The Secret Service agent's name was George Dickens. He met Lucas at the hospitality committee's office suite in a temp office in what had been an especially vacant stretch of the St. Paul skyway.
Lucas introduced himself and Dickens, a thin, hard, lank-haired man who looked like he could run down and arrest a greyhound, said, "My boss wanted me to ask you about the parameters of the alert on Justice Shafer."
"Which parameters?" Lucas asked.
"Who's looking?"
"Northern and Western Wisconsin and all Minnesota sheriffs have been contacted directly, with the full file on him, and they've all been asked to distribute the file to the local police forces in their jurisdictions," Lucas said. "We've also directly notified all the bigger police departments ' like every town over about ten thousand or so-county seats, and all the towns here in the metro area. We're calling Iowa now. They'll do Des Moines and the suburbs, the bigger towns and all the county sheriffs north of about I-80. Every place within about a short-day's drive from here."
"How many of them will take it seriously?" Dickens asked.
"Some won't-but most of them will post the pictures," Lucas said. "We've got the tag on his truck posted, too, and the highway patrol guys are looking for it."
Dickens nodded, then asked, "Why haven't we found him?"
"I'd say he's probably ditched himself," Lucas said. "He's here, or up in Duluth, or over in Eau Claire, watching TV and trying to get his guts up."
Again, Dickens nodded, as if Lucas confirmed what he thought, and said, "That's what I think, too. Damn hard to catch somebody who holes up, and when there's nobody to ask about him-no family. Shafer's mother hasn't see him in eight years and nobody knows where his old man went, and that was twenty years ago."
They thought about that for a minute, then Dickens asked, "What do you want me to do in here?"
Lucas, who mostly dealt with the FBI, at the federal level, thought that was about the most modest and reasonable question he'd ever been asked by a fed. He smiled and said, "Do the unreasonable federal act: scare them."
There weren't many people to scare the shit out of, as it turned out-three women in their forties or early fifties, all a little heavy, harried, confused about the questions.
Their leader, whose name was Helen Fumaro, who wore a large cluster of American Indian turquoise jewelry around her neck, said, Yes, they assigned blocks of rooms. Yes, if somebody had access to their computers, they could have figured out who was staying where, and when, and even the rate. Would they know who the lobbyist representatives were? Well, the billing addresses were right there in the computer ' If you could get into the computers, and if you knew who you were looking for, you could find them.
"But we wouldn't know who they were looking for," Fumaro said, her hands fluttering in front of her, as though she were air-typing. "I don't know who any ' moneymen are. I get a list of people who've been approved by our Washington office, and then we arrange the hotels depending on their numerical rating, one through ten."
"How does that work?" Lucas asked.
Fumaro said, "If you're a one-there aren't many-you get the best rooms in the best hotels. You get what you want. If you're a ten, well, we might have to tell you that, regretfully, the hotels are all booked up."
"I always wondered how that worked," Dickens said.
"So who'd have access to both lists?" Lucas asked. "Just you three?"
Fumaro scratched at her hair part with a Number Two pencil. "Well' everything we've got is mostly on our computers here…" She waved at three laptops. "We're networked and we're online, but' I mean, when we leave, we turn off the computers." She looked at the door to the skyway. "If somebody sneaked in here at night' but then they'd need the passwords…" She looked at the other two women. "Any ideas?"
They sat mute, shaking their heads.
"What about in Washington?" Dickens asked.
"You know, nobody in Washington cares, as long as the work gets done," Fumaro said.
Another one of the women, whose name was Cheryl Ann, said, "You know, really, what we do is clerical work. That's all. We get lists, we put them in a computer, and match them to available rooms. If we get a match, we send a confirmation. If it doesn't match, we call up people and see if we can figure out what to do. We put names in little squares. We don't know these people."
The third woman, whose name was Lucy, said, "You know ' never mind."
Fumaro asked, "These people who were beaten up. What were their names?"
"John Wilson, Bart Spellman, Lorelei Johnson," Lucas said.
She scooted her office chair over to one of the laptops, called up a form and typed John Wilson into a blank. Another form blinked up, with Wilson's registration, showing the bare information of name, room assignment, billing address, and credit card guarantee. Lucas, looking over her shoulder with Dickens, said, "But that doesn't say who he worked for."
"That's on another input form," Fumaro said. She popped up another form, which showed Wilson's employer and a payment guarantee from a travel agency.
"But that doesn't have the room assignment," Dickens said. "You'd have to get both of these forms to put those together?"
They hashed that over, and decided that if you knew who you were looking for, you could find the room number; but you'd need the name first. Dickens said to Lucas, "Whoever did it had to have a fix on the targets. Then he could get the room assignments…"
"But he would have had to get them from these computers, or access to these computers," Lucas said. "In Washington, I think."
He told Dickens about the line of reasoning they'd worked out in Wilson's hospital room. "Cohn and the gang members had to have the names quite a long time ago."
"The logic is a little leaky," Dickens said. "But I see what you're saying."
Lucy, the third woman, asked Fumaro, "When was Wilson registered?"
Fumaro checked and said, "May seventeenth."
Lucy asked, "How about Spellman?"
Fumaro checked. "May ninth."
To Lucas and Dickens: "That was just before the big rush. The big rush started around the first of June. That's when everybody was getting set with their rooms."
"So they were before ' Raphael," Lucy said.
The three women all looked at one another, and Lucas looked at the three of them looking at one another, and then he asked, "Who's Raphael?"
"Raphael's dead," Lucy said.
Chapter 1 1
Between the time Lucas got the call about Letty, and the time he got home, he'd bumped and stumbled over what might be critical information about the Cohn gang. His initial dismay about Letty had dissipated; but it all came back as he got closer to home.
Her bicycle was in the driveway, so she was home, and by the time he went through the connecting door between the garage and the kitchen, he was steaming.
Weather, Sam, and Ellen the housekeeper were in the kitchen when he went through. He snapped, "Where's Letty?" and Weather looked at his face and asked, "What happened?" and Letty said from the living room, "I'm in here."
She'd been waiting. Her voice had a hard edge to it and Weather stood up and asked again, "What happened?" and Lucas started for the living room.
Letty and Juliet Briar had ridden around in the Channel Three van for a while, and Letty borrowed a hundred dollars, fifty each from Frank and Lois, promising to pay them back "as soon as I can steal it from Dad." She gave the money to Briar and said, "Now you're covered. You don't have to go around making dates."