Chapter 10
They talked to St. Vincent about the possibility of a decoy operation. He said he’d think about it. Dismissed, Lucas and Sherwood took the elevator down to the bottom floor. Outside, Sherwood said, “I noticed a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the decoy proposal. He won’t do it.”
“Aw, it’s not that great an idea,” Lucas said.
“It’s the only one we’ve got. No downside to trying it,” Sherwood said.
“Unless the CIA decides to waterboard the Kansas City guy.”
“We don’t do that anymore,” Sherwood said. “Doesn’t work all that well, for one thing.”
Lucas’s phone rang, St. Vincent calling. Lucas looked up at the building, shrugged, and answered.
“Another possible break, but it’s thin,” St. Vincent said.
“One of our phone people talked to a Hertz counter guy at the airport. He had a woman in early this morning, blond, well-dressed, said she was arriving from a Chicago flight. There was a Chicago flight about the right time, we checked that. She had no reservation for a car, but he got one for her. Illinois ID, Visa card, both good. Very fashionable, he said, long fashion coat. Said she was kinda hot. Had an accent, but he thought it might be German. We’ve got a lot of people around Orono, if you want to take a look at this. Like I said, it’s thin…”
“I can run down there,” Lucas said. “Do they have video?”
“Don’t know.”
“All right. I’ll get back to you.”
Lucas told Sherwood what had happened, and Sherwood said he’d follow along. He did that, threading south across town behind Lucas, and they got adjacent parking spots in one of the labyrinthine parking garages at Minneapolis–St. Paul International.
“Wonder why St. Vincent gave this up?” Sherwood asked, as they headed for the car rental area. “I got the impression this morning that you’re not personally close.”
“We are not. I’ve annoyed him in the past.”
“I can see that might happen,” Sherwood said.
· · ·
The counter man was named George Loftus.
He was waiting with his manager, and the manager had queued up a video of the desk during the rental process.
The woman was mid-height, slender, but gave off an athletic vibration.
Her hair was tucked under a floppy beige beret that fell to her neckline in back.
Loftus said he’d gotten the impression of a pretty blond, and when they looked at the video, they could barely make out her eyebrows.
“That’s our girl,” Sherwood said, his nose two inches from the video screen. “Judging from the motel video. Body shape, size…”
“I think so,” Lucas said. He asked the manager, “Do you know where the car’s at?”
“Parked over by the Mall of America. I can tell you where it’s been and how fast it was driven, but I can’t tell you when it was anywhere. You know, the exact time. Just where it is now.”
“In one of the parking garages?”
“No. It’s a little north of the mall itself, but it’s definitely south of 494.”
He pulled up a map connected to the car’s tracker.
They could follow the track, which was a bit crude, from the airport rental lot to the Lake Minnetonka area, though it never quite got to the town of Orono, then back almost along the same route to the mall.
For some reason, she’d done a big U-turn.
“Looks like she was thinking of bringing it back here, but then decided not to,” Lucas said.
“Maybe she was planning to catch a plane out of here and suspected the car could be tracked. She parked close enough to walk here, if she wanted to,” Sherwood said.
“I don’t know how you could walk into the airport. Maybe you can,” Lucas said.
They both looked at the Hertz employees, who shrugged. “I wouldn’t want to do it,” the manager said. “It’s a long walk—three, four miles if it’s an inch.”
“I’ll tell you what she was doing,” Sherwood said.
“I wish you would,” Lucas said.
“The uninjured guy drove the worst-hurt guy to Kansas City,” Sherwood said.
“She didn’t have a car but needed to evacuate the other shot guy, because she knew there’d be a door-to-door search in the Orono area, with the information from the doctor.
She came here and rented one. Then she abandoned it because she was afraid these guys here”—he nodded at the rental agents—“would be contacted by the cops and they’d remember her and the car. ”
“How’d she get here?” one of the rental agents asked.
Sherwood shrugged. “I don’t know. How would you do it?”
Lucas and the two agents looked at each other and simultaneously said, “Uber.”
“And now she’s at the mall? With a shot guy?” Lucas asked.
“Dunno about that,” Sherwood said. “She drove that big fast loop for a reason.”
· · ·
Lucas called St. Vincent, had to wait five minutes for the AIC to come to the phone.
When St. Vincent picked up, Lucas said, “We think the woman who rented the car was the Russian. We more or less spotted where they were in the Orono area, but it’s not in Orono, it’s in the town called Minnetrista…”
“Let me look at my map…” St. Vincent went away for a minute, then came back. “We’re working way the hell northeast of there. Take us a while to regroup. You sure about this?”
“They track their cars, and we’re looking at the track superimposed on a Google map,” Lucas said, standing in front of a laptop in the back of the Hertz rental station.
“We think the woman got a ride down here, maybe a cab, or Uber? I don’t know.
Anyway, she rented an Infiniti QX-60 SUV, white, new last year, then we think she drove it back to where they’d been hiding.
The farmhouse Juarez talked about. Then she drove it back here, for some reason, and probably ditched it at the Mall of America, where it’s still sitting. ”
“You think she’s at the mall?”
“Who knows, but I doubt it. The Hertz guys tell me that the car’s in a big empty area close to 494, but not that close to the mall. It looks like she was dumping it, unless she’s sitting there waiting for someone to pick her up.”
“Tell me about the Minnetrista site…”
Lucas explained that the track was somewhat crude, but: “If you look at city hall, that’s the middle of town, I guess, it’s on County Road 110. Now track about two miles west, there’s a side road next to a hinky little bump in the highway, where the highway turns a little south…”
“I see it,” St. Vincent said; he was looking at the same Google map image.
“There’s a road going north. The car seems to have gone a few hundred yards down the road, where she apparently made the U-turn and came back to the mall.
Juarez said a farmhouse and it looks like there are a couple of them back there, maybe three, it’s hard to tell from the overhead view.
Two are on the west side of the road, another on the east. That’s all we can see on the Google satellite, and that’s just an eyeball comparison to the car track from Hertz. ”
“Okay, I’ve switched over to a satellite view, and I see them. We can throw crews around all of them in an hour or two. What are you doing?”
“We can check out the car,” Lucas said. “Don’t think that’ll amount to much. It’s been sitting there for quite a while. Think she probably dumped it and got a ride out of there with somebody else.”
“Okay. You get a sniff of anything, call me. Don’t go tearing around like a maniac, goddamnit.”
“Never.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Listen, David, we’ll cruise it…Sherwood’s with me…and if there’s anything definite, we’ll back off and call for help.”
“Do that. I’m heading out to this Minnetrista place. Stay in touch.”
· · ·
There was another QX-60 still on the lot, and Lucas and Sherwood walked out with the desk clerk to look at it. “Identical vehicles, except for the color. Hers is white,” Loftus said.
“Can’t miss it; big as a school bus,” Sherwood said.
Sherwood followed Lucas four miles west, along I-494, then into the mall complex.
North of the mall was a sprawling, mostly empty parking lot, with a couple of dozen cars scattered across it.
Sherwood went one way, Lucas another, and after three or four minutes, Sherwood called and said, “I’ve got it. Looks empty. Can you see me?”
“Yeah. Be right over,” Lucas said.
Sherwood was looking in the windows of the oversized SUV when Lucas got there. Lucas got out of the Cayenne, walked over to the big truck. Sherwood shook his head and said, “Completely and totally empty. Not even a piece of paper. Didn’t even bother to lock the doors.”
Lucas looked inside. The truck had a central console and he saw a key fob sitting in a cup holder.
“Hoping it’d get stolen,” Lucas said. He retrieved the key fob and locked the truck.
The mall was a couple of hundred yards south of them.
Lucas knew the place was studded with cameras, and even if they couldn’t make out the woman’s features, if a camera had caught her, they might be able to see who picked her up, or which way she went.
“The Bloomington cops have a precinct here,” Lucas said. “Maybe they can get us some video.”
“You haven’t suggested calling St. Vincent again,” Sherwood said.
“It’d take him an hour to get an agent here,” Lucas said. “They’d do the same thing we’d do, so why don’t we go ahead and do it now? We can call him later.”
“You’ve not only annoyed him in the past, you’ll annoy him in the future.”
“A burden I’ll have to bear,” Lucas said. “Besides, they’re probably busier than hell at that farmhouse.”
· · ·
The Bloomington cops did have access to the security cameras around the building, and after some winding and rewinding, spotted the QX-60 rolling into the distant lot.
“There she is,” Sherwood muttered, as the Russian woman got out of the SUV and walked briskly away. She was no longer fashionably dressed, but was wearing what looked like a sweatshirt or sweater over jeans.
“Won’t be going far in that outfit,” one of the Bloomington cops said. “She’d freeze her tits off.”
“Maybe she’s being picked up…” Lucas said.
But they saw no sign that she was looking for someone to pick her up. They tracked her on different cameras past several buildings, until she disappeared to the west, into a residential neighborhood. When they last saw her, she was jogging.
“Not going to the airport,” Lucas said.
“No. She could have parked a lot closer, if that’s where she was going,” Sherwood said. “She’s going the wrong direction anyway.”
Lucas: “But if that is where she’s going, she’s now at thirty-five thousand feet.” He touched the screen: the woman had left the SUV at 8:40. They were now at 12:26, almost four hours later.
“It’s nine degrees out there, with a ten-mile-an-hour wind, according to the National Weather Service,” Sherwood said, looking at his phone. “That’s a windchill factor of minus five. I believe our officer friend is correct: her tits are definitely endangered.”
“Let’s go sit in my truck. I’ve got an iPad,” Lucas said. “Let’s see what we have in the way of motels around here, in the direction she was running.”
“Think we should call St. Vincent?”
“We don’t need to bother him yet,” Lucas said. “We can call him when we figure out what we’re doing.”
· · ·
They sat in the Porsche, called up Google Maps, found there was no good way to cross the interstate highway on foot, and started looking for motels south of I-494.
There were thirteen, and possibly fourteen—two were not differentiated on the video map—within reasonable jogging distance.
Lucas suggested that Sherwood call St. Vincent, because he had Washington cred, and Lucas tended to piss off the FBI man.
When Sherwood called, St. Vincent answered, the impatience tight in his voice: “We’re moving on them now. What do you want?”
“You think they’re at the farmhouse?” Sherwood asked.
“We’re closing on the most likely one now, there’s no car, but the car is probably in Kansas City, so…”
“We found the car the woman was driving this morning. She left it in a parking lot at the Mall of America. We tracked her on security cameras, and she was jogging and running west when we last saw her.”
“Probably picked up,” St. Vincent said.
“Maybe, but there are about a dozen motels within running distance. If getting out of the farmhouse and finding a new hideout was what all that car-driving was about, she could be holed up in one of them. Lucas and I could do a recon…”
St. Vincent had to think about it, then, “All right, but just a recon. You see anything at all, you call.”
“Of course,” Sherwood said. “Good luck at the farmhouse, David. Keep your head down.”
“Thank you. Don’t let Davenport shoot anyone.”
Sherwood laughed and said, “I’ll try to restrain him.”
When Sherwood hung up, Lucas said, “I’m not saying St. Vincent is a moron…”
“He’s probably not,” Sherwood said. “He’s caught in a bureaucratic morass, and that’s difficult for anyone who is actually trying to get something done. The Agency is the same way, on everything above an operational level.”
“All right,” Lucas conceded.
“How do you want to do this? You’re the cop—do we go together, or should I follow?”
“As a cop, I’ll tell you that you always want to have the same number of cars as you have cops, because if you don’t, somebody will get uselessly stranded. Follow me, but stay close. If we happen to stumble into them, we’d want to be together. You got a gun?”
“No.”
“Okay. I’ve got an extra, if you want it. Revolver, point’n shoot.”
“I’ll pass. If I actually shot somebody in the States, I’d spend the rest of my life filling out forms and going to hearings.”