“What’s wrong?” LePere asked.
“I’m thtuck.”
“I’m going to give you a little push,” LePere told him.
“Owww!”
“Wait.” Jo grabbed LePere’s arm. “Stevie, we’re going to pull you back.” To LePere, she said, “Gently.”
“Owww!” Stevie cried as LePere drew him back. “I can’t get my head out.”
LePere supported Stevie with one hand and reached up with the other to assess the situation. “It’s his ears,” he reported to Jo. “They won’t come back through the bars. He’s stuck. Really stuck.”
“Hang on, Stevie. We’ll get you out.”
Jo tried to keep the panic out of her voice. Fighting against anger, frustration, fear. Fighting against time. She looked up into the dark gathered above her, descending, and she spoke in a bitter whisper as if someone there were listening.
“Why?”
42
THE CALL CAME AT NINE-TWENTY-SEVEN P.M., after dark had swept over most of the sky. There was still a narrow strip of washed-out blue along the western horizon, more like the memory of light, but it would soon be gone. Cork stood at the window looking across Grace Cove as Lindstrom reached for the phone.
“This is how it will be,” the voice-masked electronically, as it had been during each previous call-said over the speaker. “Take your cell phone and the money and get into your Explorer. No cops along for the ride, understand? Drive south. Keep your speed at forty. I’ll direct you as you go. Try anything-hide a cop somewhere, screw me over in any way-your family’s dead. And O’Connor’s. Dead, dead, dead. You have five minutes to be on the road.”
As soon as the caller hung up, Kay asked Arnie Gooden, “Did we get a trace?”
“1911 Cascade Trail, Yellow Lake, Minnesota. Phone’s in the name of Minda Liza and Robert Levine.”
“Yellow Lake. Ten miles south of Aurora,” Cork said. “Wally used to be the police chief there. You know these two?”
“Yeah. She’s Latvian. He’s gay. Odd couple, but nice folks. They spend a lot of time in Europe buying expensive art. Whoever this guy is, I’m guessing he broke in and used the phone.”
“He’ll be gone by the time we get there, but let’s send an evidence team down anyway,” Kay said to Schanno. “Mr. Lindstrom, it sounds as if all this is going to go down on the run. Don’t worry. We’ll be behind you, but far enough back not to be spotted. You have the cellular I’ve given you so we can be in communication the whole time. If anything happens, if we get out of touch, we’ll still be able to track you and the money via the transmitter. I want to reemphasize that you will not attempt anything on your own. Make the drop and go. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Fine. Everybody ready? Let’s go.”
“I’m going with Karl,” Cork said.
“You heard the guy, Cork,” Schanno said. “No cops.”
“I’m not a cop, Wally. Not anymore.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea-” Kay began.
“Let him go,” Earl said.
Kay glanced at the BCA agent, then at Lindstrom. “Any objection?”
Karl Lindstrom had taken a money case from Lucky Knudsen. It looked heavy in his hand. “It’s his family, too,” he said. “He wants to come with me, he comes.”
“Yellow Lake,” Lindstrom said. “That means he’s not watching us.” They were heading south on County 11, per the kidnapper’s instructions.
Cork glanced at the speedometer. “He said to keep it at forty. He’s probably driven the route and timed it so that he can direct us blind. I’d bet he’s headed to the drop site right now.”
Lindstrom’s cell phone, which was sitting on the seat beside him, chirped. Lindstrom picked it up and listened. “All right,” he said, and broke the connection. “We’re coming up on Bone Creek Road. We take it east.”
Cork looked behind him, but he saw no headlights. On the cellular supplied by Special Agent Kay, he tapped in the number she’d given him. “Bone Creek Road,” Cork said. “We’re taking it east.”
“We’re half a mile behind you,” Kay said. “Just keep the line open and give us the instructions as you receive them.”
The phone on the seat next to Lindstrom rang again. Lindstrom answered. “Yeah?” He held the phone in his right hand and the steering wheel in his left. The road dipped toward a bridge over Bone Creek. As the Explorer crossed the bridge, the headlights picked up the eyes of a deer frozen in the middle of the road.
“Christ!” Lindstrom dropped the phone and grabbed the wheel with both hands. He swerved left, just missing the buck, and nearly ran off the road. Cork slammed against the passenger-side door. The cellular Agent Kay had given him whacked the window hard. “My phone,” Lindstrom shouted. “I lost my cell phone.” While he brought the Explorer back under control, Cork was on the floor, groping for Lindstrom’s phone. He grasped it from where it had lodged under the accelerator pedal, and he put it to his ear.
“He’s gone,” Cork said.
“Shit.”
“Did you get the next instruction?”
“South on Shipley Road, I think.”
“That’s coming right up. There!” Cork hollered, and pointed at a narrow dirt lane almost invisible beneath a canopy of arching pines.
Lindstrom hit the brakes. The Explorer went into a slide. He brought it around smoothly, however, in a clean one-eighty that ended with the nose of the vehicle pointed back in the direction from which they’d come. Without hesitating, Lindstrom leaned on the accelerator, hit the turn onto Shipley Road, and, to make up time, kept the speedometer just above forty.
Cork tried the cellular with which he’d been communicating with Agent Kay. He couldn’t get a dial tone. “It’s dead,” he said. “We’ve lost them.”
“Remember, they can still follow us via the transmitter.”
Cork considered the kidnapper’s directions thus far. “He’s working us southeast, toward the back side of the Sawtooths.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I wish I knew.”
They crossed a major road, County 13.
“Are you sure we weren’t supposed to turn there?” Cork asked.
“I don’t know. I didn’t hear him say anything about it, but then I was worried about not killing us right about then.”
The phone rang. Cork was beginning to hate that noise. Lindstrom picked it up. “No, I didn’t hang up. We almost hit a deer, for Christ’s sake.” Lindstrom listened. “Yeah, I understand.” He put the phone down. “Next left. Private road.”
The wooden sign at the crossroads indicated they were headed toward Black Spruce Lodge on Goose Lake. Cork didn’t believe that was their ultimate destination. Too many people around. He was right. Within two minutes, the kidnapper called again.
“I understand,” Lindstrom said after he’d listened a moment. He put the phone down. “Logging road on the right.”
It wasn’t much of a road, and keeping the speed at forty tested both the suspension on the Explorer and the durability of Cork’s spine. But they weren’t on it long. Lindstrom got another call, and in a moment, they turned onto a paved county road. Almost immediately they were confronted with a long bridge. Cork knew the place. The bridge spanned the Upper Goose Flowage, a wide, slow sweep of water that connected Goose Lake with Little Red Cedar Lake just south. Lindstrom pulled into the parking area of a small picnic ground along the flowage.
“What now?” Cork asked.
“He said to wait.”
Almost immediately the call came. Lindstrom listened, then turned out the headlights but kept the engine running. A moment passed as Lindstrom listened further. “It’s only Corcoran O’Connor,” he said into the phone. “No, you said no cops. O’Connor’s not a cop. And, Jesus Christ, you have his family… All right, all right.” Lindstrom put the phone down. “He knows you’re with me.”
“He’s here somewhere. Watching.”
“He says to leave the money behind the trash cans.”
Cork had seen them in the flood of the headlights when Lindstrom pulled in, two cans side by side, painted green and bearing the U.S. Forest Service emblem.