Shrake came around the corner and said, "It's all locked up, up front, but the neon's turned on. The 'Open' sign."
"You bang on the door?"
"Yeah, but it's locked."
A cop car pulled into the lot, and a uniformed officer got out, looking at them, talking on a radio. Marcy said, "Poop," and walked over to him, her badge out. They talked for a minute, then Marcy waved them over.
"We're going to get his push bar right up by a front window," she said. "Shrake, you're the tallest, see if you can look in."
The cop pulled up to the bar, and Shrake stood on his push bar, using a hand to block reflections. After a moment, he said, "Well, I can see… yeah."
He hopped down.
"What?" Marcy asked.
"I can see a leg on the floor on the other side of the pool table."
"A leg. Like he's hiding?"
"Like he's dead," Shrake said. THE CITY COP wasn't sure of the technical entry procedure, so Jenkins took a long switchblade out of his pants pocket, punched a hole in the front-door glass, and flipped the interior lock. Lucas led the way in, Marcy a step behind.
Lucas called, "Mack?" but then they walked out of the main bar area and saw the body on the floor next to the pool table. A wooden chair sat over Mack's neck and chest, with a wooden crossbar at his neck, so that somebody sitting on the chair could keep Mack from sitting up or twisting away. His hands and feet were taped. He had a hole in his forehead, with burn marks around it, and a puddle of blood under the head and the legs. The front panel of the pants had been cut away, and Mack's groin was a mass of jellied blood.
"Aw, man," Shrake said.
Marcy asked, "What's that?" pointing at Mack's stomach.
Jenkins bent over, then straightened up and stepped back. "I do believe that's the gentleman's testicle," he said.
The city cop, gagging, mumbled something about calling it in, and dashed for the door. They stood there, the metallic smell of blood infusing the air, and listened to him retching in the parking lot.
Then Shrake said, "You know what? When they did this, somebody was sitting in that chair, looking right down at his face." LUCAS GOT everybody moving, BCA crime scene, the ME's investigators, while Marcy called her chief. Lucas went into the back and found Jenkins in the office, with plastic gloves on his hands, going through Mack's parka. "Anything?"
"Cell phone, I think. I can feel it, but I can't find the pocket." The pocket was under a hidden zip flap, and Jenkins pulled it out, turned it on, and said, "This is probably it: it says it's got seventy-five minutes of talk-time left."
"Need the numbers, right now," Lucas said. "Incoming and outgoing calls."
"Got it."
Marcy came in: "Lucas: what do you think?"
"We're back to square one. We don't know what's happening. MacBride is killed by somebody we don't know, Mack is tortured to death. Joe didn't do this, so… there's gotta be somebody else. Probably a couple or three of them."
"Another gang?"
"Don't know. We've got a mystery guy at the hospital. We don't know about him."
She said, "I wonder if the Macks had anything to do with it-the robbery, and all of it."
"Sure they did," Lucas said. "If they didn't, then why that?" He nodded toward the front room. "They cut on him until they got what they wanted, and then they stopped and killed him. If they were just doing it for pure pleasure, they could have gone on for a while. And then there's Haines and Chapman, and we know they were good friends with the Macks… and I still believe that Joe had something to do with MacBride. Maybe this is about the drugs. Maybe somebody figured out the Macks had the drugs, and came after them. You know what? I bet the drugs are still around." LUCAS NEVER liked the writing of reports, but did it; in this case, he could unload most of it on the Mendota Heights cop, and he did that, too. Weather called at eleven o'clock and said, "We're still on hold, but the kids are getting stronger. May go another day."
"It's gonna snow tomorrow," Lucas said.
"We're planning to operate inside the hospital, not on the parking ramp."
"Ah. That's so clever." He told her about Lyle Mack, and she said, "Worse and worse. All because some guy got mad and kicked poor old Don Peterson." LUCAS TOLD MARCY, "I'm going to call Ike-notify him, and see if we can pry anything out of him. Maybe this'll loosen him up."
The place was getting crowded, with Grace, the Mendota Heights chief, two more local cops, crime-scene and ME investigators. Lucas called the Washburn County sheriff, Stephaniak, told him what had happened, and asked, "Where'd you say he worked? I need to notify him."
"Better you than me," Stephaniak said. "I've done that a few too many times."
He looked the number up in the local directory, read it off, and Lucas dialed.
A man answered, a little tired: "Larry's."
Lucas said, "I'm a police officer from Minnesota. I'm trying to reach Ike Mack on a family issue. Can I speak to him?"
After a few seconds of silence, the man on the other end said, "Ike didn't show up today. Don't know where he is."
"Does that happen a lot?"
"No, it doesn't. He's pretty reliable, when he's not drinking, and he's not drinking. Unless he started last night," the man said. "I've been calling him on his cell, and there's no answer. What'd he do?"
"Nothing-this is a family emergency. Do you have a home phone number for him?" Lucas asked.
"He doesn't have a home phone, only the cell phone. He usually has it with him."
Lucas got the number, dialed it, got no answer. He called Stephaniak again and said, "Ike didn't show up this morning. What happened here was pretty bad. Is there any way you could send somebody over to his house, take a look?"
"You think somebody might have come up here?"
"His son was tortured," Lucas said. "Like they were interrogating him. They may be looking for those drugs from the hospital. Maybe they stashed them at Ike's, out in the woods or something… Anyway, if you could take a look."
"Ten minutes," Stephaniak said. "I got a guy patrolling over that way." LUCAS ASKED the techs if anything was coming off the body, and one of them said, "It's gonna sound weird, but I wonder if one of them was sniffing cocaine while they were cutting on him. There's this little sprinkling of powder on his legs. Doesn't look like dirt, or plaster… it's not ground in, it's just sitting there."
Lucas had to look closely to see it, a fine-grained, beige sprinkle.
"Doesn't look like coke."
"I agree. I've taken samples."
Lucas said, "You know my wife's a surgeon?"
"Yeah, plastic surgeon, right?" The tech was with the BCA, and they'd worked together on a number of cases.
"Yup. And she brings home surgeon's gloves, from time to time, like when she's going to paint things. And she gave me some for my shoeshine box. The thing is, they've got this very fine powder in them, to get them on and off easier. It looks like this stuff. When you get to the lab, check that."
"The guy's testicle looks like it was removed with something very sharp. Like a scalpel. Not like a bar knife."
Lucas patted the guy's shoulder a couple of times: "And we're looking for a doctor, somebody who could have set up the hospital robbery." JENKINS CAME BACK: "We got a full list downtown on the incoming and outgoing calls. Most of them are to one number, and five of those were in the couple hours after Joe ran."
"That's him," Lucas said.
"The last call from that number was at eleven o'clock last night," Jenkins said. "It went through a cell tower in Emporia, Kansas. It's right on 1-35."