A moment of contemplation. “All right. You know where I’m at, on this kind of thing. I’ll email it to you. After you pass it on, burn your laptop.”
“Thanks, Jon.”
“You owe me big,” Duncan said.
“I owe you medium.”
• • •
The video camein twenty minutes later, as the Uber turned into Lucas’s driveway. It popped up on his iPad, anonymously, with an equally anonymous note that read “The original.”
Lucas called a woman named Daisy Jones who ran a late afternoon TV show calledJonesing for News. When she came up, she asked, “What?”
“You sound impatient with me. That makes me sad, considering our long-term friendship,” Lucas said. “Maybe I could go to Channel Three, where I have a former lover, eager to speak to me any day, any time.”
“Fuck her. I’m prepping for an interview. With a guy I don’t care about. So. What do you want?”
“I’ve got video of the Russian spies we shot up the other day,” Lucas said. “When they were trading cars at that motel. Nobody else has it. I want to get it out there, so it maybe jogs the memory of somebody who’s seen them. But, it can’t come from me.”
“Screw the guy I don’t care about. When can you get it to me?” she asked.
“I could email it to you, but then there’d be a record and you’d use it to blackmail me.”
“Yeah, I probably would,” she said. “Put it on a thumb drive and meet me at the Starbucks across from the station.”
“Thirty minutes,” Lucas said.
• • •
Lucas got aclean thumb drive from his home office, loaded the video on it, and took his second car, a Porsche 911, across town. Jones was waiting at a table at Starbucks with a cup of coffee and a cup of hot chocolate. She pushed the chocolate at Lucas and he handed her the thumb drive.
Jones was an attractive fortysomething woman who had been working the police beat since journalism school and knew most of the Twin Cities cops by their first names. “What can you tell me that you don’t want me to say on the air, but will help me understand what I’m doing here?”
Lucas took a sip of the hot chocolate and said, “Mmm. Good.” And, “We think the hit team may still be here in the Cities. We’re trying to roust them, using you to do the rousting.”
“Where did I get the video?” she asked.
“You won’t say, but if people got the impression that it was the FBI, I would appreciate it. You could call me a source close to the FBI’s investigation.”
“But it didn’t come from them?” she asked.
“Maybe not. I’m not sure.”
“You’re not sure.” She rolled her eyes, thought about it, then said, “You probably got it from Jon Duncan at the BCA.” She checked Lucas for a flinch.
Lucas didn’t flinch. He smiled and said, “Terrific guess. Blame it on Jon. The miserable piece of shit wouldn’t fix a speeding ticket for me. Highway patrol got me on I-35 down by Owatonna. He could have done it, if he wanted to.”
“So where?”
“Let’s just say I was alone at the motel manager’s video station for a minute, after the shooting. I mean…you’ll see, it’s not BCA video, all cleaned up. It’s raw. But an FBI hint would make me happy, and I am close to the investigation.”
“You’re fucking with St. Vincent.”
“You’re smarter than you have any right to be,” Lucas said.
She put a finger along the side of her nose, studying him through her black-rimmed hot-librarian glasses. “About sixty percent of what you just told me are lies, but I don’t know which sixty percent. I’ll pretend I believe everything.”
“Thank you. Daisy…this is a real thing. You’ll be doing a service,” Lucas said.
