Storm prey

12

Weather was headed out to the car when her cell phone rang. Gabriel Maret: "Go back to bed. Sara's got problems again. I'll be down in the cafeteria about nine o'clock, maybe you could come by."

"Are you at the hospital now?"

"All night. They're cycling. Sometimes they're fine, and then they start to deteriorate. Blood pressure is a problem. I'm going to take a nap, and we can talk about what to do at the staff meeting."

"I'll see you at nine o'clock."

Lucas and Shrake were looking at her: "They put it off?" Lucas asked.

"The kids are in trouble. We're going to meet at nine. I'll tell you what, we're getting to the point where we'll have to go no matter what. They can't be hung up like this."

Weather went to their home office to work on correspondence, Lucas went back to bed, Shrake went out to drive around the block, and Virgil turned on the TV Nothing to do but wait… GABRIEL MARET looked busted. He sat at the cafeteria table with a cup of coffee, talked with Mark Lang, one of the neurosurgeons, and Geoff Perkins, a cardiologist, and when Weather and Virgil came in, he waved and pointed at a chair. Virgil peeled off, taking a chair where he could see the room. Weather sat next to Maret, and he said, "Still have the gunslinger, yes?"

She sighed and nodded. "Yes."

"He looks like a cowboy," Maret said, watching Virgil. "He's watching us, I think."

"Probably. He's a little obsessive," Weather said.

"With those boots and jeans, he would do very well with French women," Maret said. "Unless he's gay?"

"No. He's definitely not gay," Weather said. "He does disgustingly well with American women. He sometimes has Lucas writhing in jealousy."

"Ah, well. He will fall, sooner or later," Maret said.

"He's already fallen several times," Weather said. "So: are we going?"

Maret shook his head: "Maybe late this afternoon-I've asked everybody to be ready. Tomorrow morning is more likely. But Geoff is saying that the kids are in a tailspin. Is that the word? Tailspin?"

"That's right, but it's not good," Weather said. She looked at Perkins. "What's happening?"

He shrugged. "The operation is putting too much pressure on Sara's heart. To take the pressure off, we slow it down and drop the blood pressure. But that gets on Ellen's heart, too, and she's not handling it well."

"So what are we doing?" Weather asked.

"We're going to try a couple more things, try to balance out the chemistry, get back to stable," he said. "This afternoon's a possibility, but tomorrow's more likely. Still not a sure thing."

"We've got to wait it out," Maret said.

"But the trouble is not going away," Perkins said. "You might have to make a decision."

Maret knew what he meant: "No. I'm not going to lose Sara. We can pull it off."

A tear started in one of his eyes, and Weather thought, No way did this guy rob the pharmacy…

They talked for half an hour, going over and over the possibilities and probabilities, until it began to seem pointlessly obsessive: they knew what the options were. Maret finally tossed his plastic coffee cup at a wastebasket, bounced it in, and said, "I'm going to look at the kids again."

Weather went over to Virgil and said, "To reiterate, Gabe had nothing to do with anything, except helping the kids. You're doing no good, sitting there staring at him under your eyebrows."

"What next?" Virgil asked. "Back home?"

"There's a small chance we could go this afternoon, so I have to hang around. When will you get that list of French people?" Virgil looked at his watch. "Now, I guess. They should be open." "I'll come along," Weather said. "I'd like to look at the list."

Marcy showed up at the BCA with two cops named Franklin and Stone. Lucas and Franklin knuckle-tapped, old pals. Stone was new to detective rank, but had spent five years with the Minneapolis SWAT; he and Franklin had brought SWAT gear. Shrake and Jenkins were planning to ride together, in a BCA truck. Marcy rode with Lucas.

"We'll pick up the Washburn deputies in Shell Lake. The sheriff's coming along-Bill Stephaniak," Marcy said. "They're set to pull the warrants, but won't do it until the last minute, so word doesn't get around."

"They all set on a judge?"

"Stephaniak says the judge would sign a ham sandwich if you put it in front of him."

"Always nice to have one of those," Lucas said.

The trip to Wisconsin took two and a half hours, north up I-35 to Highway 70 through Rock Creek, across the St. Croix River to Grantsburg, Wisconsin, through Siren, to Spooner, and then to Shell Lake; a convoy. The snow wasn't deep, but had taken on a cold, gray midwinter edge, stark against the near-black evergreens and barren broadleaf trees. They filled the time catching up with each other's lives; and Lucas was pleased that she seemed happy with hers.

"The kid is just way more than I ever expected," she said. "I'm getting so I hate to go to work."

"How many years you got in?"

"Eighteen-I'm a long way from retirement. James says if I want to quit, I can. It's not like we need the salary."

"But what would you do? Is being a mom enough?"

"That's what I keep asking myself. Right now, it's yeah-it's enough. The question is, will it be enough in two years, when he goes to school?"

"And you don't want to get your ass shot before he grows up," Lucas said. "You want to be here to see that."

"Yeah." They looked out the windshield for a while, then she said, "But you're not exactly backing off, and you've got Sam."

"Might be different for a guy," Lucas said. "Work is… what we do. Like mom is what women do. Not to be a pig about it."

"I'll deny it if you ever tell anybody I said it," Marcy said, "but I know what you mean."

"In siren, Lucas said, "You can still see where the tornado came through."

An F3 tornado had ripped the town in 2001, a half-mile wide at points, with winds up to two hundred miles an hour.

"I have a friend from Georgia," Marcy said. "He was up here when it happened, saw some TV stuff about how the Siren warning siren didn't go off. He says, 'There was no sy-reen in sy-reen.'

" Coming into Spooner, Lucas said, "I've got to take it easy through here-the place is a speed trap. They already got me once."

Marcy got on the phone and called the Washburn sheriff. When she got off, she said, "They're walking the warrants up to the judge."

Shell Lake was five miles south of Spooner, and the Law Enforcement Center just off the highway. They collected Shrake, Jenkins, Franklin, and Stone in the parking lot, trailed inside, and hooked up with the sheriff, a bluff, former highway patrolman with a clipped gray mustache, pale green eyes, and a nonuniform rodeo belt buckle. "Dick'll be back in a minute with the warrants. I told the judge we'd have something coming up to him… You folks want coffee? We've got a Coke machine down the hall."

Stephaniak said that Ike Mack was working-the sheriff had sent one of his office workers down to the store to take a look. "I suggest I have one of my boys go along and serve him copies of the warrant, and ask him out to the house. We'll give ourselves about a fifteen-minute jump on him, so we can see what's what out there."

Marcy said, "Sounds good to me," and Lucas nodded.

Shrake asked, "Is Ike going to be a problem?"

"I don't think so. He's… tired. He's turned into an old guy. I think he mostly wants to be left alone. With his stolen bike parts, of course."

"But if Joe's out there…"

"That would be a whole 'nother problem. Though, I can't say I remember Joe as being all that violent. Not that I doubt these things you got going. But I never saw it in him."

"I can't think of another way our woman would have gotten strangled," Marcy said. "We'll know for sure tomorrow. We've got a rush DNA going."

"Well. People change. Maybe they get desperate," Stephaniak said. "Now. Look at this. I printed this out this morning, and as far as I know, it's up-to-date."

He pushed an eleven-by-fourteen photo across his desk, and the Minnesota cops clustered around: a satellite view of an isolated house sitting off a blacktopped road. The photo had been taken in late September, with the trees in full autumn colors.

In the center of the photo, they could see the roof of a house, surrounded by a farmyard, more dirt than grass. A woodlot bordered the west edge of the house's lot, with farm fields on the south and east, and the road on the north. Another building, probably a garage, stood on the west side of the house, with a narrow, silvery metallic roof extending out the back of it-probably a covered woodshed, or lean-to. Another, even smaller building stood on the south side of the house. An old chicken coop, or something like it, Lucas thought.

"Small place, nine acres. Two-story house, nothing much to look at. The garage there is good-sized-he uses it as a shop to work on his motorcycles. But it's not gonna take long to go through it. What you see is what there is."

"What we have to worry about is that Joe is laying up in there, and he's got a deer rifle and starts blowing holes in us," Shrake said. "So do we sneak up on him, or go in fast?"

"We send your two SWAT guys, with two of our SWAT guys, in through the woods." Stephaniak tapped the woodlot. "They check the garage. It's heated, so Joe could be in there. If he's not, they break through the side door-our guys have a crowbar-and get lined up at the front door. From there, it's only about thirty or forty feet over to the side door of the house. I'll call the house, and at the same time, they rush it. They'll be inside before Joe can get a gun… with any luck."

They worked through the plan for a couple of minutes, then another, older, deputy came in. The sheriff said, "Hey, Dick. You get 'em?"

The deputy nodded. "We're set."

Stephaniak said, "Let's rock."

The four SWAT guys armored up and took the BCA truck, which was unmarked and had Minnesota plates. The rest of the crew staged in the empty parking lot of a barbeque joint four miles from Mack's place.

Stephaniak had given radios to all five vehicles involved. Franklin called after a few minutes and told them that the roads were clear all the way out, and a few minutes later called to say that they'd left the truck and were about to make the approach to the back of the garage. "We've got a couple fences to cross, so we'll be ten minutes," he said.

They rolled out of the parking lot a couple of minutes later. Two miles down the road, Franklin called again: "We're at the back of the garage. No cars inside. Can't see anybody inside. Ron's at the door, we're taking the door out. Okay, we're inside. Nobody here. No loft, we can see the whole place… Make the call."

Stephaniak, riding in the lead SUV, made the call as they turned into Mack's driveway, and Lucas saw the SWAT guys rush the house, hit the door. A minute later, they were all out, on the snow, behind the trucks, and Franklin came out on the porch and waved.

"Nobody home," Marcy said, disappointed.

"Goddamnit, I hope he's not on his way to Mexico," Lucas said.

"Let's look at the phones, see who's calling him," Marcy said.

"Ike's on his way out," Stephaniak said. "My guy says he didn't seem surprised."

The house smelled like home-canning; like pickles and creamed corn and cigarette smoke. Like an old single guy living out in the woods. Shrake and Jenkins, with the Minneapolis cops, ran the search, moving quickly and efficiently through the house, from attic to basement. Marcy went for the phones: Mack used handsets that listed calling numbers, and she took them down in her notebook. As she wrote, she called to the other cops, "Nobody mention the phones to him. Nobody mention that we looked at them. Ignore them. We want him to use them."

Lucas asked, and she said, "Half-dozen calls from the Cities since the hospital. None of the numbers go to Lyle or Joe."

Lucas wandered through the house with his hands in his pockets, then out on the porch, to the garage. The garage had three overhead doors and was set up to handle two parking spaces and a motorcycle shop. There were pieces of three or four older Harleys around, and one complete frame, but without handlebars or wheels. Nothing of interest.

He checked the woodshed, supposed that something might have been concealed under the three or four face-cords of hardwood, but if so, it hadn't been concealed since the hospital robbery. Snow had been blown in from the sides and had crusted over the lower layers of wood. Not much way to fake that.

Farther back, a cop was looking into what had been a chicken house. He walked away, shook his head at Lucas, and said, "I'm going to walk the perimeter, see if there are any tracks heading back into the woods."

A cinder-block incinerator sat next to the chicken house, and Lucas went that way. There were fresh ashes, signs of burned garbage-orange peels, the odor of burned coffee grounds. Lucas looked around, got a short downed tree branch, and stirred through the debris.

Came up with a partially burned piece of black nylon fabric. Heavy, with a piece of charred strap across it. Like a nylon bag.

The robbers, Dorothy Baker had said, had come in with black bags; had dropped the bags on the floor before they'd taped up Baker and Peterson.

Lucas stirred a bit more, started finding more fragments. Stood up, walked back to the house: "Marcy, Bill…"

Marcy and the sheriff came over, and Lucas showed them the strap. "Looks like it came off a nylon bag. The ashes are fresh."

"Dorothy Baker…" Marcy began.

Lucas nodded, and said to Stephaniak, "The nurse who was in the pharmacy said the robbers brought big black nylon bags, or packs, to carry the drugs. There are more pieces out there in the ash. We need your crime-scene guy to go through it."

"It's suggestive," Stephaniak said. He meant, That doesn't prove much.

"It'll worry them," Lucas said. "If it's the bags, it'll help crank the pressure. And if we find there's more than one bag, then we'll know. The shit came through here. Ike's involved. That's always a help."

The sheriff nodded. "I'll get my boy on it."

A deputy said, "Ike's here."

Ike was a stout man, but hard fat, beer-belly fat, with a shiny red bald head and black-plastic-rimmed glasses on a full nose; with little yellow shark teeth under the nose, and water-green shark eyes. He was wearing a sixties army parka over a T-shirt. He was angry but was suppressing it: he'd dealt with the cops before.

Marcy held up her badge and said, "We're picking up evidence that your boys were here with the drugs. We're talking about murder, Ike. You're, what, sixty-five? We'll slam you in Stillwater for thirty years if you're in on it. So: where's Joe?"

"I ain't seen him." He put on a phony wild-eyed look, appealing to the cops. "I ain't seen him. He ain't been here. He knows better'n to draw the shit down on his old man."

Lucas said, "We're gonna get him, Ike. He's killed three or four people now. We're tearing the country up, and he's gonna fall. And when we get the lab results back, on these straps, your ass is grass."

"You find any dope? You won't find dope here, nosir. You'll find some Millers, but there's no dope. I don't allow it."

"Well, shoot, Ike, you made meth for ten years," one of the deputies said. "Everybody in the county knows it. You could smell it all the way down to Barronett."

"I don't know anything about any meth-"

"Ah, bullshit, you're wasting our time, Ike," Stephaniak said. "You could cooperate for fifteen seconds and we'd let you skate on the murder."

"… Maybe…" Marcy said.

"Maybe," Stephaniak agreed. "But if you don't talk to us, and we find out you been hiding that boy, or that you know where he is…"

"You went and burned the bags out in the incinerator, but you didn't burn them well enough," Lucas said. "We'll get them identified by the witness, and you're done."

Ike didn't ask, "What bags?" but said, "I don't know everything that goes in the fire. If Joe was up here, he didn't tell me. I work all day. I don't know everything that happens out here." He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, sniffed, and said, "I'm old. I'm gonna go lay down. If you don't mind."

"Put a cold rag on your head and think about it," Marcy said. "If you talk to us before I leave, we can deal. Once we're gone, you're toast. You get no second chances."

Ike looked around at all the cops, shook his head, muttered "fuckin'…" and stalked through the house to the back bedroom.

When he was out of earshot, Stephaniak said to Lucas, "You were right about the bags. That's them, and he knows it."

Ike was in the bedroom for fifteen minutes, then came out, got a beer, and sat in a platform rocker in front of the television and watched the cops take the place apart. No drugs. No anything, but the bag straps from the incinerator.

Marcy got her coat on, said to Ike, "We're leaving. Your last chance is walking out the door."

"Don't let it hit you in the ass," Ike said.

Weather and Virgil got the names of French-passport employees. Virgil called Jenkins, who'd been down in the cafeteria, and went off to talk to some of the employees. Jenkins showed up, leaned against a wall. Weather put a copy of the list in her briefcase, and then went down and found the Rayneses, Jenkins tagging behind. She'd thought the Rayneses seemed shell-shocked before, and they weren't getting better.

"Those poor little babies," Lucy Raynes said. "They hurt so bad, I can see it in their eyes. Sara knows what's going on, I can see it, she knows her heart isn't working right. She's really scared."

Weather explained about pain control, ground that Maret had already been over, but she wasn't convincing because she really didn't know for sure what the twins were experiencing. They might be, she thought, in some kind of inexpressible pain, though the cardiologist said they were comfortable. But then, he didn't know, either, Weather thought. "God, this is awful," she said aloud. "We'd hoped to get through it in a hurry, but Sara's heart… We should finish tomorrow. I really believe we will. We were ready to go this afternoon, but they started doing better. By this time tomorrow, we'll be done, and then the medical guys can really get in there with individual treatments…"

"Just want to get done," Larry Raynes said. "Just… over."

Weather found a spot in an empty waiting lounge and took the paper out of her briefcase and looked it over: seventeen names, French nationals working in the hospital. All French nationals, not just doctors, of whom there were four.

She knew one of them, vaguely, an ENT guy who thought he was also a plastic surgeon. He had, in Weather's estimation, bungled a nose job or two or three. One of them, a black woman who found herself with a nose the size of a peanut, had been referred to Weather for help. Weather had reworked the nose, but the result, while better, had still been poor.

In general, Weather decided, if some French doc had to fall on a robbery charge, he was the one she'd pick. Not because she really thought he'd done it, but because it might save somebody's nose.

Jenkins was reading The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Middle East Conflict, and she stood up and said, "Give me a half hour. I need one more consult."

"Right here?"

"Upstairs."

"I'll come along."

"Jenkins…"

"Look, if you get killed, Lucas is gonna pound me on my annual review. Okay?"

They took the elevator up two floors, and she left him sitting in a broken-down corridor chair while she went into the office of the head of surgery, a woman named Marlene Bach. Bach's secretary's desk was vacant, but Weather could see the other woman sitting in her office, her back to the door. She knocked: "Marlene?"

Bach turned in her chair and called, "Come on in, Weather."

Bach was a tall, thin woman, with a small head and dark hair, which gave her somewhat the aspect of a stork. She usually had a yellow No. 2 pencil stuck behind one ear, and had a reputation for efficiency and speed in the operating room. And, the OR nurses said, she listened to classic Whitesnake while she worked.

She had pinned a half-dozen large-format photos of a burn victim onto a corkboard on her office wall. The torso was nude, and the top half was covered with snarky black burns. Weather looked at them and said, "Electrical?"

"Yes. Blew him right off a power pole," Bach said. "He was hanging upside down for fifteen minutes before somebody went up after him."

"He gonna make it?"

"I don't know. He's forty-four, he's got fifty percent third-degree burns. Gonna be close." Rule of thumb: if the burns covered more of your body than your age deducted from one hundred, you'd probably die. Forty-four deducted from one hundred was fifty-six. Close.

"Looks like a lot of work," Weather said. She sat down and said, "Listen, I have a personal concern."

Bach nodded. "I heard. Somebody's trying to kill you. Or tried to, anyway."

"Yes. There's been some talk that the person in the pharmacy, who opened the pharmacy for the robbers, was a physician, and the witness thinks he might have had a French accent. And you know who I thought of…"

"Halary," Bach said. "You really think…?"

"Not really. But I was wondering what you think? You know him better than I do."

"He's a weasel, but I don't believe he'd do anything like that," Bach said. "For one thing, his wife's a dermatologist with a big practice out in Edina. He really wouldn't need the money."

"I didn't know that," Weather said.

"And he's not a bad ENT, if he'd lay off the plastic surgery," Bach said. "I know that thing with the noses irritated you."

"Not as much as it irritated the owners of the noses," Weather said. And she said, "Hmm. How about a guy named Albert Loewe? Supposed to be a…"

Bach was shaking her head: "Got hit by a car a month ago. In a supermarket parking lot. Broke both his legs. He was a mess, and he's still in casts."

"All right. Look, check this list. You know anybody else?"

Bach knew two more people on the list, a male nurse and a third doc named Martin, but she didn't know either of them well enough to make a judgment. "Let me ask around."

"Discreetly," Weather said. "This guy did try to kill me."

"I'll be very discreet," Bach said. "I'm too good-looking to die." She looked back up at the burn photos. "Unlike Bob. Bob's not too good-looking to die."

"Out in the hall, Jenkins asked, "You done?"

Weather said, "Yes. A burn victim. We'll be moving some skin around on him, if he makes it through the next couple weeks."

Didn't want to worry him, to think she was investigating.

That night, at the dinner table, Lucas told them about the proposed raid on Mack's place. "If Weather weren't going to the hospital every day, I'd back off," he said. "We know who did it-it's the whole damn Mack family, plus Haines and Chapman. We'll never prove anything about those bags, but we know what they were, and why they burned them. The drugs went through Ike's place, and from there, probably over to the Seed headquarters in Milwaukee, and down to the Outlaws, and they're probably all over Illinois and the East Coast by now."

"Still gotta find the guy in the hospital," Virgil said.

"All we have to do is nail one of the Macks-any one of them-and we'll get him."

"Could be done with the hospital tomorrow," Weather said. "I cleared out two weeks, just in case. If we get it done, we could take off for a week."

Lucas's eyebrows went up, and he said to Letty: "Disney World."

She stopped with a fork spun full of spaghetti, halfway to her mouth, and said, "Instead of St. Paul in January? I'd buy that."

"You'd be willing to leave the case?" Weather asked Lucas.

"My main concern in this, is you. If we take off, and nobody knows where we are, what're the Macks going to do? They won't have any way to find you," Lucas said. "If you're done with the babies, we could take off."

"I think we will be," Weather said. "One way or another, we can't wait much longer."