John Sandford - Broken Prey

“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.