “She’s running around.”
“Like how, running around?"
"Like she’s cleaning the place up, and singing a happy tune while she’s doing it."
"Gonna be kind of a downer when we bust her old man,” Lucas said. Lucas turned the radio off and dragged up a chair and said, “I caught a break on Austin.”
“Yeah?” Lucas told him about it, and then said, “So here’s what I’m thinking. Nobody can figure out why Frances needed fifty thousand in cash, or why she took it the way she did. The answer was, she didn’t. She didn’t take the money, somebody else did. Somebody opened a bank account in her name and got Fidelity to transfer money to it.”
“They’d need an ID to open the account. A valid driver’s license. Maybe a second form of ID.”
“That’s true,” Lucas said. “Which means, they’d have to find a way to dupe a driver’s license, which is not all that easy anymore. How much they cost on the street now?”
Del shrugged: “One that a bartender will take, three hundred. One that’ll fool a cop, five hundred. One that’ll fool a machine, I don’t know.”
“But the banker who opened the account didn’t run it through a machine,” Lucas said. “She probably barely looked at it.”
“What about the second form?"
"Suppose Frances Austin, a new millionaire, got a preapproved credit card form, or several forms, in the mail."
"She’d have to be dead not to,” Del said. “Even then, she’d get a few."
"Right. So somebody who’s right there-a close friend at her apartment, or the housekeeper at the Sunfish Lake house, or somebody we don’t know yet, but who had to be close-fills out one of these forms, applies for the card. Has all the information. The card comes back, it’s activated, Frances never knows, because it’s never used. There’s your preferred two forms: driver’s license and credit card.”
“That’d work,” Del said. Lucas picked up the glasses and looked for Toms, but she wasn’t in front of a window and he put them back down. “Damn right it would work. A minor variation on a really old hustle.”
“Then they kill her to cover it up.” Lucas said, “I’m not that far, yet. The killing could be spontaneous
Looks spontaneous. Let’s say it’s the housekeeper. She’s just getting ready to leave for the day when Frances shows up, and Frances knows. She’s actually been tracking her Fidelity account, figures out what happened, and there’s an accusation, a confrontation, an argument… the knife is there.”
“Go pick her up,” Del said. “There’s one teeny- weeny little problem,” Lucas said. “The house-keeper has a pretty good alibi. And there’s this car thing I can’t figure out… Plus, would somebody really take the chance of identifying herself as Frances Austin, in a St. Paul bank, a few months after Austin’s name and photos had been all over the place because of her old man getting killed?”
“Maybe,” Del said. “It’d take some balls."
"Lots of balls,” Lucas said. And, he added, “ Whoa- whoa-whoa…” Del turned and looked across the street; Lucas was using the glasses
Heather Toms had just gone to the front door, opened it, and led a man back inside. He was a tall man, thin, with curly black hair and a saturnine face. When the apartment door was closed, the man pushed Heather against the wall and with one hand on her slightly protrudent baby belly, kissed her hard.
“Sonofabitch,” Del said. Lucas handed him the glasses, and Del watched for two seconds
“If it’s Siggy, he’s grown six inches…"
"… could be lifts in his shoes…” Lucas said. “… lost thirty pounds…"
"… that could happen…” Lucas said. “… got plastic surgery…"
"You can do that in Mexico,” Lucas said. “If that’s Siggy, I’ll kiss your ass,” Del said, and handed the glasses back. Lucas looked: they moved slowly from the hallway through a blind spot and then into the kitchen, where the guy got Heather’s butt against the kitchen table and kissed her again, tipping her back, and Lucas said, “Holy shit, he’s gonna do her on the kitchen table.”
“No way,” Del said. Across the street, Heather righted herself and pushed him off, but she was laughing, and this wasn’t the end of it. “Where did this guy come from?” Lucas asked. “Who knows,” Del said. Sounding pleased, Del added, “Treacherous little minx, isn’t she?"
"Siggy is gonna kill her."
"Especially if that little knob on her tummy isn’t Siggy’s work,” Del said. Lucas handed him the glasses. “If it’s not Siggy’s, then we’re probably wasting our time sitting here. Siggy’s never coming back. She’s way too smart to do that to him. He’d kill her with a goddamn chain saw.”
“Not a complete waste of time,” Del said. “I’ve never seen anybody get laid on a kitchen table, except in that baseball movie. I don’t think it really happens-but if it does, I’d like to see it.”
“I meant, waste of time in terms of life, liberty, and the Minnesota way,” Lucas said.