Lucas nodded. "If you see them, call nine-one-one."
"Nine-one-one," said the second Hassan. "We will do."
Lucas talked to two widows and a widower, and was growing depressed, looking into their tiny apartments, when a call came in from one of the Minneapolis detectives: "We got a hit. A good one."
"Good one?" Lucas asked, the evening suddenly brighter.
"Old lady says she saw a guy going through with two women.
Tall, thin, dark hair, mustache. She said the woman looked like a Filipino, but that seemed close enough-the picture you gave us does look sort of like something else. So I showed her the mug shots, and she's not sure on the woman, but she's fairly sure about Cohn. She said it's him."
"Terrific. This is terrific," Lucas said. "You said Park Vista? Where's that at?"
The cop told him, and Lucas said, "Hell, you're right down the street."
"It's Park Vista Two, exactly. It's the door on the left. This old lady was no dummy-I got a good feeling about it, man."
"Okay. I'm coming over, I'm bringing my guys, I'm cranking up the SWAT."
"Listen, I can watch the lobby and the door, but my partner thinks you should bring the SWAT in through the basement," the cop said. "They can bring their van right down the front ramp-it'll take a Sprinter van, the manager says, so the SWAT stuff should fit. From there, it's either up the elevators or up the stairs."
"I'll hook you up with the SWAT guy. His name is Able Peterson, you can talk him in. This is good work, man."
He called the SWAT commander: "Able, we need you."
"Goddamnit, Lucas, you got them? Where?"
Lucas gave them the address off Mears Park. "It's the new ones, the ones with the colored panels. It's the one on the left as you look at them from the front. I've got the name of a guy who can let you into the basement level, the parking level."
"It'll take me twenty minutes to break off here, get my guys ready to go."
He gave Peterson the cop's phone number, and then called Shrake and Jenkins: "We've got a line on them."
"Where at?" Jenkins asked.
"Park Vista-those big twin buildings on Mears Park."
"That'd be about right. Half-full, big buildings…"
"Two minutes," Lucas said.
Letty decided that she had no choice: or rather, she had a choice, but both options were bad. One was bad for Briar, one was bad for Lucas, and that tipped the balance. You took care of your own.
She'd gotten Whitcomb's phone number the first day; now she rode her bike across town to the Capitol lawn as the evening came on. There were a couple thousand people floating around, after some kind of event, maybe a music thing. A Channel Three van was parked at the bottom of the hill, on the street. Among the crowd she spotted a group of frat boys from the University of Minnesota, who were towing some sorority girls around in little red wagons, tiny floats for Obama. She chained her bike to a tree and jogged over.
One of them, a tall young man with green soap-spiked hair that made him look a little like the Statue of Liberty, was wearing a homemade button that said "Greeks for Obama," and Letty grabbed him.
"You wanna be a TV star?" she asked him.
"Shit, yes."
"Try not to say "shit" when you're on camera," she said. "I'll be right back."
She jogged down the hill to the van and knocked on the door.
Lois looked out at her: "Letty," she said. She seemed abashed, having ratted Letty out a couple days before. "Are you supposed to be here?"
Letty said, "Could we do a minute on some kids from the U? They're pretty funny ' Frats for Obama…" Lois said, "If they're coherent'"
Letty said, "Get a camera…" and she headed back up the hill to the frat boys. They did a minute, and then Letty told Lois that she better head home, but she wanted one last look around. Lois said, "Okay. And that frat boy stuff-not too bad."
"At least he didn't say "shit" on TV," Letty said.
Alibi.
Two minutes later, she was on her bike, the streets not so well-lit now, but she had her switchblade and the confidence that she could move quickly enough, and in the dark, that nobody could move on her. She was right.
From an outdoor phone at Metro U, six blocks from Whitcomb's house, she made the calclass="underline" tried to put on an accent that she'd picked up from HBO specials on hookers. A male voice, and she said, "Randy, you know that bitch of yours is hanging out with the Davenport kid? Thought you'd like to know."
"What? What?"
"That bitch of yours is hanging out with the Davenport kid, told her what you were up to. You take care." "This ain't Randy. Wait a minute."
Letty groaned. Wrong guy. Then Randy came up: "What?"
She did it all over again, then clicked off, got back on her bike, headed up the hill toward Whitcomb's house, pumping as hard as she could.
On the way over to Park Vista, Lucas called Operations at the BCA and got an urgent warrant started: "I don't care who you call, but I need it in five minutes. If we don't get it, we might have to go anyway, because these guys are killers and they're going to kill again, and maybe tonight."
All recorded: building a case for a warrantless entry.
They walked over separately, keeping in mind that together, they looked like flatfoots. Lucas found the Minneapolis cop standing with a civilian, by the electronic gate on the parking ramp. Lucas said, "You're Doug Swanson."
"Swenson." The cop nodded and said, "My partner's Dan Long. We got a call from your SWAT guy he's on the way." Swenson looked at his watch. "They're still ten or fifteen minutes out."
"What about the apartment?" Lucas asked.
Swenson flicked a finger at the civilian. "This is Carl Bishop, he's the manager. He gave us a key to an apartment down the hall. Dan's up there with the key in the lock, and if anything moves in their apartment, or anybody comes down the hall, he'll go on in, like they just caught him getting home…"
Jenkins: "We oughta get out of sight. If they're out and they come down that entry ramp and see us, it'll be the OK Corral."
They moved inside, to the lobby, and then into the mail room, looking at the backside of three hundred mailboxes. Lucas called Able Peterson and asked, "How long?"
"We're staging, we're getting armored up. I sent Dick McGuire over there with some listening gear. He ought to be coming in the door with a carry-on suitcase. If you could get him into an adjacent apartment'"
Both of the adjacent apartments were occupied, but one of them was occupied by a retired cop who said he'd be happy to see them. About that time, McGuire came through the front door and they sent him up, after warning Dan Long that McGuire was a cop, and on the way.
Two minutes later, McGuire was at work, and two minutes after that, he called Lucas and said, "I can't hear a thing. If there's anybody there, I should be able to hear something. I should be able to hear them breathing-I think the place is empty."
"Gotta go in," Lucas said. "Could be somebody dead' maybe there's something about the walls that's defeating the listening gear."
"Wait four minutes for SWAT, send them right up," Shrake said. Thinking about the warrant. "That gives it at least the appearance of desperation."
Lucas called Peterson again and passed on the word from McGuire, which Peterson had just gotten directly. "Get here," Lucas said.
"We're loading. We're two blocks away. We'll be there in one minute."
The SWAT team came right down the ramp, unloaded, and Lucas briefed them on the situation, and the manager drew a sketch of the interior of the apartment. "No chances," Lucas told Peterson. "Blow the door down, flash-bangs, ready to rock." He got on the phone again, to McGuire: "Clear that apartment."