? ? ?
LUCAS LET FLOWERS HANDLE THAT, while he walked to his car and got on the phone to the BCA duty officer and asked him to check the owner of the phone number he’d found. As he waited, he saw a couple of deputies, including Mahler, follow Flowers into the house. Tillus was still sitting on the steps with the Somalis; a moment later, a Border Patrol truck rolled into the yard, followed by another sheriff’s car.
The duty officer came back and said, “Goes to a Chester Tillus, on Verizon.”
“Good. Get onto Verizon and tell them to ping it. We need to know where the phone is, right now. And tell them that this is official business and the phone owner is not to be notified . . . however you do that. As soon as you hear back, call me.”
That done, he got out of his truck, met Flowers coming out the door.
Flowers asked, “Now what?”
“I’ll call Sands and see if we can unload this on the Bemidji guys, and get the hell out of here,” Lucas said. Sands was the BCA director. Bemidji was the BCA’s northern outpost.
Flowers looked around the yard: there were now five or six deputies and a couple of Border Patrol guys wandering around.
“Quite the little party you got going here, Lucas,” Flowers said. “Reminds me of the stuff I do every day.”
“Thank you.”
A little while later, the sheriff arrived, followed by a white bus-like conversion van to transport the Somalis. Lucas and Flowers chatted with the sheriff for a few minutes, and the sheriff went up to look at the foot in the carpet roll.
A few minutes later, he came back and said he suspected that it was George Tillus’s mother, who hadn’t been seen for a couple of decades. She supposedly had gone to California to live with her sister; but now, it appeared, might not have gotten out of the driveway.
They were still chatting when the duty officer called back and told Lucas, “He’s off the grid right now, but they had him last night, first in Ironwood, and then a few minutes later, in Bessemer. Looks like he was heading east into the UP.”
“Tell them to keep pinging him. I want to know if he comes back up,” Lucas said. To Flowers: “My boy is on his way to Sault Ste. Marie. I will see you later.”
“I’m not going back to Fergus Falls,” Flowers called after him.
“You got anything else to do?” Lucas asked, turning back around.
“Lucas . . .” Flowers always had things to do. He covered roughly one-third of a large state.
“Then go do them. If Moore calls, I’ll personally tell him to go fuck himself,” Lucas said. Moore was the state senator who had influence on the budget.
? ? ?
LUCAS HEADED HOME, driving fast, stopped once to pee and buy an ice cream cone, cut I-35 at Moose Lake, and made it into St. Paul a few minutes before eleven o’clock. He’d driven a little over six hundred miles since leaving the cabin that morning, and he was beat.
Letty was still up: she met him at the door from the garage, and he looked at her face and said, “Wow.”
“Yeah, he really plugged me,” Letty said. Her black eye extended probably two inches down from her eye, and was a deep blue-black. “Mom’s in bed. She’s working early tomorrow.”
“And you’re okay?”
Letty nodded. “Mom took me all over the place, an eye doctor because she wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to have a detached retina, which I don’t and won’t have, and an ENT guy. The ENT guy said it’ll be three days before the nose stops hurting inside and three weeks before the black eye is gone.”
“Sounds about right. At least he didn’t break your nose. I can tell you, that hurts.”
“What happened in Baudette?” Letty asked.
Lucas told her about it as he led her into the kitchen, where he stuck his head into the refrigerator looking for something substantial to eat. He told her about the phone number and the body under the bed. “Beneath its blond exterior, Minnesota is a very weird place,” Letty said.
“On the basic weird-shit-o-meter, you’re going to college in a state that’s probably an eleven. They don’t notice it so much, because they’ve gotten used to it.”
“Are you going to Sault Ste. Marie?” she asked.
“Don’t know. I’ll talk to some people in Michigan, but I might run over there, depending on what the Michigan cops say. Put more of a point on things.”
“Not because Pilate punched me out.”
“A little bit because Pilate punched you out,” Lucas said. “The main reason is, everything is now so bureaucratic, so much talking on telephones and sending e-mails, that I don’t know if anybody else has . . . the feeling . . . I’ve gotten about this. This guy is a major-league wacko. There are three dead in Wisconsin, counting that Bony guy, and even Stern is acting like it’s another day in the flour mill. And Stern’s a good guy.”
? ? ?
WEATHER GOT UP at six o’clock, moving quietly by habit, but Lucas woke up and caught her naked in the bathroom for a little squeeze. “Letty is hoping you’re going to Michigan,” she said.
“Maybe. I’ll check at the office first,” Lucas said.
“You’re gonna fly?”
“Probably not. I looked online last night, and the absolutely fastest way I can fly there from here goes through Detroit, and from the time I have to be at the airport, until I get off the plane, is going to be seven hours or more. I can drive it almost as fast, and take all my gear.”
“You mean your guns.”
“Maybe.”
“Don’t get shot, it’d be really inconvenient for everybody.”
? ? ?
LUCAS GOT CLEANED UP and slid out of the house before seven o’clock, Letty still sound asleep. At the office he checked notes and e-mails from his agents, got a note from Flowers that had come in before seven, saying that he was heading back to Mankato, where he lived.