'All over me,' Grandpa said, scrubbing at his hands with the last of the Kleenex. 'All over me…'
Carl didn't get home until after midnight. Jan Walther was ready for bed, and came out to see him. 'It's late,' she said. 'Your homework?'
'Done. Did it in study hall,' Carl said, hand on his bedroom doorknob.
'Still have to get up early. What kept you?'
'Ah, you know Grandpa. He doesn't sleep so well anymore. He wanted to talk.'
She smiled and said, 'Okay, big guy. But get some sleep. You have to be in school in less than eight hours.'
'No problem,' said the Imperfect Weapon.
He never dreamed about the dead: he dreamed of girls in varying states of nakedness, of black cars street- racing in LA, of himself posed in a shadowed hallway somewhere with a pistol, muzzle upraised as he slid along the hall, back to the wall…
Carl still dreamed a child's dreams.
Chapter 14
After his experience with the cops in Virginia, Lucas decided not to take a chance on the Hibbing police. Instead, he called the head of the BCA's northern office in Bemidji, asked him to be the intermediary, waited ten minutes, then took the call from the Hibbing chief of police.
'We've got a situation,' he told the chief. 'The FBI's involved, counterintelligence people, and the whole thing is way too complicated to talk about over the phone, but what it is, is, I need somebody to run out to the Greyhound Museum to look around. If you have a Greyhound museum.'
'We've got one,' the chief said. He sounded sleepy, but cooperative. 'I can get a car up there in five minutes. Are my boys going to run into anything?'
'Tell them to take care,' Lucas said. 'We're talking about a killer. He's done two people that we know of, that Russian over in Duluth and the old lady a few days later.'
'Holy smokes, I been reading about it. All right, I'll get somebody up there-hell, I'll get my pants on and go up there with them. Can I call you back?'
'I'll be sitting here,' Lucas said. 'Call no matter what.'
Weather said, 'I want to know how this comes out, but I've got to go to bed. I'm working early.'
'Be up as soon as I can,' Lucas said. 'Whatever happens, we won't go back to Duluth tonight. It's too late, and there'd be nothing to do.'
'I am very worried,' Nadya said.
Lucas raised his eyebrows and said, 'Well… you guys didn't have to have a shadow. We told you that.'
'A shadow was convenient for everybody,' Nadya said. 'If all this trouble was an artifact of the past, we could leave it. If not, we could settle it with your FBI, informally. The shadow could act in ways that you, perhaps, could not, with your TV and newspapers…'
'I'll leave you two to work it out,' Weather said. She yawned, kissed Lucas on the forehead, and disappeared back up the stairs.
The Hibbing chief, Roy Hopper, called back twenty minutes later. 'We found a running back from the high- school football team in the backseat of his dad's car with his girlfriend. The boy didn't have his pants entirely on. Hope this doesn't turn out to be a distraction.'
'Distract from what?' Lucas asked.
'He's rushing for better than a hundred yards a game so far this season…'
'Chief…'
'… and we found an empty car, doors unlocked, nothing inside but a cell phone on a charging cord. We ran the plates. It's a rental from Avis at Duluth International. Checked out a week and a half ago to a Martin Johnson.'
'Hang on,' Lucas said.
He repeated the information to Nadya, who said, 'That is surely the car, do you think? I don't know the name. Is this policeman near the cell phone?'
Lucas to Hopper: 'Where's the cell phone?'
'Still here, in the car.'
'Tell him, I will call,' Nadya said. She ran upstairs, got a calendar, ran back down, and punched a number into Lucas's cell phone. A minute later, the chief said, 'It's ringing.'
'Oh my god,' Nadya said. 'I must call in. I must call.'
'Better treat that area as a crime scene, Chief,' Lucas said. 'We'll be back up there at the crack of dawn, or nine o'clock, whichever is later.'
When Lucas got off the phone, he said to Nadya, 'Call in, and then get a few hours of sleep. I've got an Ambien if you need one. I'll get you up at five-thirty, we'll get out of here at six.'
Nadya nodded and started dialing. Lucas was at the bottom of the stairs, headed up, when she called after him, 'I'm thinking I'm not liking this Minnesota too much.'
'It ain't Minnesota,' Lucas said. 'Minnesota's just fine.'
Lucas was up at five forty-five, groggy until he got out of the shower, which he shared with Weather; she got his blood moving, anyway. Weather didn't have to shave, so she was dressed and downstairs first, having stopped to knock on Nadya's door.
When Lucas got downstairs, Weather said, 'Nadya's up. She's repacking. I'll put some coffee in a thermos. You want some peanut-butter toast?'
'That'd be great. I'm sorry about the quick turnaround. Gotta make a couple of calls.' He called Andreno, talked with him for a moment; then called Andy Harmon, who sounded as though he'd been up for hours, and filled him in on the shadow.
'Interesting,' Harmon said. 'We'll get back to you.'
Nadya came in, rubbing the back of her head. She had her carry-on bag, which she'd used as an overnighter, in her hand. 'Are we ready?'
'You want something to eat? Cereal, or peanut-butter toast?'
She shook her head. 'I just want to go.'
At six fifteen, they were in the car. Nadya kept yawning, couldn't stop. 'I have no sleep at all,' she said as they backed out the driveway. She yawned and blinked. 'I should have taken the pill.'
Lucas braked, put the car in park, said, 'Hang on,' and ran into the house. A minute later, he was back and handed Nadya a sleeping mask. 'We're three hours away. Crank the seat back, see if you can doze off. Any little bit will help.'
She was gone before they got out of the Cities.
The day was brilliant and warm, with a gusty wind from the south. Lucas didn't want to disturb Nadya with the radio, so they rode in silence, running just over the speed limit in light traffic.
Time to think: but not much to think about. The case was all in pieces. Andreno was keeping an eye on Spivak, though he couldn't do a full surveillance. Nevertheless, when Lucas shook Andreno out of bed at six o'clock, he said he'd taken Spivak home at one o'clock in the morning, and had seen him, off and on, in the tavern during the day and all during the evening. The only place he'd gone all day was to a hardware store, this just before noon, where he'd bought two fluorescent lightbulbs, and to a Wal-Mart, at seven twenty.
'He went inside, and I lost him for a minute or so and then I found him back in the DVDs. He got one, and then he trailed around the store some more and I got the impression he was looking for a tail, but he wasn't very good at it. So I stayed back a little and let him run, and just before he walked out, he made a phone call from the public phones. He wasn't on for more than a minute.'
'That sounds like something. I'll have the feds see if they can do anything with it.'
'Okay. We might be getting a little tangled up here, though,' Andreno said. 'The cops already got a call about
