Letty: “Listen to her.”
There was that tone in her voice again, and Lucas turned back to Mary Last, and asked, “Why didn’t he do it?”
“Douglas, he drank too much,” Mary Last said. “I tried to tell him. And he’s smoked since he was in high school. He ate cheeseburgers every day—every day of his life. Eggs and bacon in the morning, cheeseburgers all day, or pepperoni pizza. Even now. He never exercised. He was a fat man, and he had heart failure. The doctors said he would die in one year, maybe two, if he didn’t change. He didn’t. The food was like a drug. He was an addict. My boy, he couldn’t run a hundred feet, but the police say he ran so fast nobody could catch him and he got away. This is impossible for him to do. Impossible. You ask his doctor.”
Letty later told Weather that Lucas could have said any of a thousand things in response, but Lucas was feeling the world shifting around him. What had been simple and awful had suddenly become enormously complex and even worse.
He looked at the old lady, and said, “Sonofabitch.”
14
Lucas had been a cop for more than two decades, and as soon as the words came out of the old lady’s mouth, he knew that she was telling the truth, that she was right, Last couldn’t run a hundred feet. Weather’s crash had been set up to take Lucas out of Washington, and Mary Last’s son had been murdered. Lucas had to check, but he knew it was true.
Lucas had been in the Cities for a week and had not talked to Smalls since the accident, other than to drop him an email, telling him what had happened. Smalls had simply answered back, “Take care of your wife.”
After sending Mary Last away, Lucas called Smalls on his private cell phone. When Smalls answered, Lucas identified himself, and asked, “Do you still have protection?”
“Yes, but nothing...”
“Senator, I think Weather was taken out by the same guy who ambushed you and Miz Whitehead. I think they set up the guy with the DWI, Douglas Last, and then murdered him. I’ve got good reason to think this. The killers are still with us, and active, and they might be here in the Twin Cities.”
Smalls didn’t respond immediately, though Lucas could hear him breathing. Finally: “It’s best if I go away for a while. I’ve got to be back after the recess, but for the time being...”
“Don’t tell me where you’re going. Or anyone else. You know how to get a burner phone?”
“Of course.”
“These guys are very sophisticated. My last case, my cell phone was tracked by a bunch of dopers—everybody’s got tech now. Get a couple of burners, FedEx one of them to Kitten, don’t call anyone except her, and any business that you have to do with other people, do through her. I don’t think they can break that—not easily anyway. I’ve got a private line to her myself, so we can relay anything we need to say to each other.”
“I’ll be gone tonight,” Smalls said. “Are you going back to Washington?”
“I have to talk to Weather about that. And I have to hire some people to sit with her until this is done.”
—
AFTER HE GOT OFFthe phone with Smalls, Lucas called Mitchel White, the Ramsey County medical examiner, told him about what Last’s mother had said, and asked, “Did you look at his heart?”
“Yes. He had advanced congestive heart failure. But, Lucas, he had a bullet go through his head, and the shot was fired from one inch away.”
“The witnesses said he jumped out of his car after the accident, sprinted down the street and into an alley,” Lucas said. “A sixteen-year-old kid ran after him but never saw him again.”
“I didn’t know that,” White said. “Everybody was focused on the gunshot wound. I can tell you, though, he didn’t sprint anywhere. For one thing, he weighed two fifty-two, his legs were bacon-wrapped twigs, and his heart was a lump of Jell-O.”
—
LUCAS MADE ANOTHER CALL,asked an old political friend for a favor.
He called Roger Morris, at St. Paul Homicide, and told him what he thought. “Oh boy. All right, I’m on it,” Morris said. “This shouldn’t have gotten past us. I never heard a word about his heart.”
When Lucas and Letty got to the hospital, Catrin Mattson, wearing a loose white overshirt to cover her gun, was already sitting in a chair next to Weather’s bed, reading aloud a magazine story about shoes. Virgil Flowers was slumped in the second chair, cowboy boots up on the end of Weather’s bed.
When Lucas came in, Mattson said to Weather, whose eyes were closed, “The lug is here. And your improbably beautiful daughter.”
Weather said, “We’ve got a two-lug room. And hello, Daughter.”
Lucas kissed Weather on the lips, and Mattson on the forehead, and said to Mattson, “You got here in a hurry,” and to Flowers, “What the fuck do you want?”
“Sneaky way to see your improbably beautiful daughter,” Flowers said. “The rest of you, I don’t give a shit about.”
