“Something about blue poop. I thought she meant that some toilet-bowl cleaner-”
“No.” Holly bit off the syllable. “I spent five days with Kit.” He waved his hands for quiet as he came closer, then he jabbed his finger. “She never made anything up. She was not suggestible at all. Not easily influenced. She was always very precise. If she said blue poop, she saw blue poop.”
“Holly, man; slow down,” Broker said.
“Slow down, my ass. Blue poop
Broker and Yeager stared at him.
Holly went on, “Blue shit in Dale Shuster’s toilet means he could have been working around something radioactive and taking precautions.”
“Jesus. And he’s drilling big hidey holes in construction machinery,” Broker said.
“I think we gotta locate that machine fast,” Holly said.
Yeager referred to his notepad and punched numbers in his cell. They huddled around him. His lips jerked in a disappointed expression. “Got an answering machine.”
“Wait. Don’t leave a message. End the call. If Dale’s got Nina…” Broker said. “What if he’s in contact with Dale? It would telegraph we’re onto him.” He asked Yeager, “Would people in town call Irv about the shooting and Dale disappearing?”
Yeager shrugged. “Possibly, but he’s been gone quite a while.”
“Broker’s right,” Holly said. “We want to talk to Fuller face-to-face. So where is he?”
“Lake Elmo, Minnesota.” They looked at Broker.
“Little town east of the Twin Cities, just south of where I was working last week,” Broker said. “I could call the county sheriff’s department, they could track down Fuller.”
Holly shook his head. “Same problem, might signal we’re coming. We have to hit him cold. Just us.” Holly was moving toward the door, reaching for his cell phone. “C’mon, Yeager, we need a ride to the PAR radar site.”
They piled into the cruiser and Yeager wheeled onto the highway. Holly started talking fast into his cell. “Screw what they say. Northern Route is active again. So get the bird ready, file a flight plan to Lake Elmo, Minnesota…Okay, it’s a direct order, I take full responsibility. Just get the bird ready. Lay on some ground transportation, location to come.” Holly ended the call and smiled, back in the game.
“You borrowing another helicopter?” Broker asked.
“Step on it. We gotta get in the air before the pilots start having qualms,” Holly said, leaned over the seat. “And, Yeager, you have to come with us.”
Yeager’s eyes went wide. “Where? To Minnesota? In a stolen Army helicopter. You’re shitting me.”
“He’s right,” Broker said. “You know Fuller. We don’t.”
Yeager reached for his radio handset. Holly leaned over the seat and stayed Yeager’s hand. “Don’t call. Just go. Trust me.”
“Jesus,” Yeager said. “Gotta tell ’em something.” He called dispatch. “Karen, this is Jimmy. Ah, I’m going to be outta the car for a few hours. Personal time.”
Broker said, “The sheriff said he had enough bodies to handle the scene here. He told you to keep an eye on us, right?”
“If it’s nothing, you’ll be back in a couple of hours,” Holly said.
Shaking his head, sweating profusely, Yeager drove the speed limit through town. He cast a pained expression at the county office building. “Norm ain’t gonna like this.”
“C’mon, punch it,” Holly said.
Fifteen minutes later they hurried through the security checkpoint at the radar base and drove to the helipad. Following Holly’s instructions, Yeager parked his cruiser in a hangar out of sight. Without consulting with anyone, they jogged across the strip and got in the waiting Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk.
Chapter Forty
Dale crossed to the TV/VCR, pushed in a tape, and picked up a remote.
“Electrics hooked into battery system. Shouldn’t be a problem long as she’s idling. Ah, I’m new at this, so the quality is uneven. Ours will be better. I just wanted you to see…”
Under the sheet, Nina took advantage of the darkness to test the slack in her bonds. She had to get control of her breathing, she had to gather her strength. She had to begin to resist.
The screen filled with scrambled gray static, then Nina was looking at a black-and-white photo of a young blond woman, pert, attractive. The length and cut of her hair appeared a bit dated. With a chill she remembered Dale’s odd question when they met.
Back to the jerky static, then to green. Too much lawn for a yard. It was a park, the trees not quite fully leafed out. White letters and numbers punched the date into the bottom of the screen: June 11.
Last month.
The camera picked up a running figure. A woman in brief running shorts, a sports top, and a Walkman: blond, in shape, tanned. The video was framed in black, some kind of window. Then it moved, unevenly panning across seats, a dashboard, a rearview mirror, and a windshield. The camera was shooting from inside a van.
Now the woman was closer, the camera picking her up out the passenger window as she jogged on a path. The path wound along a wall of shrubs.
A man Nina recognized as Joe Reed stepped from the bushes in front of the jogger. Powerful. Confident, his arms wrapped her up as he quickly stabbed an object into her thigh. Not a knife. One of those needles Dale stabbed her with.
Dale hit the pause button and explained in the patient tone of a tour guide who liked his job, “Epipen. Same thing I hit you with at the bar.” His patient profile was sidelit by the flickering screen. “Joe took out the epinephrine and replaced it with ketamine.”
Nina went back over the struggle in the Missile Park. How long had it taken the drug to take effect after he jabbed her thigh? Several minutes to put her completely out.
Dale hit a button. “Play,” he said in a dreamy voice as the tape resumed and showed Joe hauling the woman back into the shrubs. Quick, efficient. The snatch had taken less than five seconds.
The camera went to static, then focused again. This time on a box of Coco Puffs cereal, a used bowl, a milk spill on a tabletop, and the front page of a newspaper. As the camera panned, it caught a sweep of sunlight and shadow and a feel of kitchen windows open to a summer morning. The sound of a lawn mower. Now the paper came into focus. The
Some of the sharpness had mellowed on the face but it was the same girl in the yearbook picture. Older now. A grown woman. Nina braced for nausea.
All this time Dale stood next to the bed, his left arm folded across his chest, and his right arm cocked up so he rested his chin in the palm of his right hand. In his left hand was the remote. Dale was absorbed.
The static blipped away. The video came on.
At first it was a confused jumble. The camera swinging over a bare mattress on a filthy floor. The light bouncing off blue cinder-block walls.
