"God," was all Grace said.
Andi: "What?" She rolled onto her back and looked up at the light bulb. Sooner or later, it'd burn out, she thought, and they'd be in the dark. Would that be better? She tried to think.
"Something broke in the mattress," Grace said. She pushed herself up with one hand and punched the bump with the other hand. "It makes a bump."
Andi turned her head to look: the bump looked like somebody were gently trying to push a thumb through the pad. "Just move over…" Then, suddenly, she sat up. "Grace-there's a spring in there."
Grace said, "So?"
"So a spring is as good as a nail."
Grace looked at her, then at the mattress, and some of the dullness seemed to lift from her face. "Can we get one out?"
"I'm sure."
They crawled off the mattress, flipped it over, and tried to scratch through the fabric. The fabric was as tough as leather; Andi broke a nail without even damaging it.
"We're trying to go too fast," Grace said. "We've got to go slow, like with the nail. Let me chew on it."
Grace chewed on it forever-for five minutes-then Andi chewed on it for another two, and finally cut through. The hole was small, but with a little worrying, they opened it enough that Grace could get a finger through. Tugging on the hole, she started to split the fabric, and then Andi could get fingers from both hands through at once, and she ripped a two-foot hole in the bottom of the mattress.
The springs were coiled steel, both tied and sewn in. They took another twenty minutes working one free, using their teeth.
"Got it," Andi said, lifting it out of the hole. Grace took it, turned it in her hands. The spring had a sharp, nipped-off tip. She used it to pick at the stitching around another spring, and in a minute had the second one free.
"I bet we could get the nail out with these," Grace said, looking up at the overhead. Her face was grimy, with dirt grimed into wrinkles around her eyes.
"We could try-but let's see what happens when we stretch these things out. Maybe we won't need it." Andi rubbed the end of the spring on an exposed granite rock in the wall, the concrete floor: after a moment she looked at it, and then at Grace. "It works," she said. "We can sharpen them."
A moment later, they heard the feet on the floor above. "Back in the mattress," Andi snapped. They put the springs back in the hole, flipped the mattress over, shoved it against the wall, curled up on it.
Grace's back was to Andi, so she whispered to the wall, "Be nice to him. Maybe he won't hurt you."
"I… can't be," Andi whispered. "When he takes me out there, something turns off."
"Try," Grace pleaded. "If he keeps beating you, you'll die."
"I'll try," Andi said. As the steps got closer, she whispered, "Head down. No eye contact."
CHAPTER 24
Roux had her feet up in the half-dark of her office. She was looking pensively out at the night street, the glow of her cigarette like a firefly.
"I made nice with Stillwater," she said without turning her head.
"Thanks." Lucas popped the top on a Diet Coke and sat down. "What about Dunn? Are the feds gonna charge him with anything?"
"They're making noises, but they won't. Dunn's already talking with Washington," she said. She blew a smoke ring toward her curtains.
"We should have known that it was too easy-that Mail was jerking us around," Lucas said. "By the way, I don't know if Lester told you, but Crosby was killed before she ever got to the loft. We didn't kill her."
"He told me. You looked great on the tube, by the way. You almost might've been telling the truth, about figuring out the trap business," Roux said.
"The feds are going along," Lucas said.
"Not much choice. If they don't, they look like fools." Roux turned to tamp the cigarette out in an ashtray, fumbled another one out of the pack, and lit it with a plastic lighter. "Are you sure we're looking for this Mail guy?"
"Yeah. Pretty sure," Lucas said.
"But you don't want to go out with it."
"I'm afraid it might trigger him. If we put his actual face on the air, he'd have to run for it. He wouldn't leave anybody behind."
"Huh." Roux tapped ashes off the cigarette. "I could use something that would look like progress."
"I don't have anything like that."
"Mail's name is gonna get out," she said.
"Yeah, but maybe not for a day or two. I don't see it going much longer than that."
"I wonder if she's still alive? Manette."
"I think so," Lucas said. "When he kills her, we won't hear from him any more. There wouldn't be any point. As long as he's fucking with us, as long as he's calling me, she's alive. And I think one of the girls."
"Christ, I'm tired," she said.
"Tell me," Lucas said. He yawned. "I'm sleeping at the company tonight. On a cot."
"Who's with you?"
"Intelligence guys. And Sloan is over there tonight."
"You still think he'll come in?"
"If he's watching TV, he might. He'll be curious. And in the meantime, we're trying to nail down his friends."
A few clouds had come through in the late evening and dropped just enough rain to clear the air. Now they'd gone, and the brighter stars were visible through the ground lights. Lucas got the car and cut across town to University Avenue. He noticed a van in his rearview mirror and thought about it: there were tens of thousands of vans in the Twin Cities. If Mail showed up at the company during the day, and they flooded the area with squads, as they were planning, how many vans would be in the net? A hundred? A hundred might be manageable. But what if it were five hundred, or a thousand?
Maybe the techies at the office had some kind of statistics software that would tell him how many vans he could expect in, say, a ten-minute period in a square mile of the city. Would the density of vans be higher in an industrial area than in a suburb?
He was still mulling it over when he pulled into a Subway shop off University. He could see two young sandwich makers through the front window, both red-haired, maybe twins. Nobody else was in the shop. He yawned, went inside. The place smelled of pickles and relish; the clean, watery odor of lettuce mingled with the yeast smell of bread.
"Give me a foot-long BMT on white, everything but the jalapenos," he said.
One of the redheads had disappeared into the back. The other started working on the sandwich. Lucas leaned on the counter and yawned again and turned his head. A van was parked across the street. As Lucas turned his head, the taillight flickered. Somebody inside the dark vehicle had stepped on the brake pedal. The van looked like the one he'd seen in his rearview mirror.
"Hey, kid," Lucas said, turning back to the sandwich man. "I'm a cop and I've got to make a cop call. I don't want you to look up while I'm talking. Just keep working on the sandwich, huh?"
The kid didn't look up. "What's going on?"
"There's a van across the street, and it might be trouble. I'm gonna call in a squad car to check. Hand me one of those large root beer cups and keep working on the sandwich."
"I'm almost done," the kid said, glancing up at Lucas.
"Make another one. Same thing. Don't look out the window."
Lucas carried the root beer cup to the soda machine, where he was out of sight, took the cellular phone out of his pocket, and called in. "This is Davenport. I've got a van tailing me out to a Subway on University Avenue, I need a couple of cars here quick." He gave the dispatcher the address and asked that the cars come in at the corners on either side of the van. "Get one guy out of each car to walk to the corner on foot. Let me know when they're in position, and I'll come out."
"Hang on." The dispatcher was back fifteen seconds later. "Two cars on the way, Lucas. They'll be there in a minute or a little more. Stay on, and we'll let you know."
"Do they know what they're supposed to do?"