'We don't want to hurt him,' Lucas said sincerely. 'We really don't.'
They found him late in the afternoon.
They found him because the story was now all over TV and radio, and a kid came in with his father. A half dozen of them were sitting around the police station when a cop stuck his head in the door and said, 'There's a guy here with his kid. They say they might know where Carl Walther is… if we haven't found him yet.'
'Bring 'em in,' Hopper said.
The man's name was James Wolfe, and his kid was James, Jr., another high-school boy. Wolfe said, 'Jimmy here had the idea… We took Carl deer hunting out of our cabin the last couple of years. And last summer, the kids were playing paint-ball games up there.'
'Carl said it would be really a neat place for a war,' Jimmy said.
'Where is it?' Lucas asked.
'On the Sturgeon River west of Cook. Thirty miles.'
Hopper said to Lucas, 'That'd explain why nobody's spotted him anywhere. Why we can't even find the car. He'd have been halfway up there before you went out and looked in the parking lot.'
'Can we send somebody to check it?' Lucas asked one of the sheriff's deputies.
'Hard to find it,' the elder Wolfe said. 'We were talking about it on the way over. The best way would be to go into the Magnusons' place, they're one place down from us. You could walk through the woods over this little rise and look right down on the house. See if his car is there.'
Lucas said to Hopper, 'I'll go, I can take a couple of guys… We can be there in half an hour, and if it doesn't pan out…'
'There's one more thing,' Wolfe said. 'Uh, I keep a gun up there to clean up beaver and porcupines, and I think Carl knows where it is.'
'He does,' the younger Wolfe said. 'We sorta let it out.'
'You were screwin' around with it; that's what you were doing,' his father said.
'What is it?' Lucas asked. 'What kind of gun?'
'A Savage.223 bolt-action with a two-to-eight-power scope on it. Not a great scope, but the gun shoots really good. Inside a minute, anyway,' the kid said.
'And there's ammo?'
Wolfe nodded. 'A couple of boxes. Fast-expansion stuff to blow up the critters. You go back there, if you think he's dangerous… You best take care.'
The Sheriff's Department had a designated rapid-response team for the area, and three of them, including a sniper, were pulled in for the trip. They brought rifles and the usual assault and hostage gear. Lucas led the way out, with the elder Wolfe beside him in the Acura. Nadya insisted on going, and rode in the backseat. Dannie Carson had nothing with her but city clothes, and Lucas left her to coordinate in Hibbing.
On the way up to Wolfe's cabin, Wolfe asked Lucas what he thought the kid had done. Lucas said he wasn't sure. That they wanted to question him about a killing, and maybe two killings.
'I had a feeling about him-not anything like this-but I had a feeling that he'd been abused somehow. I know his mother, she's the nicest lady in the world, but I always wondered about old Burt. Burt was polite, but you couldn't help thinking he was an asshole. You know his grandson, Roger…'
'We're looking for him, too.'
'I've been reading about it. I knew Roger pretty well and he was sort of messed up, too. Of course, his parents were killed in that car wreck, but that's not what it was-there was always something else, and I always wondered if Burt didn't have something to do with it. Not physical. Psychological.'
'Well. Burt was a spy,' Lucas said. 'If he was recruiting family members, and they'd all grown up here where everybody's got a flag and supposed to be a good American… there'd be a lot of stress.' He looked over his shoulder at Nadya. 'Isn't that right?'
She nodded. 'This is widely recognized in the community. Family stress is a very big problem.'
Wolfe nodded, looking out the window. 'Just… messed up, Roger was. Never saw the man really happy, except maybe at his wedding. Wonder where he is now?'
The Magnuson house was a half mile down a gravel road from Wolfe's place, set in a deep patch of woods along a small muddy river. There was a chain on the gate, and they could see a long track down through the trees to where the house must be, but they couldn't see the house. 'There's a spot over there where you can get in, where they cut the brush out for the power line,' Wolfe said, pointing down the road. 'You might scratch your car…'
Magnuson wouldn't care, Wolfe said, he was a good ol' boy.
The sheriff's GMC led the way through, and they stopped halfway down to Magnuson's house, at the point where the driveway came closest to Wolfe's. Lucas gathered the three deputies around him, and they went over the approach. They took a couple of flash-bangs and some tear gas, and just as they were about to start into the woods they heard a distant banging sound, metal on metal, from the direction of Wolfe's place.
'Somebody there,' Wolfe said. 'It's gotta be him.'
'Let's go,' Lucas said.
Carl had gotten into the house with a rock through the kitchen window. He cleared out the glass, boosted himself inside, turned on the water pump and the electricity, pushed the thermostat from fifty to seventy-two, found a local station on the satellite, got the gun and a box of shells out of the hideaway.
All right. Get something to eat. He rummaged through the kitchen, found a couple of cans of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup, heated it up, and sat at the kitchen table gobbling it down, the gun on the table.
The movement kept him preoccupied. Only when he put the bowl in the sink did he begin to feel alone-nobody to tell him to wash the bowl and put it away, nobody to tell where he was going, no Grandpa to talk to. No place to go, not with the cops looking for him.
In fact… the Chevy was outside, in plain sight. If anybody came down the drive, it would be the first thing they'd see. If the cops were looking for him, somebody could come down the drive, spot the car, and sneak away to report him, and he'd never know.
He picked up the gun, went outside, checked the garage. It was locked, but with a cheap padlock, enough to keep out kids. He looked around, found a hand-sized field stone, and beat on the lock until the hasp pulled out. He went inside, checked the four-by-four for keys-there were none, they were probably hung on the back of the bookcase-and lifted the overhead door.
With the door up, he moved the Chevy inside, then went back to the house. A local news program was on. He got a Coke from the refrigerator, perched on the couch. He thought about the Honda in the garage. Maybe later, he'd go out and scout around. For the moment, he'd just see what they were saying about him. Maybe, he thought, nobody had noticed he was gone.
Eight hundred yards, through second-growth timber, the ground soft and marshy underfoot. The banging continued, off and on, for the first three or four minutes of the march, and then stopped. They crossed a rise a few seconds later, and Wolfe whispered, 'When you come across that next little rise, there, you can see the place.'
They crossed a wet depression, and one of the sheriff's deputies whispered, 'Nettles,' and Lucas raised his hands over his head-he hated nettles-and warned Nadya. She nodded, and a minute later, they climbed out of the wet ground, through some scrubby maples, and looked down at Carl Walther's Chevy.
Carl was just walking out of a metal pole barn. A rifle lay on the hood of the Chevy and he picked it up, got in the car, started it, and rolled it into the pole barn.
'Broke into the pole barn to hide the car,' Wolfe guessed.
'What's in there? Vehicles?'
'Yeah, there's a four-wheeler, a Honda, a boat, a couple of trailers, a couple of sleds, a John Deere Gator. I don't know if he knows where the keys for the Honda are, but… now that I think of it, I bet he does. I bet when they were up here screwing around with that gun, they were running the four-wheeler, too. If he got on that, he could go where we couldn't…'
Lucas turned to the deputies. 'Everybody move carefully. We've got him. There's no point in anybody getting hurt.' One of the deputies carried a radio, and Lucas said to him, 'Call in, get some more people down here.'
'We gonna talk to him, or what?'
'We'll stay in the woods, block the place, and wait until the other guys get here. Then we'll talk…'
