Damnit. Gloria Crosby. Crouched over the desk, he thumbed through the rest of the papers, trying to figure out what had happened. The phone rang and he snatched it off the desk:
“What?”
“Lucas, you’re on…”
“Yeah, yeah.” He banged down the receiver, went back to the papers, and then picked up the phone again, punched in Anderson’s number.
“This is Lucas…”
“Lucas, you’re on…”
“Yeah, yeah, fuck that, listen, you gotta get everything you can find on a guy named John Mail, DOB 7/7/68. Did time in the state hospital. We need the most recent photo we can find. Check the DMV and find his parents…wait, wait, I’ve got this…” Lucas shuffled through the papers. “His folks lived at 28 Sharf Lane in Wayzata. Goddamnit, that’s where McPherson said he was from.”
“Who?”
“Just get that shit, man. This is something.”
Off the phone again, he went through the file on Mail and found the reference to the dental records. Damnit. He got his book, looked up the Medical Examiner’s number.
“Sharon, this is Lucas Davenport…yeah, fine, it’s all healed up, yeah, listen, I need you to pull something for me. You should have some records on a guy named John Mail went off the Lake Street Bridge a few years back, I can get you the date if you need it. John Mail. Yeah, I’ll wait.”
Ten seconds later, she was back. Mail was on the computer. “Just hold it there,” Lucas said. “I’m gonna run over right now.”
Lucas was out the door and down the street, a fast five-minute walk to the Medical Examiner’s. An ME investigator named Brunswick was peering at a computer.
“Something hot?” he asked.
“You say a guy is dead,” Lucas said. “I think he might still be alive.”
“Well, the guy we saw was dead,” Brunswick said. “I’ve been looking at the pictures.” He passed a group of eight-by-ten color photographs to Lucas. The remains of the body, still partly wrapped in the remains of a pair of Levi’s blue jeans, was spread on a stainless steel table. Most of it was bone, although the torso looked like a gray ball of string or grass. The face was gone, but the dark hair was still there. Both hands were missing, as was one leg.
“Bad shape. Were the hands—is that natural? Is there any possibility they were taken off?”
Brunswick shook his head. “No way to tell. The body was falling apart. The one unusual thing is that there was evidence of a ligature around the torso—wire, or something. God knows, in that part of the Mississippi, it could have been anything.”
“Could somebody have anchored the body somewhere? Until it was ready to be found?”
“You’ve got a nasty turn of mind, Davenport.”
“But you already thought of that,” Lucas said.
“Yeah. And it’s possible. Whatever it was tied him down, had him for a while. Nearly cut the body through, in the end. There was no sign of any ligature when the body was found, though.”
“What about the dental records?”
“It’s the right guy, by the records. Here are the X-rays on the body, and you can see the dental X-rays.”
Lucas bent over them and looked: they were patently identical. In the corner of the dental records was a response phone number at the state hospital. Lucas picked up Brunswick’s phone and punched the number in.
“Can’t be right,” Lucas said.
A woman answered. Lucas identified himself and said, “I need to talk to Dr. L. D. Rehder, does he still work there? I’m sorry, she? Yeah, it really is important. Yeah.”
To Brunswick, he said, “I’m on hold.”
Brunswick said, “Is this the Manette case?”
“Part of it,” Lucas said.
“My wife went on a march last night to protest violence against women,” Brunswick said.
“Hope it works,” Lucas said.
On the phone, a woman said, “This is Dr. Rehder.”
“Yeah, Dr. Rehder, some time ago one of your patients apparently committed suicide. The body ID was confirmed by dental records from your office,” Lucas said. “A kid named John Mail.”
“I remember John.” Her voice was pleasantly clipped. “He was with us for quite a while.”
“Is there any way he could’ve gotten to the records to switch them with somebody else’s? I mean, before he got out of the hospital?”
“Oh, I don’t think so. He was confined in a completely different area. He would have had to escape over there, break in here without being detected, then get out of here and break back in over there. It would have been very difficult.”
“Damnit,” Lucas said.
“Is there some question about whether it was John who jumped off the bridge?” Rehder asked.
“Yes. Have you by any chance seen the police composite pictures of the man who kidnapped Mrs. Manette and her daughters?”
Rehder said, “Yes, I have. John had dark hair.”
“He may have changed the hair color…”
“Just a minute, let me get my paper.”
“Getting her paper,” Lucas said to Brunswick. He shuffled through the pictures of the body while they waited. Then Rehder came back on and said, “If the hair was changed, if the hair was black, I’ve just colored it in with my felt-tip pen. It could be John. There’s something not quite right about the chin line.”
Lucas nodded. He knew he was right. “Okay. Does the name Gloria Crosby mean anything to you?”
“Gloria?” Rehder said. “Gloria was an aide—Gloria worked for us.”
Lucas closed his eyes. Gotcha.
22
ANDERSON, HARRIED, HIS hands full of paper, his sharecropper’s face pickled in a permanent squint, said, “Sloan said to tell you he’s bringing the car. Dunn’s moving: you gotta get out of here.”
“Stay on the Mail thing,” Lucas said, pulling on his jacket.
Anderson ticked it off on his fingers. “We’re tracking his friends, to see if anybody’s run into him since the bridge, if anybody has a name. We’re trying to figure out who the body really was, but that will be a problem. It has to be somebody at the hospital who had dental care, who was close to Mail’s size and age, and who was out at the same time, but there are hundreds of people who fit, all of them are mentally ill, and a lot of them are impossible to find. We’re trying to find Mail’s parents—his mother and stepfather. We think they might have split up. We know they moved to the Seattle area, but one of the stepfather’s friends heard they split out there, and the mother might have remarried.”
“What about decent photos of the guy?”
“We’ve got photos coming from the hospital and the DMV, but they’re all years old,” Anderson said.
“Yeah, but with something real to work from, we can age him. Get them over to the company, if you need to. They were doing some good stuff this morning.”
“Okay. But you need to talk with the chief about whether to release them to the press. If he’s as close to the edge as you say he is…”
“Yeah. I’ll be back. Don’t do anything until we talk about it. And if anything breaks—anything—call me. I’ll be on the phone.”
WHEN LUCAS RAN out, Sloan was walking up to the building, carrying a baseball cap.
“Where is he? Dunn?”
“He’s coming through town right now,” Sloan said over his shoulder as he turned and headed back into the street. He had a gray, four-year-old Chevy Caprice sitting in traffic with its engine running. “We’ve got to motivate.”
The radios they’d gotten from the feds were standard: Lucas called in, checking the identification protocols, and was told that zebra is underway; the subject has been acquired.
“That means they can see the car from the chopper,” Lucas said.
“Fuckin’ wonderful,” Sloan said.
“It’s better than the ten-four bullshit,” Lucas said. “I never did understand that.”
“Did you bring the maps?”
“Yeah, and
I got one for the Hudson area, just in case.” Lucas took the maps out of his pocket. The radio burped:
Approaching White Bear Avenue Interchange.
“This is really fucked, you know?” Lucas said. “I’m sitting here thinking that it’s a little too strange.”
As they paced Dunn’s car through the city and into the ’burbs, Lucas told Sloan about the identification of John Mail. “Haven’t pinned him yet,” Lucas said.
“If he’s the guy, we will,” Sloan said confidently. “Once we get a face…”
“I hope,” Lucas said.
They were in the countryside now, and white puffy clouds cast long shadows on new-cut hay, the last cut of the year. The beans and corn, as far as Lucas could tell, were about as good as they ever got in Minnesota, the corn showing stripes of gold along the edge of the leaves, the beans already brown and drying. A few miles out of St. Paul, an ultra-light aircraft circled over the highway, the pilot plainly visible in his leathers and black helmet. Further on, toward the St. Croix River, a half-dozen brightly colored hot-air balloons drifted east toward Wisconsin.
And the radio said, He’s off at 95…he’s back on, heading east.
This is five; we got him coming in.
Dumbo: Everybody in position, now.
“Get off at Highway 15,” Lucas said, pointing at an exit sign. “Go north, find a place to turn around and start back. We don’t want to sit anywhere. If Mail is out roaming around and sees us, he’d recognize me.”
Sloan took the off-ramp, paused at the top, and started north on the blacktopped road. “Van coming up from behind,” Sloan said.
Lucas slid down in his seat and Sloan took the first left. The van stayed on the main road. Sloan, looking in the rearview mirror, said, “Blonde. Woman.” He did a U-turn and started back.
He’s inside. We’ve got him covered.
“They’re doing okay,” Lucas said nervously.
“Give them time,” Sloan said. “The feebs could fuck up a wet dream.”
Lucas and Sloan both looked at their watches simultaneously. Sloan said, “Five minutes,” and Lucas grunted.
They were headed back toward the interstate, no other cars in sight. The landscape was littered with new suburban houses with plastic siding in pastel tints ranging from sunset to sage; here and there a farm field came up to the edge of the road. A flock of sheep grazed over a pasture.
Lucas said, “Green pastures.”
“Say what?” Sloan looked at him.
Lucas said, “These are the green pastures, from Psalms. Elle was right. I’ll bet my ass that he’s about to lead us into Stillwater. How far are we from Stillwater? Ten miles?”
“About that.”
“Let’s head that way,” Lucas said urgently. “We’re pretty useless anyway.”
“If he’s leading us, then this might not be what it looks like…”
“Yeah, yeah,” Lucas said. “Exactly right.”
And the radio said, We’ve got a confirmed hit, confirmed hit. He’s off, he’s gone, Jimmy get me…what? We’ve got cellular confirmed but no cell designation, it was too quick. Can we run that, Jimmy? Jimmy? Subject is out of the rest stop on his way to the car, can we get the intercept up…
“What the fuck did he say?” Lucas asked. “What’d Mail say?”
And the radio said, Subject was told to go to a picnic table and pull a note off the bottom side and follow instructions…subject is at the picnic table, subject is walking back to the car, he’s reading a paper, he has the instructions…
“Come on, goddamnit, we gotta move,” Lucas said. “It’s Stillwater.”
Subject is in car proceeding west on I-94.
“Wrong way,” Sloan grunted.
“He’s got no choice from there,” Lucas said. He slapped his own forehead. “And think about it, think about it: the guy makes the initial contact on Dunn’s cellular phone, and routes him to a public phone? Why’d he do that? Why didn’t he call him on the cellular again? Then he wouldn’t have to fuck around with the possibility that somebody else was using the pay phone. Why’d he do that, Sloan?”
“I don’t know.” Sloan frowned as he thought about it. “Maybe…no. If he doesn’t trust the cellular now, why’d he trust it yesterday?”
“He didn’t. Maybe he figured we’d be monitoring it,” Lucas said. “Maybe he did it so we’d be close by, but he’d know where we were at. I’ll bet that sonofabitch is in Stillwater right now. Goddamnit, what’s he doing?”
Three minutes later the radio burped, Subject exiting at Highway 15…crossing Interstate, reentering Interstate…
“What’s he doing?” Sloan asked. “Why didn’t he go this way?”
“He’s going down to 95 and he’ll take 95 north to Stillwater,” Lucas said. “It’s simpler if you don’t have a map. How fast can we get there?”
“We’ll be there in six or seven minutes. He’ll be ten minutes behind us. If you’re right.”
“I’m right.”
“Yeah, I know.” Sloan had the Chevy up to ninety, sloughed past the Lake Elmo airport with its pole-barn hangars, and onto Highway 5 east toward Stillwater.
“Goddamnit, I wish we were set up with the Stillwater cops. Just a few guys to sit and watch. We could’ve shipped a picture of Mail out here.”
They listened to the parade moving east on the interstate, then Lucas got on the radio to Dumbo. “We’re headed to Stillwater, we think he’s playing out the Bible verses he sent us. You probably ought to have your lead cars get off at Highway 95 and start north. And take it easy: we’ve got two more verses to go, but the last one talks about a trap.”
“Got it covered, Minneapolis,” Dumbo said. “Keep your heads down. We don’t want a crowd.”
“Thanks for the technical advice,” Sloan muttered.
AS DUNN AND the federal parade turned off the interstate, Sloan blew past a Dodge pickup on the Highway 36 entrance ramp. The truck swerved onto the shoulder as they passed, and the driver, a young, long-haired man, leaned on his horn and then came after them as they weaved through the traffic, down a long passage of convenience stores and fast-food joints.
“Asshole,” Sloan said, grinning into his rearview mirror.
“Better hope he doesn’t kill any kids,” Lucas said.
“Yeah. The fuckin’ paperwork alone. We gotta light coming up, you wanna hop out and chat with him?”
“Unless you want to run the light.”
“All right.”
The truck loomed behind them as they slowed for the light, closed to eight inches from their bumper, and the kid was back on the horn.
Lucas turned to look over the backseat. The trucker had one hand on the wheel and the other on the horn; a young woman, next to him in the passenger seat, seemed to be yelling—he could see the points of her canine teeth—but Lucas couldn’t tell whether she was yelling at the driver or at him. Then she gave him the finger and Lucas decided that he was definitely the target. The trucker dropped the transmission into park, popped his door, and started to climb out, and Sloan went through the red light.
“Goddamn, he’s coming through the red,” Sloan said, peering in the mirror.
The radio: Two miles out of Bayport, slow and steady.
“We gotta do something about this guy,” Sloan said as they took the long sweeping curve toward the St. Croix River. They’d cut the corner off Dunn’s route and were approaching Highway 95 ahead of him. “Dunn’s not five miles away. Going through Bayport’ll slow him down, but this asshole…” He looked in the mirror, and the truck was coming after them.
“All right,” Lucas said. “There’s a marina up ahead. Pull in there. He’ll come in behind us and I’ll take him in the parking lot.” Lucas pulled his .45 out of the shoulder rig, popped the magazine, jacked the shell out of the chamber, slapped the magazine back in the butt, and dropped the extra shell in his coat pocket. “What a pain in the ass.”
“Ready?” Sloan asked.
“Yeah. You g
ot cuffs? If we need them?”
“Glove compartment.”
Sloan kept the speed up until he was on top of the marina entrance, then stood on the brakes and took them off the highway. The trucker almost rammed them, swerved out at the last minute, then cranked the truck down the road behind them. Sloan kept moving until they hit the parking lot, then pulled around in a circle. The trucker cut inside them, and they stopped, nearly nose-to-nose.
Lucas popped the door and climbed out, the pistol back in its holster. The trucker was already on the ground, running around the back of his truck, reaching into the open truck bed for something. Lucas ran toward him and the trucker pulled out a length of two-by-four and Lucas screamed, “Police,” showed his badge in his left hand, and pulled the pistol in his right. “On the ground. On the ground, asshole.”
The trucker looked at the two-by-four, his eyes puzzled, as though it had gotten into his hand by mistake, then chucked it back into the truck. “You cut me off,” he said.
“Get on the fuckin’ ground,” Lucas shouted.
The woman started out of the passenger side, but when she saw the gun, she got back in and punched down the door locks. Sloan got out and held up a badge where she could see it.
The trucker was flat on the blacktop, looking up, and Lucas said, “We’re on an emergency run, we’re in a big goddamn hurry or I’d kick your ass into fuckin’ strawberry jam. As it is, I’m gonna take your truck license number. I want you to sit here, out of the way, for a half-hour. You can sit in the truck, but you sit for a half-hour, and then you can leave. If you leave before then, I’ll be all over your ass. I’ll put your ass in jail on fifteen fuckin’ traffic counts and a couple of felonies, like interfering with officers. You understand that?”
Lucas Davenport Novels 6-10 Page 54
