Lucas nodded. He knew he was right. "Okay. Does the name Gloria Crosby mean anything to you?"
"Gloria?" Rehder said. "Gloria was an aide-Gloria worked for us."
Lucas closed his eyes. Gotcha.
CHAPTER 22
Anderson, harried, his hands full of paper, his sharecropper's face pickled in a permanent squint, said, "Sloan said to tell you he's bringing the car. Dunn's moving: you gotta get out of here."
"Stay on the Mail thing," Lucas said, pulling on his jacket.
Anderson ticked it off on his fingers. "We're tracking his friends, to see if anybody's run into him since the bridge, if anybody has a name. We're trying to figure out who the body really was, but that will be a problem. It has to be somebody at the hospital who had dental care, who was close to Mail's size and age, and who was out at the same time, but there are hundreds of people who fit, all of them are mentally ill, and a lot of them are impossible to find. We're trying to find Mail's parents-his mother and stepfather. We think they might have split up. We know they moved to the Seattle area, but one of the stepfather's friends heard they split out there, and the mother might have remarried."
"What about decent photos of the guy?"
"We've got photos coming from the hospital and the DMV, but they're all years old," Anderson said.
"Yeah, but with something real to work from, we can age him. Get them over to the company, if you need to. They were doing some good stuff this morning."
"Okay. But you need to talk with the chief about whether to release them to the press. If he's as close to the edge as you say he is…"
"Yeah. I'll be back. Don't do anything until we talk about it. And if anything breaks-anything-call me. I'll be on the phone."
When Lucas ran out, Sloan was walking up to the building, carrying a baseball cap.
"Where is he? Dunn?"
"He's coming through town right now," Sloan said over his shoulder as he turned and headed back into the street. He had a gray, four-year-old Chevy Caprice sitting in traffic with its engine running. "We've got to motivate."
The radios they'd gotten from the feds were standard: Lucas called in, checking the identification protocols, and was told that zebra is underway; the subject has been acquired.
"That means they can see the car from the chopper," Lucas said.
"Fuckin' wonderful," Sloan said.
"It's better than the ten-four bullshit," Lucas said. "I never did understand that."
"Did you bring the maps?"
"Yeah, and I got one for the Hudson area, just in case." Lucas took the maps out of his pocket. The radio burped;
Approaching White Bear Avenue Interchange.
"This is really fucked, you know?" Lucas said. "I'm sitting here thinking that it's a little too strange."
As they paced Dunn's car through the city and into the 'burbs, Lucas told Sloan about the identification of John Mail. "Haven't pinned him yet," Lucas said.
"If he's the guy, we will," Sloan said confidently. "Once we get a face…"
"I hope," Lucas said.
They were in the countryside now, and white puffy clouds cast long shadows on new-cut hay, the last cut of the year. The beans and corn, as far as Lucas could tell, were about as good as they ever got in Minnesota, the corn showing stripes of gold along the edge of the leaves, the beans already brown and drying. A few miles out of St. Paul, an ultra-light aircraft circled over the highway, the pilot plainly visible in his leathers and black helmet. Further on, toward the St. Croix River, a half-dozen brightly colored hot-air balloons drifted east toward Wisconsin.
And the radio said, He's off at 95… he's back on, heading east.
This is five; we got him coming in.
Dumbo: Everybody in position, now.
"Get off at Highway 15," Lucas said, pointing at an exit sign. "Go north, find a place to turn around and start back. We don't want to sit anywhere. If Mail is out roaming around, and sees us, he'd recognize me."
Sloan took the off-ramp, paused at the top, and started north on the blacktopped road. "Van coming up from behind," Sloan said.
Lucas slid down in his seat and Sloan took the first left. The van stayed on the main road. Sloan, looking in the rearview mirror, said, "Blonde. Woman." He did a U-turn and started back.
He's inside. We've got him covered.
"They're doing okay," Lucas said nervously.
"Give them time," Sloan said. "The feebs could fuck up a wet dream."
Lucas and Sloan both looked at their watches simultaneously. Sloan said, "Five minutes," and Lucas grunted.
They were headed back toward the interstate, no other cars in sight. The landscape was littered with new suburban houses with plastic siding in pastel tints ranging from sunset to sage; here and there a farm field came up to the edge of the road. A flock of sheep grazed over a pasture.
Lucas said, "Green pastures."
"Say what?" Sloan looked at him.
Lucas said, "These are the green pastures, from Psalms. Elle was right. I'll bet my ass that he's about to lead us into Stillwater. How far are we from Stillwater? Ten miles?"
"About that."
"Let's head that way," Lucas said urgently. "We're pretty useless anyway."
"If he's leading us, then this might not be what it looks like…"
"Yeah, yeah," Lucas said. "Exactly right."
And the radio said, We've got a confirmed hit, confirmed hit. He's off, he's gone, Jimmy get me… what? We've got cellular confirmed but no cell designation, it was too quick. Can we run that, Jimmy? Jimmy? Subject is out of the rest stop on his way to the car, can we get the intercept up…
"What the fuck did he say?" Lucas asked. "What'd Mail say?"
And the radio said, Subject was told to go to a picnic table and pull a note off the bottom side and follow instructions… subject is at the picnic table, subject is walking back to the car, he's reading a paper, he has the instructions…
"Come on, goddamnit, we gotta move," Lucas said. "It's Stillwater."
Subject is in car proceeding west on I-94.
"Wrong way," Sloan grunted.
"He's got no choice from there," Lucas said. He slapped his own forehead. "And think about it, think about it: the guy makes the initial contact on Dunn's cellular phone, and routes him to a public phone? Why'd he do that? Why didn't he call him on the cellular again? Then he wouldn't have to fuck around with the possibility that somebody else was using the pay phone. Why'd he do that, Sloan?"
"I don't know." Sloan frowned as he thought about it. "Maybe.. no. If he doesn't trust the cellular now, why'd he trust it yesterday?"
"He didn't. Maybe he figured we'd be monitoring it," Lucas said. "Maybe he did it so we'd be close by, but he'd know where we were at. I'll bet that sonofabitch is in Stillwater right now. Goddamnit, what's he doing?"
Three minutes later the radio burped, Subject exiting at Highway 15… crossing Interstate, reentering Interstate…
"What's he doing?" Sloan asked. "Why didn't he go this way?"
"He's going down to 95 and he'll take 95 north to Stillwater," Lucas said. "It's simpler, if you don't have a map. How fast can we get there?"
"We'll be there in six or seven minutes. He'll be ten minutes behind us. If you're right."
"I'm right."
"Yeah, I know." Sloan had the Chevy up to ninety, sloughed past the Lake Elmo airport with its pole-barn hangars, and onto Highway 5 east toward Stillwater.
"Goddamnit, I wish we were set up with the Stillwater cops. Just a few guys to sit and watch. We could've shipped a picture of Mail out here."
They listened to the parade moving east on the interstate, then Lucas got on the radio to Dumbo. "We're headed to Stillwater, we think he's playing out the Bible verses he sent us. You probably ought to have your lead cars get off at Highway 95 and start north. And take it easy: we've got two more verses to go, but the last one talks about a trap."