Storm prey

21

LATE, DARK, SNOWING. Lucas kept the speed down, watching the nav screen, and Jenkins said from the backseat, "It should be right around here."

"Hope the guy hasn't left for work."

"He doesn't have to be there for three hours, so… might be out getting a drink," Shrake said from the passenger seat.

"Night like this?"

"Night like this tends to make me drink," Shrake said. "It's snowing so goddamn hard you can't see your own feet."

The car spoke up: "You have reached your destination. "

The house was a dark tuck-under that Lucas thought might be red in daylight, when it wasn't snowing. He pulled into the driveway and said, "Wait," and hopped out, with a flashlight from the storage bin under the armrest. He walked up to the house and shined it on the house number: 1530. He walked back and said, "The car's right, this is it." He killed the engine, and they climbed two short sets of stairs to the front door; five inches of snow on the ground, Lucas thought, and coming down at two inches an hour.

There were lights in the front window, above the garage, but nothing on the left side of the house. Lucas rang the doorbell, and knocked, and somebody came to the front window and looked out at the porch, and a minute later, a man with a short, neat Afro looked out and asked, "What?"

"Are you Dave Johnston?"

"Yeah? What happened?"

Lucas held up his ID. "We need to talk to you about your employees. We're with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. The people at your office said you'd be the guy to talk to."

The guy looked at them for a few more seconds, then unlatched the door and pushed it open. "Come in… who is it?"

Lucas, Shrake, and Jenkins all stepped into an entry hall, and the guy's wife, a heavyset woman with skeptical eyes, came and looked at them, her arms crossed nervously under her breasts.

"A guy named Cappy-that's all we know," Lucas said.

"What'd he do?"

"We need to talk to him about several murders, and attempted murders. If you've seen the stories on television about the attack at the hospital this afternoon-"

"That was Cappy? Ho, shit," Johnston said. "I knew he was one crazy cracker."

"So-you know his last name, anything about him?"

"Caprice M. Garner," Johnston said. "He came in from California, rides a big expensive BMW That's about it. He doesn't talk much to anybody. Comes in, does the job, goes away."

Shrake said, "Garner. G-A-R-N-E-R."

Johnston bobbed his head: "Yup. Caprice, like the car."

Shrake said, "I'll be in the truck," and left.

"Hard worker?" Lucas asked.

"Does the job. Doesn't bitch about it, doesn't seem happy about it. Just does it."

"What else?" Lucas asked. "You know where he lives? We're really kind of hurting here. The guy doesn't leave much of a trail."

"I think, but I'm not sure, that I heard that he had a room somewhere, in a house," Johnston said. "Not like an apartment, but just in a house."

"You don't know where?"

"Got no idea. I don't know who'd know, either-he doesn't hang with anybody at work."

"You got a phone number for him?"

"You could check with the office, but I bet they don't. When he first took the job, he was living in a motel. No phone, and, you know, a motel address. He moved later, when he started getting paid, and I told him a couple times that he ought to update his file, but I don't think he did."

"And he's got no particular friends."

"Not that I know of," Johnston said.

They kicked it around for another minute, getting nowhere, then Shrake came back in and said, "The duty officer hooked up with California. They've got a current driver's license file for a Caprice M. Garner. They've also got a note in the file that his whereabouts should be reported to Bakersfield PD intelligence."

"Wonder what that's about?" Lucas asked.

"Don't know. Duty officer is getting the ID photo. We'll have it in ten minutes."

"Hey," Johnston said, "that reminds me. I do know one more thing about Cappy. He's got a credit card."

Jenkins said, "Yeah?"

"Yeah. I saw him buying gas once, with a card. You reminded me when you said that thing about the ID, because the girl at the counter asked for an ID."

"You know what kind of card?" Lucas asked.

"Well, it was at a SuperAmerica, and he hadn't been here long, and I don't think they've got SuperAmericas in California, so… I guess it was a Visa. And it oughta have a billing address."

"That's good," Lucas said. "Can you give me one more thing? Anything?"

Johnston scratched his chin, then asked, "Can I make a call? I know a guy who might know more than me."

"He won't call Cappy, will he?"

"Not if I tell him not to-he's not one of Cappy's good friends, but he works around him a lot."

"Go ahead."

Johnston made the call, talked to a guy named Roger Denton, described the situation, and then said, "You don't, huh. Well, that's better than nothing. Anything else you can think of?… Call me back if you do."

He hung up and said, "He thinks Cappy's got a place somewhere, St. Paul Park, Cottage Grove area. But he wouldn't swear to it."

They thanked Johnston, Lucas gave him a card with his cell-phone number on it, told him to keep his mouth shut, and headed back to the truck. Lucas gave the keys to Shrake and said, "If you break it, you buy it."

Sitting in the passenger seat, he called the duty officer and got phone numbers for Bakersfield, and got the duty guy working on the Visa card. The Bakersfield desk officer referred him to a detective named J.J. Ball, and said Ball would call him back. Ball did, a couple of minutes later, and Lucas identified himself and said, "You've got a note on the driver's license file of a Caprice M. Garner, who calls himself Cappy."

"Not me," Ball said. "I never heard of the guy. Let me check with a couple other guys, see if anybody knows him." BALL CLICKED OFF, and Lucas called Virgil. "Anything?"

"Your wife is tipsy. I'm thinking about taking advantage of her."

"You wouldn't survive," Lucas said. "She's a bear when she gets loaded."

"Yeah, well. I'd take care when you get home, then," Virgil said. "Because she is getting loose."

"That's okay," Lucas said. "It'll make the corn grow."

"What?"

"That's always what you say when the Weather is fucked up."

Silence. Then, "I'll pretend I didn't hear that. See you at your place, if I can get her loaded into my truck." LUCAS SMILED and hung up, and Shrake asked, "Where're we going?"

"Let's head back to my place. We can wait awhile, see if anything develops. If not, we'll wait until morning."

"If the guy got out of the hospital, and he's running, and hurt, he won't get far tonight," Jenkins said. "This is awful…"

The whole world was white, and the streets were nearly empty. They found an entrance to I-35 North, took it, and plowed along the freeway at thirty miles an hour, through most of St. Paul, then west on I-94, following a snowplow.

They'd just turned back toward Lucas's place when he took a call from Bakersfield. "Al James. I work Intel with J.J. He said you're asking about a Caprice Garner."

"That's right. We think he may be involved in a number of homicides."

"That's why we want to keep an eye on him. We've had guys from the biker gangs here tell us that Garner might have killed some people," James said. "They've had some guys disappear after they had dealings with him. We don't have anything solid, except some people have definitely dropped off the radar."

Lucas filled him in on the trouble in the Twin Cities, and James said, "That'd fit with the rumors out here. I can make a couple calls, see if I can find somebody still in touch with him. Probably won't be able to get back to you until tomorrow."

"Okay. If he's running, he may be coming back your way," Lucas said. "Keep it in mind."

"I'd prefer to have you hang on to him," James said.

Lucas clicked off, told Jenkins and Shrake what James had said, and Jenkins said, "Building a file." THEY WERE HEADING south on Cretin Avenue when the duty officer called. "I've got a mailing address for a Caprice Garner in St. Paul Park."

"That's good, that's what we've got," Lucas said.

The duty officer said, "I'm looking at the address on the Google Maps Satellite, and it's a house."

"We heard that he had a room in a house," Lucas said. "And how many Caprice Garners can there be? We gotta get some people together and take a look at it. Get the SWAT guys out of bed."

Shrake asked, "You gonna call Marcy?"

"Yeah," Lucas said. "Later." THEY WERE six BLOCKS from Lucas's house, so they went on, found Virgil's truck in the driveway, and Virgil in the kitchen. "Weather's upstairs," he said. "She's tired, drunk, going to bed."

"We got a name and address," Lucas said.

"Terrific. I'm coming," Virgil said.

"Nope, bullshit. We need somebody here."

"I'm going," Shrake said. "I'm SWAT."

"So am I," said Jenkins. "No way I'm sitting on my ass for this one."

Virgil wanted to get some St. Paul cops to come sit, but Lucas shook his head: "I trust you. Also, what would happen if Weather or the kids woke up and there were a bunch of strangers in the place?"

"Goddamnit…"

They argued off and on for another ten minutes, with Lucas, Shrake, and Jenkins eating microwave pizza. Lucas snuck into the bedroom and got a set of long underwear; Weather was sound asleep and didn't stir.

He snuck back out, down to the basement, got hunting boots, slacks, a wool sweater, parka, and ski gloves. From his gun safe, a twelve-gauge semiauto Beretta shotgun, with two four-shot magazines loaded with four-O buckshot.

He changed, clumped up the stairs with the gun case in one hand and his work clothes in the other, and Shrake said, "Goin' huntin'."

Virgil said, "Goddamnit, Lucas…"

Lucas said, "Stay, boy."