4. Positive visual ID in Rochester, positive phone ID
5. Mother in Austin, worked in area, seen in July
8. Pope told Ignace that he'll kill somebody in the Boundary Waters…
How in the hell would somebody like Charlie Pope know anything about the Boundary Waters? Pope was a pickup guy, not a canoe guy. The second man again? He had to force himself to think or woman.
THE ALEVE WERE TAKING HOLD. He pushed himself out of the chair, found a Minnesota road map, and unfolded it. If you drew a cross made up of major highways south of the Twin Cities, he realized, you would encompass Charlie Pope's world.
Pope had killed Angela Larson at the northern point of the cross, a couple of miles from I-35 in Minneapolis. He'd been living in Owatonna, which was right on I-35, halfway between Minneapolis and the Iowa border. That was the center point. And he'd grown up in Austin, Minnesota, just a few miles from the Iowa border and not far east of I-35. That was the southern point.
The east-west arm of the cross ran through Owatonna, with Rochester on the east, where he was seen making a phone call, and Mankato to the west, where he'd killed the Rices. All three town were linked by Highway 14.
As a matter of fact, it was almost perfect. He drew a circle connecting the four outlying cities, with Owatonna in the middle. The circle together with the highways looked like the crosshairs on a rifle scope.
HE CARRIED THE MAP back upstairs to the sketchbook:
Lucas thought about (10) for a moment, then added,…who knows the Big Three.
HE WENT INTO the bathroom and shaved; the warm water felt good, but his nose was still clogged with blood, and he could only breathe through one side. That fuckin' Clanton…
In the shower, he decided that Pope was in his circle. Not for sure, but 80 percent. Somewhere, in a rough circle maybe a hundred miles across. He tried to do the math with the water pounding on his back. Something like 7,800 square miles, he thought. Lots of rabbit holes in 7,800 square miles of corn and beans.
With the water pouring on his head, he thought, forlorn hope? And then he thought, beans?
HE GOT OUT OF the shower, toweled off, went back to the bed-room, and sorted through the case reports. When they'd talked to Ruffe Ignace after the call from Pope, Ignace said a couple of times that he'd taken down everything Pope said 'verbatim.' He'd emphasized his own precision.
Lucas found the Ignace/Pope transcript in the report, and thumbed through it. According to the transcript, Pope had used the words forlorn hope. The words rattled around in Lucas's brain because he'd seen them in a Richard Sharpe novel by Bernard Cornwell. In the novel, the words had referred to a group of men who volunteered to be the first to attack a breach in a city wall during a siege. The survivors got otherwise impossible promotions… but they were also unlikely to survive.
Lucas put on shorts and a T-shirt and went down to the study, opened his Oxford Encyclopedic English Dictionary. Forlorn hope meant, exactly, a 'faint remaining hope' or a 'desperate enterprise.'
He snapped the dictionary closed: Charlie Pope, the retard, had used the phrase precisely. And something else… He ran back up the stairs, still carrying the dictionary, and picked up Ignace's transcript. Didn't Pope say he'd thrown the baseball bat into a field of 'whatever-it-is?'
Lucas found the line. Yes, he had. The whatever-it-is was beans.
Charlie Pope spent his entire life in a sea of soybeans, and he didn't know what a soybean field looked like when he was standing next to it? Now that was stupid, something you might expect from Charlie Pope.
He went back over the transcript. The language was what he'd expect from Charlie Pope, except for the 'forlorn hope.' And, come to think of it, Ruffe had him referring to a razor strap. Maybe he'd said strap and Ruffe had misspelled it.
Back to the dictionary: strop meant 'a strip of leather for sharpening razors.' Huh. Again, the precision. He'd have to talk to Ruffe…
HE FINISHED DRESSING, picking out a good-looking Versace blue suit and tie, a subtle Hermes necktie, blue over-the-calf socks with small coffee-colored comets woven into them, and soft black Italian loafers. He looked at himself in a mirror, took a pair of sunglasses out of his pocket, and tried a smile.
Fuckin' Jack Nicholson, he thought. Except taller and better-looking. He tried to whistle going out the door, but his face hurt when he pursed his lips.'
RUFFE IGNACE TOOK two big phone calls.
The first was from Davenport. Ignace was sitting in the basement of Minneapolis's scrofulous City Hall, reading about the New York Yankees-his team-when his phone rang.
Davenport: 'You sure he said 'forlorn hope' and 'razor strop'?'
'Hey. How many times do I explain the word verbatim to you?' Ignace asked. 'That's what he said.'
'But maybe he said strap, instead of strop.'
'Sounded like strop to me. I don't even know what a strop is. It's like a sharpening stone, right?'
'No, it's more like a strap.'
'Strop, strap, what the fuck are you talking about?'
THEN LATER, the second call.
Ignace was walking along Sixth Street, heading back toward the paper, playing Ruffe's Radio: Thought I was a bum, shit, this jacket cost four hundred bucks. Wonder why they put the street cars right down the middle of the main street so they screw up traffic for the whole town? Look at that skinny chick, wonder if she's bulimic? She looks bulimic, looks sour… wonder how much Macallister makes, can't be two grand, can it? Maybe I oughta ask for another hundred, my review's when, when was the last one? March? lot a way to go…
Like that. He was mumbling to himself, standing on a street corner, watching the walk light when his cell phone rang. He fished it out of his pocket and slipped it open: 'Ignace.'
'Roo-Fay…it's me.' The coarse whisper. No question.
'Mr. Pope? Is that you?' Ignace had a reporter's notebook stuffed in his back pocket. He fished it out, walked sideways to the wall of the nearest building, and sat down on the sidewalk, the cell phone trapped between his right shoulder and ear. 'How'd you get my number?'
'I called at the newspaper and told them I was a cop and it was an emergency and they gave me your cell
