Everybody paused to listen. Lucas said, “Ah, I'm a police officer, I need to talk to you for a second about a friend of yours. Could you step outside, maybe?”
“I'll have to get my shoes… Or, it's nice, I could go barefoot…” She took off her dance shoes and followed Lucas outside. “What happened?”
“Have you seen Jesse Barth today?” Lucas asked.
“Yes. When school got out.” Her eyes were wide; she'd see it all on TY too. “I talked to her, we usually walk home, but I had a band practice and then my dance lesson… Is she hurt?”
“We can't locate her at the moment,” Lucas said. “She was…”
“She was going to testify to a jury today, tonight,” McGuire said. “She was pretty nervous about it.”
“If she decided to chicken out, where would she go?” Lucas asked. “Does she have any special friends, a boyfriend?”
McGuire was troubled: “Jeez, I don't know…”
“Look, Kelly: if she doesn't want to testify, she doesn't have to. But. We can't find her. That's what we're worried about,” Lucas said. “Somebody saw her on the street, walking home, but she never showed up. We've got to know where she might've gone. If she's okay, we can work it out. But if she's not…”
“Ah…” She stared at Lucas for a moment, then turned and looked at a bus, and then said, “Okay. If she hid out, it'd be either Mike Sochich's house, or she might have gone to Katy Carlson's-or she might have taken a bus to Har Mar, to go to a movie.
Sometimes she goes up to Har Mar and sits there for hours.”
“Where can I find these people…?”
McGuire was an assertive sort: She said, “Give me two minutes to change. I'll show you. That'd be fastest.”
She took five minutes, and hustled out with a bag of clothes. In the car, she said, “Turn around, we want to go over to the other side of Ninety-four, into Frogtown.
Mike would be the best possibility… Best to go down Ninety-four to Lexington, then up Lexington. I'll show you where to turn…”
He did a U-turn on Snelling, caught a string of greens, accelerated down the ramp onto I-94, then up at Lexington, left, and north to Thomas, right, down the street a few blocks until McGuire pointed at a gray-shingled house behind a waist-high chain-link fence. Lucas pulled over and McGuire slumped down in her seat and said, “I'll wait here.”
Lucas said, with a grin, “If she's here, she's gonna know you ratted her out. Might as well face the music.” He popped the door to get out, and heard her door pop a second later. She followed him across the parking strip to the gate. There was a bare spot in the yard with a chain and a stake, and on the end of the chain, the same yellow-white dog he'd seen at the Barth's.
“Jesse's dog,” Lucas said.
“Naw, that's Mike's dog,” McGuire said. “Sometimes Jesse walks home with it. Dog likes her better than Mike.”
Again, they stepped carefully. The dog barked twice and snarled, but knew where the end of the chain was. And a good thing, Lucas thought. All he needed this afternoon was a pitbull-wannabe hanging on his ass.
Mike's house had a low shaky porch, with soft floorboards going to rot. The aluminum storm door was canted a bit, and didn't close completely. Lucas rang the doorbell, then knocked on the door. He heard a thump from inside, and a minute later, saw the curtain move in a window on the left side of the porch.
He felt the tension unwind a notch. He banged on the door, pissed off now. “Jesse.
Goddamnit, Jesse, answer the door. Jesse…”
There was a moment's silence, then Lucas said to McGuire, “If she comes to the door, yell for me.”
He stepped off the porch, circled the dog, and hurried around to the back of the house: five seconds later, Jesse Barth came sneaking out the back door, carrying a backpack.
“Goddamnit, Jesse,” he said.
Startled, she jerked around, saw him at the corner of the house. Gave up: “Oh, shit.
I'm sorry.”
“Come on-I've got to call your mom,” Lucas said. “She's freaked out, half the cops in St. Paul are out looking for you. People thought you were kidnapped.”
“I was just scared,” Jesse said as he led her through the ankle-deep grass back around the house. “What if I make a mistake?” Her lip trembled. “I don't want to make a mistake and go to jail.”
“Did Conoway say she was going to put you in jail?” Lucas asked. “Who said they were gonna put you in jail?”
“Well, you did, for one.”
“That's if you tried to sell your testimony,” Lucas said. “If you just go down and tell the truth, you're fine. You're the victim here.”
“But if I make a mistake…”
“There's a difference between lying and making a mistake,” Lucas told her. “They're not gonna put you in jail for making a mistake. You have to deliberately lie, and know you're lying, and it's gotta be an important lie. You talked to Conoway about what you're going to say. Just say that, and you're fine.”
They cleared the front of the house and found McGuire on the porch, talking to a tall, bespectacled kid wearing a Seal T-shirt and jeans: Mike. McGuire said: “Jesse, they were afraid you were kidnapped. I'm sorry, I was so worried, you know, you see on the news all the time…”
“That's okay,” Jesse said. “I'm just fucked up.”
Lucas called Kathy Barth: “I got her. She was hiding out with a friend. You've still got time to get down to Dakota County.”
“I've got to talk to Jesse,” Barth said.
“She's willing to go. You're holding up a lot of people here,” Lucas said.
“Oh, God.” Long silence, as though she were catching her breath. “Well, I've got to change…”
Lucas called Flowers, who was just crossing the Mississippi bridge into South St.
Paul. He was ten minutes away: “Man, I thought she was gone,” Flowers said. “I was thinking all this shit about the Klines and finding her body under a bridge…”
“Can you pick her up? That'd be best: I'm here with the Porsche and I got a rider.”
“Fast as I can get there. If we turn right around, we'll just about be on time.”
He told Flowers how to find the house, then called the St. Paul cops and canceled the alert: “Yeah, yeah, so I'll go kill myself,” he told a cop who was inclined to pull his weenie.
The three younger people sat on the porch, waiting for Flowers, and Lucas gave Jesse a psychological massage, telling her of various screw-ups with grand juries, and explained the difference between grand juries and trial juries. Jesse unsnapped the dog, whose name, it turned out, was Screw. She put it on a walking leash and the dog rolled over in the dirt and panted and licked its jaws and whimpered when Jesse scratched its stomach. “You're gonna make him come,” Mike said.
“No…” Jesse was embarrassed.
Lucas moved and the dog twitched. “I don't think he likes me.”
“Bit a paperboy once,” Mike said. “They were gonna sue us, but Mom said, 'For what?' so they didn't.”
“That's great,” Lucas said.
Flowers arrived, towing a boat. He got out of his car, ambled over, shaking his head, and said to Jesse, “I ought to turn you over my knee.”
“Oo. Do me, do me,” McGuire said.
In the car, McGuire said she might as well go home, since her class would be ending.
“Hope the neighbors see me coming home in a Porsche. They'll think I'm having a fling.”
“Maybe I oughta put a bag over my head,” Lucas said.
“That'd be no fun,” she said. “I want people to see it's a big tough old guy.”
Lucas was still cranked from Flowers's original call, and, in the back of his head, couldn't believe that they'd found Jesse so quickly. He dropped McGuire off at her home in Highland. She waved goodbye going up the walk, and he thought she was a pretty good kid. He looked at his watch. If he took a little time, rolled down Ford Parkway with his arm out the window, enjoying the day and the leafy street, and maybe blowing the doors off the Corvette that had just turned onto the parkway in front of him, he'd just about make dinner with the wife and kids.
He was done with Kline and the Barths.