“Ah, you know. It’ll work out, eventually,” Lucas said.
“You got Bowden behind you and she’s gonna be President. That oughta help.”
“I try not to lean on that too hard,” Lucas said. “But... yeah.”
“If you want to talk to some real cops, stop by Homicide. Happy to have you.”
They chatted for another minute, spouses and kids, then Trane said she had to run, she had a conference call on a guy who was being bad in both Minneapolis and Denver. She jogged away and Lucas went on into the federal building.
Talking to Trane had cheered him up. Because of the way he’d been appointed to the Marshals Service, he wasn’t the most popular guy in the place. He’d been dropped in from the top, a deputy U.S. marshal who sat in the Minneapolis office but worked independently and took no orders from anyone in Minneapolis, although he occasionally took recommendations and requests for help. His most direct contact was with a service bureaucrat in Washington named Russell Forte. He and Forte had met only briefly, and had gone to lunch, and Lucas had gotten the impression that Forte was the best kind of apparatchik: efficient, connected, more interested in results than in methods or style.
So far, they’d gotten along.
—
LUCAS HADan office on the fourth floor of the sorta-modern-looking Minneapolis federal building, down the hall from the U.S. marshal for the District of Minnesota and the other deputy marshals. The arrangement was complicated and one source of bad feelings on the part of a few deputies.
The Marshals Service had a politically appointed U.S. marshal at the top of each of the ninety-four federal judicial districts. They were appointed much as federal judges were—nominated by the President, usually at the recommendation of a U.S. senator, and confirmed by the Senate. Below them were the civil service deputies, including a chief deputy, and below him, supervisory deputies, and below that, the regular deputy marshals.
Lucas stood outside that normal bureaucratic pecking order; and some in the Minneapolis office thought he might be a spy. For whom, he had no idea, but that was the rumor.
—
IN ADDITION,there was Lucas’s private office, which had been, until recently, a windowless storage room. Still, it was private. The resentment was further exacerbated by the fact that he didn’t have to put up with the bureaucratic rigors of the other deputies, the bad hours, crappy assignments. He didn’t serve warrants, he didn’t transfer prisoners.
On top of it all, he was personally rich and arrived at work in either a Mercedes-Benz SUV or a Porsche 911. A federal judge withwhom he was friendly had suggested a modest American car would be more discreet, until he was better known inside the service.
Lucas said, “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.”
The judge had said, “It ain’t them who’s getting fucked, m’boy.”
—
THE UNEASINESSwasn’t confined to the other deputies: Lucas had wanted a good badge after leaving the BCA and had grabbed the first one offered. He really didn’t mind the temporary isolation—he thought that would break down in time—but he’d surprised himself with the feeling that he was seriously adrift.
From his first day as a Minneapolis cop, he’d worked to understand his environment. He’d eventually understood Minneapolis–St. Paul and its population of bad people. If someone told him that an unknown X had murdered a known Y, he’d usually know a Z that he could talk to, to begin figuring out what had happened.
That wasn’t always true, but it was true often enough to give him a clearance rate that nobody in the department could touch.
When he’d moved to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, a statewide organization, he’d struggled toward the same kind of comprehensive understanding, but this time, of the entire state of Minnesota. He’d never gotten as comfortable with the state as he had with the metro area, but he’d worked at it. As part of that, he’d developed a database of shady individuals with whom he’d pounded out private understandings. He’d call, they’d talk; if they got in trouble themselves, Lucas would have a chat with a judge, as long as the trouble was minor.
With the help of other agents, he’d eventually put together aroster of snitches with at least a couple of names in every single Minnesota county, and for larger cities, like Duluth or Rochester, he had an entire roll call. Included in the database were several dozen cops who formed a web of personal relationships tight enough that Lucas could get help anywhere in the state, at any time.
Even in his new job as a deputy marshal, he was taking calls from BCA agents who wanted into his database: “Who do you have in Alexandria who might know about thechiclecoming across from Canada?”
Didn’t work that way with the Marshals Service. His jurisdiction was the United States of America, including the various territories. There was no possibility of comprehending it, in any real way: he’d fallen into a morass. He could call for help from the FBI, the DEA, the Border Patrol, all the alphabet agencies enforcing the nation’s laws, but he didn’t know the individuals. He couldn’t count on them—they were just voices on the far end of a cell phone call, and would get around to helping him as their own schedules permitted. He didn’t know the bad guys at all, or who were the baddest.
He was, as his wife, Weather, had said, out there on his lonesome.
And he didn’t understand the “out there.”
—
HAL ODER,the marshal for the district, resented Lucas’s independent status. Lucas took no orders or assignments from Oder, and, to Oder, had looked like a job threat. That hadn’t eased, even though Lucas made it clear that he had no interest at all in Oder’s job.
“I hate the shit you have to put up with,” Lucas told the other man. “I wouldn’t do it. I’d quit first. All I want to do is hunt. The bureaucratic bullshit is the reason I quit the BCA.”
“Just hunt.”
