Storm prey

17

Virgil told Lucas, "I got tired of wandering around doing nothing, so finally I started asking everybody I met if they knew any Arabs with French accents, or accents that might be French, who've been acting flaky. Or Frenchmen who look like Arabs."

They were sitting at the dining table, with coffee. Weather was holding her head in her hands, and every once in a while said something like "Oh my God."

Lucas asked, "What happened?"

"Nothing yet," Virgil said. "The question hasn't had time to metastasize. I figure the politically correct wolverines will be onto it pretty quick. They'll blab it all over the hospital, and I should have about six formal complaints and three answers by noon tomorrow."

Weather said, "Oh my God."

Lucas patted her on the leg and said, "Don't worry. If it works, we're golden. If it doesn't work, and there are too many complaints, we'll reprimand him and tell everybody he'll be required to go to sensitivity training. He's going to the Bahamas in two weeks, anyway, so he'll be out of sight."

"Oh my God."

Lucas asked Virgil, "Run into any good-looking doctors over there?"

"A couple," Virgil said.

"I heard radiologists are hot. And dermatologists. They're more intellectual than, like, surgeons," Lucas said.

"I'll keep that in mind," Virgil said.

Weather said, "Sometimes, the two of you think you're being funny, but you're not that funny. I've got to work with a lot of… of…"

Lucas said to Virgil, "She's trying to find a softer word for 'Arab.' Like, 'Persons of Middle Eastern heritage.'"

"Fuck you," Weather said.

"See?" Lucas said. "A dermatologist never would have said that. They're more classy."

Lucas came to bed at one o'clock, moving quietly, and Weather said, "I'm awake."

"You should be asleep. Are you okay?"

"We're going to do it," she said.

"Yes. I hope that thing with Virgil isn't keeping you awake."

"No. I know how to prioritize," Weather said. "I even understand what he's doing, but you'll never get me to approve of it. You know, officially."

"Gods of correctness," Lucas said.

"Mmm."

"Thinking about the babies?" Lucas slipped under the blankets.

"They're just like us, but they don't understand," Weather said. "They're alive, they have emotions, they have intellectual processes, they are learning, they know some words… they're physically underdeveloped because they haven't been able to walk or crawl, but they're like us. They're lying there, maybe in some pain, wondering what's happening, and tomorrow, by this time, one or both of them might be dead, because of what we're doing."

"Weather-"

"I know. I wouldn't want to do anything else, or be anywhere else, but: it's a load."

"Did you take a pill?"

"No. I'll be fine. Maybe if we could just do a spoon for a few minutes," she said.

"Listen," Lucas said. "It's gonna work out. That's the karma here… it's going to work."

"You don't believe in karma."

"Snuggle up," he said. "Close your eyes. It's gonna work." WEATHER LEFT at six, got to the hospital fifteen minutes later, bodyguards fore and aft. Maret was gathering the team together for a pep talk: "This time we must keep going. We are close, but still several hours away. Everybody must resolve to work quickly. If we can save five minutes here or there, it's worth doing. We're in a race. We are not sloppy, but we are quick."

Weather went down to the separation lounge and found the Rayneses talking to a stress counselor. "You okay?" she asked them.

"Gabriel says that one way or another, we'll finish today," Lucy Raynes said.

Weather nodded. "We will. The babies look better, but they can't take much more. We'll finish."

"God willing," Larry Raynes said.

She left them, went to the women's locker room, changed into scrubs; when she came out, the babies were being rolled into the operating room. LUCAS STAYED UP just long enough to see her off with Virgil, Jenkins, and Shrake, then went back to bed, looking for another hour or two of sleep. It came hard: his mind wouldn't stop churning, looking for strings that might lead to the doctor. He finally rolled out of bed at eight, cleaned up and headed down to his office. He was just turning into the parking lot when he got a call from Virgil.

"Your pal Marcy's all over me," Virgil said.

"Because of the Arab thing?"

"That's ten percent of it," Virgil said. "The other ninety percent is, an Arab doctor from Lebanon was murdered down in south Minneapolis last night. He used to live in Paris. They're taking some unusual drugs out of his apartment, and some wrappers for more drugs they haven't found. Like, a lot of drugs."

"You're serious."

"She should be calling you in about two minutes," Virgil said. "I probably got in first because you're on my speed dial."

"Where's this at? The murder? You got an address?"

"No, but like I said, she'll be calling. Jenkins and Shrake are still here. I'm gonna run down there and take a look." LUCAS'S CELL PHONE booped, and he said, "There she is. Talk to you later." He pressed the flash button, and Marcy came up. "You know what your guy Virgil did yesterday?"

Lucas asked, "So what's the address? You there yet? What kind of drugs…?" THE MINNEAPOLIS cops were all over the scene, Marcy standing in the hall talking to the lieutenant in charge of the homicide unit. She saw Lucas and walked down toward him and said, "That fuckin' Flowers. They were talking all over the hospital yesterday about how he was looking for an Arab, and see what happens?"

"The dead guy is an Arab?"

"Yes. Adnan Shaheen, from Lebanon," she said. "Decent rep, far as we can tell, but we've got some dope containers and other stuff, and it looks like it might have come out of the hospital pharmacy."

"This didn't happen because of Virgil," Lucas said. "He didn't kill anyone. We've got a stone killer who's cleaning up the mess left from the hospital holdup."

"Pretty goddamn far-out there, though…"

"Don't get on his case. He's coming by in a few minutes," Lucas said.

"Already been here and gone. And I did get on his case. He is the most uncooperative, insubordinate-"

"What'd you want him to do? Say he was looking for a swarthy doctor?" Lucas asked.

"Shut up," she said.

"So we got the doc…"

"And another problem," Marcy said.

Lucas nodded: "Who killed the doc?"

She said, "It's pretty clear to me that it's a gang thing. Somebody else in the Seed got wind of the robbery and hijacked it."

Lucas nodded and said, "Let me take a look."

Not much to see-a dead man with a broken head and a small puddle of blood beneath it, lying on his back, arms beside his body, palms up, in what Yoga people called "the corpse pose," for good enough reason. Lucas watched the processing for a few minutes, then asked, "Who found him?"

"Neighbor. Another guy who works downtown, they carpool into work. He knocked a couple times, and Shaheen didn't answer, and Shaheen's car was still in the parking lot. He peeked in at a corner of the blinds, and he could see him on the floor. Like we did with Lyle Mack."

"Gives me an ice cream headache," Lucas said. "Listen, I'm gonna go put a damp cloth on my eyeballs."

"You do that," she said. "If you think of anything, let me know."

"I already thought of one thing. The doc was friendly enough with the killer that he let the guy hit him from behind."

Lucas went out and sat in his truck for a while, then put it in gear and headed over to University Hospitals.

Virgil was lounging in the cafeteria, again, waiting. "Am I gonna get some shit?" he asked.

"Nah," Lucas said. "We were looking for an Arab. So what? Turned out we were right."

Lucas got a doughnut and a Diet Coke and came back to Virgil's table and said, "When I think about a gang holding up the pharmacy, I think of a tight group of people: Joe Mack, who was seen by Weather, and Chapman and Haines, with Haines confirmed through DNA. Lyle Mack was involved, probably as the brains behind the operation. Ike Mack was probably in charge of selling the drugs downstream. And the doc, who probably set up the robbery, including the theft of a key."

No one else would be needed for the job, he said, and there'd be no reason to tell anyone else about it. Telling somebody else would just be an unnecessary risk.

"First, I thought it was somebody in the group," Lucas said. "They'd committed a murder, inadvertently, and I thought the killer was probably wiping out anyone who could pin the murder on him. And I thought it had to be the doc. Everybody else we know about were friends, and knew each other forever, and now they're all dead. So the doc must be the killer.

"But then the doc was killed. And the doc… I don't see him as a longtime friend of this bunch. The Macks don't have medical friends."

"You're making a logical case for the existence of at least one more guy," Virgil said, "which we already know, unless the doc beat himself to death."

"But one more guy wouldn't have any function in the holdup. And that guy didn't know what happened to the drugs, because he had to torture Lyle Mack to get the information. So he's a total outsider. Then, the way Lyle Mack was tortured, I thought it had to be two guys, one guy sitting in the chair, pinning Mack to the floor, the other guy cutting on him. And that powder on him… I thought the other guy was the doc. The guy who did the cutting."

Virgil said, "Logically, if there could be one outsider, there could be ten outsiders. All the Macks had to do was tell one guy, and the outsider gets his gang together and hijacks the robbery. You don't need the doctor and…" Virgil paused, mid-screed, and then said, "No, that's not right, is it?"

"I don't think so," Lucas said. "Did the Macks tell everybody they knew what they were doing? Why would they do that? And why would the outsiders kill everybody in the gang, if they weren't involved in the pharmacy murder? If all they wanted was the drugs, if they were outsiders, they could have tortured Lyle Mack and killed Ike, and nobody would have known who they were. So why did they kill the doc? How'd they even know about the doc? Why did they make a run at Weather?"

"That could have been Joe Mack or Haines or Chapman, right?"

"No. Haines and Chapman were already dead. The autopsy suggests they were killed the day of the robbery. At least twenty-four hours before Weather was attacked. Weather says the biker was a small guy, and Joe Mack is notably large."

"So there's at least one other guy," Virgil said. "The guy who killed Jill MacBride. That's some outsider DNA, right?"

"If it doesn't belong to the doc." Lucas thought about it for a minute, then said, "But it won't belong to the doc, because the guy who killed Jill MacBride is the guy who tortured Lyle Mack. Same cold killer. Same…"

He stopped and turned away from Virgil and said, "Oh, Jesus."

"What?"

"How did the guy who killed Jill MacBride get to the airport? And how did Joe get out? MacBride's car was still there… Somebody picked him up, and killed MacBride, right? The killer picked up Joe Mack. Joe either called him, or Lyle Mack called him and sent him over to pick up Joe. We know Joe Mack talked to Lyle, after he ran."

"They could have taken the train in and out," Virgil said. "But it's about nine hundred and ninety-nine to one that they drove."

Lucas stood up, suddenly excited: "You know what? You know what? The day Joe Mack ran, he was signing his van over to a skinhead. He signed the paper, but the guy never gave Joe any money. No check, nothing. Nothing we saw. I suppose the skinhead could have given Joe a wad of cash ahead of time, but that usually doesn't get done, you know, until the papers are signed. They were either friends, or Joe Mack owed him big. And this was a hard-looking guy."

Virgil's eyebrows went up. "The skinhead-what does he look like?"

"You know, a skinhead," Lucas said. "Probably twenty-five, wind-burned face, skinny, muscles in his face…"

Virgil leaned forward, intent. "Man, I've seen that guy, wandering around by the twins' team, doing nothing," Virgil said. "An orderly, or a whatever, a nurse. He's wearing a hospital uniform. I've seen him a couple times. I'm always catching his eyes-"

Lucas snapped his fingers: dug out his cell phone, called the duty officer: "I need the tag numbers of a van owned by a Joe Mack, M-A-C-K, sold in the last few days… I can wait."

They waited, no more than a minute, and the duty officer came back. "We've got a Joe Mack as the owner of a 2006 Dodge Grand Caravan cargo van, white in color, but there's no transfer come through."

"You got the tags?"

"Yeah. You want them?"

"No. Get onto the airport cops, find out if those tags came into the airport…"

Lucas gave him time and date and said he'd wait again. The duty officer came back after two minutes and said that it'd be another two minutes; and came back and said, "Well, you got it. The van came in at ten forty-two and was out at eleven-oheight."

"Thank you. Get all the numbers, tell the airport cops to be careful with the data, see if they've got a face in their van photo. Get back to me."

He clicked off and said to Virgil: "Got him. It's our skinhead. Goddamnit, we should have scanned all the tags coming in and out around the time of the MacBride murder. It would have kicked out Joe Mack's van. I mean, I saw the guy."

"And if it's the same guy I saw…"

"Where's Weather right now?" Lucas asked.

"Either operating or up in the observation room." They both stood up and Virgil said, "This way," and as they hurried back toward the elevators, they both reached down and touched their weapons.

Lucas said, "He's maybe got hand grenades."

"I was just thinking that," Virgil said. "Shoot first, ask questions later."

Weather opened the operation as she did each day, moving fast now. Moving fast, she was in and out in ten minutes, laying bare the ring of bone that connected Ellen and Sara. Most of the bone had been taken out, and Hanson, at her elbow, was ready to take out all but about a centimeter of the rest of it.

"Anything I can do before I go?" Weather asked him.

"I could use a couple more sterile hands in close," he said.

She stayed, to help hold the babies' heads, six hands in close and tight. Maret asked, through the crowd, "Hearts?"

"Okay so far," somebody answered from the back.

The saw, in cutting through the bone, kicked up the stink of raw blood mixed with something else… almost a floral scent. Dead peonies, maybe.

Hanson was a half hour, against an estimate of forty minutes. His mask was dotted with sweat when he backed away. "We're good."

The neurosurgeons moved up.

Weather backed out, stripped off the operating gear, dumped it, washed, and walked down to talk to the Rayneses again.

Lucy, anxious, wide-eyed. "Is something wrong? You were gone so long…"

"I stayed to help with some bone removal. At this point, their hearts are stable, we've got everything but the last half-inch of bone out. Rick can take that out in one minute if he has to."

Larry: "So the neuro guys are working?"

"Yes. Still a way to go," Weather said.

They talked for a couple more minutes; the Rayneses said the overnight crew had reported that the twins had gotten their best sleep since the operation began.

A team nurse popped in, looked at Weather: "Gabe wants you in the OR."

"Something happened?" Larry Raynes asked.

"Looks like it's going okay to me," the nurse said. "I'm not a doctor, though."

Weather stepped inside the OR and said, "Gabriel?"

Maret looked up from the operating table and said, "Ah, Weather, come around here."

She walked carefully around the edge of the working crew, and Maret pointed at the babies' skulls. "The seven vein," he said, and she nodded.

The seven vein had been difficult to image, but they didn't know why, exactly. It rose close to the edge of the defect, up out of Sara's brain, before apparently edging over to a trough where it dumped the blood.

"It doesn't do that. It actually curled around the edge of the defect and dumps into Ellen's side. So, we can ligate it and forget it. But there's another vein we didn't see-we're calling it fourteen-that comes up beside it. If we could splice seven into fourteen…"

"How big are they?" Weather asked.

"Not big. But not so small as the ones you did on the toe operation…"

"I was using the scope for that. If we drop the scope on them, you guys would have to get out of the way."

"I think they might be large enough for you to do with your loupes… I'm hoping."

"I'll scrub up," she said.

She was back in ten minutes, robed in another five, operating glasses in place. Maret moved sideways, pushing one of the nurses away from the table, and Weather moved in close. The other neurosurgeon continued working on the other side of the babies' heads.

Maret said, "Here," and indicated the two veins with a tip of his scalpel.

Weather's operating glasses were equipped with an LED, and the light illuminated the patch of dura mater as though it were an illustration in a medical text. The veins were small, dark, wire-like-a bit smaller in diameter than the wire in a coat hanger.

Weather looked at them for a full fifteen seconds, until Maret asked, "What do you think?"

"How bad do you need it?"

"Well, it's impossible to know. But the babies are doing okay, so far, we are ahead of schedule, and better to do this now, if we can-we need to move as much blood as possible…"

"I can do it, but it'll take a while," she said finally. "Sandy might have to stop working every once in a while. I couldn't have the slightest bit of movement."

"How long?"

"Thirty, forty minutes. They're well exposed."

"Thirty minutes?"

"Thirty or forty."

"Thirty minutes. I believe you can do this."

The veins were not especially delicate, but they couldn't be yanked around, either. Weather tied off the smaller fourteen, and began the process of splicing it into the seven. The process was slow: she would be placing four square knots, each smaller than a poppy seed, around the edge of the splice. Ten minutes in, she had one knot; in seventeen minutes, she had two.

An anesthesiologist said, "We've got a gradient showing up."

"I'll be out in ten or fifteen," Weather said. The gradient was the blood pressure in Sara's brain.

"Let's stay with it," Maret said.

Weather did the third knot and asked, "Where's the gradient?"

"Need to move along," the anesthesiologist said.

"We could bleed her for a minute," Weather said. "I think we're tight enough that we won't damage the established sutures."

Maret said, "How long to go ahead and finish?"

"Six or seven minutes, if there're no problems."

"Bleed her just a minute…"

Weather released a ligature on the fourteen, and blood began seeping out of the incomplete splice. They stood for a minute, then two, soaking up the blood, and the anesthesiologist said, "Better," and Weather closed the vein again.

Six minutes later she was out, removed the ligatures on seven and fourteen, and she and the other neurosurgeon, Sandy, watched the splice for ten seconds, fifteen, and then Sandy said, "Just like shooting free throws."

Weather said, "You should explain surgery to my husband."

Maret: "What does this mean, free throws?"

"Means we're good," Sandy said. "Get your ass back in here. We're coming to the stretch."

"Sometimes, I wish I understood English," Maret said. To Weather: "Thirty-two minutes."

"Best I could do," she said, a little stiff.

He said, "If you'd told me an hour, I would have asked for forty-five minutes. Thirty-two, I hardly believe."

That made it all better.

Weather was sitting in the observation theater when Virgil and Lucas squeezed in, and Lucas reached down and tapped her on the shoulder and gave her the thumb. She followed them out into the hall.

"Have you seen a skinhead orderly around?" Lucas asked.

She shook her head. "Not close by. I haven't really noticed one. You mean a guy with a shaved head?"

"Not shaved, just a super-butch. Virgil's seen him around."

"You think?"

"We think. Gotta call Marcy, let her know, see if we can break out the guy's name. It bothers me that Virgil may have seen him here. So I'm sticking close. I'm going to get Jenkins and Shrake over here…"

"We'll be done this afternoon," Weather said. "We're moving fast now."