13
LUCAS WENT TO the Regions Hospital emergency room, where a doctor with warm soft fingers pushed his nose around, said the bleeding seemed to have stopped, and asked how Weather was doing in England.
“You know her?”
“I used to talk with her when I was doing my surgical rotation over at the university,” the doc said. “She’s got some amazing skills.”
“I’ve seen her work,” Lucas said.
The doc smiled at him and said, “I know. The famous tracheotomy. She used to tell us that if we really wanted to impress our boyfriends, we’d cut their throats.”
She smiled; but Lucas thought of Angela Larson and Adam Rice, and grimaced. The doc, whose hands had been on his face, said, “Ooo—did that hurt?”
“No—so what’s the diagnosis?”
She crossed her arms and looked at him with what might have been skepticism. “You got punched in the nose. It looks likes your poor nose has been through the routine before, I could feel some scar tissue on the bone . . .”
“Yeah, playing hockey . . . and one time . . . never mind.”
“This time, it’s only a crack, not a clean fracture. Best thing to do is to leave it. I’ll put a plastic protective cup on it and give you a prescription for some pain medication. You may need it to get to sleep.”
EVEN WITH THE PAIN MEDICATION, he couldn’t sleep; but because of the pain medication, his brain got foggy and he couldn’t think about the case, either. The protective cup drove him crazy, and at two A.M., he got up, pulled it off, and threw it away. He spent the rest of the night sitting in a leather club chair, semiupright, vacillating between slumber and stupor.
He did get a few hours: he last looked at the clock at five A.M. When Weather called at eight, he was asleep. The phone rang a second and a third time before he got to it; his back hurt from the unaccustomed position in the chair, and his face and neck hurt from Clanton’s punch.
He picked up the phone: “How are you?” she asked.
WHEN HE GOT OFF THE PHONE, he went into the bathroom and looked at his face. He had a bruise the size of a saucer, a stupendous black eye; rather, a purple eye, with stripes of crimson and yellow-gray.
“Jesus H. Christ,” he muttered.
He went back to his chair, closed his eyes. Another hour of unconsciousness, and the phone rang again. Sloan said, “I heard you got your nose busted.”
Lucas groaned and looked at the clock. Time to go. “Yeah. My whole goddamn head hurts. I gotta sleep sitting up.”
Sloan might have choked back a chuckle. “They splint it? Your nose?”
“Naw. They pushed it around a little and gave me some pills.”
“Got a shiner, huh?”
“You’re a ray of sunshine,” Lucas said. “How’s the disease?”
“I’m dying. Every hole in my body’s got junk running out of it.”
“I’d rather have the busted nose.”
“I’d have to think about it for a while . . .”
LUCAS FILLED HIM IN on the meth-lab bust. Sloan summed it up: “You got nothing but hit in the face.”
“No. I got something,” Lucas said seriously.
“Yeah?”
“This Clanton guy, the guy who knocked me on my ass. We were on the lawn after we busted him, and I was pushing him on Pope. He didn’t know who I was talking about. I was looking at his face when he figured it out—and, man, he couldn’t believe it. He called Pope a retard.”
“Mr. Politically Correct.”
“Hey—we’ve been fighting the same thing. We’ve got all these really smart professionals at St. John’s talking about Pope in a professional way. They’d never call him a retard. What they know about Pope is too complicated. But Clanton made it simple: he knew a retard when he saw one. And he’s right.”
“Huh.” Sloan knew what Lucas was saying. “You think we’re chasing the wrong guy.”
“We could be,” Lucas said.
“What about the DNA?”
“Oh, Pope was there, all right,” Lucas said. “He did it, some of it. But he’s not setting it up. Maybe he does the act, but somebody else does the directing. Somebody else has a car, somebody else has the money, somebody else does his shopping for him—Christ, the guy can barely feed himself. There’s gotta be somebody else.”
“We need to find this Mike West guy.”
“We need to find everybody who might ever have talked to Charlie Pope,” Lucas said. “We need to get back to St. John’s, talk to people.”
“Not me,” Sloan said. “I’m out of it for a while. I can barely f*ckin’ walk. I walk across the house, I get so dizzy I wanna puke.”
“Hey—I’m not saying you gotta do it yourself, but that’s what’s gotta be done. I’ve got to talk to Elle some more. She was right from the beginning—it’s not Charlie Pope.”
WHEN HE GOT OFF THE PHONE, Lucas went into the bathroom to look in the mirror again. His face hadn’t changed: it was still the color of an eggplant. The pain had changed: though it was duller than it had been, it had spread all through his skull, and he felt as though his front teeth might come out.
He couldn’t use the pain pills. They kicked his ass. Instead, he took two Aleves, got a drawing pad from the study, along with the all the paper and reports generated so far, and headed back to the chair.
He was trying to get comfortable when the phone rang again.
Sloan said, “Me again. You got me thinking.”
“Okay . . .”
“You say there’s gotta be another guy.”
“Yup.”
“Then where do the Big Three come in? We know they’re involved. Somehow. Who did they influence, Charlie Pope or this other guy?”
Lucas thought about it for a moment. A puzzle. “I dunno. We come back to Mike West again.”
“Or somebody like Mike West,” Sloan said. “I can’t believe that they made a robot out of Charlie Pope, and then he just went out and found some brains for himself. You know, a smart crazy guy to manage him.”
“Maybe . . . maybe it was somebody one of the Big Three knew before he went inside. Did any of those guys have accomplices? Did they work with anyone?”
“I don’t know. I can get Anderson to pull all those old records, if you think it’s worth doing.”
“It is. We don’t want to miss anything.”
“I’ll call him. Like, in ten minutes. Right now, I gotta get back to my toilet.”
LUCAS PUT HIS KNEES up and propped the drawing pad against it, stared at the blank page. Got on the phone again, called Shrake, the BCA muscle who’d gone after Mike West. Shrake picked up on the first ring.
“You get even a sniff of him?” Lucas asked.
“Not even a sniff.”
“What’s his history? Does he wander all over the country, or does he stay close?”
“He’s got family here, and they say he’s generally around somewhere,” Shrake said. “They do know he goes out west from time to time. Washington, Oregon, California.”
“Look, call Minneapolis and St. Paul, and all the burbs. Tell them we need to drag the streets—this is a big priority now. This is right there with finding Charlie Pope.”
IN THE SKETCHBOOK he wrote,
1. DNA
2. Kills in Minneapolis, Mankato
3. Prison in St. John’s
4. Positive visual ID in Rochester, positive phone ID
5. Mother in Austin, worked in area, seen in July
6. Worked Owatonna; meet somebody there?
7. Rice goes to Faribault bar
8. Pope told Ignace that he’ll kill somebody in the Boundary Waters . . .
How in the hell would somebody like Charlie Pope know anything about the Boundary Waters? Pope was a pickup guy, not a canoe guy. The second man again? He had to force himself to think or woman.
THE ALEVE WERE TAKING HOLD. He pushed himself out of the chair, found a Minnesota road map, and unfolded it. If you drew a cross made up of major highways south of the Twin Cities, he realized, you would encompass Charlie Pope’s world.
Pope had killed Angela Larson at the northern point of the cross, a couple of miles from I-35 in Minneapolis. He’d been living in Owatonna, which was right on I-35, halfway between Minneapolis and the Iowa border. That was the center point. And he’d grown up in Austin, Minnesota, just a few miles from the Iowa border and not far east of I-35. That was the southern point.
The east-west arm of the cross ran through Owatonna, with Rochester on the east, where he was seen making a phone call, and Mankato to the west, where he’d killed the Rices. All three towns were linked by Highway 14.
As a matter of fact, it was almost perfect. He drew a circle connecting the four outlying cities, with Owatonna in the middle. The circle together with the highways looked like the crosshairs on a rifle scope.
HE CARRIED THE MAP back upstairs to the sketchbook:
9. Must limit exposure; short drives?
10. Too dumb to act alone; must be second guy . . .
Lucas thought about (10) for a moment, then added,
. . . who knows the Big Three.
HE WENT INTO the bathroom and shaved; the warm water felt good, but his nose was still clogged with blood, and he could only breathe through one side. That f*ckin’ Clanton . . .
In the shower, he decided that Pope was in his circle. Not for sure, but 80 percent. Somewhere, in a rough circle maybe a hundred miles across. He tried to do the math with the water pounding on his back. Something like 7,800 square miles, he thought. Lots of rabbit holes in 7,800 square miles of corn and beans.
With the water pouring on his head, he thought, forlorn hope? And then he thought, beans?
HE GOT OUT OF the shower, toweled off, went back to the bedroom, and sorted through the case reports. When they’d talked to Ruffe Ignace after the call from Pope, Ignace said a couple of times that he’d taken down everything Pope said “verbatim.” He’d emphasized his own precision.
Lucas found the Ignace/Pope transcript in the report, and thumbed through it. According to the transcript, Pope had used the words forlorn hope. The words rattled around in Lucas’s brain because he’d seen them in a Richard Sharpe novel by Bernard Cornwell. In the novel, the words had referred to a group of men who volunteered to be the first to attack a breach in a city wall during a siege. The survivors got otherwise impossible promotions . . . but they were also unlikely to survive.
Lucas put on shorts and a T-shirt and went down to the study, opened his Oxford Encyclopedic English Dictionary. Forlorn hope meant, exactly, a “faint remaining hope” or a “desperate enterprise.”
He snapped the dictionary closed: Charlie Pope, the retard, had used the phrase precisely. And something else . . . He ran back up the stairs, still carrying the dictionary, and picked up Ignace’s transcript. Didn’t Pope say he’d thrown the baseball bat into a field of “whatever-it-is?”
Lucas found the line. Yes, he had. The whatever-it-is was beans.
Charlie Pope spent his entire life in a sea of soybeans, and he didn’t know what a soybean field looked like when he was standing next to it? Now that was stupid, something you might expect from Charlie Pope.
He went back over the transcript. The language was what he’d expect from Charlie Pope, except for the “forlorn hope.” And, come to think of it, Ruffe had him referring to a razor strop. Maybe he’d said strap and Ruffe had misspelled it.
Back to the dictionary: strop meant “a strip of leather for sharpening razors.” Huh. Again, the precision. He’d have to talk to Ruffe . . .
HE FINISHED DRESSING, picking out a good-looking Versace blue suit and tie, a subtle Hermès necktie, blue over-the-calf socks with small coffee-colored comets woven into them, and soft black Italian loafers. He looked at himself in a mirror, took a pair of sunglasses out of his pocket, and tried a smile.
F*ckin’ Jack Nicholson, he thought. Except taller and better-looking. He tried to whistle going out the door, but his face hurt when he pursed his lips.
RUFFE IGNACE TOOK two big phone calls.
The first was from Davenport. Ignace was sitting in the basement of Minneapolis’s scrofulous City Hall, reading about the New York Yankees—his team—when his phone rang.
Davenport: “You sure he said ‘forlorn hope’ and ‘razor strop’?”
“Hey. How many times do I explain the word verbatim to you?” Ignace asked. “That’s what he said.”
“But maybe he said strap, instead of strop.”
“Sounded like strop to me. I don’t even know what a strop is. It’s like a sharpening stone, right?”
“No, it’s more like a strap.”
“Strop, strap, what the f*ck are you talking about?”
THEN LATER, the second call.
Ignace was walking along Sixth Street, heading back toward the paper, playing Ruffe’s Radio: Thought I was a bum, shit, this jacket cost four hundred bucks. Wonder why they put the street cars right down the middle of the main street so they screw up traffic for the whole town? Look at that skinny chick, wonder if she’s bulimic? She looks bulimic, looks sour . . . wonder how much Macallister makes, can’t be two grand, can it? Maybe I oughta ask for another hundred, my review’s when, when was the last one? March? Gotawaytogo. . .
Like that. He was mumbling to himself, standing on a street corner, watching the WALK light when his cell phone rang. He fished it out of his pocket and slipped it open:
“Ignace.”
“Roo-Fay . . . it’s me.” The coarse whisper. No question.
“Mr. Pope? Is that you?” Ignace had a reporter’s notebook stuffed in his back pocket. He fished it out, walked sideways to the wall of the nearest building, and sat down on the sidewalk, the cell phone trapped between his right shoulder and ear. “How’d you get my number?”
“I called at the newspaper and told them I was a cop and it was an emergency and they gave me your cell phone. And I was telling the truth: it’s an emergency, all right.”
“What?”
Pope laughed. “I got her.”
Ignace didn’t make the connection for a second, and again said, “What?”
“I got her. The next one.”
Ignace started taking notes. “Who?”
“Carlita Peterson. I been watching her for three weeks. Got her in my car and I’m leaving right now, taking her up the thirty-five right into the deep woods. Know where’s this old empty cabin up there, you can camp out.”
“Ah, Jesus, man, you gotta stop. You gotta stop . . .”
“I ain’t gonna stop, Roo-Fay,” the whisperer said. “Tell you what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna spend a little time with her tonight, take the starch out of her. Then I’m gonna kick her out in the woods tomorrow, give her a one-minute head start—I won’t look, either, I won’t look which way she runs. Then I’m going out with my razor. Maybe she’ll get away.”
“Ah, Jesus . . .”
“My other woman drove me to it; I been walking around with a hard-on for three days, the way she talks, she just drives me to distraction. But this’ll fix it for a while. You know how, after you f*ck, you don’t have to f*ck again for a while? Well, after I take this next one, I won’t have to worry about taking my woman.”
“Ah, jeez . . .”
“Hey, don’t tell me it don’t give you a little tingle in the back of your balls, thinking about it.”
“Listen, Mr. Pope. Please. Let her go. C’mon, you gotta get help, please let her go. I’ll write whatever you want, I’ll write your whole story, whatever you want to say, if you just let her go . . .”
“Hey, f*ck you, Roo-Fay. Too late for all of that shit. But I’ll tell you what—you got the rest of today and all of tonight to find us. I won’t do her until tomorrow morning; but that’s as long as I’m gonna go. You tell that to the cops.”
Click.
IGNACE STARED DUMBFOUNDED at the phone for a moment, then pushed himself up, unconsciously brushed the seat of his pants, took a couple of walking steps, then broke into a run, running as hard as he could, arms pumping, notebook in one hand, cell phone in the other, down to the paper, buzzing all the way: Man, man-oh-man, Jesus, man.
CAROL STUCK HER HEAD in Lucas’s office and said, “If your nose doesn’t hurt too bad to talk, a guy named Rufus is on the telephone. He says he’s a reporter from the Star-Tribune and it’s urgent.”
Lucas picked up the phone: “Davenport.”
“He just called me,” Ignace blurted. “One minute ago. On my cell phone.”
“Ah, shit . . . ,” Lucas said.
“He said he took a woman whose name is Carlita Peterson, wait a minute, wait a minute, I got the number he was calling from . . .”
Lucas sat up and shouted at Carol, “We’re gonna need a phone number run . . . Get Dave, get Dave on the line . . .”
Ignace said, “You ready? Here it is . . .”
He recited the number and Lucas shouted it to Carol, who shouted back, “Dave’s running it . . .”
Lucas went back to the phone: “He said he’s already got this woman?”
“That’s what he said. He said he’s going to take her up north and f*ck with her for a while and then tomorrow morning he’s going to turn her loose and hunt her down with his razor.”
“You’re sure it was him?”
“Same guy as last time.”
Carol shouted, “Carlita Diaz Peterson, Northfield. It’s a cell phone. The address is coming up.”
Lucas yelled back, “Get the sheriff on the line. I think it’s Rice County, but it might be Dakota. Get somebody over to her house. Tell the phone guys I want to know the location of the cell phone when he called . . .”
BACK TO IGNACE, the phone: “Are you at your office?”
“Yes.”
“Stay there. I’ll be there soon as I can. I’ll need a typescript.”
“I’ll have it by the time you get here,” Ignace said. He suddenly left his a*shole persona and sounded like a worried human being: “Jesus, Davenport, he said he had her in his car, that he was already heading north.”
LUCAS BANGED OUT the number for the co-op office, talked to Ray Reese: “Pull your socks up. The Star-Trib reporter got another call from Charlie Pope; he says he’s taken a woman from Northfield and he’s in his car heading for the Boundary Waters. Pull the trigger on the network. Now.”
“Hang on.”
Ten seconds later, Reese was back: “We’re doing it. Anything else? You know where he’s starting from?”
“Gonna get that in a minute. Tell everybody that Pope says he already picked up the woman. Tell them that: that he says he’s got her, that if we miss him, she’s gonna die. Tell them to be careful.”
HE THREW THE PHONE back at the receiver and realized his hands were slippery with sweat: that didn’t happen often. Up and out of the office: Carol was on the phone. “Where’d it come from? Where’d it come from?”
She waved him off.
He walked out of the office, ten feet down the hall, and then back, anxious to move, grating, “Where’s it coming from?”
She was taking a note, then pulled the phone away from her ear: “It came from a cell in Burnsville.” Burnsville was a big suburb right on the south side of the metro area: Pope was less than fifteen miles from where Lucas was sitting.
“Damnit. If he’s heading north . . . He could be on either Thirty-five E or Thirty-five W . . .”
“Or city streets,” Carol offered.
“Yeah. Call Burnsville. Tell them that. Pull out everything.”
He went back to the map. If Pope was on either branch of I-35, he would just about be going through the downtown area of either Minneapolis or St. Paul. But the two areas were ten minutes apart, and he might also have gone either east or west on the I-494 loop.
Pope had called from precisely the place where they could get the least information on direction. But if he were going north, the possibilities narrowed down again once he got north of the Twin Cities. The most obvious route would be on I-35 north, but there were other major links going north.
If he was going north. He’d never gone north before.
Lucas thought of the bull’s-eye he’d drawn on the Minnesota map that morning. He went back to the phone, called Reese at the co-op office: “Ray, listen. He called from Burnsville. That means if he’s going north, he’s in the metro area, so move the search area north about as fast as he could be traveling. Then, when the network is set, I want you to call all of the major nodes in the south end. He may be jerking us around when he keeps saying that he’s going north. He didn’t leave his home ground with the others, and from what I’ve been able to tell, Pope doesn’t know anything about the Boundary Waters. So tell the people down south that he may be down there. Tell them that it’s really critical that they don’t ease off because they think he’s going north . . .”
“I can get that out in five minutes.”
“Do that.”
Carol stuck her head in the office: “Two calls—Northfield police and Ruffe Ignace, that reporter . . .”
“I want both of them. Give me Northfield first.”
HE PICKED UP his phone and a voice said, “Agent Davenport, this is Jim Goode down in Northfield. We’ve got a car at the Peterson house, and it doesn’t look good. She didn’t show up at work this morning. She’s a ceramics teacher at St. Olaf, and the guys looked in the window of her house and they saw some cut rope on the kitchen floor. They called that probable cause, went in, they say the house is empty, but there’s a smear of what looks like dried blood on the kitchen floor, not much, but a smear, and that cut rope.”
“Seal the place off,” Lucas said. “I’ll send down our crime-scene crew . . .”
“It’s sealed off now. I’m calling in all our guys, we’re gonna do the streets, and the sheriff is running the county.”
“Don’t quit on it—there’s a possibility that he’s still down there.”
“That cocksucker, if he’s killed Carlita Peterson, he’s a dead man,” Goode said.
“You know her?”
“Yes, a little bit. She seemed like a nice lady.”
“I’m coming down,” Lucas said. “I’ve got a guy to talk to first, I might be a couple of hours.”
IGNACE CAME UP: “Listen, instead of running over here, I got a transcript that I can cut and paste to Microsoft Word and ship it to you. You could have it in one minute.”
“Do that,” Lucas said. “I should have thought of it myself. Here’s the address . . .”
HE CHECKED THREE TIMES, five seconds apart, and then the document came rolling in. At the top: “This is verbatim.”
Lucas read down through the conversation between Pope and Ignace. Pope said they had until tomorrow morning. Some time, then. Not much, and he might be lying. Still, there was a chance.
He sent the document to the printer, then looked again at the language, searching for the kind of things he’d pulled out of the first call. Nothing struck him that seemed particularly important. Pope said he had the woman in his car, which implied a sedan or coupe, but not a pickup or an SUV. That eliminated about half the vehicles heading north . . . unless he was lying. Pope said he was “leaving.”
Leaving from Burnsville? Was that where he was hiding? A big town, a major suburb. Lots of people around.
Most likely, Lucas thought, Pope meant that he was leaving the area, not that he was leaving that very minute. Lucas was still mulling over the conversation when Carol came in: “Channel Three just called. They’ve heard about the network alert from their cops reporter. Everybody else will hear about it in the next ten minutes. What do you want me to do?”
“Tell them that we’ve got no comment at this time . . . Do they have Peterson’s name yet?”
“They didn’t say anything.”
Lucas stood up, picked up his sport coat. “Put them off. Tell them you can’t talk without an okay from me, and I’m somewhere in my car. You don’t know where.”
“So where will you be?”
“Northfield. I’ll be on the cell,” Lucas said.
“And you’re okay to drive?”
“Huh?”
“Your nose—your face. You don’t look so good.”
“Nah. I’m fine. Couple more Aleves, I’m good for the day.” He touched his nose, gave it a tentative push, and winced. For ten minutes there, he’d forgotten about it.
He stopped at the co-op center, three guys, three computers, and three telephones in a room the size of a closet. Lucas said, “Probably a sedan or coupe. White, maybe an Olds.”
They all nodded, and he was out the door.
EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE, Carlita Peterson would get together both the energy and the angle to give the backseat a good thump. She was lying on her face, or had been, and it gave him a hard-on thinking about her back there, desperate, trying to kick, feeling the rope cut into her.
Knowing the power.
The Gods Down the Hall always said that was the best part. The killing and the pain were fine, but when you could look into their eyes, and know they were feeling the power . . .
He’d stash her for the rest of the day, take her out tonight, just like he’d told Ruffe that he would. And tomorrow morning . . . He could feel the need coming on him, stronger than ever. The Gods Down the Hall had talked to him about this, about the power and the need, so closely tied together, about the ecstasy that was coming . . .
ONE NIGHT WALKING BACK to Millie Lincoln’s town house, Mihovil said, “Is Sherrie a very close friend with you?”
“Well . . . yeah. I guess,” she said. “I mean, we don’t hang out so much now that you’re around, but we used to, you know. Hang out.”
“I think she watches us make love.”
“What?”
“The other night when I came over and we go back to the playroom and do it, and then we are resting, and I see a spot of light on the door. A minute later, I look back and it’s gone. No light. Then a couple of minutes later, I see the light again. Just a little spot. So then we are doing it again, and I see no light.”
“What was it?” Millie was intrigued.
“There is a very small hole in the door, like a nail hole, right under the bar that runs across the middle of it. When we are done, and you and Sherrie are in the kitchen, I look through the hole. All you can see is the bed, but you can see all of the bed. I think . . . when there is no light, she is watching. When you can see light, then her eye is not at the hole.”
Millie could feel herself going a flame pink. The witch. What did she see? What had they been doing the last time . . . ? Millie thought about it and, if anything, got a little pinker.
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Well, I am not sure. And you are friends. And I’m not sure she was watching. But I think she was.”
Now a surge of anger. “Goddamnit. We’re gonna have it out right now . . .” She stepped out a little faster.
“Wait, wait wait . . . ,” Mihovil said. “Maybe, let it go this night.”
“What?”
“What can it hurt? She watches, she doesn’t do anything. You can’t take pictures through the hole. She has no boyfriend, she just enjoys herself.”
“You sound like you liked it.”
“Well . . .” He shrugged and grinned. “Maybe I did like it . . .”
“God, Mihovil . . .” But, in fact, his comment produced a little thrill.
That night, when they were doing it, Millie kept an eye on the door—and that meant she had to keep her glasses on, because she couldn’t see the little spot without them. Would Sherrie be suspicious? Millie didn’t know, but she wanted to see if the little spot was there—and before they went in the bedroom, Mihovil had carefully turned on a living-room desk lamp that they’d calculated would provide the light.
And Millie saw the tiny light blink at her. This time, she got more than a little thrill: Mihovil had his head down between her thighs, and her head was propped on the pillow, her eyes cracked just enough to watch the light, and when the light blinked out—when Sherrie started watching—Millie felt a rush so intense that she wasn’t sure she could stand it.
She cried out once, and again, and felt her heels drumming on the mattress as Mihovil had said they would, when she really got into it, and then an orgasm rolled over her brain like a tsunami. She could remember yipping, a noise she’d never heard herself make before, and then nothing was anything except the feeling of Mihovil’s tongue in the middle of her existence, and her own self, going off . . .
14
LUCAS HAD TAKEN the truck to work, because the softer ride was easier on his broken nose. Now he stuck the flasher on the roof, punched the address of Carlita Peterson’s house into his dashboard navigation system, cut too fast through the traffic on I-35, and got clear of St. Paul.
When the traffic had thinned, he reached into the passenger foot well and fumbled through his briefcase, looking for Ignace’s transcript of the talk with Pope. Someplace, something in the document was not quite right. He wasn’t sure what it was: just a vibration.
He found the transcript, pinned the paper into the center of the steering wheel with his thumb, and read it again. No vibration this time. But he’d picked something up the first time he’d read it . . .
He got on the cell phone and called Sloan at home: “Pope called and said he’s picked up a woman named Carlita Peterson from Northfield. He says he’s taking her north.”
“Ah, no.” Cough. “What’d he say exactly?”
Lucas read the transcript, flicking his eyes between the paper and the traffic he was knifing through. Sloan said, “Find out . . . never mind. If the house listing was to a Carlita Peterson, that probably means she’s single or divorced and lives alone. That’s three single people. We know Rice went to bars looking for women, and Larson used to go into Chaps when she got off work. I bet he’s picking them up in bars or some kind of social activity . . .”
LUCAS THOUGHT ABOUT IT: Northfield was a college town just off I-35 and not far from Faribault, where Adam Rice had spent time at the Rockyard. If Lucas had been told that a sexual predator had been hanging out in Faribault and asked to guess where he would next attack, he might have guessed Northfield. A couple of thousand college girls would provide easy prey, and the college town’s mix of student and farm bars, cafés, and stores would provide plenty of camouflage through which to prowl.
“I’ll buy that,” Lucas said to Sloan. “Listen: Any chance that Larson was gay, or had gay contacts?”
“Nobody said anything. She had a boyfriend . . . What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking about the second man—or the second woman,” Lucas said. “What if she’s picking them up and Pope just does the killing? Nobody would ever see him in a bar. If she drives, nobody would ever see him in a car.”
“Yeah, but you could make the same argument if it’s a guy—he picks up women as a straight guy, or men as a gay.”
“But: nobody ever saw Larson hanging out with guys in Chaps,” Lucas said. “That paper you gave me said she mostly went in to chat with the bartender. And a woman would be more inclined to walk outside, or get in a car, with another woman, than with a man.”
“Let me call around,” Sloan said. “I’ll get some guys asking questions.”
“We’ve now got two people connected to colleges. Both the women. One a student, one a teacher.”
After a moment of thought, Sloan said, “I don’t see much in that.”
“Neither do I, but think about it,” Lucas said. And, almost as an afterthought, “How’re you feeling?”
“Better. I get these coughing jags that make me think I’m gonna bust a rib, but I don’t feel too bad. Maybe get out tomorrow . . .”
WHEN LUCAS RANG OFF, he realized that he’d become distracted, trying to read, talk on the phone, and drive all at once. He was speeding down a white line between two lanes, still running over a hundred. He guiltily moved back into the left lane; he hated to see other drivers on cell phones . . .
And goddamnit! What had he picked up in the transcript? Something had stuck in his mind like a gooey old song, and he couldn’t stop thinking about it. Nothing obvious, something subtle . . .
He held the Lexus at a hundred; any faster and the truck felt unstable. As it was, he made it into Northfield in a little more than half an hour from his office. Following the GPS map off I-35 down Highway 19, he buzzed past the Malt-O-Meal plant, across the bridge and a long block up to Division, right on Division and left on Seventh, and up a long rising hill until he saw, on the left, two cop cars outside a small blue-gray clapboard house that stood in a copse of maples.
A couple of cops were leaning against a car and turned to look at his truck as he pulled to the curb. He killed the engine, pulled the flasher and tossed it on the passenger seat, and walked up the drive. A dilapidated detached garage sat just behind the house, and a stack of decorative birch firewood was piled next to a side door.
“Davenport?” one of the cops asked.
“Yeah—nothing?”
The cop shook his head. “Nothing you don’t know about. A dab of blood, a piece of rope. It don’t look good.”
“Who all’s inside?”
“Only our lead investigator, Jim Goode. The chief’s down at the office, coordinating. If you’re going in, you should go in the back.”
LUCAS WALKED AROUND to the back of the house, climbed a short wooden stoop, and looked in through the screen door. Inside, a thin man in a plaid shirt and gray slacks was talking on a cell phone. He saw Lucas and said into the phone, “Just a minute,” and then, to Lucas, “Lucas Davenport?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m Jim Goode. If you hook the edge of the screen with your fingernails, you can pull the door open. The house is contaminated up to where I am.”
Lucas hooked the door open, carefully avoiding the door handle. He was in the kitchen, a small room with laminate cupboards and a narrow, U-shaped counter covered with plastic; a double porcelain sink, chipped and yellowed with age; and a floor of curling vinyl.
The walls were real plaster, and there were pots everywhere, several with flowers, geraniums and cut yellow roses. A small breakfast table, covered with an embroidered tablecloth, sat under a bright window, with two brilliant blue chairs, one on each side. The arrangement looked both tidy and lonely. The house probably dated to World War II, he thought, and had last been updated in the seventies.
THERE WAS A FOOT-LONG smear on the floor, the purple-black color of blood. Somebody had stepped in it and smeared it. Not too much blood, Lucas thought: less than he’d lost when he was hit in the nose. On the other side of the kitchen was a curl of yellow plastic rope, the kind used to tie down tarpaulins. Goode was saying into the cell phone, “I do think we have to get them farther out now. Uh-huh. At least that far. And Dakota has to push down this way . . . Okay. Maybe we could try the Highway Patrol . . . Uh-huh. Okay. Davenport’s here now, I’ll be back pretty quick.”
He rang off, put his hand out, and as Lucas shook it, he said, “We’ve got everybody we can find out on country roads. If he’s really going to hunt her down, and do it around here, he’s got to be moving around. We downloaded pictures of Pope and Peterson, Xeroxed off a few hundred of them, and we’ve got students from St. Olaf and Carleton going out in their cars, leafleting everything inside of twenty miles.”
“Hope nobody stumbles on Pope.”
“They’re out in groups of three, except where they’re putting up public posters in stores and phone poles, and then they’re in twos,” Goode said. “Everybody’s got cell phones.”
“Great,” Lucas said. And it was—somebody had been moving fast. “What about this place?”
Goode pointed: “The blood and the rope. That’s all we’ve got—but it really is blood, it isn’t chocolate syrup or anything. It’s pretty dry, but not completely, so he probably got her this morning.” He was talking quickly, nervously, the words tumbling out. “We checked the house to make sure there was nobody here. Other than the check, we’ve stayed out. We’re hoping your crime-scene crew . . .”
“They might find signs of Pope or a second person with him, but they won’t help us find Peterson,” Lucas said. “We gotta be careful in here, but I want to go through her personal records. Credit-card bills, that sort of thing. Did you see anything like that?”
“There’s a little office in the second bedroom.” Goode pointed down a hallway.
“Then that’s where I’ll be,” Lucas said. “What about Peterson? Single or divorced? Kids?”
“Divorced two years. No kids. Ex-husband’s a teacher at the high school.”
“Check him?”
“At the exact time that call got to your reporter up in Minneapolis, he was halfway through a physics class. It’s not a copycat.”
“How about Peterson? She good looking? Has she been out on the town?”
“Pretty average-looking, forty, a little heavy . . . Hang on. There’s a photograph.” He stepped over to a kitchen counter, pushed a piece of paper, and pointed at a snapshot. “We’re not touching it, because we thought maybe Pope shot it. Brought it with him. But that’s her.”
A woman with brown hair, a squarish chin held up a bit, direct dark eyes.
Goode continued as Lucas looked at the photo: “We don’t know if she’s been on the town. She’s been divorced two years, so she might have been looking around.”
“Okay. This is critical, because everybody that Pope’s killed has been single, and out on the town at least a little bit,” Lucas said. “It’s about the only thing we can find that all three had in common. Get some guys, talk to the neighbors, talk to the people at Carleton. I want to know who she hung out with, who her friends were. I want to talk to her ex. I want to do this as quick as you can get them here . . . Or not here, but someplace close by.”
“I’ll set something up,” Goode said. He took a calendar out of his pocket, took out a card, and scribbled on it. “My cell phone. You think of a single thing, call me, I’ll be right outside on the street, talking to neighbors.”
“Okay.”
Lucas turned away and took a step, and then Goode asked, “What are her chances?”
“Man . . . ,” Lucas shook his head. “If he’s telling the truth, and she’s still alive? About one in hundred, I’d say. We’re gonna have to take him while he’s moving her.”
GOODE LEFT, and Lucas went back to Peterson’s home office. Her desk was made of four file cabinets, two each on either side of a knee space, with a red-lacquered door spanning the knee space. A Macintosh laptop sat in the middle of the desk, with a cable leading to a small HP ink-jet printer on the left. A telephone sat next to the printer, along with a radio-CD player; a CD, showing a slender woman standing in the rain with an umbrella overhead—Jazz for a Rainy Afternoon—sat on top of the player. And there were pencils and ballpoints in an earthenware jar, a bottle of generic ibuprofen, a Rolodex, a box of Kleenex, a scratchpad, and a bunch of yellow legal pads.
The walls around the desk were crowded with cheap oak-look bookcases, six feet tall, the shelves jammed with books. More books and papers sat on top of the bookcases, and more paper was stacked on the floor.
And he could smell her. She had been in the room not too many hours earlier, wearing perfume, a subtle scent, just a hint of lilacs or violets or lilies of the valley—something woodland, wild, and light.
THE SCENT CAUGHT HIM by surprise. For a moment, he lay his forehead on the front edge of her desk, closed his eyes. A few seconds passed, and he sat up, pushed the “on” button on the Mac, and began going through the desk litter, starting with the scratchpad, the notebooks, and the Rolodex. Anything that might show a place, or a date, or an appointment.
He found phone numbers with a couple of first names, some appointment times noted with places that seemed to refer to student meetings. Could the second guy be a student? Seemed unlikely—what student would want to hang with Pope? But everything he found, he set aside.
When the computer was up, he went into the mail program and started reading down through the “in box,” the “deleted” and the “sent” listings. More names, with e-mail addresses; most of the e-mail was from students, a few from fellow faculty, one from a woman who was apparently a personal friend who wanted to know if she was going up to MOA Saturday. Mall of America? Two e-mails came from a guy with the initial Z who Lucas thought was probably Peterson’s ex-husband, concerning cuts from a jade tree. Most of the rest came from ceramics people scattered around the country. Receipts from Amazon, old travel reservations with Northwest, Hertz, and Holiday Inn, and miscellaneous life detritus made up the rest.
Nothing leaped out at him.
He pulled open the file cabinets: she was meticulous about finances, and one cabinet contained file folders of her American Express and Visa bills. Lucas went through them line by line, noting the few times she’d used her credit cards in what appeared to be restaurants. There weren’t many, and most were out of state.
He made notes on all of it and was still working when Goode called back.
“Marilyn Derech is a friend of hers,” Goode said. “She lives down the street, three houses down. We can use her family room to talk to people. I’ve got them coming here, we’ve got a half dozen coming so far. There are a couple here now . . .”
“I’ll come down. I’ve got some more names,” Lucas said. “Did you ever find her purse?”
“Uh . . . we tried not to track through the place much, but it seems like I saw a bag by the couch facing the TV in the front room.”
“Okay. Give me five minutes.”
He found the bag, pawed through it. Again, her scent hit him in the face. And Jesus, the old cliché about women’s handbags had never been wrong, he thought. She had everything in there but a fishing pole. Lots of paper: receipts from the gas station, notes from students, a withdrawal slip—forty dollars—from an ATM, bundled Kleenex, loose change, glasses, a glasses-cleaning cloth, a billfold with thirty-five dollars in the cash slot and some change in the clip section.
Car keys in the bottom of the bag. A rock; an ordinary black smooth basaltic stone, and he wasn’t the least bit mystified: Weather picked up that kind of stuff all the time. Lipstick. A ChapStick. Another ChapStick. More ibuprofen.
Nothing: he felt like throwing the bag through the f*ckin’ front window.
Turned around in the room. She’d just been here, and now, she was God knows where. His eye caught the clock on the stove in the kitchen, through the archway from the living room: as he glanced at it, the display changed, clicking off a minute.
He could feel the time trickling away.
HE GOT HIS NOTES and hurried outside; a cop was still leaning against the car, designated, he guessed, to keep an eye on the house. “If the phone rings in there . . .”
“It won’t—they’re being routed downtown.”
“Good. Where’s this place . . . ?”
The cop pointed farther up the street and across. “That white house. The one . . . There’s Jim.”
Lucas saw Goode step out on a porch and look down toward him. He went that way, fast.
“GODDAMN TIME,” he said to Goode as he hurried up. “We’ve got no time.”
“I know, I know . . . I got six people here.” Goode looked at his watch. “We sent a guy downtown to get her ex-husband, he’s been down at the station . . .”
“What’s his name?”
“Uh, shit—Zack? Zeke?”
Lucas nodded: “Okay.”
MARILYN DERECH WAS a plump blond woman who looked scared: wide-eyed and scared. Four other women and a plump man, who all looked scared, sat on the living-room couch and chairs, and two more kitchen chairs Derech had brought into the living room.
Lucas introduced himself, got their names: “We’re really in trouble here,” he said. “Does anybody know anything about her social life? Who she was seeing, where she went at night? Was she dating, did she go to bars?”
After a moment of silence, one of the women flipped up a hand. “We went to a restaurant up in the Cities, they have wine and music.” The woman had introduced herself as Carol Olson. She looked about forty, with medium-brown hair, a thin nose. “On Grand Avenue in St. Paul, it’s called BluesBerries.”
“BluesBerries—I know where that is,” Lucas said. “Did you talk to guys, did you . . .”
“We just went up and had some wine and listened to music, and then we had dinner . . . we didn’t really talk to anybody.”
“Only the one time.”
“I only went the one time, but I think she’d gone up a couple of times.” Then she stopped and put a hand to her lips. “Listen to me. I’m trying to protect her reputation. I don’t think she went up, I know she did. She knew the place pretty well, where the best parking was and everything. She liked it because she thought . . . it was interesting and safe and she wouldn’t see anybody from Northfield up there.”
“Why wouldn’t she want to see anybody from Northfield? She was divorced.”
“Yes, but Zach is around. He’s not dating anyone,” Olson said. “When they broke up, it was sort of her that did it. She wanted a little . . . more.”
“Adventure?” Lucas asked.
“More of something,” Olson said.
“I’m not being cute,” Lucas said. “Was she looking around? Was she hanging out? Was BluesBerries it, or was she hitting the bars? Did anybody ever hear of a place down in Faribault called the Rockyard?”
The guy, who had introduced himself as Tom Wells, knew about the Rockyard. “I live up the street, my business sells commercial sanitary supplies—toilet paper and paper towels and cleaning stuff . . . the Rockyard is one of our accounts. If you were going to pick one place where Carlita Peterson would never go, that’s it.”
“But would she know not to go there?”
“She’d know,” he said. “She wouldn’t go there.”
“If you took Carlita to a strange city and told her to find a place to eat, the first door she walked through would be the best restaurant in town,” said a woman named Ann Lasker.
“But maybe she’d go there for an adventure? To the Rockyard?’ ”
“Her adventures wouldn’t come in the form of a biker,” Wells said. “If she was looking for action, it’d maybe be a”—he looked around at the women—“what? A history professor who sailed?”
A couple of them nodded.
LUCAS WORKED THEM THROUGH: Where did she go, whom did she see? The answers were “not far, and not many, outside the school.”
Fifteen minutes in, Zachery Peterson arrived. He was a tall man, too thin, in a pale blue short-sleeved dress shirt, dark blue slacks, and brown thick-soled shoes. He wore tiny rimless spectacles and had a sparse, two-inch ponytail tied with a rubber band. He stood with his hands knotted in his pockets.
He hadn’t heard from his ex-wife in two weeks: “We talked about once a month,” he told Lucas, looking uncomfortable. “We hadn’t really settled everything from the divorce yet. It was going slow.”
“Did she mention any kind of relationship with anyone, any kind of relationship?” Lucas asked. “Did she have any new girlfriends? Anybody?”
They all shook their heads; and they went down his list of questions. Lucas was watching Peterson, caught him once wiping an eye, and wrote him off as a suspect.
“If he took her, he took her from the house, early. Did anyone see a car? Could you call all your neighbors and ask if anybody saw a strange car . . . ?”
GOING OUT OF THE HOUSE, he looked back and caught the kitchen clock in the Derech house: an hour had gone by. Another one. He was nowhere.
Sloan called: “I can’t find anyone who’ll tell me that Larson was gay, or ever had any gay contacts, or even knew a lesbian, for that matter.”
“Everybody knows a lesbian,” Lucas said. He was outside on Derech’s lawn, looking at the sun.
“Everybody but Larson.”
LUCAS WENT BACK to Peterson’s house, into the detached garage, pulled her car apart. Nothing to work with. Nothing. Back into the house, into the paper. Desperation pulling at his shirttails. Somebody called, “Agent Davenport?”
“Yeah . . .”
Back past the stove clock to the back door. A cop was there, in uniform. Another man stood in the backyard, an elderly man, cork shaped, with white-straw hair, wearing a cap that said TOP GUN. He had a small black, brown, and white dog on the end of a thin leash. The dog kept jumping straight up in the air. Lucas thought it might have been a Jack Russell terrier.
The cop said, “Mr. Grass lives around the block . . . well, around two blocks. He was walking Louie this morning and thinks he may have seen a guy around here that he’d never seen before.”
A pulse of hope.
Lucas stepped outside, trying to relax his face. “Mr. Grass? Your first name is . . .”
“Louie . . . just like the dog.” He frowned at Lucas: “What the hell happened to your face, son? You look like you went three rounds with a better boxer.”
“That’s about right,” Lucas said, touching the loop of bruised skin under his eye, wincing. “A guy plugged me right in the nose . . . Listen, tell me about this car.”
“Silver car . . .”
“Not white?”
“Mmm, looked silver. Could have been white, I guess. I saw him down at the bottom of the block going around the corner. I thought he might be lost because he was going slow.”
“No way you would have seen the plates . . .”
“I did see the plates, but I don’t know what the number was. It was Minnesota, though.”
“Could it have been an Oldsmobile?”
“I don’t know . . . Do they have an SUV?”
Lucas grimaced. “An SUV? It wasn’t a sedan?”
“Naw, it was an SUV,” Grass said. “I couldn’t tell you what make, they all look alike.” He picked up Lucas’s look of frustration and said, “I’m sorry.”
“The driver . . .”
Now Grass shook his head. “Didn’t see his face. I was going this way, he was going the other way, and he was looking away from me . . . but he came down this street, all right. Early. Before six o’clock. This goddamn dog has a bigger prostate than I do, I think. He starts jumping up and down, yapping, wants to get out and pee first thing.”
“Mr. Grass, if you can remember anything else . . . this is really critical . . .”
Grass looked sad; thought and shook his head. “I’m sorry, son. I saw this car go by, all by itself, early, slow, and it just stuck in my mind. But I didn’t pay it any real attention.”
“Think about it, will you?” Lucas asked. “Any little thing.”
They talked for another minute, then Lucas got on his phone and called the co-op: “Listen: we’ve got a second guy who says the car may be light, silver or possibly white. But he says it’s an SUV. Put that out: tell everybody not to rely on it, we’re still looking for a white Olds, but if anyone spots a silver or white SUV in a sensitive area, stop it.”
THE AFTERNOON SLOPED into evening. Lucas felt like he wanted to prop a couple of two-by-fours under the sun to keep it from going down. The crime-scene people arrived, confirmed most of what they already knew: there was blood on the kitchen floor. They also pointed out two small round black marks the size of dimes, on the vinyl floor. Since there were only two marks, there was a good chance they’d been made by the killer.
“Black-soled athletic shoes,” the crime-scene tech said. “Soft rubber. It rubs off easy, on vinyl. If she’d been wearing them, we’d probably see more of them. It’s almost impossible to keep from rubbing them off . . .”
“How many people in Minnesota wear black-soled athletic shoes?” Lucas asked.
“Lots,” the tech said. “Maybe hundreds of thousands.”
LUCAS WORKED THROUGH the rest of the files in Peterson’s office and learned a lot about Peterson, but nothing helpful. He went so far as to dump her entire e-mail list to the co-op, to have them run against car registrations, looking for a white GM car or a silver SUV.
Nothing.
Minnesota is a tall state, Lucas thought, going out into the yard, looking at the half dome of the sun as it sank behind the house next door, but even if he was going all the way north, he’d be there.
A great summer evening; there’d be a few car deaths and a few more cripplings, a couple of shootings—maybe—and somewhere a woman was waiting to be butchered.
He couldn’t stand it.
STANDING IN THE YARD, he talked to Sloan again—Sloan had gone downtown so he’d have access to a police computer—and to Elle, and even to Weather, whom he reached before she went to bed.
“You say Sloan is going psycho . . . you sound like you’re going psycho,” she said. “I don’t think it’s healthy for both of you to be crazy at the same time.”
“Sloan says he’s gonna quit. He sounds serious.” Silence, two seconds, five seconds. “You still there?”
“I was wondering what took him so long,” Weather said.
“Ah, Jesus, I’m trying to talk him out of it.”
“Don’t do that. Let him get out.”
“Gotta find this goddamn woman,” Lucas said.
“Yes. Do it.”
HE WENT DOWN to the Northfield police station, a red-brick riverside building shared by the cops and the fire department. Three cops were sitting in a conference room, two city guys and a sheriff’s deputy, Styrofoam cups scattered around, the smell of coffee and old pastry; a police radio burped in the background, a harsh underline to the hunt. The main dispatch center for the region was in Owatonna, well to the south, and the cops inside the station were just waiting for any call that needed a quick reaction. Not what you’d expect, Lucas thought, for a major search operation—but the fact that there was nobody in the office meant that everybody was on the road.
Stopping white cars. Stopping light-colored SUVs.
Stopping cars with single men in them. Stopping cars that looked funny; acted funny; might be out of place.
Glassing hillsides in the woods, as though they were hunting for deer, or elk.
Fighting the sundown.
AFTER DARK, the action slowed. Reports came in from the Boundary Waters. Nothing there.
Lots of cars stopped.
Lucas watched, waited, and talked. At eleven o’clock, tense but bored, tired of jumping every time one of the radios burped, he borrowed a yellow legal pad and began to copy the names of rock songs onto a piece of paper. One hundred and twenty songs, when he finished. He looked at the list, crossed off two songs, added one that Carol had suggested that morning—Robert Palmer’s “Bad Case of Loving You,” which Lucas thought was on pretty shaky grounds to make the top 100, if not in outright quicksand. Still, a good tune . . .
He stood up and said, “Jesus Christ, where is she?”
A half an hour later, he’d rolled and rerolled the paper with the rock list until it looked like a cheap yellow cigar. He finally stuffed it in his pants pocket and was about to go out for a Coke when a Goodhue County deputy was routed through to the dispatcher in Owatonna, and then back out to the countryside. He was breathing hard: “Guy . . . white truck I think, SUV, turned off when he saw my lights, running fast, dumped his lights, I think he cut across a field because I lost him, I don’t know which way he’s heading now, but he was heading west when I first saw him, I’m gonna go another mile or two south, see what I can see, cut my lights and creep back up the road, I think maybe he’s just pulled off, you got somebody west of here on Nineteen?”
“Yeah, we got a couple guys, I’ll get them headed that way.”
“Tell them to shut down the flashers, he saw mine and dodged . . . I’m not seeing anything . . .”
“Jesus Christ,” Lucas said, as the dispatcher talked to cops farther out. “Where is this, where is this . . . ?”
One of the cops poked a map; his finger touched a spot where Goodhue, Rice, and Dakota counties came together.
Then another guy came up and shouted, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, guy ran by me moving fast . . . high lights. He was doing eighty-eight, I think it’s the SUV, I’m turning. I’m on Nineteen, Jenny, get me some help up here . . .”
“C’mon,” Lucas shouted at the radio.
The deputy shouted, “Ah, shit, he’s gone, he’s killed his lights, I don’t know, shit, don’t know whether he went north, south, or straight ahead. Goddamn . . . I’m going north on Boyd, that was the first turn, but he maybe ditched somewhere, do we have anybody west on Nineteen? Or south, we need somebody south . . . Man, he was moving. Andy, if you’re still around Waterford, get over to Nineteen and head east. He may be coming at you, I don’t know what color the car was, his high lights were on, but I think it was an SUV . . . I clocked him at eighty-eight . . . He could be going south, do we have anybody south . . . ?”
Lucas listened for another few seconds, then asked, “Where is that?”
One of the cops jabbed a finger at a wall map. “Tommy was coming west on Highway Nineteen when he saw the guy, and the guy disappeared here. Tommy went north, Andy is coming in this way . . .”
Lucas looked at it, said, “Maybe he should have gone south here instead of north . . .” He was second-guessing the guy on the scene, and he had absolutely nothing to base it on, except his own case of nerves.
“Flip of the coin,” the cop said. “It’s all cut up over there, hills and farm plains. We—”
He shut up for a moment as the dispatcher said, “Manny, are you up?”
“Yeah, I’m moving, but I’m way over northwest of town.”
Lucas looked at the map for another minute, then said, “I’m going out there. South. I can be there in five minutes.”
“Big chunk of territory.”
“I’m doing nothing here,” he said. “And there’s nobody out there right now.”
HE FELT BETTER as soon as he got in the truck. He put the light on the roof and ripped south out of town, working with the navigation system on his truck. If the guy had been going west on 19 and turned south, and was trying to dodge cops by taking a twisty route out of trouble . . . Lucas manipulated the scale of the map up and down, running out to One Hundredth Street at high speed. There were few cars around—more pickups than anything—and few of them were moving fast, as far as Lucas could tell without radar. He punched the number of the Northfield center into his cell phone: “This is Davenport—any action?”
“Tommy’s coming south again. Andy hasn’t hit anything on Nineteen, he’s going to turn south on Kellogg, but the guy’s gotta be way south of that, if he went south. Most likely, he’s ditched in some woods off Nineteen.”
“I’m running with a single flasher on One Hundredth Street, I haven’t seen anything yet.”
“Have you crossed Kane?”
“About a minute ago.”
“Then you’re coming up on Goodhue. It’s gravel down there, I’d suggest you head south, then come back west on One Hundred Tenth. There are a bunch of little streets south of there on Kane.”
Lucas traced the suggested route on his nav system, thought it sounded reasonable. He cut south on Goodhue, spraying gravel.
The night was hazy, the lights of the surrounding small towns showing up as ghosts on the sky. He took Goodhue across some railroad tracks to One Hundred Tenth, cut west, hesitated at the next crossroad, and turned south again. He zigged back and forth, following the dusty gravel roads, narrow, no shoulders, houses flicking by in the night; some of the houses were old farmsteads, some looked like they’d been airlifted out of a St. Paul suburb. Most showed a yard light; and though the night was deadly dark, it was pierced all around by yard lights, mercury-vapor blue and sodium-vapor orange, and far away, the red-blinking lights of radio towers.
Hard-surface road now.
He flicked through the tiny town of Dennison, decided he was getting too far east—the vehicle they were hunting had been heading west—did a quick U-turn and whipped through Dennison again, past the Lutheran church, down a hill, a bank, a Conoco station, a car dealer, all with small lights alone in the night, empty . . .
His nav system said he was on Dennison Boulevard and then Rice County 31, as though it couldn’t make up its mind. The town lights were fading in his rearview mirror when he saw a car’s taillights flare ahead of him.
No headlights; just the taillights. He felt a pulse: somebody running?
“Get the motherf*cker,” he muttered to himself.
He was doing seventy. He shoved the accelerator to the floor, looked at his navigation system. Nothing going south; just a Lamb Avenue going north. He stabbed at the nav system’s scale button, moving it to the largest scale. A thin line came up, heading south, also identified as Lamb Avenue. Had to be a small road, a track. The car without lights, if it was a car without lights, had just turned into the hard countryside. Had he done it because he’d seen the roof light on Lucas’s truck?
Lucas grabbed the phone, just had time to punch up the Northfield center before he slid into the mouth of Lamb Avenue. “I got a guy running without lights. I still don’t see him. He’s heading south on Lamb off, shit, I think it’s Thirty-One or Dennison . . .”
“Got you, Lucas. We’ll call dispatch, get some guys down there. Right now they’re all up around Nineteen . . .”
Lucas punched off and tossed the phone on the passenger seat. He flashed past a bunch of derelict semitrailers, sitting in a farm field, and what looked like an impromptu junkyard. Two green spots came up on the right shoulder, and Lucas had time to pick up the red-striped cat in the weeds, hunting; up a hill, down another, the road narrow, the gravel pounding up under his wheel wells, rattling like hail.
Came up to the top of a hill and, in his high lights, saw the truck dust. He’d been going through it, but now he realized he could use it to track the man ahead of him. As long as the runner stayed on gravel, Lucas could follow the dust hanging in the still night air.
A culvert crossing flashed by . . . then a crossroads: which way, left, right, straight? He swung the truck in a circle, realizing that he was losing time, saw the dust hanging over the road to the right, went that way: the nav system said Karow Trail.
He was pushing the truck as hard as he dared, sliding through curves, flashing past farmhouses and mailboxes; caught in his lights a driveway with four cars parked in front of a metal shed. What if the guy in front of him pulled into a farmyard and just let him roll by? He’d never know . . .
The nav system was saving him. Without it, he might never have seen the turnoff to the even smaller James Trail. He slowed, went past the intersection, still on Karow, and suddenly was in clear air. He stopped, jammed the truck in reverse, backed up to James, and headed west. More dust, but losing great gouts of time. He needed to call in his location, but the road was so twisty, dark, narrow, that he couldn’t take his hands off the steering wheel.
Around a bend, around another bend, almost losing it . . . then there, the taillights flickered up ahead, once, twice, then a one-second shot of headlights . . .
Nothing on the nav system. A driveway? He was coming through a turn, going into another one, and off to the right, he could see vehicle lights of a bigger highway. He didn’t know which one, because the nav-system scale was too large.
Another flash of taillights, directly north of him, headed toward the bigger highway. He slowed, looking for a side road: and found what looked like a tractor turnoff into an oat field. He pulled into it and saw the tracks cutting across the oats. As his headlights swept the field, he saw another flicker of taillights, and then another . . .
Somebody out there, running across the open field, heading toward the highway.
Lucas went after him, bumping now, the truck almost uncontrollable, his speed dropping to twenty-five, to twenty, to fifteen . . .
BUT THERE!
Headlights flared ahead of him, then disappeared over the rim of a hill. The guy could no longer run without lights. And whoever it was was only two or three hundred yards ahead of him. Lucas flashed on the chase back at the Martin farmhouse. He didn’t dare to hope that it was Pope. The hope itself would jinx him. A meth distributor? There were dozens of labs south of the metro . . .
The truck bounced and jounced and struggled along the track, pain banging through his face, spreading from his broken nose: he ignored it, clenched his teeth. He saw movement to his left, quick, jerked his head that way. Gone: a cow?
“Fence,” he said aloud. He was running parallel to a fence and slightly downhill. Up ahead, his headlights were showing nothing but darkness. Hill coming up, he thought, and a few seconds later, he was over the lip of it.
Closer now, maybe two hundred yards ahead, he could again see the other vehicle’s headlights bouncing wildly over the countryside, heading down, down toward what looked like a crack in the earth. Still couldn’t make out anything of the car: just the light on the fields it was crossing.
Moving faster and faster: closing in. Moving faster.
“F*ckin’ hold on . . . ,” he said.
Another hill, another lip, even steeper, and the car disappeared again, only to suddenly reappear, bucking wildly, then suddenly heading uphill. The guy had made it to the far side of the valley but was only a hundred yards ahead, his taillights clear ovals now. Lucas groped for the cell phone with one hand, couldn’t find it on the passenger seat.
“Goddamnit.” The ride had thrown the phone on the floor, and he couldn’t see it.
Ahead, the other car slowed, made a sharp wiggle, then moved forward again, away from him, only seventy-five yards, less than the length of a football field.
Just a moment too late, Lucas saw the black line in his headlights. The crack in the earth, and he remembered how the other car had suddenly bucked so wildly. A creek?
He jabbed at the brake, dropped over a short, steep bank, and hit hard, water splashing on the windshield. He floored the accelerator, and the car bucked and hit something hard, got sideways. He wrenched the steering wheel back to the left, and hit the far bank of the creek with a heavy whack that stopped him dead. He tried to push up it, but he could feel wheels spinning in sand. He reversed, tried to get straight, hit the bank again, stopped. Backed up again, tried again, near panic now: he was losing him. How’d the other guy gotten out?
Stymied, he groped in the glove compartment, found a flashlight, got out of the truck into ankle-deep water, and looked at the situation. He was stopped dead in the middle of a small creek, a six-foot-wide trickle of water in a bed maybe thirty feet wide. Nothing but sand under his feet.
When he shined the light on the opposite bank, he picked out two narrow tracks, tractor tracks, going up the far side. He’d simply missed them, missed the alignment when he went into the creek.
He jumped back in the truck, backed it down, found the two small tracks in his headlights, and pushed up them. As the other car had, the truck bucked up and then he was on dry ground again: but he’d lost three or four minutes.
He continued up the hill, fast as he could. He saw the track disappear in front of him, remembered that the other car had wiggled up the hill, slowed, spotted the wiggle, and followed it up. A moment later, the track intersected with another highway, the highway where he’d seen headlights.
There were taillights in sight, both east and west: the nav system told him he was back on Dennison Boulevard.
Decide.
He looked both ways, remembered the cell phone. He found it under the front passenger seat, punched up the Northfield center.
Decide. He said, “Shit,” and turned west, accelerated.
“The guy took me across a field,” he told the Northfield cops. “I’m on Dennison, but I don’t know exactly where. Near James. I’m heading west . . .”
“We got guys on the way, but they’re east of you, we’ll vector them in there.”
He gave it everything the truck had, blowing by two pickups and a Toytota Corolla before coming back into the lights of Northfield.
“Shit. Shit.” Lucas pounded the steering wheel with the heels of his hands. Northfield was a big town, crowded with every kind of car. The guy was gone.
THEY DID HEAR from the driver, though.
At two-thirty, Lucas had just gotten back to the Northfield center when Ruffe Ignace called, freaked: “Pope just called again. He wouldn’t talk to me. He wants your cell-phone number. He didn’t say why. I lied and told him I didn’t have it but I might be able to get it. He said he would wait five minutes and then he was going to throw the phone in a ditch. You’ve got four minutes to decide.”
“Give him the number,” Lucas said.
LUCAS CALLED THE co-op center on one of the Northfield center’s phones and told them about the cell-phone call. “Find the cell,” he said. “He’s gonna call me. You got my number. He’s probably using Peterson’s phone again. Find the f*ckin’ cell. Find the f*ckin’ cell.”
AND THEN POPE CALLED.
“Agent Davenport,” he drawled. He spoke slowly, with the same whispery voice that Ignace had described. Lucas tried to penetrate it: husky, a middle tenor. Could it be a woman? “That was you that chased me through that crick, wasn’t it?”
Lucas was astonished. The question froze him, and he asked, inanely, “Where are you?”
“Out here in the woods where I always am. Miz Peterson is still okay. Well, she wouldn’t say that, I guess. I had me a little p-ssy before dinner. And after dinner. And for dessert. She’s right here. You want to talk to her?”
Not a woman. A woman wouldn’t talk like that—unless she were very, very manipulative. “Listen, man, you really need our help . . .” Lucas felt absolutely stupid as he said it.
“Nah. I’m doing okay. I thought you had me there for a minute, those first two cops, and then you. When I got loose I heard them talking about you on my scanner, said you almost wrecked your truck in that crick. I wondered what happened to you. I hit that sonbitch just right, I guess. Never saw it—nothing but luck.”
“Listen, Mr. Pope . . .”
“Didn’t call me no Mr. Pope when you had my ass in St. John’s. But listen, don’t you want to talk to Miz Peterson? She was in the back the whole time. Here . . . Miz Peterson. This is the law. Talk to him . . .”
There was the sound of flesh against flesh, as though somebody had been slapped, the tenor, “Talk to him, bitch,” and then a dry, ragged woman’s voice, “Help me . . .”
“That’s good enough,” Pope said in his whisper. “We gotta go.” And then: “Well, it’s been fun, but I gotta say good-bye, Agent Davenport.”
“You gotta . . .”
Click.
LUCAS WAS SCREAMING at the co-op center, and they came back: “The cell’s in Owatonna. It’s Peterson’s. He got around you and went straight south.”
“Get the goddamned people moving around there, get them moving . . .”
“They’re moving now, everything we’ve got.”
Five hours later, Lucas was on a dirt road west of Owatonna when he got a call from the Blue Earth County Sheriff’s Department. There were a couple of clicks and he was patched through: “Lucas, this is Gene Nordwall, I’m down south of Mankato, little west of Good Thunder.”
“Gene, you heard?”
“Yeah. We found her,” he said.
“You found her?” Lucas asked. “She’s alive?”