"Oh, bullshit," Lucas said irritably. "Most of them might stop killing when they get older, but not all of them do. He could come back out and start killing again in a month. If you get him twenty, and if he only had to do two-thirds of it, he'd be out when he's about fifty-one, fifty-two. If we take him on a first-degree, he has to do a minimum of thirty. Then I'd feel pretty safe. He wouldn't get out until he was in his late sixties."
"We'd do that, if we didn't feel a little shaky on the case," Dunn said.
"You gotta take some risks sometimes," Lucas said. Cops hated the conservative prosecution policies: The county attorney's office had a near one-hundred-percent conviction rate-which looked terrific on campaign literature-mostly because they prosecuted only the sure things. Everything else was dealt down or dismissed.
"We're not just risking a loss," Kirk pointed out. "If we lose him, he kills somebody else."
"But I'll tell you what," Marcy said. "If you go to J. B. with that kind of an offer, he's gonna smell blood. He'll turn you down. If you make an offer, it's gotta be tougher than that."
Towson shook his head. "How can we make it tougher? If we go up one notch to first degree, the way the mandatory sentencing works now, he'd go down for the max-same thing he'd get if he fought it. Without a death penalty, we've got nothing to deal with except dropping the degree of guilt."
"Why don't you talk to Wisconsin?" Lucas asked. "They have a couple of counts on the guy, they think. Work out a deal where if he takes one count of first degree over here, he serves his time, and Wisconsin drops out. If he doesn't agree, he goes to trial in both states. One of us'll get him."
Towson was drumming on his calendar pad with a yellow pencil. "That's an option," he said to Dunn. "Weak, though."
"The problem is, I've looked at the Wisconsin cases, and they've got less than we do. About the only thing that connects him to Wisconsin is that he was at Stout."
"And Aronson's pearls and the method of the murders and the fact that they were buried together. There's really a lot there," Lucas said.
"Tell you what," Towson said. "We won't make any move on a deal until we're through looking at everything. If you've got anything else, roll it out. And maybe J. B. will make the first offer."
"Who's handling the preliminary?" Lucas asked.
"I am," Kirk said. "We're just gonna sketch the case, put Whitcomb up and get a statement about the jewelry, and that pretty much ought to do it. You coming?"
"Yeah, I want to look at him again," Lucas said. "He's a strange duck."
MARSHALL WAS BACK for the preliminary hearing, dressed in a brown corduroy suit and fancy brown cowboy boots, his hair slicked down.
"You look like Madonna's boyfriend," Marcy told him.
"Aw, shoot, you get off my case," he said. He didn't quite dig his toe into the tile.
The hearing was routine-Qatar in a dark suit and tie, but his face drawn and white, his eyes ringed as though he'd been weeping-until Randy Whitcomb was rolled in.
Randy, strapped into a wheelchair, looking out at the chamber under a lowered brow, scanning the rows of press people and gawkers, finally found Lucas and fixed his gaze. Marcy, sitting next to Lucas, whispered, "Is he looking at you?"
"Yeah. And he looks pissed," Lucas whispered back.
Kirk took Whitcomb through the preliminaries.
Yes, Randy said, he'd bought the pearls from a man who said he was from St. Pat's. Yes, he'd bought the diamond rings from the same man. He'd sold the pearls on the street, he said. He didn't know who had them now.
"Do you see the man who sold you the jewelry here in the courtroom?" Kirk asked.
Randy looked around for a full minute, scanning up and down each row, then said, "No. I don't see him."
Kirk took a step back. "Look at this man here at the defense table."
Glass, Qatar's defense attorney, surprised as anyone, struggled to his feet, but before he could object to Kirk's direction, Randy leaned toward the microphone and said, "I never seen him before in my life."
A moan swept the courtroom. Marshall said, "What happened?" and Marcy said, "The little jerk."
Lucas didn't say anything, because he could feel Randy staring at him and knew he wasn't finished. "How do you like that, asshole?" Randy bellowed into the microphone. He pointed at Lucas and yelled, "You cocksucker, how you like them apples?"
The judge was beating on his desk, but Randy kept shouting, and finally the judge told the bailiff to wheel him out. Randy went, screaming all the way, and Lucas stood up and said, "We gotta find out what happened. We gotta get the little sonofabitch. Where's Lansing? Did anybody see Lansing?"
Lansing was in the hallway. As soon as Lucas and Marcy stepped outside, Randy, whose outburst had subsided, began screaming again: "You keep that motherfucker away from me; you keep that motherfucker away."
Lansing came over and said, "You heard him."
Lucas reached forward and pinched a piece of Lansing's coat lapel between his thumb and forefinger. "It's not up to me to give you advice, but I will, because you're so young and dumb. You better find out what happened, or you could be looking at the end of your legal career. You cut this deal, and we've got the case hanging on it. We're all in shit city now-you not the least of us."
Lansing swallowed and stepped back. "I know. I'll find out what happened."
"Get back," Lucas said.
MARSHALL CAME OUT and said, "Well, shit. That really put the dog amongst the cheeseburgers."
"What's happening in there?" Lucas asked. He took a step back toward the door.
"They're talking about bail," Marshall said. "They're gonna give it to him."
28
"SOMEBODY CALLED RANDY last night and talked to him," Lansing said. He was on the phone from his office in St. Paul. Lucas and Marcy had just gotten back from a meeting with the county attorney, where Kirk and Towson began laying the lines of a deal offer for Qatar. "Randy's not the most coherent guy, but the basic story is, whoever talked to him told him that the word on the street is that you turned him. That you own him, that you're running him, and that you're going around town bragging about it. It's supposed to be all over town."
"That's bullshit," Lucas said.
"Who've you talked to?"
"Outside of this office, nobody. My social life is my fiancй, and we haven't been going out that much. I have been nowhere, I've talked to no one."
"How about other people?" Lansing said.
"I'll ask around, but it smells like bullshit."
"Randy doesn't think so."
"Get Randy on the line with some of his pals-or if he doesn't have any, some of his acquaintances. Have him ask," Lucas said.
"Well… let's see what happens."
"I'll tell you one thing that happens. The deal he made was predicated on honest testimony. He either lied to us in his statement-and I know he didn't do that, because he picked the pictures out without having seen them before-or he perjured himself this morning. You can tell the little cocksucker two things for me: First, I never talked to anybody; and second, he can kiss his ass goodbye. He's on the train to Stillwater, and when he gets out, he'll be ten years older than I am now."
"Wait a minute, wait a minute…"
"I'm not gonna wait a minute. I'm gonna take a couple of days off, and if Randy decides he wants to change his mind, he'll have to change it with somebody else. I'm finished with him. He can rot in fuckin' Stillwater."
Marcy, who'd been listening, said, "Wow. Really?"
"Really. If anything urgent happens, call me on my cell phone. I'll keep it on, but don't call unless you've got no choice."
"Marshall took off?" she asked.
"Yeah. His head must have been about to blow up."
"I don't know. He just shook his head and that was that. He was a hell of a lot calmer than you were. More like he was amazed. You want to put a team on Qatar? Just to make sure?"