"Hello. I’m Deputy Chief of Police Lucas Davenport from Minneapolis; I’m a friend of Weather’s."
The frown on her face eased a bit, and she tried on a smile. "Oh, good. I’ve been trying to keep an eye on the place since last night."
"Thanks. I, uh, I’m on my way to talk to your police chief out here, and I thought I’d take a look… Listen, do you know if anybody saw anything last night? Or heard anything?"
"Nobody in my house heard anything until the fire engines, but Jane Yarrow across the street heard the window break. She said she didn’t know it was a window breaking until later. She just heard something. And then she heard a car door slam, but she didn’t get up until she heard the sirens. And that was about it-nothing like this ever happened here before."
The Chief was out when Lucas arrived at Edina, but he was routed to a Detective James Brown. Brown was a tall, shambling man with a shock of white hair; he wore a rough tweed sportcoat with suede elbow patches, a blue oxford cloth shirt, and khakis with boat shoes. He looked like a professor of ancient languages.
"NottheJames Brown?" Lucas asked.
"Why yes, I am," Brown said modestly. "This is my disguise: keeps the groupies off."
"Excellent strategy," Lucas said. He dropped into a chair beside Brown’s desk.
Brown looked down at a file open on his desk, sighed, and said, "I understand you have a personal relationship with Weather Karkinnen."
"Had one; she broke it off," Lucas said. "I can’t prove to you where I was at three o’clock this morning, ’cause I was home in bed, alone. But…" He shrugged. "I didn’t do it."
"And even if you did, that’s a pretty goddamn unbreakable alibi," Brown said.
Lucas said, "Hey… I didn’t do it."
Brown sighed again and asked, "The chief told you about the scoring on the bottle?"
"Yeah. He said it looked like a pro job."
"That’s what the fire guys say. You get a regular bottle, it might bounce, it might not even break. But with the scoring, it explodes when it hits the floor. Very fast, very efficient. What we think is, the bomber came in from the north, idled to a stop in front of the house, got out, leaving the car door open, walked up to the front of the house with the jug, flashed the wick with a cigarette lighter, and heaved it through the window. The whole thing, I timed it, would be ten to fifteen seconds, walking, from the time he got out of the car to the time he got back in. Then he rolled off down the street, around the corner, four blocks down to the highway, and back to Minneapolis. He was on the highway before Ms. Karkinnen even called 911."
"Who owns the place?"
"A couple named Bartlett-they’re down in Florida. They’d rented it to a doctor for the past eight years, and then to your friend. Strictly an income property for them."
"Any reason they might want to torch it?"
"Nothing obvious-it’s a good neighborhood, they could probably sell it for a lot more than they’d ever get from insurance. And they’re pretty reputable people."
"Shit," Lucas said.
"All that stuff that was in the paper last winter… The LaChaises…"
"Yeah. That’s what I’m afraid of," Lucas said.
Brown tapped his desk: "But one thing doesn’t fit with that. Whoever did this wasn’t trying real hard to kill her. I mean, if it was a pro job. They didn’t even come close. She was in the back bedroom, ran out when she heard the window break, saw the fire, called 911, and if she hadn’t tried to save her pictures, she wouldn’t have been hurt at all."
"She was hurt?" Lucas sat up, angry now. "I was told she wasn’t…"
"Not bad, not bad," Brown said. "She got a couple of small cuts on her feet from broken glass, and her hair was singed, and she got some small spark burns on one hand. But she told us she has some operations tomorrow and she expects to do them."
Lucas took it slow driving back to Minneapolis, pulling threads together. Black checked in on Lucas’s car phone: "I had to do some psychotherapy on this Markham asshole, but the bottom line is, he thinks O’Dell couldn’t do it."
"All right. You got another one yet?"
"L. Z. Drake," Black said. "Went to school with McDonald."
"Call when you get done."
"Yeah. Hey, you know about Weather?"
"Yeah. How’d you hear?"
"They had some pictures of the house in a news brief… Markham had his TV on the whole time I was talking to him. They said she was okay."
"Yeah, yeah…"
"You think there’s any chance it’s another comeback from LaChaise?"
"I don’t know what to think."
"All right," said Black. "I’ll call you after I talk to Drake."
Sloan and Franklin were waiting outside Lucas’s office when Lucas got back. Both of them had been involved in the shoot-out that killed the two LaChaise women the winter before, though Sloan hadn’t fired his weapon and hadn’t been a direct target of the reprisal attacks. Franklin, on the other hand, had been shot in his own driveway.
"We’ve been talking, man," Franklin said in his booming voice. Lucas was large; Franklin dwarfed him. "We gotta look into this, unless there’s some motive for somebody hittin’ Weather."
"How’d you hear about it?"
"It’s all over the department, it’s been on TV," Sloan said.
"You think I oughta call my folks, get them out of the house?" Franklin asked.
"I don’t know," Lucas said. They were milling in the hall, and he saw Sherrill starting down toward them. "I don’t know what’s going on. Nobody’s got a motive that I can figure, and there’s a possibility that it was a pro job."
"Why a pro job?" Sloan asked. As Sherrill came up, Franklin said to her, "Could’ve been a pro job."
"You’re sure?" Sherrill asked.
Lucas told them about the scored bottle. "That’s it," Franklin said. "I’m putting the old lady in a motel."
Black arrived as they were talking about it, stood on the edge of the discussion: he hadn’t been in the shoot-out, hadn’t been a target.
"I think what we need to do before we panic, is we need to get everybody we got out on the street," Lucas said. "I’ll talk to Intelligence and Narcotics and the gang people, I’ll talk to St. Paul, and every one of us has got people… Let’s get out there and dig for a few hours. If this is a group, somebody’ll know."
"Loring’s got the good biker contacts," Franklin said. "He’s been working nights, he’s probably home asleep. You want me to roust him?"
"Get him moving," Lucas said.
"I’ll find Del, get him started," Sloan said.
"I’m outa here," said Franklin.
As the group started to break up, Black said, "Lucas, I talked to this guy Drake about McDonald."
"Oh, yeah." Old news; he wasn’t thinking about McDonald anymore.
Black continued: "I had to push him, but he says he knew McDonald all the way through school, and he has a real violent streak. Bottom line was, Drake thinks he could kill somebody if he decided it was necessary. He said McDonald was a big guy, played a little high school football, and he and a couple of other guys stalked another kid for a couple of years, a little wimpy guy, beat him up a half-dozen times just because they knew they could make him cry in front of the girls…"
"Yeah, yeah," Lucas said impatiently. "We can pick that up later."
And as Black left, Sherrill, who’d been drifting away, said from down the hall, "You were gonna talk to O’Dell today…"
"No time now," Lucas said. He remembered the phone call about Bone sleeping with Kresge, but pushed the memory away. "Let’s get out on the street."
ELEVEN
The Polaris Bank tower was a rabbit warren of meeting, training, and conference rooms, but only one of them was The Room.
The Room was on the fortieth floor, guarded by two thick oak doors.