25
LUCAS LIKED DRIVING FAST and had gotten in trouble a few times because of it; even liked driving fast in a truck, and now had the Lexus screaming in pain as they roared toward Grant’s address. The navigation system put them right into the apartment complex. The fat tires squealing around the turns, the antiroll buzzer beeping in protest, Sloan talking to Jenkins as they tore along a leafy street toward the apartments, Shrake and Jenkins a car-length back.
They turned a corner past a cluster of lilacs and burst into a parking lot, past a swimming pool behind a chain-link fence, and Sloan said, “There!” Lucas looked that way and saw the cluster of expectant bystanders at an apartment doorway—there were always expectant bystanders for the first responding car.
Lucas went that way—he could hear sirens coming in behind them—and he hopped out of the truck, shouted at Jenkins and Shrake, “One of you guys stay here for the city cops,” and he headed toward the door, a half step ahead of Sloan.
A heavy woman with frizzy blond hair, a red bandana, and eyes big with fear, said, “There’s a crazy man here. He hurt a man up on two, cut him with a razor.”
“Where’s the stairway?”
She pointed, and Lucas said, “Show us, take us up . . . Is the guy still here?”
As they jogged across an atrium, she said over her shoulder, “Yes. He’s hurt, really bad, there’s blood all over the place.”
They were in the stairwell, her ass bouncing in Lucas’s face as they went up. “He’s hurt?” Sloan asked. Shrake was coming up behind them now. “The crazy man?”
“No, not the crazy man. He ran. The other man . . .”
Lucas said, “Shit . . .”
Then they were out of the stairs and running down a hallway toward another cluster of the curious, and Lucas called, “Police, coming through.”
The cluster broke, and Lucas went in, found a young woman in underpants and a T-shirt crouched over a man who wore nothing but jeans. The man was awake and talking. Lucas went to his knees and looked at the woman and said, “What happened? How bad?”
The man answered for her, good English, but accented: “A crazy man. We have not seen him before. He cut me with a straight razor, an old kind, and then he went out. He cut a small artery in my shoulder. I’ll be okay if they get me soon to the hospital. We must cauterize the artery. For now, we put pressure on it.”
“He’s a doctor,” the young woman said, and Lucas nodded.
“Ambulance is coming,” Shrake said. He was on his phone, talking to the 911 dispatcher. “One minute out. The locals are looking for the car.”
Lucas asked the injured man and the woman, and then the people jammed into the doorway, “Was the guy’s name Grant? Does anybody know if the guy’s name was Leopold Grant?”
One woman in the doorway, an older woman with harsh red lipstick, said, “I didn’t see the attack, but I know Leo. He lives on the other side of the building.”
The man on the floor said, “I have never seen him before this.” The woman with him said, “Me, either. He just kept kicking the door. I thought it was an earthquake. He knew my name. He called me Millie . . .”
Lucas said to the lipstick woman who knew Grant, “Show me where Grant’s room is.”
GOING BACK DOWN the hallway, they ran into Jenkins, with the Mankato cops in tow. Lucas said to a sergeant, “Get the ambulance guys up here quick, we got an arterial. Keep these people isolated, the witnesses. Jenkins, you come with us.”
“Where’re we going?”
“We’re following her.” He pointed at the woman who was taking them to Grant’s apartment, and they fell in behind her. To get to Grant’s, they had to go back down the hallway, through the second-floor lobby, and out the opposite side into another hallway. They’d walked fifty or sixty feet down the hallway, and the woman said, “It’s right up ahead. The next door.”
“Just about back-to-back with that chick’s apartment,” Shrake said.
Lucas came up slowly, pulled his gun, pushed the woman back, and pressed a finger to his lips. He could see that the door to Grant’s apartment was open an inch or two. He stopped at the door, and Jenkins, gun in hand, went on past. With Jenkins lined up on the other side, Lucas pushed the door open. They could hear a radio—and then Lucas realized that it was coming from somewhere else. From the apartment, he could hear nothing at all.
Jenkins said, “I can’t see anything.”
“Gonna go,” Lucas said. He got his .45 out in front and stepped through, one step, two, three, ready to fire, Sloan right behind him, Sloan’s gun tracking to the right while Lucas’s gun tracked left. Two bedrooms, two baths. Open-plan kitchen, nobody in that. Cleared a bedroom used as an office, cluttered but not torn up, cleared the master bedroom, the bathrooms, the closets.
“He’s a freak,” Jenkins said. He’d come in behind them, and he nodded at the bed. Lucas stepped over to look, saw the stethoscope trailing out of the wall.
“Listening to the chick,” Shrake said. “They looked like they’d been f*cking, the guy must’ve been over here, must’ve cracked.”
Lucas put his gun away. “All right. I’ll call the co-op center, put out a call on the car. It’s a snake hunt now.”
THEY BACKED OUT of the apartment, not wanting to hack up any evidence: best to let the crime-scene crew deal with it. As they went, Jenkins said, “He didn’t take much, looks like his clothes are still here.”
They closed the door, got a city cop to come down to watch it until they could get it sealed. As Lucas talked to the co-op center, Jenkins, Shrake, and Sloan went down to Millie Lincoln’s apartment. The halls were full of frightened people, and Lucas heard a woman talking about the man hauled away by the ambulance. He went to the lobby windows, finished with the co-op guys, and called Rose Marie Roux.
“We know who he is, but we don’t have him yet. He’s running.”
“But we’ll get him,” she said.
“One way or another. He could stick a gun in his ear . . . But yeah. It’s over.”
“When are you coming back?”
“Tonight, an hour or two. There are a couple of loose ends down here.”
“Call me . . .”
Lucas rang off and saw the sheriff’s car pull into the lot, and Nordwall got out. Lucas looked at the crowd of cops around Millie Lincoln’s apartment, decided they had enough help, and walked down the stairs and out into the parking lot.
Nordwall, no athlete, was chugging across the parking lot, a young deputy trailing him. “What happened?”
“We’re looking for a Leo Grant. He’s a psychologist up at the security hospital. Before he ran out of here, he tried to attack a woman up on the second floor . . .” He told Nordwall about the sequence that led to Grant.
When he was done, Nordwall grunted, scratched his nose, then awkwardly patted Lucas on the shoulder and said, “I knew I was calling the right guy.”
“I’m gonna dream about Peterson,” Lucas said.
“Yeah, but you know what? I read all those true-crime books,” Nordwall said. “Like on the Green River guy. I was afraid we might lose ten people, or fifteen. When we were looking for Pope, it seemed like he was invisible.”
“There’s that.” Lucas’s phone rang. He answered, expecting somebody from the co-op center. Instead, he got a voice that sounded like an angry squirrel, high-pitched, chattering, incoherent, frightened.
“Wait, wait, calm down,” he said. “Who is this, what happened?”
“This is Cale,” the voice shouted. “Up at the hospital. Leo Grant just shot three people, and he’s loose in the hospital. He’s got guns. We don’t have any lights, all the doors are open, we’ve got a fire in the cage. We’ve got the ambulances coming, we’re calling the sheriff. Jesus, are you coming? Where are you? Where are you?”