LUCAS HAD NEVER WORKED for the St. Paul cops but had lived in the city for better than twenty years and was well known around the St. Paul Police Department. He might not have been the best-liked guy, but a cop’s wife is a cop’s wife.
The sergeant got more cars to the crash scene, and the cops crawled the neighborhood with flashlights and dogs, but they never found the driver. They had his truck, though, and the license plate went to an Alice B. Stern. Alice Stern’s house, on St. Paul’s east side, was dark and quiet. There was no response to persistent knocking. A neighbor said Stern worked at a nearby bar, as a waitress. They found her there, serving drinks. She had been at the bar since four o’clock.
When questioned, she admitted owning the Tacoma. She used the old truck for cruising yard sales on Thursday mornings and for selling stuff at the flea market on Saturdays. For daily driving, she had a Corolla, which was still in the bar’s parking lot.
She also had a boyfriend.
“I can’t believe Doug would have taken it—he can’t drive,” she told the St. Paul sergeant. “I mean, he can drive, but he’s not allowed to. He just got out of Lino Lakes on his last DWI.”
The sergeant gave her a look, and she said, “Oh, no . . .”
* * *
—
THREE COP CARS went back to her house. She let them in, and together they found Douglas Garland Last in the garage, dead in a flea-market-bound office chair, a bullet hole in his head, a .38 on the floor next to his hand, along with a bright gold Iowa Hawkeyes ball cap. The sergeant called everybody. When all was said and done at the Medical Examiner’s, Last was found to have a blood alcohol content of 2.1, well over twice the legal limit.
The same old story. Call Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Again. Not that it would do much good—Douglas Last had never been elected to anything.
Before they ever found Last, they’d found Capslock. Del knew exactly where Lucas was.
* * *
—
LUCAS WAS SITTING on his bed, paging through a tattered book of American haiku, when Del got through to him.
Del didn’t screw around with preliminaries. “Man, Weather’s been in an auto accident. She’s on her way to Regions. She’s hurt bad. I’m on my way now, but you better get back here.”
Lucas, heart racing, was on his feet, looking for his pants. “What happened? Where’d it happen? How bad? Del . . .”
“She got hit on Mississippi River Boulevard, couple of blocks from your house. The other driver ran off, but they got his truck. That’s all I know. I’ll call you back . . .”
Lucas turned cold. He had to get back there.
The front desk hooked him up with an air charter service at Dulles International. He gave them a credit card number, he invoked Senator Smalls by name. The operator said they could leave as soon as the card cleared. He called the desk again for a cab, got dressed, stuffed his Dopp kit, all his various phones, his computer, and his camera in his backpack, did a quick survey of the room to make sure he had everything involving the case, and sprinted out the door. At the desk, he told them to hold his room, that he would be back but didn’t know when, and to let Bob or Rae in the room if they asked.
During the forty-minute trip to Dulles, he called Bob, told him what had happened.
“I don’t know how bad she is but she is hurt, from what I can tell. I’ll be gone for a while. You guys stay. I’ll let you know when I’m heading back . . . if I come back.”
He next called his daughter Letty, at Stanford. He told her what Del had said, and she said, “I’m on my way. I’ll get back to you.”
He called Del, who said, “I’m at Regions, I can’t talk to a doc, they’re all working on her. Anyway, she’s alive. The EMTs who brought her in said she was still unconscious when they got here. I found a friend of my wife’s, got her to snoop around.” Del’s wife, a nurse at Regions, wasn’t on duty when Weather was brought in. “Weather was bleeding from some head cuts, but they don’t think she’s got a fractured skull, which is good. But she does have a collapsed lung and a broken arm. They’re gonna run her through an MRI when they think they’ve stabilized her enough. They haven’t had to give her blood yet, which is also good I guess . . . That’s what I’ve got so far.”
“I’m on my way to the airport,” Lucas said. “What do we have on the other driver?”
“Don’t know anything yet about the driver. I’m calling my friends in St. Paul; I know they’ve got every patrol cop in the city searching the neighborhoods for him. They told me that the guy ran the stop sign on Randolph and T-boned her in that convertible of hers. That’s all I know so far, but I’m doing my best to stay on top of things. When you get on your plane, call me and tell me when you’ll get in—I’ll meet you at Humphrey.”
* * *
—
LETTY CALLED BACK as Lucas’s cab was approaching Dulles. “I’m on a red-eye out of SFO at ten, going through Denver. It’s the only flight I could get. I’ll rent a car when I get to Minneapolis. See you early in the morning. How’s Mom?”
Lucas told her what Del had given him, and then they were at the airport. She said, “Dad, take care.”
* * *
—
THE SMALL BUSINESS JET had two pilots, no cabin attendant. The pilot said, “We’re told your wife was in an accident; sorry to hear it. We’ll get you there in a hurry.”
Lucas nodded, strapped in, and they were gone.
Lucas had seen movies in which people made phone calls from flying jets, but he wasn’t able to get through on his cell. Two hours after they left Dulles, the jet put down at the Humphrey terminal at Minneapolis–St. Paul International, and Del was waiting.
“How much do you know?” Del asked, after Lucas had stumbled down the steps to the tarmac.
“Only what you told me—I couldn’t get through on my phone when we were in the air.”
“She’s alive. She sort of recovered consciousness . . .”
“What the hell does that mean?” Lucas demanded. “Sorta?”
“She’s got some short circuiting. The docs say that’s not unusual with concussions. She’s got a broken arm. Her lung collapsed when something . . . I dunno what, maybe a rib . . . punctured it, but the lung’s been re-inflated. She has more cracked ribs, she’s got major bruising, and she’s probably got a soft injury in her neck tissue, although all her arms and legs and fingers and toes are moving. She’s gonna make it, but she’s gonna hurt for a few weeks. Or months.”
Lucas felt the boulder lift from his shoulders. “I gotta call Letty,” he said. “She should be in Denver by now.”
“I gotta tell you about the driver.”
“They got him?”
“Sorta.”
“Del, goddamnit.”
“He’s dead. He’d just gotten out of Lino Lakes on a fifth DWI. The last one, he managed to cross the centerline and hurt a couple of people,” Del said. “He did a year in the treatment facility. I guess he wasn’t completely treated because he’s only been out for a month.”
Lucas had nothing to say to that, except, “Wouldn’t you fuckin’ know it.”
* * *
—
THE TWO OF THEM walked into Regions at two o’clock in the morning. Weather was in the intensive care unit, where guests were discouraged, but given Lucas’s history and the fact that Weather was a doc, they’d pulled two chairs behind the ICU curtains around her bed.
When Lucas stepped behind the curtain, he wanted to stop and cry. Weather’s eyes were open, but her face was horribly bruised, purple over the entire left side. Her neck was encased in a brace, her left arm in a fiber cast. Two bags of solution were hanging from a drip stand, with tubes snaking down to her arm; another emerged from beneath the bed covering, emptying urine into a bag hanging on the side of the bed.