“You good?” Lucas asked, on the radio.
“Got my video game, got my iPod. Got two sacks of pork rinds and a pound of barbeque ribs, and a quart of Diet Coke for propellant. All set.”
“Glad I'm not in the car with you,” Lucas said. “Those goddamn pork rinds.”
“Ah, you open the door every half hour or so, and you're fine,” Jenkins said. “You might not want to light a cigarette.”
Weather was cutting again in the morning, and was asleep when Lucas tiptoed into the bedroom at twelve-fifteen. He took an Ambien to knock himself down, a Xanax to smooth out the ride, thought about a martini, decided against it, set the alarm clock, and slipped into bed.
The alarm went off exactly seven hours and forty minutes later. Weather was gone; that happened when he was working hard on a case, staying up late. They missed each other, though they were lying side by side…
He cleaned up quickly, looking at his watch, got a Ziploc bag with four pieces of cornbread from the housekeeper, a couple of Diet Cokes from the refrigerator, the newspaper off the front porch, and was on his way. Hated to be late on a stakeout; they were so boring that being even a minute late was considered bad form.
As it was, he pulled up on the side street at two minutes to eight, got the hand-off from Jerrold, called Del, who'd just been pushed by Flowers, and who said that a light had come on ten minutes earlier. “She's up, but she's boring,” Del said.
The newspapers had the Widdler story, and tied it to Bucher, Donaldson, and Toms.
Rose Marie said that more arrests were imminent, but the Star Tribune reporter spelled it “eminent” and the Pioneer Press guy went with “immanent.”
You should never, Lucas thought, trust a spell-checker.
Anderson stepped out of her house at 8:10, picked up the newspaper, and went back inside. At 8:20, carrying a bag and the newspaper, she walked down to the bus stop, apparently a daily routine, because the bus arrived two minutes later.
They tagged her downtown and to her office, parked their cars in no-parking zones, with police IDs on the dashes, and Lucas took the Skyway exit while Flowers took the street. There was a back stairs, but Lucas didn't think the risk was enough to worry about…
As he waited, doing nothing, he had the feeling he might be wrong about that, and worried about it, but not too much: he always had that feeling on stakeouts. A few years earlier, he'd had a killer slip away from a stakeout, planning to use the stakeout itself as his alibi for another murder…
A few minutes before noon, Shrake showed up for the next shift, and Lucas passed off to him, and walked away, headed back to the office. He'd gone fifty feet when his cell phone rang: Shrake. “She's moving,” and he was gone. Lucas looked back.
Shrake was ambling along the Skyway, away from Lucas, on the phone. Talking to somebody else on the cell, probably to Jenkins, probably afraid to use the radio because he was too close to the target; she had practically walked over him.
Seventy-five feet ahead of Shrake, Lucas could see the narrow figure of Amity Anderson speed-walking through the crowd.
Going to lunch? His radio chirped: Flowers. “You want to hang in, until we figure out where she's going?”
“Yeah.”
Shrake took her to a coffee shop, where she bought a cup of coffee to go, and an orange scone, and then headed down to the street, where Jenkins picked her up. “Catching a bus,” Jenkins said.
They took her all the way back to her house. Off the bus, she paused to throw the coffee-shop sack into a corner trash barrel, then headed up to her house, walking quickly, in a hurry. She went straight to the mailbox and took out a few letters, shuffled them quickly, picked one, tore the end off as she went through the door.
“What do you think?” Flowers asked, on the radio.
“Let's give her an hour,” Lucas said.
“That's what I think,” Flowers said. Shrake and Jenkins agreed.
Half an hour later, Anderson walked out of her house wearing a long-sleeved shirt and jeans and what looked like practical shoes or hiking boots. She had a one-car detached garage, with a manual lift. She pushed the door up, backed carefully out, pulled the door down again, pointed the car up the hill, and took off.
“We're rolling,” Jenkins said. “We're gone.”
Lucas got on the radio: “This could be something, guys. Stack it up behind her, and take turns cutting off, but don't lose her.”
Shrake: “Probably going to the grocery store.”
Lucas: “She turned the wrong way. There's one just down the hill.”
They had four cars tagging her, but no air. As long as they stayed in the city, they were good-they'd each tag her for a couple of blocks, then turn away, while the next one in line caught up. They tracked her easily along Ford to Snelling, where she took a right, down the bluff toward Seventh. Snelling was a chute; if she stopped there, they'd all be sacked right on top of her. Flowers followed her down while Lucas, Jenkins, and Shrake waited at the top of the hill.
“I got her,” Flowers said. “She took a left on Seventh, come on through.”
They moved fast down the hill, through the intersection, Flowers peeling away as Lucas came up behind him. They got caught at a stoplight just before I-35, and Lucas hooked away, into a store parking lot, afraid she'd pick up his face if he got bumper-to-bumper.
“Jenkins?”
“Got her. Heading south on Thirty-five E.”
Lucas pulled out of the parking lot, now last in line, and followed the others down the ramp onto I-35. Lucas got on the radio, looking for a highway-patrol plane, but was told that with one thing or another, nobody could get airborne for probably an hour. “Well, get him going, for Christ's sake. This chick may be headed for Des Moines, or something.”
The problem with a four-car tag was that Anderson wasn't a fast driver, and they had to hold back, which meant they'd either loom in her rearview mirror, or they'd have to hold so far back that they might lose her to a sudden move. If she hooked into a shopping center, and several were coming up, they'd be out of luck.
“Jenkins, move up on her slow,” Lucas said. “Get off at Yankee Doodle, even if she doesn't.”
“Got it.”
She didn't get off; Jenkins went up the off-ramp, ran the lights at the top, and came down the on-ramp, falling in behind Lucas.
They played with her down the interstate, the speed picking up. She didn't get off at the Burnsville Mall, a regional shopping center that Lucas had thought would be a possibility. Instead, she pushed out of the metro area, heading south into the countryside.
Lucas could see the possible off-ramps coming on his nav system, and called them out; one of them would fall off at each, then reenter. She didn't get off, but stayed resolutely in the slow lane, poking along at the speed limit.
South, and more south, thirty miles gone before she clicked on her turn signal and carefully rolled up the ramp at Rice County 1, two cars behind Flowers. Flowers had to guess, and Lucas shouted into the radio, “She went to Carleton. Go left. Go east.”
Flowers turned left, the next car went right, and Anderson turned left behind Flowers.
Carleton was off to the east in Northfield, but they'd already gone past the Northfield exit; still, she might be familiar with the countryside around it, Lucas thought, and that had been a better bet than the open countryside to the west.
Now they had a close tag on her, but from the front. Flowers slowly pulled away, leading her into the small town of Dundas; but just before the town, she turned south on County 8, and Flowers was yelling, “I'm coming back around,” and Shrake said, “I got her, I got her.”
Well back, now. Not many cars out, and all but Lucas had been close to her, and she might pick one of them out. They kept south, onto smaller and narrower roads, Shrake breaking away, Jenkins moving up, until she disappeared into a cornfield.
“Whoa. Man, she turned,” Jenkins said. “She's, uh, off the road, hang back guys, I'm gonna go on past…”
Hadn't rained in a few days, and when Jenkins went past the point where she'd disappeared, he looked down a dirt track, weeds growing up in the middle, and called back, “She looks like she's going into a field. I don't know, man… you can probably track her by the dust coming up.”