Chapter 5
White followed Lucas to the pond where the Subaru had been left.
A police car was blocking access to the boat ramp.
They pulled in, and an Orono cop lit them up with a flashlight.
They got out of their cars, identified themselves, and the cop took them back into the ramp, pointing out two different sets of vehicle tracks.
“Nothing’s been down this ramp probably since October. It’s mostly for canoes, the water is about three feet deep,” he said. “Not much in the way of fish.”
“They must have been familiar with the place,” White said. “How would you even know it was here if you weren’t?”
“Could have scouted it with a satellite view,” the cop said.
“They must have done some ground truthing, here, so they must have known where Sokolov was going, probably for days or weeks ahead of time. The leak has gotta be in D.C.,” Lucas said to White. To the cop: “Is there blood in the Subaru?”
“Yeah, quite a bit on the back seat, unless somebody spilled ketchup on their home fries,” the cop said. “The car that was parked here was probably empty. Doesn’t seem likely there was another person waiting…”
Lucas: “How’d you figure that out?”
“Well, the word is, there were four people at the motel,” the cop said.
He pointed. “You can see the tracks from the incoming Subaru, so the other tracks are from the second vehicle, which was parked here for a while. Long enough for the motor heat to melt the snow underneath. Looking at the short wheelbase, it’s not a pickup, but it has very aggressive tread.
I’d say either a Jeep Wrangler or maybe a Bronco.
Probably a Jeep Wrangler. Big enough for four, but not for five, not comfortably. ”
White: “Why a Wrangler?”
“Because it leaked oil while it was parked here,” the cop said. “I figure that made it more likely a Jeep than a Bronco.”
“You’re a smart guy,” Lucas told the cop.
“Yeah, and I’m looking for a better job,” the cop said. “That was a hint, in case you didn’t get it.”
“We got it,” White said. “I don’t suppose anybody from your department is following the little oil drops to their new location?”
“Very funny,” the cop said. “Anyhooo…”
White: “I’ve got some gloves in my car. We’ll want to take a look inside the Subaru in case there’s anything…”
“Your call,” the cop said. “The BCA crime scene van is supposedly on the way. There are foot tracks around the Subaru, but mostly on this side, so maybe you’ll want to go around to the other.
Only one set of foot tracks over there, besides mine.
I used my flash to look inside to see if there were any bodies. Nada.”
· · ·
White got gloves from her truck. They opened the doors of the Subaru and, using the cop’s flashlight, looked inside without touching anything. There was blood, but no rental papers. Lazy snowflakes were drifting down when they finished. They closed the door and carefully backed away.
Lucas asked the cop if he could hang around until a crime scene crew got there to process the car. “Somebody will. I’ll make sure.”
“Thank you.”
White looked up at the starless sky and said, “Wasn’t supposed to snow.”
“It won’t,” Lucas said, with more confidence than certainty. “That’s just cold flakes, the cold is squeezing out whatever water is left in the air.”
“Hope you’re right,” White said. She was in the winter stance again, and shivering. “We’re outa here, heading home?”
“I am,” Lucas said. “There’ll be a clusterfuck tomorrow. Get some sleep while you can.”
“See you at the office,” she said.
As she walked away to her truck, Lucas got a card from the cop they’d been talking to and told him that he’d give it to the U.S. Marshal for the district of Minnesota.
“You think I got a chance?” the cop asked.
“You got a chance,” Lucas said.
· · ·
Lucas had already talked to his wife, Weather, twice, filling her in on his day. Back in his car, he called her again. “What have we got to eat?”
“We’ve already eaten here. Hit a drive-through on your way back. I’ll be streaming The Perfect Couple. Sam’s down the basement and wants some privacy for his study session with Ellen. Your daughter is in the middle of an end-of-days sulk because I wouldn’t let her go to the mall, so…”
“Did Sam take a book down the basement with him?”
“I didn’t notice one. He did take two Cokes,” Weather said. “I’m washing enough nocturnal emissions out of his Jockey shorts that I doubt he’d have anything to spare for Ellen.”
“God, women can be so vulgar,” Lucas said.
“I’m sure your mother did the same for you. Go get a sandwich.”
“As a much-needed alert…I did have enough to spare. Keep an eye out. We don’t need Sam knocking up any teenagers.”
“I’ll wait until somebody moans.”
· · ·
Lucas stopped at a pizza place that might once have been a gas station, which was confirmed by the menu—he ordered a twelve-inch El Camino—and after a wait, got halfway through the pizza when the burner rang in his jacket pocket.
He found it, answered, and Sherwood said, “I apologize for the interruption in whatever you’re doing…”
“I’m eating a pizza. What happened?”
“Our Russians hit an emergency room in the town of Bison, if you know where that is?”
“Know it like the back of my hand,” Lucas said. He didn’t, but he’d once had an informant who lived there, and he’d visited a few times. “Kill anyone?”
“No, but they kidnapped a doctor and took drugs, blood, and surgical equipment with them, and disappeared, to where, we don’t know. If you have time…I’m calling from a rental car, I’m on the way there myself.”
“I can be there in forty-five minutes or maybe an hour…”
“I wouldn’t bother you, but you’re local and the FBI people I’ve been talking to…they’re not local.”
“See you in a bit.”
Lucas got a box for the remaining pizza along with a dozen napkins and called Weather to tell her what had happened. He ate the congealing slices of pizza at stoplights along the way, a napkin tucked behind his necktie.
The land around the lakes west of Minneapolis was low, marshy, with cattail swamps in the roadside ditches, narrow highways, half-seen barely lit small-town water towers floating like flying saucers in the night sky.
He crossed the Crow River at a town which was called, for some reason, Rockford; shouldn’t it be called Crowford?
But then, maybe the riverbed was rocky? He’d been through the town a half-dozen times, and never stopped to solve the mystery, because he really wasn’t that interested in it.
He was even less interested in thinking about the shooting earlier in the day, the blood spatter on White, Martha’s brains on the kitchen cupboards. He thought about it anyway and experienced no revelations. He made it to the hospital in forty-five minutes.
Two black SUV cop cars, a highway patrol car, two plain vanilla sedans with micro-flashers that looked like FBI transportation, and two civilian compact SUVs were in the parking lot. A uniformed cop checked Lucas through, and he parked and walked up to the glassed-in entry cubicle.
· · ·
Sherwood was standing inside the emergency room, talking to a couple of suits, without any apparent urgency; Lucas assumed they were feds.
Sherwood saw Lucas coming and crooked a finger at him.
“FBI is covering the kidnapping, but so far, we don’t have anywhere to go.
We thought maybe the doc had her phone with her and we could find her that way, but she didn’t: her phone’s laying on the floor in the back along with a pager. ”
“We might be looking for a Jeep Wrangler that’s dripping oil,” Lucas said. “That’s all I got, and I’m not sure of that.”
“Could confirm another sighting,” Sherwood said. “A guy walking a dog saw a black Jeep Wrangler turning out onto the street, in a big hurry, about the time of the attack.”
“So where are you looking?” Lucas asked.
“Everywhere, but there just aren’t a lot of patrol cars out in the countryside, and there seem to be a lot of Jeeps.
Every one of them we stop takes ten minutes, because we have to be so careful on the stop,” one of the feds said.
He had a half-empty paper cup of coffee in his hand that he was pecking at.
“The hit on the Sokolovs was what, fifteen, twenty miles south of here?” Lucas said.
“When they ran, initially, when Shelly and I shot them up, they were headed further south. The Subaru was ditched even further south, on an unused trail down to a frozen-over pond, where they transferred to the Jeep. I’ll bet that wherever they went, it wasn’t too far from the Subaru.
They’d want to get off the street as fast as they could. ”
The second fed said, “Good points. We alerted all the major jurisdictions around the big lake, Orono, Minnetonka, Wayzata, the county sheriffs…but it’s a lot of territory.”
“Tell him the bad news,” Sherwood said.
The feds both shrugged. One of them asked, “What?”
Sherwood: “I did the numbers. The hunt got started a half hour after they left here. The people they had on the floor, the nurses, didn’t get moving for maybe fifteen minutes, then it took five minutes for the first cops to arrive, and then they had to talk it over and decide what to do.
They didn’t even know about the shooting at the house this afternoon, so the hunt was local, right around here.
By the time it got expanded toward Minneapolis, might have been an hour. ”
“Well, poop,” Lucas said. “Let me…” He took out his phone, punched in a number, and ten seconds later said, “Hey, Frankie, is Virgil there? Well, go get him. He can type later. I only need him for a minute.”
He waited, then said, “Virgie. Got some people running, had a thirty-minute lead. What’s the circle? Yeah? Yeah. Yeah. Thanks.”