LUCAS LEARNED ABOUT the fire at Irv’s Boat Works while he ate a late breakfast at his desk. The fire was reported in a routine, four-inch filler in the Star-Tribune: FIRE STRIKES MINNETONKA BOAT RENTAL. The article quoted a fire marshal: “It was arson, but there was no attempt to hide it, and we don’t have a motive as yet. We’re asking the public…”
Lucas called the marshal, whom he’d known vaguely from the neighborhood.
“It was a bomb, essentially, a Molotov cocktail, gas and motor oil,” the fire marshal said. “Not a pro job, but a pro couldn’t have done it any better. Burned that thing right down to the foundation. Old Irv didn’t have but six thousand dollars in insurance, so he didn’t do it. Not unless I’m missing something.”
AT THE UNIVERSITY, Sherrill sat gloomily at a microfilm reader, operating the antiquated equipment by hand, eyes red from staring at the scratchy images of ten-year-old records. “Jesus Christ.”
“What?” Black was on the next chair, three empty root beer cans next to his foot. He was wearing tan socks with blue clocks.
“This guy went around fucking exhaust pipes,” Sherrill said.
Black looked at her: “You mean on cars?”
“Honest to God.” She missed the double entendre and giggled, her finger trailing down the screen, over the projected image. “You know how they caught him?”
“He got stuck,” Black suggested.
“No.”
Black thought for a second. “His lawnmower sued for sexual harassment?”
“He tried to fuck a hot one,” Sherrill said. “He had to go to the hospital with third-degree burns.”
“Aw, man.” Black groaned. He reached into his crotch and rearranged himself, then scribbled a note on the pad next to his hand.
“Anything good?” Sherrill asked as he made the note.
“Kid who was into sex and fire,” Black said. “I think he scared her bad.” He rolled through to the next page. “She says he shows signs of ‘substantial sexual maladjustment manifested in improper, aggressive sexual behavior and identification with fire.’”
“Guys are so fucked up,” Sherrill said as Black pushed the printout button. “You never see women doing this stuff.”
“Have you heard the ‘best friend’ joke’s been going around?”
“Oh, no. Don’t tell me.” She shook her head unconvincingly.
“See, there was this guy goes to work, gets there late, and the boss jumps him…”
“C’mon, don’t tell me,” Sherrill said.
“All right. If you really don’t want to hear it,” he said. “Let me get this printout.”
He came back a minute later with the printout and she said, “All right, let’s hear it. The joke.”
Black dropped the printout next to the microfilm reader and went on, “…so the boss says, ‘Get the fuck out of here. You’re fired. I don’t want to see your ass again.’ So the guy drags out the door, really upset, gets in his car, and halfway home he’s t-boned at an intersection by a teenager. Trashes his car, and the kid’s got no insurance. Jesus. This is turning into the worst day of his life. So his car is towed, and the guy has to take the bus home—and when he gets there, eleven o’clock in the morning, he hears sounds coming from the bedroom. Like sex. Moaning, groaning, sheets being scratched. And he sneaks back there, and there’s his wife, having sex with his best friend.”
“No shit,” said Sherrill.
“And the guy freaks out,” Black said. “He yells at his wife, ‘Get out of here, you slut. Get your clothes, get dressed, and get out. Don’t ever come back or I’ll beat your ass into the floor.’ And he turns to his best friend and says, ‘As for you—Bad dog! Bad dog!’”
“That’s really fuckin’ funny,” Sherrill said; she turned away to smile.
“So don’t laugh,” Black said, knowing she liked it. And on the top of the printout he wrote “John Mail.”
IRV WAS A broad-shouldered old man with a crown of fine white hair, with a pink spot in the middle of it. His nose was pitted and red, as though he might like his whiskey too much. He wore a faded flannel shirt and canvas trousers, and sat on a park bench next to his dock. A cash box sat on the bench beside him. “What can I do you for?” he asked when Lucas rolled up.
“Are you Irv?” Off to the left, there was a scorched stone foundation with raw dirt inside, and nothing else.
“Yeah.” Irv squinted up at him. “You a cop?”
“Yeah, Minneapolis,” Lucas said. “What do you think? Will you get it back together?”
“I suppose.” Irv rubbed his large nose with the back of one hand. “Don’t have much else to do, and the insurance’ll probably get me halfway there.”
Lucas walked over to the foundation. There wasn’t much evidence of fire, except for soot on the stones. “Got it cleaned up in a hurry.”
The old man shrugged. “Wasn’t anything in it but wood and glass, and a few minnie tanks. It burned like a torch. What didn’t burn, they took out with a front-end loader. The whole kit and caboodle was out of here in five minutes.” He took off his glasses and cleaned the lenses on his flannel shirt. “Goddamnit.”
Lucas turned away, inspected the foundation some more, and, when Irv got his glasses straight, walked back and handed him the flier. “Did you see this guy in here last week?”
Irv tipped his head back so he could look at the flier with his bifocals. Then he looked up and said, “Is this the sonofabitch that burned me out?”
“Was he in here?”
Irv nodded. “I believe he was. He doesn’t look quite like this—the mouth is wrong—but he looks something like it, and I wondered what he was doing when he came in here. He wasn’t any fisherman; he didn’t know how to start the kicker. And it was cold that day.”
“When was this?” Lucas asked.
“Two days ago—the day the rain came in. He came back in the rain.”
“You remember his name?”
Irv scratched his chin. “No, no, I don’t. I’d have his name off his driver’s license, in my receipt box. If I had a receipt box anymore.” He looked up at Lucas, the sun glittering off his glasses. “This is the one that took the Manette girl and her daughters, isn’t it?”
“Could be,” Lucas said. And he thought: Yes, it is.
JOHN MAIL CALLED Lucas at one o’clock in the afternoon. “Here I am, figuring the cops are coming down on me at any minute. I mean, I’m buying my food a day at a time, so I don’t waste any. Where are you guys?”
“We’re coming,” Lucas growled. The voice was beginning to get to him: he was looking at his watch as he talked, counting the seconds. “We’re taking bets on how long you last. Nobody’s out as far as a week. We can’t give that bet away.”
“That’s interesting,” Mail said cheerfully. “I mean, that’s very interesting. I best do as much fuckin’ as I can, then, because I might not get any more for a while. Have to do with those hairy old assholes out at Stillwater.”
“Be your asshole,” Lucas snarled.
Mail’s voice went cold: “Oh, I don’t think so. I don’t think so, Lucas.”
“What?” Lucas asked. “You got a magic spell?”
“Nothing like that,” Mail said. “But after people get to know me, they don’t fuck with me; and that’s the truth. But hey, gotta go.”
“Wait a minute,” Lucas said. “Are you taking care of those people? You’ve got them for now, and that puts some responsibility on you.”
Mail hesitated, then said, “I don’t have time to talk. But yeah, I’m taking care of them. Sometimes she makes me angry, but I don’t know: subconsciously, she likes me. She always did, but she repressed it. She has a guilt complex about our doctor-patient relationship, but she used to sit there…”
He paused again, then said, “I’ve got to go.”
Given a different context, he might have sounded almost human, Lucas thought, as the phone went click. As it was, he simply sounded insane.
“FIRE,” LUCAS SAID to Black and Sherrill.
“Sex. Probably he’s been institutionalized—he talks about Stillwater like…I don’t know. He doesn’t really know about it, but he’s heard a lot about it.”
Lester came in. “He called from out in Woodbury somewhere.”
“Woodbury. That’s 494,” Lucas said. “The guy’s riding up and down the 494 strip, so he’s someplace south.”
“Yeah. We’ve whittled it down to one-point-two million people.”
“The fire and sex thing,” Sherrill said. “We got one just like that.”
“Yeah.” Black thumbed through a stack of paper. “This guy. John Mail. Let me see, he was fourteen when she saw him…Huh. He’d be about twenty-five right now.”
Lucas looked at Lester. “That’d be pretty good. That’d be about prime time for a psycho.”
Lester tappedthefile. “Let’s isolate that one and get on it.”
LUCAS LOOKED AT his watch: almost two o’clock. Nearly forty-eight hours since the kidnapping. He locked the door to his office, closed the blinds, pulled the curtains, put his feet back on his desk, and thought about it. And the more he thought about it, the more the telephone link seemed the best immediate possibility.
He closed his eyes and visualized a map of the metro area. All right: if they coordinated cops from all over the metro area—if they set everything up in advance—how far down could they push the reaction time? A minute? Forty-five seconds? Even less than that, if they got lucky. And if they caught him in a shopping center, someplace with restricted access, only a couple of exits—if they did that, they should be able to seal the place before he could get the car out. They could process every plate in the lot, check every ID…
Lucas was putting the idea together when another thought occurred: what had Dunn said? That he talked to Andi in her car? So Andi Manette had a cellular phone? What kind? A purse phone, or a dedicated car phone?
He sat up, turned on the desk light, rang Black’s desk, got no answer, tried Sherrill, no answer. Got Anderson’s daily book, flipped through it, found Dunn’s phone number and dialed.
A cop answered. “He’s probably on his car phone, chief.”
Lucas got the number and called, and Dunn answered.
“Does your wife have a cellular?”
“Sure.”
“A car phone, or a personal phone?”
“She carries it in her purse,” Dunn said.
12
THE FBI’S AGENT-IN-CHARGE had a cleft chin and blond hair; his name was T. Conrad Haward, and he thought he looked like a Yale footballer, just now easing into his prime. But he had large, fuzzy ears and behind his back was called Dumbo.
Lucas, Lester, and an anonymous FBI tech sat in Haward’s office underlooking the Minneapolis skyline. Haward interlaced his fingers in the middle of his leatherette desk pad and said, “It’s all on the way, with the techs to operate it. The Chicago flight lands in an hour; the LA flight is still three hours out. The Dallas stuff, I don’t know if we’ll get that tonight. We’ll go ahead in any case. Time is too much of a problem. In sixty-five percent of the cases, the victims have been terminated at this point on the time line.”
“I just hope he’s got that fucking phone,” Lester said.
“He plays computer games—he won’t throw out a piece of technology like a new flip phone,” Lucas said.
The FBI tech, an older man with a silvery crewcut and striped clip-on tie, said, “The big question is, how do we hold him on the phone, if he answers it?”
“We’re working on it,” Lucas said, leaning forward in his chair. “We talked to one of the local rock-radio stations—the general manager is a friend of mine, and the only people who’d know about this would be him, one DJ, and an engineer. We’re gonna have the DJ call, with a contest they’ve been running. It’s a real contest, real prizes, and it’ll really go out over the air. The only difference being that we’ll feed them the phone number. If he doesn’t answer the first time, we’ll try again in a few hours. If he answers—whenever he answers—we’ll have the DJ ready to go. The typical air time, for one of these contest things, is only about a minute or a little more. We’re working out credible ways to stretch it.”
“Unless we’re lucky, we’ll need at least two or three minutes to get a really good fix,” the tech said. “You gotta hold him on there.”
“He’s a gamer—we’re gonna appeal to his vanity,” Lucas said. “He’ll stay on long enough to deal with the question. And when he answers, if he’s right, the DJ’s gonna say, ‘Hang on while I do an intro to the next song.’ Then he’ll do it—take his time, maybe do a little ad—and then come back for a mailing address.”
“We’ll never get an address,” Lester said. He grinned. “But wouldn’t that be something?”
Lucas shook his head. “He’d just give us some bullshit. But if we can hold him on that long, we ought to get the fix.”
“When you say, ‘Really good fix,’ what does that mean?” Lester asked the tech. Dumbo frowned. The conversation seemed to be flowing around him. “A half-mile, a block, six inches, what?”
“If we could risk riding the signal in, we could get it right down to the house,” the tech said. “As it is, we’ll be able to put you on the right block.”
“Why not go closer?” Dumbo asked.
“Because if he’s really nuts, he might slit their throats and run for it,” the tech said, turning to his boss. “He’d hear the choppers coming when they were six blocks away.”
Lucas said, “You get us to the block, we’ll have him out of there in an hour, guaranteed.”
“If you can get us the air time, we’ll put you on the block,” the tech said.
On the way out of the building, Lester said, “Do you believe them?”
Lucas nodded. “Yeah. This is what the feebs are good at—technology. If he answers the phone, and we can keep him on, they’ll track him.”
“Dumbo was right about one thing—it’s getting long,” Lester said. He glanced at his watch as if to check the date. “The asshole won’t keep them much more than four or five days at the outside. The pressure’ll get to him.”
“How about the full-court-press idea?” Lucas asked.
“Anderson’s trying to set it up, but it’ll be tomorrow before we’re ready. It’s a goddamned administrative nightmare. Even then…I don’t know. There are too many people involved. Somebody will fuck it up.”
“It’s a shot,” Lucas said. “What about that guy Black and Sherrill were tracking? The kid who liked sex and fire?”
“John Mail,” Lester said. “That’s a definite washout. I don’t know why, but Black left a note for me. They’re looking into three other possibilities.”
“Shit,” Lucas said. “The guy sounded good.”
WITH TWO SETS of cellular tracking equipment, they would need six helicopters, one flying high and two flying low in each of two groups. The gear from Chicago arrived first, along with three techs, and they busied themselves fixing odd-looking globe antennas to the support struts on the choppers. The gear from Los Angeles arrived two hours later, and the other group was put together. When the choppers were ready, and the equipment checked, they assembled on a landing pad at the airport.
“All you have to do,” one of the techs told the assembled pilots, “is generally face in the direction we tell you, and hold it there. The instruments will do the fine tuning. And keep track of what you’re doing: I don’t want to get hit by a goddamned jumbo jet because you get interested in what we’re doing, and I don’t want anybody running into anybody else.”
“Glad he said that,” Lucas muttered to Sloan, who was riding with the second group.
“You ready?” Sloan asked. Lucas feared airplanes in a way that amused other cops. Sloan no longer thought it was very funny.
“Yeah.”
“They’re pretty safe…”
“Helicopters don’t bother me the way planes do,” Lucas said. He grinned briefly and looked up at the chopper. “I don’t know why, but I can ride
a chopper.”
AT EIGHT FORTY-FIVE they were in the air, lifting out of the airport landing zone, Lucas’s group of choppers fixing themselves over I-494 south of Minneapolis, while Sloan’s group hovered south of St. Paul. Below them, the lights in the cars on I-494 went by like streams of luminescent salmon, and the street and house lights stretched into the distance in a psychedelic chessboard. At nine-twenty, the techs were happy: “Let’s do it,” said the tech in Lucas’s chopper.
And at the radio station, the DJ picked up a phone, said, “OK,” looked through the glass of the broadcast booth at the engineer and the general manager behind him, and nodded.
…wrapping up with “Bohemian Rhapsody” from Queen. Tell you what, sports fans, it’s time to play a little squeeze. Here, I’ll stick my hand in the fifty-five-gallon drum… There was a deep thumping, a man trapped inside an oil drum)…and pull out one of these telephone numbers. We’ll give it ten rings. If we don’t get it in ten, then we push the prize up by ninety-three dollars and try again. So…
John Mail listened with half an ear: he was playing one of Davenport’s fantasy games on a Gateway P5-90. He was in trouble: all of Davenport’s games were full of traps and reversals. When you were killed, you could restart the game, carefully edge up to the point when you were killed—and get killed by something that passed you through the first time. A back-trail trap, a switchback ambush; must be some kind of circular counting mechanism in the program, Mail thought. He felt he was learning something about the opposition.
On the tuner, the DJ’s voice followed a nice set of Queen. His phony bubble-gum rap was a subliminal annoyance, but not worth changing. Mail heard the beep-beep-boop of the phone dialing. And when the phone rang on the radio—at that very instant—the phone rang in Andi Manette’s purse.
Mail sat up, pushed away from the game with a spasm of fear. What was that? Something outside? The cops?
When he’d finished with Andi Manette the first night, he’d gone to the store for groceries and beer. Andi’s purse was on the front seat of the van, where he’d thrown it after the attack. He opened it as he drove and pawed through it. He found her billfold, took out almost six hundred dollars, a pleasant surprise. He found her appointment book, a calculator, miscellaneous makeup, and the two pounds of junk that women seem to accumulate. He’d pushed it all back in the purse.