Lucas had never felt anything quite so close to panic as when they were running back toward the school. Hopper said, 'You go check the locker room in case he's there. I'm gonna go pull the trigger on the emergency plan.'
There had already been two school shootings in Minnesota that year, three kids dead. The thought that a cold-blooded killer, who'd already wiped out a Russian agent and a cop, and God knows who else, was loose in the school-maybe with a silenced pistol-was a possibility so grim that he could hardly bear to think about it.
He didn't argue with Hopper. Inside the door, Hopper said, 'Locker room,' and pointed. There were a few kids around, gawking at them, and Hopper started shouting, 'Everybody go back to your classroom. Everybody back to your classroom.'
Lucas ran down to the boys' locker room and inside. Dannie Carson continued on to the girls' locker room, her Glock at her side. Inside the boys', a kid was emptying a clothes basket full of towels, and he saw the urgency on Lucas's face and asked, 'What?'
Lucas stepped close, one hand on his pistol, the pistol still under his jacket, and asked, quietly, 'Have you seen Carl Walther?'
'Yeah, he was here two minutes ago. But I think he left…'
'Which way did he go?'
'I don't know, I didn't see him go, I only heard him…'
Lucas did a quick run through the locker room, including the showers, saw nobody else, and went back into the hallway. A gray-haired woman was walking down the hall, bouncing a basketball. Lucas said, 'I'm a cop. Have you seen Carl Walther? He should have been out in the hallway just a minute ago…'
She said, 'Uh…'
Overhead, a speaker burped some static, and then a man's voice said, 'All teachers, we are turning lights out. All teachers, lights out.'
And the gray-haired woman said, 'Oh, shit. Carl? Does he have a gun?'
'We don't know. We can't find him, but he was just here. Were you walking around here?'
'No, I was in the gym…'
Dannie Carson came out of the girls' locker room and said, 'Not there.'
'The 'lights out' code means we're supposed to lock down and report in,' the gray-haired woman said.
'Then do that,' Lucas said. 'Hurry.'
They tore the school apart. Lucas ran through the weight room, checked the swimming pool, and two or three cops walked each row of the huge, elaborate auditorium; every room and cubbyhole was checked. No sign of Carl Walther. Twenty minutes after the search began, a teacher walked down to the office with a student and said, 'Somebody needs to hear this.'
And the kid said, 'You should check the parking lot for his car,' the kid said. 'I saw him come in this morning. He parked right next to me.'
Lucas borrowed the kid and they went out to the parking lot. On the way, the kid described the location where the car was parked-and when they got there, to the exact location, they found an empty space.
'This is mine,' the kid said, pointing to an aging Volkswagen Rabbit in the next slot. 'He's gone. But he was right here this morning. He's got a Chevy.'
The tension backed off a notch. There were now ten city cops and six or eight sheriff's deputies and a highway patrolman in the school. Parents were beginning to arrive outside; the kids had cell phones. Lucas found Hopper and told him about the car and Hopper said, 'Maybe he's gone home. We'll get some guys moving. Nobody's seen him in here, thank God.'
They'd put Janet Walther in the principal's office, and told her to stay there. Now they got her, and Lucas asked, 'Where do you think Carl would go. Home?'
She was scared to death. 'Don't hurt him. He's a good kid, don't hurt him…'
The only places she could think that he might be were at home, at the store, or possibly at Grandpa's.
Lucas, Nadya, and Carson went with Hopper first to Jan Walther's home, cleared the place, then down to the store. The store was locked, and they cleared it; at the same time, they got a call from cops clearing Grandpa's-all the doors were still sealed from the outside.
'I'll talk to the highway patrol, the roads going out,' Hopper said. 'He can't be far.'
Janet Walther grabbed Lucas's arm: 'You don't hurt him. You don't hurt him, okay. He's just scared, you're just scaring him.'
'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
