“Man, that sounds bad, that sounds bad, man,” Virgil said. He felt an urgent need to do something, anything, but there was nothing he could do.
“It’s never good,” the nurse said. He added, “There’s a lot worse comes through here every day, and they walk out a few days later.”
A cop was sitting in a plastic chair at the end of the emergency room and he got up and walked over when he saw Virgil. “Hey, Virg. I talked to Donnie Carlson a minute ago, and he said they don’t have any names yet, but Frankie took a piece out of the arm of one of the guys who jumped her. Bit out a piece the size of a quarter, so when we get a name, we’ll have DNA and he’s probably got a pretty good hole on his arm.”
Virgil nodded. “Hang here for a minute, Al, will you? I want to talk, but I want to go look at Frankie…”
“Sure.”
–
With the nurse on his heels, Virgil went into the ICU, where the nurse opened a crack in the curtains around Frankie’s bed. Frankie’s eyes were closed, but when he stepped in, she must have heard the heels on his cowboy boots, and she asked, “Is that you?”
“Got here as fast as I could. What the hell happened?” Virgil asked.
Now her eyes opened. “How shitty do I look?”
Virgil shook his head. “You look like somebody who got held down and sandpapered. No permanent damage, no big cuts or anything; you won’t have scars, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Her face was a massive bruise, and though her nose was straight and unsplinted, and so probably not broken, there was dried blood around her nostrils and at the corners of her mouth. He could see her bare arms and they were scraped as badly as her face. Both eyes would be blackened for a while.
“That’s what I was worried about,” she said. Then she asked, “You okay?”
“What? Of course…”
“I don’t want you killing anybody,” she said.
Virgil looked at her for a few seconds, then said, “I can’t make any promises.”
“Virgil!”
“Fuck you. I’m not making any promises.” Virgil started to tear up, looking at her, wiped the tears away with the heels of his hands. “Ah, Jesus, Frankie… We’ll find the guys who did this. Have you pissed anybody off lately? Bad enough to do this? Unless you know somebody, it’s gotta be aimed at me.”
“No, no. It wasn’t.” Her voice was quiet, almost rusty. “It’s Sparkle. She wanted to visit a migrant trailer park on a farm out west of here; it’s off a rutted dirt road. She borrowed my truck to get up there. I was driving her speck.”
Specks were cars that Frankie thought were too small to be useful. “They thought I was her,” she said.
“Ah, shit…”
“They kept saying, ‘You get your nose outa our business. Go home, bitch.’”
“There’s a cop out in the emergency room, Al Foreman. You know him?”
“I know Al…”
“He says you bit a chunk out of one of them and the cops picked it up,” Virgil said. The guy’s gonna have a hole in his arm and we can nail him with the DNA. We’ll get him, I swear to God.”
Frankie said, “That’s nice… I feel really sleepy…”
The nurse, who had trailed in behind Virgil, said, “You’re filled up with painkillers, honey. You’ll be sleeping a lot.”
They talked for a few more minutes, but Frankie was slipping into sleep, and when she was gone, Virgil kissed her on the forehead, backed out of the room, and found Foreman, the Mankato cop. “What do you know?”
“Nothing but what I heard from the guys. She went over to the Kwik Trip around three o’clock. She went inside and bought some groceries and when she came back out, she was jumped by two guys who caught her between her car and a truck that was parked beside her,” Foreman said. “Donnie can tell you how big they were and all that, but I can tell you that they parked in the street, so the cameras didn’t get the license plate number. A witness says the vehicle was a red Ford SuperCrew pickup. Probably a couple years old.”
“Get their faces on the video?”
“No. They wore ball caps without any brand markings, which means they must have bought them for this job, and rubber Halloween masks. Somebody says they were Mitt Romney masks. They wore canvas work gloves. The guys have the video down at the shop, if you want to see it. Can’t really see too much after the first few seconds, because Frankie goes down between the cars. They were wearing work shirts and jeans.”
“Do you…” Virgil trailed away as a pretty but tough-looking blonde walked into the emergency room. She was tall, square-jawed, and wide-shouldered, with small, barely discernible boxer’s scars under both eyes. She wore dark slacks, a tan blouse under a dark blue jacket, and black marginally fashionable boots that could be used to kick somebody to death.
She said, “Virgil. How’s your friend? Is it Frankie?”
“Yeah, Frankie. She’s pretty roughed up, but she’ll be okay,” Virgil said. He knew Catrin Mattsson, but not well. “Catrin-good to see you. This is Al Foreman, Mankato PD. Al, this is Catrin Mattsson, she’s with us at the BCA.”
“Oh, yeah,” Foreman said, as they shook hands.
Foreman said “Oh, yeah” because he recognized the name: Mattsson had been a sheriff’s deputy famously kidnapped, raped, and beaten by an insane serial killer. She’d been rescued at the last minute by Lucas Davenport, and she had killed her captor with a steel bar, as Davenport had been reeling with a smashed nose. That was their story, anyway.
Her ordeal and her resilience had brought her to the attention of the governor, who’d pressured the BCA into hiring her. Davenport had supported the appointment, having worked with Mattsson on the serial killer case, before she was kidnapped. She was building her own reputation at the BCA as someone not to be messed with and who carried more than her own load.
Foreman filled her in on the details of the attack and Virgil told her what he’d gotten from Frankie: that the attack was probably aimed at Frankie’s sister, Sparkle, and why that might be. Mattsson listened closely, one fist on her hip; a full-sized black Beretta was clipped to her waistband just ahead of her fist.
When they were finished, Mattsson said, “Virgil, Jon wants you back on the tigers. Soon as you can reasonably do it. He knows you’ve been making progress-Sandy said to tell you that she’s found a shipment of meat dryers and has e-mailed the details to you. I’ll find the guys who attacked Ms. Nobles.”
“Frankie,” Virgil said.
“Yeah, Frankie.”
“She’s asleep; she’s full of pain medication,” Virgil said.
“Okay, I’ll be here overnight. I’ll check every once in a while, see if she’s awake,” Mattsson said. “In the meantime, I need to talk to this Sparkle.”
“She’s staying at Frankie’s farm.”
“Why don’t you wait here for a minute,” Mattsson said. “I want to talk to the doc. Then we’ll go look at the video, see what the locals have, and then I’ll follow you out to the farm. You better get back to the Cities tonight. The tigers are still number one on the media hit parade.”
She went off with the nurse to find the doc and when she was out of earshot, Foreman said, “Whoa.”
Virgil looked after her and said, “Yeah.”
Foreman: “Hot and scary. I mean, totally jumpable, but then she’d probably eat your head, like a black widow.”
“I’m not sure I’d say that out loud,” Virgil said.
“I hear you, brother. You okay with her on the case?”
“More than okay,” Virgil said. And he was: nobody at the BCA would go after Frankie’s attacker harder than Mattsson. He owed Duncan for that one.
–
Mattsson came back a few minutes later and Virgil led the way across town to the Mankato public safety department. Mattsson had called ahead, and the Mankato detective, Donnie Carlson, had the video ready to run.