“Not anymore,” the marshal said.
Todd began to cry, his wide shoulders shaking under the deputy’s uniform, then he looked at Lucas and said, “You asshole.”
“That’d be Marshal Asshole, to you, Todd,” Lucas said.
—
THE ST. LOUIS MARSHALSarrested six people—the sheriff, four deputies, and Shirley McDonald. They’d be back, later, to get a state judge.
After they put the cuffs on her, Shirley had started talking about being extorted by the Turners, and still hadn’t stopped when they pushed her into a federal car and sent her north. “Them fuckin’ Turners made me do it. Todd and Scott made me suck them off, too. Ask them about that. I’m only fifteen...”
It all made an interesting recording, and since the marshals readher rights to her a half dozen times, and she talked anyway, it would all hold up in court.
Before he got in the car, Lucas took a breath test, which showed a 0.01 BAC—about what a man would get if he rinsed his mouth with whiskey a half hour before he took the test. Which Lucas had done. That level implied no impairment whatever, in case a defense attorney should ask.
—
THE STINGat Cooter’s had begun when a widower federal judge had run into the same trap. Turner and his son had decided he might be more useful in his capacity as a judge than in his potential to pay his way out, and made a deal: the judge agreed to give them three verdicts, any three that could conceivably be seen as reasonable, and nobody would talk about young girls in motels. Three verdicts in the right corporate cases could be worth a million dollars...
But they’d misjudged the judge. As soon as he got back to St. Louis, he’d contacted the U.S. attorney and made a statement about the entrapment and blackmail. He’d admitted to having been alone in a room with a girl whose age he didn’t know. He thought she might be nineteen or twenty, he said, but he made no other excuses.
Two days later, the St. Louis Marshals office was checking around for a rich-looking marshal with a decent backstory. They found Lucas.
—
THE FIVEarrested men rode north in a federal van, with two deputy marshals to drive and watch over them. Duffy, the chief deputy forthe Eastern District of Missouri, rode with Lucas, in the comfort of the big Benz.
“One day ought to do it on the paperwork, but we’ll need you back for depositions and so on,” Duffy said. “We appreciate you coming down. Our own people are too well known, couldn’t take the chance that Turner might recognize them. Anyway, don’t none of us got that slick veneer you actual rich guys got.”
“It’s only a veneer,” Lucas said. “Underneath, I’m just another really, really good-looking yet humble working cop.”
Duffy snorted and asked, “How’s your caseload?”
“I’m still looking.” Duffy knew about Lucas’s circumstances: a freelance deputy marshal, slipped into the Marshals Service through nothing but pure, unalloyed political influence, wielded by Michaela Bowden, the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. Lucas had kept Bowden from being blown up at the Iowa State Fair the year before.
He’d been a marshal for three months, and had gone through brief training at Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac from Washington, D.C., most of which hadn’t applied to him because of his special status. On the other hand, he really did have to know about the paperwork, which was ample.
“There’s some interesting stuff out there, but not really to my taste,” Lucas told Duffy. “I’m looking for something hard. Something unusual. Something I can work at and would do some serious good.”
Duffy said, “Huh.” He looked out the window at the countryside, damp, green, shrouded in darkness. A moment later he asked, “You ever hear of a guy named Garvin Poole?”
“Don’t think so,” Lucas said.
“No? Then let me tell you about him.”
“Poole? Marvin?”
“Garvin. Gar’s a good ol’ Tennessee boy... maybe killed ten or fifteen innocent people, including at least one six-year-old girl, just last week, and a Mississippi cop, sometime back, and God only knows how many guilty people,” Duffy said. “He’s smart, he’s likable, he’s good-lookin’. He once played in a pretty fair country band, and he’s got no conscience. None at all. He’s got friends who’d kill you for the price of a moon pie. Some people think he’s dead, but he’s not. He’s out there hiding and laughing at us. Yes, he is.”
3
MARGARET TRANEnearly ran over Lucas as she trotted out of the federal building, a solidly built cop in a hurry. She grabbed his jacket lapels and said, “Jesus, Davenport,” at the same instant Lucas grabbed her shoulders and kept her upright and said, “Easy, Maggie.”
They backed away from each other and she said, “Hey. Been a while. Was that girl down in Missouri as young as they say?”
“She was young, she says fifteen,” Lucas said. “Sort of horrifying, if you know what I mean.”
“I do,” Trane said. She smiled up at him—they’d always had good chemistry, even when Lucas was Minneapolis’s top violent-crimesinvestigator and she was stuck in precinct investigations. They’d both moved on, Trane to Minneapolis Homicide, Lucas to Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and then to the U.S. Marshals Service. “I hear things have been a little tense up in the marshals’ office.”
