All right. Here she was. Now what?
She had her hair up under her helmet, and was wearing sunglasses; that was enough of a disguise. Pedaling up the hill, she decided that she'd cruise Whitcomb's place on the downhill. If they spotted her, it'd be an easy run down to Seventh and into downtown, where there'd be lots of cops around as convention security.
She did that, climbing the hill, taking the left on Hope to Margaret, and paused there. She could see the trees from the park behind the houses on Greenbriar, but there must be, she thought, a huge hole behind the houses, because she was looking at treetops.
Needed more scouting; but the house was right there, or should be, about halfway down the street. She got up her guts, and pedaled on down. Before she could spot Whitcomb's number, she saw the van, sitting by the side of the house.
The house was old and decrepit, with peeling paint, a crumbling front porch, a sagging roof, and a front sidewalk of poured concrete slabs that were tilted this way and that. The grass on the postage-stamp lawn had rarely been cut, she thought; it lay flat, like the fescue grass in a cow pasture.
She rolled on by, saw nobody, looked to her left and saw the break in the line of houses. From a block over, she could look between two houses and see the front of Whitcomb's place. She'd heard Lucas and Del and Sloan and Virgil and all the others talk about the boredom of surveillance, and the sometimes spectacular payoffs.
She'd watch for a while, she decided. She could cruise the area around the park, and check the van every few minutes. Get the lay of the land '
A bike path wound down through the park, as it turned out. The place was essentially a hole in the ground, but not just an ordinary hole: it was a huge, spectacular hole, almost like a quarry. She could see houses along the top rim, through breaks in the trees. As a park, there wasn't much, and what there was, was overgrown, weedy. A bum was wandering through, carrying a backpack, watching her curiously, as though she were a strange sight. Maybe she was, she thought.
She pedaled out of the park, around the back, up the hill, and found a spot one block over from Whitcomb's place.
Got lucky. She'd sat there, with her bike, for ten minutes, when Whitcomb's door banged open, and Randy Whitcomb, followed by the woman, rolled down the wooden handicap ramp to the van. They were trailed by a third man, rail-thin, with a scruffy beard.
Whitcomb pointed a remote control at the van, and the side door rolled back, and a ramp unfolded onto the driveway. Whitcomb rolled himself up the ramp, and the woman strapped him in, the straps anchored to the floor. When she was done, the woman yanked on the straps, testing them, then walked around the van and got into the driver's seat, and the second man got in the passenger side.
The van backed out of the driveway, into the street, and turned down the hill. Letty ran parallel, to Seventh Street, saw the van heading into town.
AS a young girl, she'd learned that if she decided to do something, it was best to do it immediately: otherwise, somebody would stop you from doing it, or you'd start thinking too much and chicken out. She'd taught herself to drive when she was eight, bumping around the field behind the house, and though the cops would get pissed when they caught her at it, she'd driven herself all over the county by the time she was eleven.
An old drunk would sometimes lend her his truck in return for a late-night pickup at the town bar; and when her mom got drunk, she'd provided the same service. In her driving years, she'd never had an accident.
Now, as the van dwindled in the distance, she looked back at the house. How quickly could they get back, anyway? With the snarl of traffic in town, with streets blocked by marches '
She turned around and pulled up the hill, pedaling hard, straight up the street to Whitcomb's place, down the side, turned the bike so it was facing out the drive.
The handicapped ramp ended in a newer-looking door with six small panes arranged in a square looking into a mudroom off a kitchen, just like the country farmhouse where she'd grown up. She knocked, loudly, heard nothing. Looked around. She could be seen from the street, but jeez, she was a young girl on a back porch.
Letty knew about burglary from Lucas and Del and Shrake and Jenkins and all the other cops who hung around with Lucas; and from the reporters and producers at the station. She knew you were allowed one loud noise, or two quiet ones '
She took the switchblade out of her waistband, flicked the blade out, took another quick look around, and shoved the blade through the glass next to the door lock. The glass dropped inside the door and she had to punch it again to get the last of it out. Then she reached through and flicked the turn-lock.
The house was quiet inside, smelled of rotten vegetables and dirty diapers and smoke. In fact, it was only half a house-an apartment. The front door led to the porch, but there was no way to get into the other side of the house.
She went back to the kitchen after the first look, got a dish rag off the sink, wiped the lock where she'd touched it, then moved through the house, looking for targets of interest. She found that there was almost nothing to see-a ratty old couch, two scarred tables, a couple of chairs, a broken-down bed in a room that may once have been a dining room, a new TV set with a cable connection. She found stairs going up to what might have originally been a bedroom, but the bedroom was empty, nothing but a half-dozen Snickers candy bar wrappers on the floor, and three or four cigarette butts.
Whitcomb had a lot of clothes, and so did the woman, most of them hung in a doorless closet, the others in a plastic-laminate chest of drawers. The woman wore cheap fashion jeans and low-cut blouses and black brassieres and thong underwear. Tucked in the rickety chest of drawers was a box of Reality female condoms. The woman, Letty understood, was a hooker.
She stopped to listen, heard nothing. Saw a flash of amber on a windowsill, checked it, found five empty pill containers. The names of the drugs meant nothing to her.
In the whole house, the only new thing was the high-def Sony television with an Xbox 360 game machine and a couple of controllers.
Then she found Randy's switch.
She knew what it was, because she'd known a man who'd beaten his children with a switch just like it, until one day, after whipping one of his daughters for some imagined moral infraction, his two older sons had taken him out into the side yard and had beaten him so badly that he hadn't been able to walk for the best part of a year.
Anyway, she knew what it was, and she took it out from behind the couch, handling it with the dish rag from the kitchen, and she looked at the blood spots. He's a pimp, she's a hooker, and he beats her with it. Letty considered breaking it into pieces, then thought, Huh, and put it back.
Took a last look around, and backed out of the house.
Pulled the door shut, got on her bike, and rode away, down the hill, toward town.
Things to think about.
Chapter 8
Lucas talked to every manager, assistant manager, and bellman he could find, in all of St. Paul's hotels, got unanimous head-shakes, and was headed out the door of his last stop when he saw Mitford walking toward the bar with a couple of other guys. "Neil!"
Mitford turned, spotted him, walked over: "How's it going?"
"Slowly. I'm walking a picture around…" He showed Mitford the shot of Cohn, told him about the victim interviews, and about Jones's impatience with the victims.
"You told him about the money?" Mitford asked.
"He knew about the money. He knew there was something going on." Lucas shook his head. "There're going to be rumors, and when it gets out to the blogs, you'll have some damage control to do."