“You’re sure of that?”
“Absolutely. Put it this way: those guys risked their own lives to keep Jim alive, and he did the same for them. After that, they’re not going to shoot him in cold blood.”
“Tom told me the same thing,” Lucas said. “Did Tom tell you that Claxson bullshitted him on the waterboarding thing?”
“Yes. Claxson lied to me, too. If it’s a lie,” she said.
“It is.”
“You think he did it?”
“No. We don’t think it was Claxson himself. Although I think Claxson could have set it up.”
“Parrish, then.”
“I’m not sure. Do you know Parrish?”
“Yes. If he did it, it was because he was told to do it. Parrish is a bullshit artist, a fixer. He might be able to do it, if you squeezed him hard enough, but he wouldn’t like it. He wouldn’t want to. Not because he’d be killing somebody, but because he might get caught. Or might fuck it up and get shot himself.”
“Okay.”
“That leaves Senator Taryn Grant.” Lucas didn’t say anything, and after six or eight seconds Wendy said, “You’re a U.S. Marshal, so you don’t want to say that.”
“It’s complicated,” Lucas said. “Did you look her up?”
“Yes, and I looked you up, too. You think she was involved in some murders in Minneapolis, but you weren’t able to get her onthat. Senator Smalls thinks she tried to assassinate him. You think Jim was one of the people in on that silly fuckin’ stunt.”
“Jim was involved, for sure,” Lucas said. “He was one of the triggers, but he wasn’t doing it for himself. His orders came from someone else, and since he worked for Claxson... But what would Claxson get from killing Smalls? Nothing that I can figure out. We need to find somebody who needed to get rid of Smalls.”
“You say that but you won’t say her name,” Wendy said.
“Like I said, it’s complicated. I don’t really know who I’m talking to.”
“Let me give you a hypothetical,” Wendy said. “Do you think a person like Grant, with her personality, could pull the trigger?”
“I don’t want to get involved in hypotheticals,” Lucas said. “I do know that a lot of people have died around her, people who might have obstructed her ambitions.”
“Huh. Then you think she could. Okay. From what I’ve read about the Minneapolis situation, you obviously think she was the one giving the orders in those killings.” Again, Lucas didn’t reply, and she asked, “Are you going to get her?”
“I’m beginning to doubt it,” Lucas admitted. “To do that, we’d have to jump through a lot of evidentiary hoops, and she’s got an ocean of money for lawyers. Our only hope is to get Claxson or Parrish to talk to us. But if they do talk to us, they’d be implicating themselves in multiple murders.”
“So you won’t get her.”
“I’ll be as honest as I can be: I’m not sure we’ll get any of them. Not for murder. Not for killing Jim, or the others. We had hardevidence that Jim was involved in one murder, when Senator Smalls was run off the road, but Jim’s dead now. We don’t know exactly who was with him, although we have some evidence that Claxson was directing the murder in St. Paul and the attack on my wife. McCoy and Moore may have been involved in that, but we have no hard evidence against them, and they won’t admit it... And we can’t find Moore. He may be dead, too. We’re still trying, though. We should know in a week.”
“All right,” she said. “You got anything else?”
Lucas hesitated, then asked, “Have you seen the actual autopsy report on Jim?”
“No. Tom told me about it. He was shot twice.”
“Listen, Wendy... I want you to know, this wasn’t just a shooting. It was a cold-blooded murder done by somebody who Jim thought was a friend. The crime scene analysis suggests that when he was shot, he was holding a carton of milk. His face and shirt were soaked with it, like a bullet went through the carton. He didn’t even have a chance to throw the carton, or even drop it. Then they cut off his fingers...”
“What!”
“They were apparently trying to keep him from being identified. They actually identified him from a Special Forces tattoo. Then, you know, they threw him in that dumpster...”
Wendy broke: Lucas could hear her sobbing. “I’m sorry. I thought you knew all this.”
