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."
"Maybe he moved."
"Yeah, but Peck has been listed as the occupant for two years. So maybe Hood's living with him."
"Huh." Lucas thought it over as she sat leaning forward, waiting for a comment. "Are you sure you've got the right Bill Hood? There have got to be a lot of them…"
"Yeah, we're sure. The Sears account had a change of address."
"Then I'd bet he's still living at that apartment," Lucas said. "We're on a roll, and when you get on a roll…"
"… it all works," Lily said.
Lily had not gone down to look for Hood, she said, because Daniel wanted to keep the police presence in the neighborhood to a minimum. "The FBI's all over the streets. They must have half a dozen agents going through the community," she said.
"Isn't he going to tell them about identifying Hood?"
"Yeah. He's already talked to a guy." She glanced at her watch. "There's a meeting in half an hour. We're supposed to be there. Sloan should be back and Larry Hart's coming in sometime this morning," Lily said. She was quivering with energy. "God damn, I was afraid I'd be here for a month. I could be out of here tomorrow, if we get him."
"Did Daniel say who the FBI guy is?" Lucas asked.
"Uh, yeah. A guy named…" She looked at her notes. "Kieffer."
"Uh-oh."
"Not good?" She looked up at him and he shook his head, frowning.
"He doesn't like me and I don't like him. Gary Kieffer is a most righteous man. Most righteous."
"Well, get your phony smile in place, then, because we're meeting with him in twenty-seven minutes." She looked at her watch again, then at his nearly empty coffee cup. "Where can we get more coffee and a decent Danish?"
They walked through the tunnel from City Hall to the Hen-nepin County Government Center, took a couple of escalators to the Skyway level, walked along the Skyway to the Pillsbury building. Standing on the escalator a step above him, she could look straight into his eyes; she asked if he had had a long night.
"No, not particularly." He glanced at her. "Why?"
"You look a little beat."
"I don't get up early. I usually don't get going until about noon." He yawned again to prove it.
"What about your girlfriend? Is she a night person too?"
"Yeah. She spent half her life reporting for the ten-o'clock news, which meant she got off work about eleven. That's how we met. We'd bump into each other at late-night restaurants."
Going across the Skyway, Lily looked through the windows at the glossy downtown skyscrapers, monuments to the colored-glass industry. "I've never been in this part of the country," she said. "I made a couple of cross-country trips when I was doing the hippie thing, back in college, but we always went south of here. Through Iowa or Missouri, on the way out to California."
"It's out of the way, Minnesota is," Lucas conceded. "Lake Michigan hangs down there and cuts us off, with Wisconsin and the Dakotas. You've got to want to come here. And I suppose you don't often get out of the Center of the Universe."
"I do, once in a while," she said mildly, refusing to rise to the bait. "But it's usually on vacation, down to the Bahamas or the Keys or out to Bermuda. We went to Hawaii once. We just don't get into the middle part of the country."
"It's the last refuge of American civilization, you know- out here, between the mountains," Lucas said, looking out the windows. "Most of the population is literate, most people still trust their governments, and most of the governments are reasonably good. The citizens control the streets. We've got poverty, but it's manageable. We've got dope, but we've still got a handle on it. It's okay."
"You mean like Detroit?"
"There are a couple of spots out of control…"
"And South Chicago and Gary and East St. Louis…"
"… but basically, it ain't bad. You get the feeling that nobody even knows what goes on in New York or Los Angeles and that nobody really cares. The politicians have to lie and steal just to get elected."
"I think my brain would shrivel up and die if I was living here. It's so fuckin' peaceful I don't know what I'd do," Lily said. She looked down at a street-cleaning machine. "The night I came in, I got here late, after midnight. I caught a cab at the airport and went downtown, and I started seeing these women walking around alone or waiting for buses by themselves. Everywhere. Jesus. That's such… an odd sight."