"I'm not telling you to go fuck yourself," Lucas said. "I can call you a confidential informant, that doesn't bother me. But I'm not a cover-up guy. There might come a time when I've got to go public with it. But not necessarily…"
"Not necessarily…" Mitford gnawed at a fingernail, spit a piece of nail at his wastebasket. "Well' take it easy. If you really get in a crack, and have to make a record, let me know ahead of time. Let me get a jump on the PR. But I'll tell you, I know for sure that none of these people will admit that they had the cash."
"So why do anything?"' Lucas asked. "Why not call it a day and go home?"
"Because they're some of us," Mitford said. He patted himself on the chest. "Us political guys. We're like cops. Everybody hates us, so we've got to take care of each other. And I really don't want to see anybody get killed by these assholes."
"If I get them, if there's a trial'"
"I'll worry about that when I get to it," Mitford said. "Prosecutors are politicians-plea bargains are out there, things can be done. But right now, Lucas: stop them."
Lucas just looked at him for a moment.
Mitford pushed some paper across his desk. "Names, room numbers, cell phones. Please?"
"I'll take a look," he said.
"And ' one more thing," Mitford said. "Keep it to yourself? Much as you can?"
Lucas went back home, got undressed, crawled into bed, and went back to sleep. He woke again when Weather got up. She pulled a drape halfway back, and a shaft of sunlight cut across the room. "What are you doing here?" she asked.
"Need to talk," he said, rolling onto his back.
"Uh-oh. What happened?"
"Get cleaned up, then I'll come brush my teeth and we can get some coffee."
Seven o'clock, and quiet, though they'd all be up soon enough. Weather usually got up at five-fifteen on weekdays, and was at the hospital by a little after six: sleeping to seven o'clock was a weekly treat. Lucas rarely got up before nine o'clock, rarely went back to bed before 1:30 or two o'clock. He got up with her Sunday so they could get an hour together with a little quiet.
They got coffee going, and oatmeal, and some ready-made hot-cross buns from a can, and odors mixed pleasantly across the kitchen. When she sat down with the coffee, he told her about the robberies, about the no-tell cash.
"So Neil wants you to catch these people, or at least stop them, without telling anybody about the money," she said.
"That's about it," Lucas said.
"Why'd he tell you about the money? He could have asked you to look into it, without telling you about it," Weather said. "He could have told you that these people were important, or were political friends, and that would have kept you out of it, ethically…"
"He knew I'd find out," Lucas said. "He wanted to be able to predict what I'll do."
"All right."
"The thing is, I already have an idea who they might be. They might be some guys who killed a couple of cops in New York."
He told her about the Friday call from Lily Rothenburg. She'd heard a story from Del or Sloan about Lucas and Lily and the front seat of an earlier Porsche; she said now, "Old Bucket Seat."
Lucas rolled his eyes, "C'mon. It was years ago. She's married and has a family…"
"You never tried to get me in the Porsche…"
"At our age, we'd have to take a year of yoga first," Lucas said. "Anyway she called to tell me that there's this heavy-duty stickup gang in town. They only go for large amounts of cash, and they're good at it-always work off a plan, bold, but very careful. This sounds like them."
"Then you've got a problem," Weather said. "You're going to have to bring some other people in on the deal. Other cops. You can't go up against them by yourself. Then you've got to tell the other guys."
"That can be handled," Lucas said. "Cohn might be down in Texas by now. On the other hand, he might have a list. If I can spot the gang, there'd be no problem bringing in a SWAT team to take them down. I mean, there're already two robberies on the table. Formal complaints, one guy in the hospital. It's more ' You know, if I do this, I'm sort of one of them. The political guys."
"You already are," Weather said.
He wagged a finger at her. "No. I've taken assignments that had a political component, but the assignments were legit. You know, chasing down some asshole because Henderson owes some sheriff a favor. This is different-I know about a pretty serious crime. I'm going to have to ignore it. Probably."
"You've ignored crimes before," Weather said. "When we got Letty, all those nuns were bringing illegal drugs across the border. You knew about it and let it go."
"There was a certain morality involved, there," Lucas said. "I was on the right side of it. One of the women said, you know, they weren't smuggling illegal drugs-the drugs were legal both here and in Canada. What they were smuggling was illegal prices. They were doing right, even if it was against the law. These people, this money ' you know, they're going to buy votes or something."
Weather said, "I can't help you on the morality thing. I can give you something to think about-whether or not there's all this money involved, you've got a lead on a gang that killed some cops. It's worth bringing them down no matter how much money might be involved."
"What do I tell the Minneapolis guys?"
"Tell them ' something's going on. Something's going on, and that this gang sounds like the gang that Lily Bucket Seat was talking about."
Lucas thought about it: "Okay, you're right. If this is Lily's gang, they need to be taken down. But I've got to tell Minneapolis something-I can't send them up against Cohn without knowing."
She nodded: "There's gonna be some tap dancing, though. You won't get through this without your best Fred Astaire."
Letty wandered into the kitchen, wrapped in a ratty blue terry-cloth robe, looking sleepy, rubbing one hand through her tangled blond hair. "Smells good," she said. "God, I need some caffeine."
Lucas grinned at her and said, "Long night?"
"I should have read it last month ' Is there any Coke?" She opened the refrigerator and peered inside. She'd been assigned to read To Kill a Mockingbird over the summer, and to write a paper on it, and had let it go until the last minute.
"How much more do you have to read?" Weather asked.
"Eighty pages," she said, twisting the cap off a bottle of Coke. "But I've got to get over to the station. I'm getting a camera, I'm going to do a piece on the kids up at the Capitol. I mean, like, you know, people my age in politics."
Lucas dropped his eyelids and made a snoring sound, and Weather snapped: "Lucas!"
"Ah, he's right," Letty said. "Another thumb-sucker. But, I get the camera time. The kids at school freak out. Emily Grissom can't stand it. She thinks I'm sleeping with somebody over there."
"Ah, God," Weather said, outraged. "Letty, do you really have to do this stuff? You could be a surgeon, or-well, you probably wouldn't want to be a lawyer…"
Lucas stood up, kissed Weather on the forehead, and said, "Thanks," and "Counsel your daughter," and headed out the door.
As he went, he heard Letty ask, "Mom, could you give me a lift over to the station? I need to get there early…"
A Minneapolis cop named Rick Jones had caught the robberies. Lucas found him at the Dairy Delight, a downtown ice-cream stand modeled after a Dairy Queen, getting a chocolate-dipped vanilla cone. Jones was a tall, slender black man with a shaved head and a diamond earring. He not only thought he looked like a pro basketball player, but he actually did. He was wearing jeans, a loose gray army T-shirt, running shoes, and dark wraparound sunglasses.