Moving faster and faster: closing in. Moving faster.
"Fuckin' hold on…," he said.
Another hill, another lip, even steeper, and the car disappeared again, only to suddenly reappear, bucking wildly, then suddenly heading up-hill. The guy had made it to the far side of the valley but was only a hundred yards ahead, his taillights clear ovals now. Lucas groped for the cell phone with one hand, couldn't find it on the passenger seat.
"Goddamnit." The ride had thrown the phone on the floor, and he couldn't see it.
Ahead, the other car slowed, made a sharp wiggle, then moved forward again, away from him, only seventy-five yards, less than the length of a football field.
Just a moment too late, Lucas saw the black line in his headlights. The crack in the earth, and he remembered how the other car had suddenly bucked so wildly. A creek?
He jabbed at the brake, dropped over a short, steep bank, and hit hard, water splashing on the windshield. He floored the accelerator, and the car bucked and hit something hard, got sideways. He wrenched the steering wheel back to the left, and hit the far bank of the creek with a heavy whack that stopped him dead. He tried to push up it, but he could feel wheels spinning in sand. He reversed, tried to get straight, hit the bank again, stopped. Backed up again, tried again, near panic now: he was losing him. How'd the other guy gotten out?
Stymied, he groped in the glove compartment, found a flashlight, got out of the truck into ankle-deep water, and looked at the situation. He was stopped dead in the middle of a small creek, a six-foot-wide trickle of water in a bed maybe thirty feet wide. Nothing but sand under his feet.
When he shined the light on the opposite bank, he picked out two narrow tracks, tractor tracks, going up the far side. He'd simply missed them, missed the alignment when he went into the creek.
He jumped back in the truck, backed it down, found the two small tracks in his headlights, and pushed up them. As the other car had, the truck bucked up and then he was on dry ground again: but he'd lost three or four minutes.
He continued up the hill, fast as he could. He saw the track disappear in front of him, remembered that the other car had wiggled up the hill, slowed, spotted the wiggle, and followed it up. A moment later, the track intersected with another highway, the highway where he'd seen headlights.
There were taillights in sight, both east and west: the nav system told him he was back on Dennison Boulevard.
Decide.
He looked both ways, remembered the cell phone. He found it under the front passenger seat, punched up the Northfield center.
Decide. He said, "Shit," and turned west, accelerated.
"The guy took me across a field," he told the Northfield cops. "I'm on Dennison, but I don't know exactly where. Near James. I'm heading west…"
"We got guys on the way, but they're east of you, we'll vector them in there."
He gave it everything the truck had, blowing by two pickups and a Toytota Corolla before coming back into the lights of Northfield.
"Shit. Shit." Lucas pounded the steering wheel with the heels of his hands. Northfield was a big town, crowded with every kind of car. The guy was gone.
THEY DID HEAR from the driver, though.
At two- thirty, Lucas had just gotten back to the Northfield center when Ruffe Ignace called, freaked: "Pope just called again. He wouldn't talk to me. He wants your cell-phone number. He didn't say why. I lied and told him I didn't have it but I might be able to get it. He said he would wait five minutes and then he was going to throw the phone in a ditch. You've got four minutes to decide."
"Give him the number," Lucas said.
LUCAS CALLED THE co-op center on one of the Northfield center's phones and told them about the cell-phone call. "Find the cell," he said. "He's gonna call me. You got my number. He's probably using Peterson's phone again. Find the fuckin' cell. Find the fuckin' cell."
AND THEN POPE CALLED.
"Agent Davenport," he drawled. He spoke slowly, with the same whispery voice that Ignace had described. Lucas tried to penetrate it: husky, a middle tenor; Gould it be a woman? "That was you that chased me through that crick, wasn't it?" Lucas was astonished. The question froze him, and he asked, inanely, "Where are you?"
"Out here in the woods where I always am. Miz Peterson is still okay. Well, she wouldn't say that, I guess. I had me a little pussy before dinner. And after dinner. And for dessert. She's right here. You want to talk to her?"
Not a woman. A woman wouldn't talk like that-unless she were very, very manipulative. "Listen, man, you really need, our help…" Lucas felt absolutely stupid as he said it.
"Nah, I'm doing okay. I thought you had me there for a minute, those first two cops, and then you. When I got loose I heard them talk-ing about you on my scanner, said you almost wrecked your truck in that crick. I wondered what happened to you. I hit that sonbitch just right, I guess. Never saw it-nothing but luck." "Listen, Mr. Pope…"
"Didn't call me no Mr. Pope when you had my ass in St. John's. But listen, don't you want to talk to Miz Peterson? She was in the back the whole time. Here… Miz Peterson. This is the law. Talk to him…"
There was the sound of flesh against flesh, as though somebody had been slapped, the tenor, "Talk to him, bitch," and then a dry, ragged woman's voice, "Help me…"
"That's good enough," Pope said in his whisper. "We gotta go." And then: "Well, it's been fun, but I gotta say good-bye, Agent Davenport."
"You gotta…"
Click.
LUCAS WAS SCREAMING at the co-op center, and they came back: "The cell's in Owatonna. It's Peterson's. He got around you and went straight south."
"Get the goddamned people moving around there, get them moving…"
"They're moving now, everything we've got."
Five hours later, Lucas was on a dirt road west of Owatonna when he got a call from the Blue Earth County Sheriff's Department. There were a couple of clicks and he was patched through: "Lucas, this is Gene Nordwall, I'm down south of Mankato, little west of Good Thunder."
"Gene, you heard?"
"Yeah. We found her," he said.
"You found her?" Lucas asked. "She's alive?"
15
WAYNE'S FOUR CORNERS INN was a rambling white structure that sat on top of a ridge where Blue Earth County 122 and County 131 crossed each other. There were two nonfunctional gas pumps out front, with crown-shaped glass globes on top, left over from the 1950s, and left in the parking area as a statement of the inn's antiquity. To the left side of the inn, just outside the gravel parking area, was a pi-shaped struc-ture that might have been a medieval gallows, built of rough four-by-four lumber.
Lucas recognized the structure as soon as he pulled into the park-ing lot, outside the collection of cop cars. They were rare, in recent times, but as recently as the 1960s and 1970s they had been ubiquitous in the countryside. They were hanging bars, meant to display the carcasses of the biggest local bucks taken during deer season.
Carlita Peterson's body hung by the neck from the crossbar.
Not so much a body, as a carcass; Lucas had already been told, and walked toward the hanging bar with his eyes averted, not wanting to look.
A cop was there, and said to Lucas, "This is awful."
Lucas looked now: no way to avoid it.
Peterson's throat had been slashed; that had been the killing Stroke. But after she'd been killed, she'd been gutted, and her empty body, slashed from throat to anus with a cutting tool, hung in the cool still morning air.
LUCAS LOOKED AWAY, then stepped away, shaking his head, his hands trembling. He'd thought that they might get her back.