Lucas nodded: "I'll buy that."
"If that fuckin' Flowers was here, we could split up, two and two," Jenkins said.
"He's coming, but he was way the hell out in Bigelow," Lucas said.
"Where's that?"
"I don't know, but it's way the hell out."
The two condos were kitty-corner from each other in the same block, with a shopping area and offices in a mall between them. They parked underground and walked around the block to the larger of the two buildings. On the way, they ran into a walking train of people in formal wear, women with glittery icefalls of diamonds around their necks, down their breasts. They were heading up the skyways toward the convention hotels at the top of the hill.
Shrake: "She's got more money on her tits than I got on my house."
"Both our houses. Together," Jenkins said, looking after them.
Lucas's phone rang, and he looked at the screen. Del. Lucas punched him up and Del said, "It's a boy."
"You knew that," Lucas said, and "Congratulations. Jeez, whoever would have even believed it, Del." He passed the phone to the other two, who gave Del the raft of shit that he'd expect, and both congratulated him, and Lucas took the phone back and Del said, "I gotta get some sleep. I think I'm more beat up than my old lady."
"I doubt it," Lucas said.
"What're you doing?"
"House-to-house," Lucas said, deliberately discouraging him. "You wouldn't be interested."
"I'm going home," Del said.
At the apartment, another jeweled train went by, and they gawked, and Jenkins said, "These aren't even the rich ones. The rich ones are staying up there. These ones have to walk in."
Lucas called the association president, whose name was Dan Eller, and Eller buzzed them up to his apartment on the twenty-fourth floor and met them at the door. He was bald, mustachioed, genially overweight, and retired.
After Lucas explained, Eller said, "The problem is, we have rentals here, too, and those people are coming and going all the time."
"How about the people on the floors? Who knows who?"
"I can help you with the condo levels, but I don't know about the rentals," Eller said. "I mean, I know a couple people, maybe they could chain you up with more."
"You haven't seen anybody who looks like these guys?"
"No, and I'm around the building a lot," Eller said. "Pretty much on every condo floor every day. We've been having roof and drainage problems, and, it's gonna cost to fix, so I've been politicking."
"People have rented out their condos, though, right?"
"Yup. A few. People have cabins up north. They stay up there and make money down here on the convention."
Eller gave them a list of names-"most of them are older, they'll be home"-and also the name and phone number of his opposite number in the other apartment building. "That building's all rentals, but they set up an apartment association, and Ken runs it. More like a tenants' union than a condo association."
They decided to start at the top, and rode the elevator up, and when they got off, Jenkins stopped, and when Lucas and Shrake looked back, he said, "You know what? We look exactly like a bunch of flatfeet."
Lucas looked at them, and himself, and sighed and nodded. "All right. You two guys do this building. I'm gonna go talk to this Ken guy in the other building."
"This is feeling kind of weak," Shrake said, turning around to look at the empty hallways. "I got that empty-tank feeling."
"Maybe it'll go away when you do some actual work," Lucas said.
But it was the worst kind of police work, Lucas thought, as he took the elevator back down. The kind of stuff done as a last resort, talking to people who you had no reason to suspect knew anything at all. Or maybe, he thought, like church bingo; sort of dull and hopeless, but somebody was going to win. Just not you.
On the street level again, another two glittery couples brushed past, aiming up the hill. Four cops went down the street on horses; horses seemed to be everywhere. The cops looked him over, but the last cop lifted a hand and said, "Davenport," and Lucas waved back, and pushed into the lobby of the apartment building.
Ken Jacobsen, who lived on the eighteenth floor of the second tower, looked at the photographs and shook his head. He'd been cooking liver and onions, and the apartment was fragrant with the gravy. "Let me give you some names, people to talk to."
"Are you around the building much?"
"Off and on," Jacobsen said. "But we're not directly responsible for the buildings. We're not owners, so it's not quite like it is in Dan's condo."
As Lucas was going out the door, Jacobsen said, "Hey: let me make a call, here. I'll see if the Hassans are still in the building."
The Hassans were two cell-phone-equipped Ethiopian janitors: their English wasn't good, but was good enough that Lucas was sure that they hadn't seen Cohn or Diaz.
"Terrorists?" one of the Hassans asked.
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.