phone in a ditch. You've got four minutes to decide.'
'Give him the number,' Lucas said.
LUCAS CALLED THE co-op center on one of the Northfield center's phones and told them about the cell-phone call. 'Find the cell,' he said. 'He's gonna call me. You got my number. He's probably using Peterson's phone again. Find the fuckin' cell. Find the fuckin' cell.'
AND THEN POPE CALLED.
'Agent Davenport,' he drawled. He spoke slowly, with the same whispery voice that Ignace had described. Lucas tried to penetrate it: husky, a middle tenor; Gould it be a woman? 'That was you that chased me through that crick, wasn't it?' Lucas was astonished. The question froze him, and he asked, inanely, 'Where are you?'
'Out here in the woods where I always am. Miz Peterson is still okay. Well, she wouldn't say that, I guess. I had me a little pussy before dinner. And after dinner. And for dessert. She's right here. You want to talk to her?'
Not a woman. A woman wouldn't talk like that-unless she were very, very manipulative. 'Listen, man, you really need, our help…' Lucas felt absolutely stupid as he said it.
'Nah, I'm doing okay. I thought you had me there for a minute, those first two cops, and then you. When I got loose I heard them talk-ing about you on my scanner, said you almost wrecked your truck in that crick. I wondered what happened to you. I hit that sonbitch just right, I guess. Never saw it-nothing but luck.' 'Listen, Mr. Pope…'
'Didn't call me no Mr. Pope when you had my ass in St. John's. But listen, don't you want to talk to Miz Peterson? She was in the back the whole time. Here… Miz Peterson. This is the law. Talk to him…'
There was the sound of flesh against flesh, as though somebody had been slapped, the tenor, 'Talk to him, bitch,' and then a dry, ragged woman's voice, 'Help me…'
'That's good enough,' Pope said in his whisper. 'We gotta go.' And then: 'Well, it's been fun, but I gotta say good-bye, Agent Davenport.'
'You gotta…'
Click.
LUCAS WAS SCREAMING at the co-op center, and they came back: 'The cell's in Owatonna. It's Peterson's. He got around you and went straight south.'
'Get the goddamned people moving around there, get them moving…'
'They're moving now, everything we've got.'
Five hours later, Lucas was on a dirt road west of Owatonna when he got a call from the Blue Earth County Sheriff's Department. There were a couple of clicks and he was patched through: 'Lucas, this is Gene Nordwall, I'm down south of Mankato, little west of Good Thunder.'
'Gene, you heard?'
'Yeah. We found her,' he said.
'You found her?' Lucas asked. 'She's alive?'
15
WAYNE'S FOUR CORNERS INN was a rambling white structure that sat on top of a ridge where Blue Earth County 122 and County 131 crossed each other. There were two nonfunctional gas pumps out front, with crown- shaped glass globes on top, left over from the 1950s, and left in the parking area as a statement of the inn's antiquity. To the left side of the inn, just outside the gravel parking area, was a pi-shaped struc-ture that might have been a medieval gallows, built of rough four-by-four lumber.
Lucas recognized the structure as soon as he pulled into the park-ing lot, outside the collection of cop cars. They were rare, in recent times, but as recently as the 1960s and 1970s they had been ubiquitous in the countryside. They were hanging bars, meant to display the carcasses of the biggest local bucks taken during deer season.
Carlita Peterson's body hung by the neck from the crossbar.
Not so much a body, as a carcass; Lucas had already been told, and walked toward the hanging bar with his eyes averted, not wanting to look.
A cop was there, and said to Lucas, 'This is awful.'
Lucas looked now: no way to avoid it.
Peterson's throat had been slashed; that had been the killing Stroke. But after she'd been killed, she'd been gutted, and her empty body, slashed from throat to anus with a cutting tool, hung in the cool still morning air.
LUCAS LOOKED AWAY, then stepped away, shaking his head, his hands trembling. He'd thought that they might get her back.
NORDWALL SCUFFED UP in his cowboy boots, not looking: 'He fuckin' gutted her.'
'You gotta get some people out in the woods, looking for the…' Lucas stopped. He knew the phrase, but he didn't want to say it.
The sheriff said it for him. 'The gut dump.'
'Yeah. I would think it would be close by,' Lucas said. 'He chose this place for display. Look for, crows. You should see crows flocking around.'
'I'll put it out right now.'
'Tell everybody to walk easy. When we find it, we'll backtrack to where he held her, we gotta see if any of the neighbors saw cars in the night, anybody coming or going…' The sheriff nodded, and Lucas finished: 'Shit, Gene, you know the routine. We know Pope is involved, somehow, so processing isn't so important… unless we can come up with a second name. What's important is the car-what are they driving, where were they headed?'
'I'll put it out. You gonna be here?'
'No. I'm going home for a while.'
LUCAS WAS WALKING back down the hill to the parking lot when he saw a brown Chevy slowing at the turnoff; the man inside showed an ID to the cop at the corner, and then the car continued into the parking lot and pulled in a slot down from Lucas. Sloan got out.
'How're you feeling?' Lucas asked, automatically.
'Tell you in a minute,' Sloan said. He looked pale, and drawn, but he often did, especially in the morning. He headed up the hill toward hanging bar. Lucas leaned against the truck, watching him go, waited.
AS HE WAITED, another familiar face came up. Lucas searched for a name, and the man helped him out: 'Lucas-Barry Anderson, Goodhue.' He was the sheriff of Goodhue County, wearing tired civilian clothes, tan slacks, and a red plaid shirt. Like Lucas, he'd been up all night; the chase the night before had started just inside Goodhue County.
'I know where he was going last night,' he said grimly, looking up the hill. 'We got a bar at a place called Old Church-there's no church anymore, burned down twenty years ago, but there's a bar and they've got a deer rack. Wasn't five miles from where that first deputy jumped him.'
'Ah, jeez…'
'Wonder what made him pick the one up there?'
