Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(5)
2
Lucas Davenport and Charlie Knight walked out of the Sedgwick County Regional Forensic Science Center into the bright Kansas sunshine, and Lucas took his sunglasses from his jacket pocket, slipped them on his nose, and said, “Move on. Nothing to see here.”
“Could be worse,” Knight said. He put on his own sunglasses. They were silvered and made him look like a movie version of a Texas highway patrolman, which he probably knew. His teeth, which didn’t quite match—the two upper central incisors were white, the others various shades of yellow—made him look even more like a Texas cop. “The sonofabitch might’ve lived.”
That made Lucas smile, and he said, “He wasn’t as bad as his boss.”
“Maybe not, but it’d be a goddamn close call.” They’d been to look at the bullet-riddled body of a man named Molina.
“You want to write this up?” Lucas asked, as they walked out to the rental car.
“Yeah, I’ll do it tonight,” Knight said. “You’ll be rolled up with your old lady by the time I get finished.” Lucas’s plane was going out that evening, Knight’s not until the next morning.
“What about Wise?” Lucas asked.
“Fuck him. Let Wichita put him away,” Knight said. “I don’t know for sure, but I suspect the Kansas state pen ain’t a leading garden spot.”
“I suspect you’re right about that,” Lucas said. “So, you thinking steak or cheeseburger?”
“Anything with beef in it that’s not Mexican,” Knight said.
“Yeah? Mexican’s one of my favorites,” Lucas said.
“I’m married to a Mexican, and we got gourmet Mexicano right there in the kitchen, so I ain’t eating Mexican in Wichita. I’d like to get around a big bloody T-bone.”
“You can do that in Wichita,” Lucas said. “Did I ever tell you about the time I danced with a professional assassin in Wichita? No? Her name was Clara Rinker . . .”
* * *
—
LUCAS, WORKING OUT OF MINNEAPOLIS, but without a lot to do, and Knight, working out of Dallas, had hooked up to look into the murder of a Jesús Rojas Molina.
Molina, at the time of his death, was in the Federal Witness Protection Program, which was run by the U.S. Marshals Service. Both marshals now, Lucas and Knight had been chosen to look at the case because they both had histories in earlier lives as homicide investigators, Lucas in Minnesota, Knight in Houston.
Molina, the dead man, had ratted out his boss in a homegrown “cartel” that served the illegal drug needs of Birmingham, Alabama. After the boss was convicted and sent to prison forever, Molina was relocated to Wichita to keep him away from the boss’s relatives, who’d promised to disassemble him with a power drill and a straight razor.
He believed them, as did the Marshals Service. As a Witness Protection client, Molina got a crappy manufactured home on the south side of Wichita, and a five-year-old Corolla, and a greeter’s job at a Walmart Supercenter.
Not good enough for a man who liked rolling high.
A year after moving to Wichita, he was peddling cocaine to the town’s higher-end dope clientele, meaning those who were afraid of methamphetamine or didn’t like the way meth cut into their frontal lobes. He did that until Bobby Wise, whom he’d met as a fellow free enterprise enthusiast and whose wife Molina was screwing, put five shots from his .44 Magnum through Molina’s screen door and into his chest and neck.
One would have done the job. Then Wise would have had the other four to use on his wife, who had promptly turned him in for the murder. But he loved her, so he simply cried when the cops came to get him, and he told her he still loved her.
The Wichita cops seized the .44, matched the slugs, confronted him with the evidence, and got a confession. Lucas and Knight were the Marshals Service representatives to the investigation, making sure that Wise was the one and only killer: that he hadn’t been sent by the Alabama boss’s murderous wife or equally murderous children.
They’d interviewed both Wise and his wife, who’d been confused about the whole Witness Protection thing—they had no idea that Molina had been in it. They were convincing.
Lucas and Knight were moving on: nothing to see here.
* * *
—
THAT HAD BEEN THE STORY too frequently with Lucas in his two years as a marshal. He’d had a half dozen interesting cases, most resolved in a couple of weeks, along with a half dozen tracking cases that were still open and two cold cases that might never be resolved. Lucas had joined the Service specifically to work on difficult cases—and he’d found something he hadn’t expected.
The world was opening up to American criminals. The wars in the Middle East and the demand for American blue-collar workers in foreign jobs meant that the brighter crooks were disappearing into the confusion of war and irregular employment.
Others were crossing into western Canada, where the raucous oil sands industry provided income and obscure hideouts, as well as a familiar language. The disaster industry, helped by climate change, provided unregulated construction jobs and opportunities for scam artists in the Caribbean and Mexico.
In the U.S., even casual contact with the law often tripped up fugitives; when they went foreign, that didn’t happen.