Chapter 5 #2
Off the phone, Lucas said, “That was a friend who works down in southern Minnesota. He has lots of incidents in the countryside where people are running, but nobody knows which direction. He says with a thirty-minute head start, a runner could be anywhere in about a seven-hundred-square-mile area. Doesn’t sound reasonable, but it is. ”
“So we’re screwed,” Sherwood said.
“Well, we gotta think that the hit crew is not totally familiar with the country around here, because they didn’t plan on visiting this hospital.
I have to believe that they’d be using a navigation app.
If I were you, I’d put in a route search between here and the Orono city hall.
I’d bet they’d be along there somewhere.
After Orono, I dunno. They could be anywhere after that. ”
One of the feds said, “Hell, they could be in Des Moines.”
“I don’t think so. They got to the Sokolov house in fifteen minutes. They’ve got a safe house around there somewhere and they’ve got three wounded to take care of.”
The feds looked at each other, and one of them said to the other, “Let’s get on that,” and to Lucas, “That’s a good thought, sir.”
“Are you going to steal credit for thinking of that?” Lucas asked.
The fed nodded: “That was my plan.”
Lucas looked at Sherwood and said, “That’s not something you see every day. A fed with a sense of humor.”
· · ·
“That’s about all we got,” Sherwood said. “The people here, they got nothing. They saw eyebrows on the woman and say she’s white-blond and had an accent. The guy was burly and had a bigger accent. That’s it.”
Lucas took a phone call on the burner. All he had was an incoming number from the 703 area code, which he knew was Arlington, Virginia, because that’s where the Marshals Service was headquartered.
“Davenport,” he said.
“Lucas, this is Russ.” Russell Forte, his nominal boss.
“Yeah, Russ.”
“Man, I don’t know how you do it, but I just took a call from the Director and he told me to call you and tell you that you’re full-time on this, whatever it is, shooting. I don’t even know what the hell I’m talking about.”
Lucas filled him in and Forte said, “Okay, that clears up some of it. The Director got called by a deputy attorney general and he was called by somebody so important he shares a bathroom with Jesus Christ himself. So, be good, don’t piss anyone off.”
“You know I try. Not to piss anyone off.”
“But you fail so often,” Forte said. “Okay, not a discouraging word. Cold out there? Of course it is. Not too bad here. I’m going to bed. Good night.”
· · ·
The highway patrolman was going out the door as Forte hung up and Sherwood came over and said, “The state patrol guy says there’s a small town along that route south…and somebody might have noticed a Jeep going by. He’s headed out there to knock on doors.”
“If I’ve steered you wrong, I apologize in advance,” Lucas said.
“You’re the only guy who steered me at all.
The feds over there…” He nodded at the two FBI agents, who were listening to a call on one of their phones.
“They’re mostly worried about fucking something up.
I don’t blame them: a high-profile kidnapping and they’ve got nothing. Now: tell me what else I can do.”
“The only thing I can think of, and the 9-1-1 center may already have it working, is the Jeep. The first two cars, the Jeep we shot up and the Subaru, were both rentals from two different agencies. If this new Jeep is a rental, most rental cars have LoJacks, or something like it. We should check and see if anyone…”
“That’s something the FBI can do right now,” Sherwood said. “That’s the kind of stuff they’re good at.”
He hurried off to the feds, who paused the phone call, listened to him, looked at Lucas, and went back to the phone. Sherwood listened for a moment, then came back to Lucas: “Okay. They were talking to the AIC so they’ll see about the Jeep.”
“If it is a Jeep,” Lucas said. “Let me tell you how we decided it was a Jeep.”
He told the story of the oil spot on the boat ramp, and, if not for the leak, how it might be fifty-fifty a Bronco.
Sherwood shook his head and said, “Rental agencies don’t rent Broncos. I spend half my days in rentals, it’s something I know about. Let’s go outside and look for oil spots.”
The driveway to the emergency room had been scraped clean after the last snowstorm, but just about where the kidnap car might have parked, they found an oil spot that was still sticky, despite the cold. “Could be,” Lucas said.
Sherwood looked at the black oil stains on his fingertips. “God bless leaky Jeeps.”
· · ·
Then they waited. Talked with the feds and the locals and the nurses and the hospital director and his wife, who’d been out to a barbeque joint when the trouble started. Lucas called Shelly White, told her everything that had happened, and that he’d keep her posted.
They were standing around, not doing much, and Sherwood said, “I like your overcoat. And your shoes. Though I didn’t think those brown high-top boots you were wearing this afternoon really went with the suit.”
“We don’t speak of such things in Minnesota,” Lucas said. “What happens in winter, stays in winter.”
Sherwood: “So the suit. Figueroa and Prince? N Street?”
“How’d you know?”
Sherwood opened the front of his overcoat to show Lucas the label: Figueroa and Prince, a tailor shop on N Street in Washington. “I could see Pat’s AMF stitching on the lapels, keeps the edges from rolling. I like that.”
Lucas reached out and rubbed the fabric on Sherwood’s overcoat: “Is that vicuna? I don’t think I could afford one of those.”
“We’ve got about six guys researching you. You could afford it.”
“Why are you—”
“Because of the problem. We’re researching everybody who was around that house today. And you’re a very odd duck.”
“That was always my ambition, to be recognized as a duck,” Lucas said. “How much did you pay for the coat? Couldn’t have been less than ten.”
“It was less, and I got a deal on top of the regular price.”
“Huh. I didn’t know Figgy gave deals. So…how important are you, anyway? Calling up people, they’re jumping to do whatever you say? Giving you deals on coats?”
Sherwood shrugged and said, “I dunno. I was involved with the Sokolovs from the start, recruiting him. That was a serious win, so I had the sun shining out of my ass for a while. The deputy ops director calls me John and I call him Frank, but I throw in a ‘sir’ every once in a while. But you…you have interesting connections in Washington. Some of them, even Frank would call ‘sir.’ ”
“Ah…I know some people,” Lucas admitted.
· · ·
They drank coffee, which was awful and Lucas didn’t like coffee even when it was good, and they talked about menswear—they were equally interested in fashion—and Lucas enjoyed the exchange.
The mayor came over to Lucas and said, “Aren’t you the guy who used to hang with Bill Norton? On that drug thing?”
“Yeah. How’s Bill?”
“Dunno. He moved to Oklahoma to raise horses.”
“And maybe some weed?”
“Could happen,” the mayor said. “He always had the quality stuff, back before it was legal.”
· · ·
Then the highway patrolman called and said he was with a cop named Fagerberg, in the town of Delano.
Fagerberg said he had seen a black Jeep Wrangler going through town at about the right time.
He knew it was a Wrangler because he desperately wanted one and had researched them; and he’d noticed it because it was traveling at the speed limit, which was not that common.
Sherwood thanked the patrolman.
Lucas knew where Delano was, and they pulled up a map on the fed’s laptop and Lucas touched the screen with a fingernail. “Fastest route to Orono. If you drew a ten-mile circle around the Orono city hall, I bet the Jeep would be inside it.”
The fed with a sense of humor said, “I believe you. I gotta call the office.”