“That’s right.”
“If you screw up, it’ll make this office look bad,” Oder had said.
“I might screw up, but if I do, I’ll make it clear that it has nothing to do with you or your office, that my people are in Washington, not in Minnesota,” Lucas had said.
“Who’s your contact in Washington?”
“Russell Forte,” Lucas said.
“Don’t know him,” Oder said. “Are you sure he’ll be happy to take the responsibility if you mess up?”
“Well, heisa bureaucrat. You’d know more than me about the likelihood of his taking the blame.”
Oder had been tapping on a legal pad with a mechanical pencil. He thought about Lucas’s comment, then said, “Look, Lucas, I know what happened when you quit the BCA, and I’m up-to-date with what happened down in Iowa. You saved Mrs. Bowden’s life and you got a badge because of it. The way it looks, she’s going to be President, and I don’t want to fight with a friend of Bowden. But I feel like I’m stuck in the middle. I don’t want to get blamed for things I don’t do. But when you fuck up, and you will, it’s inevitable with the job, I’ll get blamed. I hate that.”
“I won’t be a problem,” Lucas promised. “You’ll hardly ever see me around the place.”
—
ODER HADseemed to accept that, but, in the way of bureaucrats, he let it be known that Davenport was not reallyone of us.
In an effort to further smooth things over, Lucas had offered tohelp out in unusual situations. The Minnesota Marshals office was perpetually short-handed, and that was how he’d wound up as a rich-guy decoy in Missouri.
Lucas and another deputy had also run down an embezzler who’d skipped his date in Minneapolis federal court in favor of a new name and a new home in Idaho, and had recovered a chunk of the embezzled cash from an Idaho safe-deposit box, which had made everyone look good.
He’d helped locate, with his Minnesota database, a redneck who didn’t like federal wildlife laws and had decided to eliminate wolves and eagles in his personal hunting grounds. The guy’d been busted by the Fish and Wildlife Service, but had forfeited a $2,500 bond rather than show up for trial in federal court.
He’d told acquaintances that the feds would take him when they “pried my cold dead hands” off his black rifle, and had suggested that he was polishing up a special bullet for the U.S. attorney. Lucas and two other deputies had hauled his ass out of a bar in Grand Marais, blubbering about his rights.
They were good arrests... but not what Lucas had been looking for.
Still, he’d been useful enough that he and Carl Meadows, the chief deputy, had begun taking an occasional lunch together.
—
THE DAY AFTERhe returned from St. Louis, a bright and cool autumn Monday in Minneapolis, he and Meadows walked over to the food trucks on Second Avenue and bought brats and Lucas told the other man about the Missouri sting.
“That’s all good,” Meadows said, when Lucas finished, “but have you found anything to dig into? You’ve been sitting on your ass for a while.”
“I know, but I might be on to something now,” Lucas said. “Have you ever heard of a guy named Garvin Poole?”
Meadows frowned and looked down at his brat, as though it might hold an answer. “The name rings a bell, back a while, but I can’t place it. Maybe a Southerner? He was on our Top Fifteen list for a while?”
“Yeah. Everything I know came out of a conversation with Jim Duffy down in St. Louis, and what I fished out of the online records this morning. Poole was an old-style holdup man down in the Southeast—Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, North Florida. Came out of Tennessee originally, but didn’t operate much there, at least not after he did four years in a Tennessee prison. He dropped out of sight five years ago. He was tentatively identified in an armored car robbery in Chattanooga, and nothing after that. Lot of his pals have been busted and questioned, but they all agree that he’s gone. Nobody knows where. Lot of people thought he was dead. Then, ten days ago, a dope counting house down in Biloxi was knocked over. The robbers killed five people, including a six-year-old girl.”
“Yeah, jeez, I heard about that. That’s ugly,” Meadows said.
“One of the victims apparently got off a shot before he was killed,” Lucas said. “The crime scene people found a few drops of blood, ran it through the DNA database, and got a hit—they think it was Poole.”
“Think? DNA’s supposed to be for sure,” Meadows said.
“Not this time,” Lucas said. “The DNA match came from thearmored car robbery in Chattanooga. The truck had internal cameras that the robbers couldn’t get at. The video showed one of the robbers banging his forearm against a door frame when he was climbing out of the truck with a bag of cash. They got some skin off the frame, ran the DNA. They didn’t get a hit, but believe it was Poole on the basis of height and body type and the robbery technique. They couldn’t see his face, and he was wearing gloves, so there’s no fingerprints, no definitive ID. Both drivers were shot to death with.40 caliber handguns, as were the five people killed in Biloxi. Poole favors.40 caliber Glocks.”
“Same as we carry.”
“Yeah. Well, you, anyway.” Lucas carried his own.45, which was against regulations, but nobody had tried to argue with him about that.
“Any federal warrants on him?” Meadows asked.
