Peters speared a gum wrapper and looked away from Lucas, and said, “Yeah?”
“I want you to walk down past the bandstand, over on the left side but behind it, maybe twenty yards, and then yell, ‘Pilate! Pilate!’ Twice like that—like you were calling to him across the field,” Lucas said. “When you’re walking away from me, off to your right, you’ll see two guys and a woman sitting on a blanket. She’s painting their faces. They’re the ones I’m interested in. When you call for Pilate, I don’t want them to be able to see you, but I want them to hear you. As soon as you call, get into the group around the bandstand, so they can’t figure out who was calling. Got it? I want to see if they look for you.”
“I got it. Give me a minute or so.”
Peters walked off and twenty seconds later, disappeared behind the bandstand. Another fifteen seconds and Lucas heard him call, “Pilate! Pilate!”
The woman immediately looked up from her nearly finished mask and the supine man rolled up on his side, then pushed himself up, both of them looking toward the bandstand. The second man, with the half-painted face, turned and said something to them, and then got up and walked toward the bandstand, looked behind it, apparently didn’t see anything that interested him, and walked back to the first two, shrugged, and sat down on the blanket again. The woman took another long look at the bandstand, then sat down again and went to work on his face mask again.
And Lucas thought, Gotcha.
He called Laurent on the phone, and told him what had happened.
“Do we pick them up now, or wait until Pilate gets here?” Laurent asked. “It sounds like they don’t know where he is and are waiting for him. If we wait, they might take us straight to him.”
Lucas had to think about it for a moment: “If we wait,” he said, “and they take us to him, it might be impossible to isolate them later. If one of them starts screaming for a lawyer, they’ll all start. We need to get something from them, almost anything, to really go after him. As soon as they lawyer-up, though, we could have a problem.”
“What do you want to do?” Laurent asked. “You tell me.”
Lucas said, “I guess I’d really like to split the difference: watch them, and wait until one of them splits off from the other two. Pick up that one, see if we get anything, then see if the other two take us to Pilate when he shows up.”
“That’s a plan,” Laurent said. “I’ll tell the guys.”
“If we pick up one, you guys don’t have a jail . . . am I right?”
“No, but we have a holding cell and an interview room.”
“Good enough.”
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LAURENT GOT A SPOT at the end of the field, where he could look down at the three people on the blanket, while Lucas watched from the other side. The two uniformed cops stayed down by the end of the field, near the car where the woman had gotten the backpack.
The woman finished putting the mask on the first man, put one on the second man, then packed up her makeup kit and put it in the backpack. She said something to the men, one of them nodded and dug into a bag he’d had beside him, and sparked off a fatboy.
The woman took a long drag, then another, passed the joint back, said something else, and started back toward her car. Lucas’s phone beeped: Laurent. “She’s moving, you see her?”
“I got her. She’s going back to her car,” Lucas said. “Let’s close in on her, see if we can grab her without too many people noticing. Let’s you and I do it. Tell the uniforms to get a car ready, but not to move until they see us grab her. We want her in the car, cuffed and gone in ten seconds, no muss, no fuss.”
“Got it.” Laurent rang off, and Lucas ambled down the field, twenty or thirty yards in front of the woman. She was moving a bit faster than he was, and he slowed enough that she’d catch him about the time she got to the car. As he came up to the car, he glanced back and saw Laurent moving up on the woman. Lucas angled toward the car. From where he was, she’d walk down the far side of it; he touched the call button on his phone, and Laurent said, “Yeah?”
“Follow her as she goes around the car. I’ll be on the other side, we’ll have her between us. Roll the patrol car.”
The woman never saw them until they were right there. She popped the trunk lid, and Laurent came up beside her, and Lucas slightly behind her. The cop car was already rolling up, and Laurent said, “Excuse me, miss,” and when she looked up, he showed her his badge and said, “I’m the Barron County sheriff, and you’re under arrest. Put your hands on the trunk lid, please.”
She sputtered, “What? What? What did I do?”
She tried to back away, but bumped into Lucas, who said, “Put your hands on the trunk lid, please.”
She put her hands up on the trunk lid as the patrol car stopped directly behind her and the driver got out. Laurent quickly patted her down, and then the deputy cuffed her as a crowd started to congeal down around the squad car.
A woman called, “What’d she do?”
“She escaped from the hospital,” Laurent said. “She’s a nurse, she’s got the Ebola virus. We’re trying to keep her away from contact with other people. We don’t think she’s really a danger, so don’t be worried. Well, not too worried.”
The crowd thinned, and the cuffed woman said, “I do not, I do not—”
Lucas said, “They all say that,” to the crowd, and to the woman, “Do what the doctor says. We’re trying to help you.”
The uniformed cop read her rights from a recital card—more mumbled than read, Lucas thought—and five seconds later, she was in the back of the patrol car, on her way out of the park. Lucas and Laurent followed, leaving the reserves behind to watch the park, and keep an eye on the woman’s two clown-faced friends.
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