"No, I don't think so."
"How about this New York cop lady?"
Lucas thought, Ah, and said, "She'll be there."
"I hear she's terrific-looking," Jennifer said. She looked up from her dinner plate, straight into Lucas' eyes.
"She's pretty good," Lucas said. "A little chubby, maybe… Is this going to be a problem? Who I work with?"
"No, no." Jennifer looked down at her plate again. "There's something else too," she said.
"Okay," Lucas said, putting his fork down. "Let's have it."
"A guy at the station asked me out."
"Who?"
"Mark Seeton."
"What'd you say?"
"I said… I'd get back to him."
"So you want to go?"
Jennifer stood up, picked up her plate and carried it to the sink. "Yes, I think so," she said. "No big heavy deal. Mark's a nice guy. He wants somebody to go to the symphony with."
Lucas shrugged. "So go."
She looked sideways at him. "You wouldn't mind?"
"I'd mind. I just wouldn't try to stop you."
"Jesus, that's worse than trying to stop me," she said, one fist planted against her hip. "You're trying to mind-fuck me, Davenport."
"Look, if you want to go, go," Lucas said. "You know I'm not going to take you to the symphony. Not on any regular basis."
"It's just that you have your friends and the things you do, the games, the fishing, the police work… me and Sarah. You see somebody almost every day, one way or another. I hardly see anybody at all, outside of work. And you know what I'm like about music…"
"So go," Lucas said shortly. Then he grinned. "I can take Mark Seeton, I'm not worried," he said. He pointed a finger at her. "But I don't want to hear any shit about this New York cop. She is good-looking, but she's also happily married to a big-shot professor at NYU. Shearson made some kind of move on her yesterday and he's now carrying his nuts around in his lunch box."
"You're protesting too much," Jennifer said.
"No, I'm not. But you're looking for an excuse…"
"Let's not fight, okay?"
"Are we still in bed?" Lucas asked.
"You might get lucky," Jennifer said. "A little romance wouldn't hurt, though."
Lily had a short white line on her upper lip when she got back to Lucas' office. They were alone in the tiny office, the door open on the darkened hallway.
"Did you have a glass of milk?"
She cocked her head. "You're also psychic, right? In addition to the game-making and the money."
He grinned and reached out and wiped his thumb across her lip. "No. Just a little rim of milk, here. Like my daughter."
"What's her name? Your daughter?"
"Sarah."
"We've got a Marc and a Sam," Lily said. "Marc's fifteen now, God, I can't believe it. He's started high school and he plays football. Sam's thirteen."
"You've got a kid who's fifteen?" Lucas asked. "How old are you, anyway?"
"Thirty-nine."
"I thought maybe thirty-four."
"Oh, la, such a gentleman," Lily laughed. "How about you?"
"Forty-one.' "Poor guy. Your daughter will be hanging out with all the metal-heads at the high school and you'll be too old and feeble to do anything about it."
"I'm looking forward to my feebletude," Lucas said. "Sit around in a good leather chair, read poetry. Go up to the cabin, sit on the dock, watch the sun go down…"
"With your fly down and your dick hanging out because you're senile and can't remember how to dress yourself…"
"Jesus, I can barely stand the flattery," Lucas said, laughing despite himself.
"You were getting a little carried away with the retirement bullshit," Lily said wryly.
Hart called at quarter to eight from the Rapid City airport. "They knew him right away," he said. "His name's Bill Hood. He's a Sioux from Rosebud, but he married a Chippewa woman a few years ago. He lives in Minnesota. Somewhere up around Red Lake, they think."
"What?" Lily said. There was no extension in the office and she was watching Lucas' face.
Lucas nodded at her and said into the phone, "How about the other people. You got any more names?"
"Yeah, they know quite a few of them. During the trouble with the bikers, they did a bunch of IDs. I'll give them to Anderson, get him to crank them through the computer."
"What?" Lily asked again, when Lucas got off the phone.
"Your man's name is Bill Hood. He supposedly lives somewhere up by Red Lake…"
"Where's Red Lake?" she asked.
"It's a reservation up north."
"Let's get going. We'll have to stop at my-"
"Whoa. We've got things to do. We'll start with our identification people tonight, see if we can figure out exactly where he lives. The Indians are always back and forth from here to the res. For all we know, he may be down here, with Bluebird. If he's not, we'll arrange some contacts up north, then go. If we head up there tonight, we'd spend most of our time thrashing around."
Lily stood and put her hands on her hips and leaned toward him. "Why do guys always have to wait another day? Jesus, in New York…"
"You're not in New York. In New York, you want to go somewhere, you take a taxi. You know how far Red Lake is from here?"
"No. I don't know."
"About the same distance as it is from New York to Washington, D.C. It ain't just a taxi ride. I'll get some calls going tonight, and tomorrow…"
"We go."
CHAPTER 8
"You heard?" She called.
Lily strode down the hall toward him, a sheaf of papers clutched in one hand. Before, she'd always worn soft pinkish lipstick, and just a touch. This morning, her lipstick was hard and heart-red, the color of street violence and rough sex. She had changed her hair as well; black bangs curled down over her brow, and she looked out from under them, like the wicked queen in Snow White.
"What?" Lucas was carrying a paper cup of microwaved coffee and had a Trib pinched under his arm.
"We found Hood. Right here in town. Anderson got on the computers early this morning," she said. The papers were computer printouts with notes scrawled in the margins in blue ink. She looked down at the top one. "Hood used to live at a place called Bemidji. It's not on a reservation, but it's close."
"Yeah. It's right next to Red Lake," Lucas said. He opened the metal door of his office and led the way in.
"But we got a problem," Lily said as she settled into the second chair in the office. Lucas put the coffee on his desk, pulled off his sport coat, hung it on a hook and sat down. "What happened is…"
Lucas rubbed his face and she frowned. "What's wrong?"
"My face hurts," Lucas said.
"Your face hurts?"
"It's sensitive to morning light. I think my grandfather was a vampire."
She looked at him for a moment and shook her head. "Jesus…"
"So what's the problem?" Lucas prompted, smothering a yawn.
She got back on track. "Hood's not driving his own car. He's the listed owner of a 1988 Ford Tempo four-wheel-drive. Red. That car's still at his former home up in Bemidji, along with his wife and kid. The Bemidji cops have some kind of source in his neighborhood-some cop's sister-in-law-and the red car's been there all along. We're not sure what Hood was driving out of that Jersey motel, but it was big and old. Like a 'seventy-nine Buick or Oldsmobile. It had bad rust."
"So we've got no way to spot him on the highway."
"Unfortunately. But…" She thumbed through the printouts. "Anderson did a computer run on him and talked to the state people. He's got a Minnesota driver's license but no second-car registration. So Anderson went through everything else in the computers and bingo. Found him listed as a defendant in a small-claims-court filing. He bought a TV on time and couldn't make the payments."
"And his address was on the filing."
"Nope. Anderson had to call Sears. They looked up the address on their accounts computer. It's an apartment on Lyndale Street."
"Lyndale Avenue," Lucas said. He sat forward now, intent.
"Whatever. The thing is, the apartment's rented to a guy named Tomas Peck. Sloan and a couple of Narcotics guys are over in the neighborhood now, trying to figure it out."