Storm prey

8

LUCAS, MARCY, and the others circled through the neighborhood, on foot and by car, looking for Joe Mack, confused for a few minutes about exactly which town they were in. They finally settled on Mendota Heights and they got a couple of Mendota Heights cars out, but there were only a half-dozen cops on duty. The chief, whose name was Mark Grace, was a little pissed about the ruckus, until Lucas explained that they'd thought it'd be a routine interview.

"We were putting some pressure on the guy. We didn't think he'd do anything that stupid," Lucas said. It sounded lame in his own ears. "We sorta fucked up, but not really."

"Yeah, yeah," Grace said. "I guess it happens. The question is, is he holed up in somebody's house?"

"We don't know," Marcy said. "He got lost in those houses back there, and he could have gone anywhere."

"But not too far-he didn't have a coat," Lucas said.

"You look for tracks?"

"Yeah, but there are a lot of tracks. When we lost sight of him-"

"Guess we start knocking on doors," Grace said.

"Problem is, half the people in town are at work," one of the other Mendota cops said. "If he's got a gun on somebody, and nobody answers the door, how're we gonna know he's inside?"

Everybody looked at Lucas, who said, "You know what? We won't. So let's not do that. Could we just get a couple of your cars roaming around the streets? Put some pressure on him and let him run. He'll run sooner or later. He's not smart enough not to."

They argued about that for a while-the chief pointed out that somebody might be held hostage, and if they knocked on doors, they'd at least eliminate places where they knew he wasn't-but finally agreed that cruising was the best option, until something better came along. They were still talking about it when Lucas got a call from the BCA duty officer.

"You got a guy name of Lyle Mack calling you about his brother, who he says you're chasing."

Lucas took the call, and Lyle Mack said, "I got a call from Joe. He said you guys scared the shit out of him and he ran away."

"Where is he?" Lucas asked.

"I don't know. Someplace around here," Lyle Mack said. "He said he ran until he couldn't run anymore and then he went down to a shopping center where he saw a cab letting a guy out, and got a ride downtown. He said he bought a coat at Macy's, and he's leaving town."

"Don't lie to me, man. We're past that," Lucas said.

"Hey-I'm not," Lyle Mack said. "I'm telling you what he said. He said he ran for it because you accused him of sticking up the hospital, which he didn't, and you're trying to frame him, and he's heading out. He said hasta la vista, and he's gone."

"How is he gone? We saw him selling his van this morning."

"Yeah, and he's got a pocket full of cash from it, and Joe Mack's got friends," Lyle Mack said. "I told him I was gonna call you, because there was no point of both of us getting in the shit. He said 'go ahead."'

"Where are you?" Lucas said. "We're coming to see you."

"I'm on my way to the bar. I'll be there in five minutes."

Lucas got off the phone and told the chief that it'd be good to keep a car or two roaming around, but that he believed Joe Mack was gone. SHRAKE AND THE BACKUP COPS went to Joe Mack's address, while Marcy and Lucas waited at the bar for Lyle Mack. While they waited, they pushed on Honey Bee.

"When you came back there, you said to Joe Mack, 'They were our friends,' or something like that," Lucas said to her. "It sounds like you thought Joe had something to do with them being dead."

Honey Bee had had a little time to think about it, and she said, "No, I don't think Joe… Listen, they were friends of mine. They were friends of Joe and Lyle. They came here every night, and when they had the money, they were good tippers. Good guys. I couldn't believe those assholes didn't tell me they were dead. Like they were nobodies. Like they didn't care, it was like a bigger deal to pay the Budweiser guy."

"So why'd he run?" Marcy asked.

"I don't know-I don't know what you guys said to him. You must've scared him," she said. "Joe's a good guy, but he's not smart. Lyle's always taken care of him. I think you must've said something that panicked him."

"We told him we thought he helped rob the hospital," Lucas said.

Honey Bee flipped her hands in the air. "Well, that would have done it. Listen, the one thing Joe knows for sure is that cops frame people. He says he was framed twice, already."

She'd thought about it, but she overdramatized her answers, giving them the odor of lies. Lucas smelled it, and so did Marcy.

Lucas said, "As far as we know, there were no women involved in the robbery at the hospital. If you know something about that, and you're lying to us, you could go to jail as an accessory after the fact to a triple murder. That's thirty years, Honey Bee, and I'm not fooling around. This is a bad thing."

"I'm not lying," she said, with her best earnest, honest face. But she was.

Quick test: Lucas asked, "When did Joe get the haircut and shave?"

She hadn't seen it coming, and she said, "Uh…" and she looked from one of them to the other, and finally went with the truth. "Couple days ago, I guess. Listen, I don't know why. He does that every once in a while." LYLE MACK came steaming through the door, looked at the three of them and said, "What happened? What happened? What'd you say to Joe? He's so scared he's peeing his pants. For Christ's sakes, Joe's a little retarded. What'd you tell him?"

Mack was scared. They all sat in the front of the bar, in the stink of the weenie machine, arguing about what Joe Mack was up to, and Lyle Mack insisted that his brother had nothing to do with any holdup. He rapped his knuckles on the table. "He doesn't do that shit. We got a good business here. And Joe Mack is not a violent guy. He doesn't like violence."

"Hey, we got his records," Marcy said.

"They don't tell the whole story."

"Oh, horseshit," Marcy said. "And we understand you're a branch of eBay."

"Hey. That's a lie. Anybody tell you that, send them to me. I'll set them straight."

"So where's he going?" Lucas asked. "Joe?"

Lyle Mack shook his head: "I don't know. LA, maybe. Mexico? He's a good mechanic, I suppose he could head up to Alaska or Canada."

"Has he got a passport?"

"Yup. He does. But he doesn't carry it. And if you've got cops over at his apartment, then he's not going to get it. But you know LA-if he wants to go to Mexico, he can. You can buy real passports on the street corner for a thousand bucks."

"What about Joe's haircut and shave?" Lucas asked. "You must have asked him what all that was about."

"I don't know what that was all about," Lyle Mack said. "Time for a change, I guess."

"Right." LUCAS TOOK a call bounced off the BCA office from Grace, the Mendota Heights chief of police.

He said, "We got a call from a preschool teacher. One of the kids' moms was supposed to pick her up two hours ago, and they haven't been able to find her. Doesn't answer her cell, nobody home. Supposed to be super-responsible… and her house is three blocks from Cherries. She was supposed to pick up her kid about ten minutes after Joe Mack ran, and the school is about five minutes away. Never called to say that she'd be late or had a problem. She would have been leaving the house just about the time he ran."

"Sonofagun," Lucas said. "You got somebody on the way to the house?"

"Yeah. The preschool lady is there, with the kid. They say there was no answer at the door, but the back door was open, so they went in. Nobody home. The minivan is gone. Crock-Pot is on. I mean, maybe it's nothing."

"Maybe the Pope's a Presbyterian," Lucas said. "I'm heading over there. You got the tags for the car?"

"Uh, we're getting that," Grace said.

"Call the duty guy at the BCA when you get them. I'll have him set up to put them out everywhere."

"You think he's got her?"

"I do." Lucas took down the woman's address and rang off and said to Lyle Mack, "Your brother may be in really deep shit. I'm telling you, man, if you know anything, you better cough it up. Or we're gonna hang you, I swear to God."

"Man…" THEY WERE out the door, and Lucas filled Marcy in on the possible kidnapping. Marcy said, "I'm going to get a warrant for a phone tap."

"Okay."

"Didn't have probable cause. Now we've got a lot of circumstantial, plus he's a runner, and we've got a possible kidnapping. And we know he calls his brother."

"So get it," Lucas said. "Problem is, every jerkwater on the planet has a disposable phone." ON THE WAY OVER, Lucas called the BCA duty officer and told him to expect the call from Grace; and Marcy got the wiretap going. Two cop cars were parked in front of the house, and Grace arrived as Lucas and Marcy were walking up the driveway.

The house was a modest, dirty-white ranch with a detached garage; the garage door was open. It was more like five blocks from Cherries, than three, but also made sense for a runner, Lucas thought. Joe Mack had threaded around houses to stay out of sight as long as possible, then made a long hard zig downhill to his left. THE TEACHER'S name was Marti Stasic. MacBride's daughter, four-year-old Stacy, a tiny black-haired girl with a smudge of tears under her eyes, held on to one of Stasic's index fingers.

Stasic said, "She was never late. Never. We had Brenda for two years, and now Stacy for almost two, and in all that time… never."

She said that she'd personally driven Stacy back home because she was afraid that "something had happened" to Jill MacBride. "I was almost afraid to come in the house."

Marcy asked, "Was the garage door open when you got here?"

"Yes, it was. That's… well, it looked to me like she left in a hurry, like she was running late to the school. So I called there before I called you, but she still hadn't shown up." She glanced down at Stacy: "I just hope… you know."

The other daughter was still in school, first grade. Grace said, "We'll get somebody over there when school gets out, if we haven't found her."

Stacy asked Lucas, "Where's my mom?"

"We're looking for her, honey," Lucas said, and he touched the top of her head with his fingertips, and felt the anger starting to build. To Stasic: "What about Mr. MacBride?"

"Jill and Frank are divorced. He has an apartment over in Minneapolis, I guess. I know he comes to see the kids pretty often," Stasic said.

Stacy said, "Where's Mom?" and she started to cry again.

Lucas said to Marcy, "Can you…"

Marcy nodded: "Right now," and she stepped away with her phone. To Stasic: "Frank MacBride? Do you know where he works?"

"He works for the federal government, but I don't know what he does. I really don't know him very well," Stasic said.

Marcy talked to somebody in Minneapolis, and finished by saying, "I want to hear back inside of ten minutes. I mean, like now."

Grace asked, "You need to check anything here? Inside?"

Lucas shook his head: "No-you guys have been through the house, right?"

"Top to bottom." He tipped his head and said, "C'mere."

Lucas followed Grace out the door and around the house. The snow was thin and hard, crunchy, with strips of frozen grass showing through. "Look." Grace pointed at a single line of footprints in the crusty snow, coming across the backyard from the house behind it.

"Okay," Lucas said. "Don't let anybody get near them: we'll want some photos, and some crime-scene guys. I'll make the call."

"Getting nasty," Grace said. LUCAS AND MARCY left, and as they were going, they both turned back to look at the kid, and then walked away. "If Joe Mack did anything to that little girl's mom, I'll kill him," Lucas said. He was not joking. He said, "Keep that under your hat."

Marcy said, "Listen, it wasn't us. We were talking to him, had him right there, and he runs. That's crazy. He just outran us. It happens. It's like… I don't know what it's like."

"Ah, man," Lucas said. "I was just thinking that. How many people you got? How many can we put on it?"

They ran through the resources, and Marcy asked, "What about Lyle Mack? No way his brother was in this deep and Lyle didn't know about it. I got the feeling he's the brains behind the operation, whatever brains there are."

"I don't want to mess with Lyle at this point," Lucas said. "I want him sneaking around. Why don't we get your guy, and Martin, and put them on Lyle? See where he goes and who he talks to. At least for the rest of the day."

She nodded: "Let's do that. What else?"

"Well, I'm gonna stop downtown at Macy's and see if anybody who looks like Joe Mack bought a coat. Get a guy calling around to the cab companies to see if anybody picked him up. Get the highway patrol and all the local agencies looking for MacBride's van. There's a chance we'll need some DNA, so we get a warrant for Joe Mack's apartment, or wherever, and get what we can, and start processing it. See if we can find anything from the hospital robbery."

"That works," she said.

They rode along in silence for a while, and then Lucas said, "The longer we go without hearing from MacBride, the more likely it is that he killed her. Goddamnit. Goddamnit." BARAKAT KNEW he had to stay down, at least for a while. He'd nearly killed himself the night before with the orgy of cocaine, to say nothing of the McDonald's meal afterward. One of the other docs asked him if he was ill, when he came in, and he mentioned the burgers. "All I wanted was a falafel," he said, with a sickly grin.

His body felt as though somebody had beaten him with a broomstick. He felt old, creaky in the joints, and like there might be something wrong with his heart rhythm. When he got up in the morning, he'd taken a couple of quick snorts, and then resolutely put the rest of the coke back in the shoe.

He got to the hospital an hour before his shift began, went to the reference library, got an open computer, went to the Internet and began searching for Weather Karkinnen's home address.

He got a hundred and twelve hits on Google, and all but a handful of them referred to Weather; Karkinnen was not a common name. He crunched through the listings: papers, reports, civic honors. And way, deep down, from years back, a report of a shoot-out at Hennepin General Hospital, Karkinnen taken hostage by members of the Seed, freed with a single shot by a sniper.

Barakat recoiled. How could that be? The Seed? The same gang? He looked for other stories about the shoot-out. Never found an address, but found a reference to her husband, who'd set himself up as bait for the sniper in the hospital. A police officer?

He switched his search to "Lucas Davenport" and got more than four thousand hits. He read through the length of Davenport's career: the man was a killer, and controversial, but somehow had climbed into an influential post with the state police.

They were hunting the wife of a state police investigator… and a killer.

He was still working through the files when Lyle Mack called. He answered on the way to the library door, and in the hallway, hissed, "Are you insane? You can't call me-"

"I'm on a safe phone, I'm in my garage. We've got big problems. The cops are all over us, and that dumb shit brother of mine ran. They don't know anything, I don't think, but he kidnapped a woman when he was on the run."

"Kidnapped… Kidnapped?"

"He was scared and he was running, and the cops don't know he took her. At least, they can't prove it."

"What do you mean, can't prove it? She'll tell them." Silence from Lyle Mack, and Barakat caught on: "Oh, no, no. Oh…"

"Listen. We got one chance," Lyle Mack said. "We've got to nail down that woman doctor. We're looking for information…"

"I'll give you some information," Barakat said. "She's the wife of a state police officer. If we touch her, they'll never give up. Never give up."

There was another long moment of silence, and then Lyle Mack said, "We don't have any choice at this point. Do you have her address?"

"No, but I didn't look for Davenport-that might be her married name," Barakat said.

More silence, then, "You're not joking with me."

Barakat: "Of course I'm not joking, you idiot. Why would I joke? This whole insane program-"

"Davenport is one of the investigators on the case," Lyle Mack said. "He was here. I just talked to him."

Barakat's jaw flapped, but no sound came out, until he managed, "Did you know? The Seed and Davenport?"

"What are you talking about?"

"The Seed took Weather Karkinnen hostage, trying to assassinate Davenport. He had your man shot by a sniper. They killed… the police killed… five or six Seed members."

"That was him?"

"Yes. That was him. Go to the Internet, it's all there."

"Ah, man. Listen: You gotta get a clean cell phone. Buy one at a Wal-Mart, with cash. Call me at this number… We need that address."

"You don't need that address. They come here in a convoy. She has bodyguards. They must be bringing her from home. You're going to assassinate a half-dozen police officers now? You're going to invade her house and shoot it out with men who have machine guns?"

Another space, then, "No. I guess not."

"I have some advice for you, my fat friend. If something were to happen to your brother, then it would all be done. Would it not?"

"He's my brother," Lyle Mack said.

Barakat sensed equivocation. "If your brother kidnapped somebody, then he is going to prison for a long time. A living death, anyway. Be better, not to be kept in a rat cage for the rest of your life."

"I'm gonna get him to Mexico," Lyle Mack said. Again, Barakat thought he sensed a tentativeness.

"If you just-"

"I'm not going to talk about it. Take down this number…" Barakat took down the number for Mack's clean phone. Mack added, "Get yourself a clean phone. Use a fake name and address. They won't ask for an ID. And if we can't get at Weather what's-her-name at home, then we'll have to do it at the hospital. Watch her."

And he was gone. Two FLOORS DOWN, Weather was working on a cancer patient, a quick job transferring skin from buttocks to arm to cover a wound created by the removal of a lesion from a blood vessel. She was humming along with Shostakovich's Jazz Suite #2, thinking of nothing much more than getting a nice suture line, when Maret pushed backward through the OR door, holding a mask to his face.

"What's up?" Weather asked.

"We've heard from Spacy, and he said that we should probably push through the operation tomorrow. He needs to get Sara isolated so he can work on her heart. They're evaluating her for a possible op within a few days after we finish. A week, maybe."

"Okay." She'd been expecting something like this. Juggling the requirements of both children had become increasingly difficult. "I can be here anytime."

"There's no point in starting this evening-too many people scattered around. But we are tentatively on for seven o'clock tomorrow."

"I'll be here."

He left, and one of the nurses asked if she'd heard any more about the killer who'd kicked the pharmacist to death.

"Nothing more. My husband is out chasing him today. I should get an earful when I get home."

"How can that happen in a hospital?" the nurse asked. She was a young blond woman, three years out of school.

"All kinds of weird and awful things happen in hospitals," Weather said. "Now listen to the nice music, and let me finish this arm." BARAKAT WANDERED onto the surgical floor, nodded at a nurse at the monitoring station. "I've been trying to watch the separation work as much as I can. Is it on for tomorrow?"

The nurse had recognized him as a doc, both from passing him in the hallways and from the ID clipped to his jacket. She'd had other inquiries, and never even thought about the question: "Yup. Seven o'clock. Get there early for a good seat."

"The whole thing is so cool, huh?"

They chatted for a couple of minutes; Barakat was tall, dark, handsome, and convivial. The nurse liked him for all of that. He patted her hand as he left: "Thanks for the info. Maybe I'll see you up there."

Nice guy, she thought. Definitely husband material. LUCAS LEFT MACY'S with a bag of short-sleeved golf shirts-January in Minnesota, how far away could summer really be?-and the information that the menswear department hadn't sold any coats at all that morning. By January, everybody in Minnesota already had one.