Lucas said to Lily, “You know what I think. If those are trophies hanging on his wall—”
“They are,” Lincoln said.
“Then we’re dealing with a lot more than four dead. Even if we don’t have what we need for a search warrant, we need to go in there anyway.”
Lily shook her head. “We need a warrant.”
Lucas turned to Lincoln. “Help me out here.”
Lincoln said, “We took samples from the poured concrete steps outside the building, for which we didn’t need a search warrant, and we found that the concrete matched the flecks of concrete in the victims’ backs. We also found flecks of bronze which are chemically identical to the bronze found in the victims’ backs.”
“But—” Amelia said.
Lincoln raised his hand. “Quiet.”
“That’s certainly enough for a warrant,” Lily said. “At least, if I go to the right judge, and I will. If you’ll write out the specs for the application, I can have it in an hour.”
“I’ll do that,” Lincoln said. And to Lucas: “If you’ll go back to the building with a couple of collection pads, get those samples for me. Backdate them to this morning. There may not be any bronze, but we’ve got a fair collection of it now. Take a few flecks with you. You know. Just in case.”
They all looked round at each other, then Lucas said, “At least a dozen trophies.”
“After you make the collection, just wait there,” Lily said. “I won’t be long behind you.”
“I’ll go with Lucas,” Amelia said. “If we need to block the back of the building, or he needs backup while we’re there.”
“You might want to bring an entry team,” Lucas said to Lily.
“Entry team? I’m bringing everybody. I’ll make a courtesy call to the FBI, they’ll want to have an observer.”
“I’ll be there,” Lincoln said. “I don’t want your entry team trashing my evidence.”
They took Amelia’s car, a maroon 1970 Ford Torino Cobra, heir to the Fairlane, kicking out nifty 405 horsepower, with 447 pounds of torque. They made the twenty-minute trip in twelve minutes. Eight minutes out, she looked at Lucas and said, “You’re not holding on to anything.”
“You know what you’re doing,” he said. “You’re almost as good as I am.”
She snorted: “What do you drive?”
“A 911.”
“I always heard”—she paused in her comment to chop the nose off a town car as she took a left turn—“that 911 drivers—”
“Have small penises. I know. Every time I meet somebody who can’t afford a 911, I get the ‘small penis’ line. So I ask them how large a sample they’ve looked at.”
She grinned as she said, “I’ll tell you what, though: in a fair run, I’d eat your 911 alive.”
“I don’t like the word ‘fair,’ ” Lucas replied. “ ‘Fair’ always means, ‘to my advantage.’ If it’s not to my advantage, it’s ‘unfair.’ If you guys ever get to Minneapolis, bring your car. I’ve got a run just across the border, in Wisconsin. Narrow blacktop, blind hills, twenty miles long, maybe two hundred braking curves.”
“That’s not fair,” she said, but she grinned again, and threw the Cobra down an alley, the walls whipping by, two feet away on each side, six inches from Lucas’s window when she dodged a trash can. Lucas yawned and said, “Wake me up when we get there.”
He tilted back in his seat and then said, “By the way, I’m one of the best action shooters around.”
Amelia dropped off Lucas, who was dressed in jeans, a polo shirt, and running shoes, at Verlaine’s apartment. He was carrying a backpack loaned to him by Amelia. There were four men on the long block, two on each side, each one by himself.
Amelia was headed around the block, where she could watch the back of the building. Lucas sat on Verlaine’s stoop; he was too well fed to be a street person, but from a distance, with the pack by his feet, he could pass. They’d put a few bronze flakes in the bags with the sampling pads before they left, and now he took them out, one at a time, trying to look like he was shaking cigarettes out of a pack, and pressed them into the stoop. When he had five samples in place, he put them in the pack and zipped it up.
That done, he stood and ambled up the block, took out his cell phone, and called Lily, Lincoln, and Amelia, and said the same thing to all of them: “We’re good to go.”
Lily said, “Forty minutes.”
“What’s taking so long?”
“Nothing. You just got there quicker than you should have. I’ve got the application, I’m seeing the judge in about two minutes, and the entry team is gearing up. So, easy, boy.”
Lucas continued up the block, and on to the next block, and then walked back, and finally, with nothing at all going on at Verlaine’s building, he turned the corner and walked around the block, where he found Amelia’s car, parked, with Lincoln’s Chrysler van right behind it. Amelia climbed out of the passenger’s side: “Want to leave the pack?”
“Yeah.” He looked at his watch. “Half an hour, yet. I’ll find another place to sit.”
“Stay in touch,” Lincoln said, from the back.
Lincoln’s aide, Thom, who was driving, said, “I brought some sandwiches along. These two can spend hours at a crime scene. If you want a ham-and-cheese—”
“I not only want one, it’ll give me something to do while I’m watching,” Lucas said. “Some reason to be sitting there.”
Lucas ambled back around the block, carrying his brown-paper sandwich bag, and found a stoop fifty yards down the block from the entrance to Verlaine’s studio. He sat down, took Thom’s ham-and-cheese out of the sack, took a bite, and said, aloud, “That’s a great ham-and-cheese.”
He was thinking about the fact that you almost couldn’t buy a great ham-and-cheese in the Twin Cities, and why that might be, but that you could get a great one in Des Moines or Chicago, and then thought about Chicago being the “hog butcher to the world,” when a man stuck his head out of the door behind him and said, “This look like a fuckin’ cafeteria? Hit the road, asshole.”
Lucas chewed and swallowed, then shook his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed Lily, ostentatiously pushed the speakerphone button, and, when she answered, said, “I’m being hassled by a guy across the street from the target, at 219—how long would it take to get, say, a half dozen building inspectors here? The place doesn’t look so sturdy.”
“I could have them there in an hour,” Lily said.
Lucas looked at the guy in the doorway. “An hour good for you?”
“Stay as long as you want,” the guy said, and eased the door shut.
Five minutes after that, a white van drove by Verlaine’s building, and the guy in the passenger’s seat took a close look at Lucas, and then nodded to him. Lucas nodded back. The van reappeared another five minutes later, going in the opposite direction, and this time the driver nodded to him.
Ten minutes after that, Amelia called: “We got the blocking squad here. Lincoln and I are coming around.”
And Lily: “One minute.”
The entry team arrived in two white, unmarked vans, closely followed by Lily in an unmarked car, another unmarked car, Amelia’s car, and two patrol cars. Behind them all, Lincoln’s van turned the corner. Lucas jogged down the street toward them as the vans stopped directly in front of Verlaine’s stoop and two guys carrying an entry ram hustled up to the door; four cops in armor were right behind them, and as Lucas came up, the ram handlers smashed the door open, and the armored cops went in.
Lucas was right there with Lily, and as they piled into the entryway, the team suddenly stopped, there was some milling, and the team leader called, “We got a body.”
Lily and Lucas shouldered their way from behind through the crowd, with Amelia a step behind, and they turned the corner at the door that went into the studio.