“That’s what I’m saying,” Lucas said.
“Huh. Well, Todd, what do you have to say?”
“We were over at the Motel 6, doing a routine check, and I was walking along that walkway there and I heard Shirley... er, Triste... cry out, and the door was unlocked and I went through it and I found her naked as the day she was born and this guy here all over her.”
The sheriff looked at Lucas. “That right?”
“No. She took her own clothes off and started screaming,” Lucas said. “I was not all over her—I was standing by the door and she was on the other side of the room.”
“You’re saying Todd’s lying, too.”
“Yes.”
Todd reached over and slapped Lucas’s face. Lucas half spun away, trying to keep his balance, which was harder than he’d thought it might be with his hands pinned behind him. The slap stung but didn’t do any damage. Todd was pissing him off, though.
The sheriff puffed himself up and noisily sighed, then said, “Well, looks like we got ourselves a situation.” He turned to Triste. “You pretty messed up, girl?”
“Hell, yeah,” she said. “Nothing like this ever happened before. I’m pretty much a virgin.”
The sheriff gazed at her for a bit, then said to Scott, “Go sit her down in the waiting room again. You stay with her. Me’n Todd will interview the subject here.”
When they were gone, the sheriff asked Todd, “You check his ID?”
“Not yet. I was gonna do that when you got here.”
“Well, check it. Let’s see who we got.”
“My name’s Lucas...” Lucas began.
“Shut up,” the sheriff said.
Lucas carried a bifold alligator-hide wallet in his front pants pocket, and Todd slipped it out, opened it, and said, “No cash, nothing but credit cards and a Minnesota driver’s license. ‘Lucas Davenport, Mississippi River Boulevard, St. Paul.’”
“Well, let’s see what we got on Mr. Davenport,” the sheriff said. He turned to a computer, tapped a key, which brought up a browser, went to Google and typed in Lucas’s name. There were a dozen articles and a hundred mentions or so, some with photographs. The sheriff read for a while, clicking through the articles, and then said to Todd, “Says here Mr. Davenport is a wealthy patron of the arts in Minneapolis and St. Paul, made his money in software. Don’t say a thing about his fuckin’ underage girls. Is that all true, Mr. Davenport?”
Lucas nodded. “I guess.” An FBI computer specialist had done some editing of Lucas’s history beforehand.
“You ‘guess’? Huh. You don’t know for sure?” Turner asked.
Lucas said, “Yeah, that’s me.”
“You so rich you don’t even carry cash? You just wave that black Amex card at people?”
“I...”
“You know what?” Todd asked. He reached out and patted Lucas on the chest. “Here we go.”
He fished a second leather wallet out of Lucas’s breast pocket, opened it, and said, “Whoa, Daddy. Heisrich.” He pulled out a wad of hundreds, spread it like a hand of cards. “There must be... five grand here.”
“That’s evidence,” the sheriff said. “Give it here.”
Todd handed him the money and the sheriff put it in his jacket pocket, peered at Lucas for a few more seconds, then said to Todd, “Take those cuffs off him.” When the cuffs were off, the sheriff said, “Sit down, Mr. Davenport. I need to explain to you some realities of the world.”
—
THE REALITIES,the sheriff said, were that both the deputies had been wearing body cameras, which he called Obama-cams, and they clearly caught Lucas and Triste in the motel room. Triste, he said, had probably been ruined by the night’s sexual experience, or, if not ruined, at least psychologically damaged. Long-term psychiatric care would be needed to fix that, and long-term psychiatric care wasn’t cheap.
“I got enough to send you off to the state prison for, oh, five to ten years, but that’s not gonna do Triste any good, is it? She’s still ruint,” the sheriff said. “I’m saying, between you and me, it might be better to cut our own little deal. I understand how you could have been misled, and everybody likes a little young puss now and then. But that’s neither here nor there—she’s still fifteen. You pay for hercare—if those newspaper stories are right, you won’t even miss the money—and we forget the whole thing. Or, you can do the five-to-ten.”
