Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15

by John Sandford

  “Carl? Carl’s a child!”

  “Well, he’s not quite a child. You keep saying a child, but he’s old enough to drive. He does drive. I’ve seen his driver’s license and the registration for a car.”

  “What—” She began, and then her eyes suddenly flinched to the side, and Lucas thought she’d remembered something.

  “What?”

  “You said bodily injuries . . .”

  “Does he have a knife cut on his arm, Mrs. Walther?”

  “What do you think he did? What do you think . . . ?”

  So he did, Lucas thought. He turned to the chief and nodded, and the chief nodded back. “We think he killed the Russian man in Duluth, and maybe the police officer. Possibly under the direction of Burt Walther.”

  “That’s crazy . . .” But the fear shone from her eyes.

  “Do you wish to come?” Lucas asked formally. The kid was toast, so he would be as formal as possible from now on. “We could also see that a public defender, a defense attorney, is waiting at the police station when we get there.”

  “At the police station . . .” Her eyes flooded with tears, and she covered her face with both hands. “At the police station . . .”

  SHE RODE WITH Hopper to the high school, a huge old building famous for its art deco auditorium. They all went trooping inside, down a long hall to the office. The principal met them, went back to her desk, looked at a piece of paper and said, “He’s in gym class.”

  The principal led them to the gym, where a teacher pointed them outside. They found a group of kids standing around, in gym shorts and sweatshirts, flags hanging from the sides of their shorts, all staring at the line of cops. The gym teacher said, “He said he was sick. He went back inside.”

  “When was this?” Lucas asked.

  “Ten minutes ago.”

  Lucas looked out at the street, turned to Dannie: “Shit. He saw us coming. He’s running. I hope he’s running.”

  Hopper looked at the school, a looming brick pile with kids visible in the windows. “You don’t think he could . . . oh, shit,” and he started running toward the school, his two cops trailing behind.

  “What, what?” Janet Walther screamed after them.

  Lucas trotted after Hopper, Dannie Carson, jogging alongside, Nadya hurrying to keep up.

  Nadya: “You think he’s in the school? With a gun?”

  “I hope not. I hope he just took off. But I don’t know. We can’t take a chance . . . I’m trying to think, I’m just trying to think . . .” He looked up. “The place is just so goddamn big.”

  32

  CARL WALTHER ALMOST stopped thinking when Grandpa killed himself.

  He spent the night wide awake, sprawled on the bed, looking at the clock; the next morning he felt like he had gears in his head, turning slowly, full of sand; the world was not quite in sync.

  His mother fussed at him, argued that he should stay home, but he drove into school. Random images popping up as he drove: Grandpa and Grandma dead, the images imagined. His father dead, the image right there, replaying itself—the warmth of his body, his lonely grave out in the clear-cut. The woman he killed in Dad’s bed; the lady vagrant on the street, the feel of the wire cutting into her neck; the Russian agents going down.

  A car in front of him had a fading WWJD sticker on the back bumper: What Would Jesus Do? And he thought, What would Grandpa do? Grandpa would . . . work it. He’d play it like a chess game.

  But exactly what would he do? In all the years they’d been together, Grandpa kept telling him what to think, but had never quite told him how.

  HE WAS PLAYING flag football, still in silent, robot mode—no one at the school had said anything at all about Grandpa being a spy, although he could feel eyes following him in the hallways—when he saw the parade of cars turn the corner and pull up outside the main entrance.

  The cars were almost a block away, and there were no sirens or lights, so nobody else paid any attention. But Carl noticed them, and focused, and saw his mother get out of the lead car with the chief, and he knew they were coming for him.

  He walked over to the gym teacher and said, “I’ve got to get my medicine in my locker. I’m gonna puke, I’m really sick,” and he turned and walked quickly across the playing field, inside, into the locker room, shedding clothes as soon as he was inside. He dressed in one minute, and was out the door, over a fence, down to the parking lot and into his old Chevy.

  Where to go? Russia? He couldn’t drive to Russia. He just needed to get loose, get away. Get a gun, he thought. Get out in the woods. He got a quick image of himself with a rifle and some pretty neat clothes, like the kind from Cabela’s, and maybe a cowboy-type hat, looking through the trees; a Honda four-wheeler. A guerrilla . . .

  He was rolling on teenage hormones. There was some joy in it, a little fear, lots of intensity. He had gas, he wasn’t hungry yet, he had seven dollars in his pocket and he knew where he could get both food and guns and there was nobody home . . .

  He went that way.

  33

  LUCAS HAD NEVER felt anything quite so close to panic as when they were running back toward the school. Hopper said, “You go check the locker room in case he’s there. I’m gonna go pull the trigger on the emergency plan.”

  There had already been two school shootings in Minnesota that year, three kids dead. The thought that a cold-blooded killer, who’d already wiped out a Russian agent and a cop, and God knows who else, was loose in the school—maybe with a silenced pistol—was a possibility so grim that he could hardly bear to think about it.

  He didn’t argue with Hopper. Inside the door, Hopper said, “Locker room,” and pointed. There were a few kids around, gawking at them, and Hopper started shouting, “Everybody go back to your classroom. Everybody back to your classroom.”

  Lucas ran down to the boys’ locker room and inside. Dannie Carson continued on to the girls’ locker room, her Glock at her side. Inside the boys’, a kid was emptying a clothes basket full of towels, and he saw the urgency on Lucas’s face and asked, “What?”

  Lucas stepped close, one hand on his pistol, the pistol still under his jacket, and asked, quietly, “Have you seen Carl Walther?”

  “Yeah, he was here two minutes ago. But I think he left . . .”

  “Which way did he go?”

  “I don’t know, I didn’t see him go, I only heard him . . .”

  Lucas did a quick run through the locker room, including the showers, saw nobody else, and went back into the hallway. A gray-haired woman was walking down the hall, bouncing a basketball. Lucas said, “I’m a cop. Have you seen Carl Walther? He should have been out in the hallway just a minute ago . . .”

  She said, “Uh . . .”

  Overhead, a speaker burped some static, and then a man’s voice said, “All teachers, we are turning lights out. All teachers, lights out.”

  And the gray-haired woman said, “Oh, shit. Carl? Does he have a gun?”

  “We don’t know. We can’t find him, but he was just here. Were you walking around here?”

  “No, I was in the gym . . .”

  Dannie Carson came out of the girls’ locker room and said, “Not there.”

  “The ‘lights out’ code means we’re supposed to lock down and report in,” the gray-haired woman said.

  “Then do that,” Lucas said. “Hurry.”

  THEY TORE THE school apart. Lucas ran through the weight room, checked the swimming pool, and two or three cops walked each row of the huge, elaborate auditorium; every room and cubbyhole was checked. No sign of Carl Walther. Twenty minutes after the search began, a teacher walked down to the office with a student and said, “Somebody needs to hear this.”

  And the kid said, “You should check the parking lot for his car,” the kid said. “I saw him come in this morning. He parked right next to me.”

  Lucas borrowed the kid and they went out to the parking lot. On the way, the kid described the location where the car was parked—and when they
got there, to the exact location, they found an empty space.

  “This is mine,” the kid said, pointing to an aging Volkswagen Rabbit in the next slot. “He’s gone. But he was right here this morning. He’s got a Chevy.”

  THE TENSION BACKED off a notch. There were now ten city cops and six or eight sheriff’s deputies and a highway patrolman in the school. Parents were beginning to arrive outside; the kids had cell phones. Lucas found Hopper and told him about the car and Hopper said, “Maybe he’s gone home. We’ll get some guys moving. Nobody’s seen him in here, thank God.”

  They’d put Janet Walther in the principal’s office, and told her to stay there. Now they got her, and Lucas asked, “Where do you think Carl would go. Home?”

  She was scared to death. “Don’t hurt him. He’s a good kid, don’t hurt him . . .”

  The only places she could think that he might be were at home, at the store, or possibly at Grandpa’s.

  Lucas, Nadya, and Carson went with Hopper first to Jan Walther’s home, cleared the place, then down to the store. The store was locked, and they cleared it; at the same time, they got a call from cops clearing Grandpa’s—all the doors were still sealed from the outside.

  “I’ll talk to the highway patrol, the roads going out,” Hopper said. “He can’t be far.”

  Janet Walther grabbed Lucas’s arm: “You don’t hurt him. You don’t hurt him, okay. He’s just scared, you’re just scaring him.”

  “We don’t want to hurt him,” Lucas said sincerely. “We really don’t.”

  THEY FOUND HIM late in the afternoon.

  They found him because the story was now all over TV and radio, and a kid came in with his father. A half dozen of them were sitting around the police station when a cop stuck his head in the door and said, “There’s a guy here with his kid. They say they might know where Carl Walther is . . . if we haven’t found him yet.”

  “Bring ’em in,” Hopper said.

  The man’s name was James Wolfe, and his kid was James, Jr., another high-school boy. Wolfe said, “Jimmy here had the idea . . . We took Carl deer hunting out of our cabin the last couple of years. And last summer, the kids were playing paint-ball games up there.”

  “Carl said it would be really a neat place for a war,” Jimmy said.

  “Where is it?” Lucas asked.

  “On the Sturgeon River west of Cook. Thirty miles.”

  Hopper said to Lucas, “That’d explain why nobody’s spotted him anywhere. Why we can’t even find the car. He’d have been halfway up there before you went out and looked in the parking lot.”

  “Can we send somebody to check it?” Lucas asked one of the sheriff’s deputies.

  “Hard to find it,” the elder Wolfe said. “We were talking about it on the way over. The best way would be to go into the Magnusons’ place, they’re one place down from us. You could walk through the woods over this little rise and look right down on the house. See if his car is there.”

  Lucas said to Hopper, “I’ll go, I can take a couple of guys . . . We can be there in half an hour, and if it doesn’t pan out . . .”

  “There’s one more thing,” Wolfe said. “Uh, I keep a gun up there to clean up beaver and porcupines, and I think Carl knows where it is.”

  “He does,” the younger Wolfe said. “We sorta let it out.”

  “You were screwin’ around with it; that’s what you were doing,” his father said.

  “What is it?” Lucas asked. “What kind of gun?”

  “A Savage .223 bolt-action with a two-to-eight-power scope on it. Not a great scope, but the gun shoots really good. Inside a minute, anyway,” the kid said.

  “And there’s ammo?”

  Wolfe nodded. “A couple of boxes. Fast-expansion stuff to blow up the critters. You go back there, if you think he’s dangerous . . . You best take care.”

  THE SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT had a designated rapid-response team for the area, and three of them, including a sniper, were pulled in for the trip. They brought rifles and the usual assault and hostage gear. Lucas led the way out, with the elder Wolfe beside him in the Acura. Nadya insisted on going, and rode in the backseat. Dannie Carson had nothing with her but city clothes, and Lucas left her to coordinate in Hibbing.

  On the way up to Wolfe’s cabin, Wolfe asked Lucas what he thought the kid had done. Lucas said he wasn’t sure. That they wanted to question him about a killing, and maybe two killings.

  “I had a feeling about him—not anything like this—but I had a feeling that he’d been abused somehow. I know his mother, she’s the nicest lady in the world, but I always wondered about old Burt. Burt was polite, but you couldn’t help thinking he was an asshole. You know his grandson, Roger . . .”

  “We’re looking for him, too.”

  “I’ve been reading about it. I knew Roger pretty well and he was sort of messed up, too. Of course, his parents were killed in that car wreck, but that’s not what it was—there was always something else, and I always wondered if Burt didn’t have something to do with it. Not physical. Psychological.”

  “Well. Burt was a spy,” Lucas said. “If he was recruiting family members, and they’d all grown up here where everybody’s got a flag and supposed to be a good American . . . there’d be a lot of stress.” He looked over his shoulder at Nadya. “Isn’t that right?”

  She nodded. “This is widely recognized in the community. Family stress is a very big problem.”

  Wolfe nodded, looking out the window. “Just . . . messed up, Roger was. Never saw the man really happy, except maybe at his wedding. Wonder where he is now?”

  THE MAGNUSON HOUSE was a half mile down a gravel road from Wolfe’s place, set in a deep patch of woods along a small muddy river. There was a chain on the gate, and they could see a long track down through the trees to where the house must be, but they couldn’t see the house. “There’s a spot over there where you can get in, where they cut the brush out for the power line,” Wolfe said, pointing down the road. “You might scratch your car . . .”

  Magnuson wouldn’t care, Wolfe said, he was a good ol’ boy.

  The sheriff’s GMC led the way through, and they stopped halfway down to Magnuson’s house, at the point where the driveway came closest to Wolfe’s. Lucas gathered the three deputies around him, and they went over the approach. They took a couple of flash-bangs and some tear gas, and just as they were about to start into the woods they heard a distant banging sound, metal on metal, from the direction of Wolfe’s place.

  “Somebody there,” Wolfe said. “It’s gotta be him.”

  “Let’s go,” Lucas said.

  CARL HAD GOTTEN into the house with a rock through the kitchen window. He cleared out the glass, boosted himself inside, turned on the water pump and the electricity, pushed the thermostat from fifty to seventy-two, found a local station on the satellite, got the gun and a box of shells out of the hideaway.

  All right. Get something to eat. He rummaged through the kitchen, found a couple of cans of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup, heated it up, and sat at the kitchen table gobbling it down, the gun on the table.

  The movement kept him preoccupied. Only when he put the bowl in the sink did he begin to feel alone—nobody to tell him to wash the bowl and put it away, nobody to tell where he was going, no Grandpa to talk to. No place to go, not with the cops looking for him.

  In fact . . . the Chevy was outside, in plain sight. If anybody came down the drive, it would be the first thing they’d see. If the cops were looking for him, somebody could come down the drive, spot the car, and sneak away to report him, and he’d never know.

  He picked up the gun, went outside, checked the garage. It was locked, but with a cheap padlock, enough to keep out kids. He looked around, found a hand-sized field stone, and beat on the lock until the hasp pulled out. He went inside, checked the four-by-four for keys—there were none, they were probably hung on the back of the bookcase—and lifted the overhead door.

  With the door up, he moved the
Chevy inside, then went back to the house. A local news program was on. He got a Coke from the refrigerator, perched on the couch. He thought about the Honda in the garage. Maybe later, he’d go out and scout around. For the moment, he’d just see what they were saying about him. Maybe, he thought, nobody had noticed he was gone.

  EIGHT HUNDRED YARDS, through second-growth timber, the ground soft and marshy underfoot. The banging continued, off and on, for the first three or four minutes of the march, and then stopped. They crossed a rise a few seconds later, and Wolfe whispered, “When you come across that next little rise, there, you can see the place.”

  They crossed a wet depression, and one of the sheriff’s deputies whispered, “Nettles,” and Lucas raised his hands over his head—he hated nettles—and warned Nadya. She nodded, and a minute later, they climbed out of the wet ground, through some scrubby maples, and looked down at Carl Walther’s Chevy.

  Carl was just walking out of a metal pole barn. A rifle lay on the hood of the Chevy and he picked it up, got in the car, started it, and rolled it into the pole barn.

  “Broke into the pole barn to hide the car,” Wolfe guessed.

  “What’s in there? Vehicles?”

  “Yeah, there’s a four-wheeler, a Honda, a boat, a couple of trailers, a couple of sleds, a John Deere Gator. I don’t know if he knows where the keys for the Honda are, but . . . now that I think of it, I bet he does. I bet when they were up here screwing around with that gun, they were running the four-wheeler, too. If he got on that, he could go where we couldn’t . . .”

  Lucas turned to the deputies. “Everybody move carefully. We’ve got him. There’s no point in anybody getting hurt.” One of the deputies carried a radio, and Lucas said to him, “Call in, get some more people down here.”

  “We gonna talk to him, or what?”

  “We’ll stay in the woods, block the place, and wait until the other guys get here. Then we’ll talk . . .”