with sweat: that didn’t happen often. Up and out of the office: Carol was on the phone. “Where’d it come from? Where’d it come from?”
She waved him off.
He walked out of the office, ten feet down the hall, and then back, anxious to move, grating, “Where’s it coming from?”
She was taking a note, then pulled the phone away from her ear: “It came from a cell in Burnsville.” Burnsville was a big suburb right on the south side of the metro area: Pope was less than fifteen miles from where Lucas was sitting.
“Damnit. If he’s heading north . . . He could be on either Thirty-five E or Thirty-five W . . .”
“Or city streets,” Carol offered.
“Yeah. Call Burnsville. Tell them that. Pull out everything.”
He went back to the map. If Pope was on either branch of I-35, he would just about be going through the downtown area of either Minneapolis or St. Paul. But the two areas were ten minutes apart, and he might also have gone either east or west on the I-494 loop.
Pope had called from precisely the place where they could get the least information on direction. But if he were going north, the possibilities narrowed down again once he got north of the Twin Cities. The most obvious route would be on I-35 north, but there were other major links going north.
If he was going north. He’d never gone north before.
Lucas thought of the bull’s-eye he’d drawn on the Minnesota map that morning. He went back to the phone, called Reese at the co-op office: “Ray, listen. He called from Burnsville. That means if he’s going north, he’s in the metro area, so move the search area north about as fast as he could be traveling. Then, when the network is set, I want you to call all of the major nodes in the south end. He may be jerking us around when he keeps saying that he’s going north. He didn’t leave his home ground with the others, and from what I’ve been able to tell, Pope doesn’t know anything about the Boundary Waters. So tell the people down south that he may be down there. Tell them that it’s really critical that they don’t ease off because they think he’s going north . . .”
“I can get that out in five minutes.”
“Do that.”
Carol stuck her head in the office: “Two calls—Northfield police and Ruffe Ignace, that reporter . . .”
“I want both of them. Give me Northfield first.”
HE PICKED UP his phone and a voice said, “Agent Davenport, this is Jim Goode down in Northfield. We’ve got a car at the Peterson house, and it doesn’t look good. She didn’t show up at work this morning. She’s a ceramics teacher at St. Olaf, and the guys looked in the window of her house and they saw some cut rope on the kitchen floor. They called that probable cause, went in, they say the house is empty, but there’s a smear of what looks like dried blood on the kitchen floor, not much, but a smear, and that cut rope.”
“Seal the place off,” Lucas said. “I’ll send down our crime-scene crew . . .”
“It’s sealed off now. I’m calling in all our guys, we’re gonna do the streets, and the sheriff is running the county.”
“Don’t quit on it—there’s a possibility that he’s still down there.”
“That cocksucker, if he’s killed Carlita Peterson, he’s a dead man,” Goode said.
“You know her?”
“Yes, a little bit. She seemed like a nice lady.”
“I’m coming down,” Lucas said. “I’ve got a guy to talk to first, I might be a couple of hours.”
IGNACE CAME UP: “Listen, instead of running over here, I got a transcript that I can cut and paste to Microsoft Word and ship it to you. You could have it in one minute.”
“Do that,” Lucas said. “I should have thought of it myself. Here’s the address . . .”
HE CHECKED THREE TIMES, five seconds apart, and then the document came rolling in. At the top: “This is verbatim.”
Lucas read down through the conversation between Pope and Ignace. Pope said they had until tomorrow morning. Some time, then. Not much, and he might be lying. Still, there was a chance.
He sent the document to the printer, then looked again at the language, searching for the kind of things he’d pulled out of the first call. Nothing struck him that seemed particularly important. Pope said he had the woman in his car, which implied a sedan or coupe, but