Lucas thought, Not unless you shake hands with Sloan. But at the same time he smiled and shook his head, No.
12
ROCHESTER WAS A GOOD-SIZED CITY, built around a colony of doctors and wealthy patients, and probably had the highest per-capita income of any big city in the state. The money showed up in the government center, a modern red-brick, concrete, and glass building that sat on the Zumbro River a couple of blocks from the Mayo Clinic.
Twenty-nine sheriffs and police chiefs, or their alternates, along with a half dozen highway patrolmen, game wardens, and parole officers, got together in the boardroom, where the city council and county board met. Of the thirty-five, thirty were middle-aged men, most a little too heavy and going gray. The other five were women, all five tightly coifed and suited.
Lucas had talked to the Rochester chief about Bird; he would make arrangements for a formal statement. Then Lucas started the pitch to the gathered cops: "We know he's down here someplace. You've all seen this morning's Star-Tribune-he's going to do it again. He's probably already picked out somebody, and he's stalking her. Or him. We're looking for another guy from St. John's named Mike West. We're trying to keep this under our hats…"
They had questions, but Lucas had few answers: "Honest to God, we really don't know what he's doing, or how he's hiding. There's been; a parole-violation bulletin out on him for a month, and we've got nothing. He's buried himself someplace. We need to pry him out of his hole."
He told them about the white Olds. They all made a note. One guy held up a hand: "A new white Olds… they stopped building Oldsmobiles…"
"I know."
"We should be able to track every one of them," the guy suggested.
"We're doing that," Lucas said. "The woman who gave us that information is elderly, really elderly, and we're not absolutely sure of its quality."
"You're not sure how he's armed?"
"No, but he says he is, he says he got some guns, and we believe him," Lucas said. "Rice was in pretty good shape. We don't think Pope would have taken him bare-handed. The medical examiner says all of the damage to Rice's body was inflicted either with the whip or a blade. He didn't show any signs of being beaten, or having been in a struggle before he was tied up. So there was probably a gun. If one of your guys even gets a whiff of Pope, he better be wearing a vest."
"Pretty goodamn hot out in the countryside right now," one of the cops said.
"Better hot than dead," somebody else said.
Another hand: "Where'd he get the guns?".
"Same place he got the Olds," Lucas said. "We don't know."
"We know he was in Rochester last night?"
"Three blocks from here," Lucas said. He gestured out the window at his back. "Right across the river." And it went on for a while.
WHEN THEY BROKE UP, Sloan came over and said, "I'm feeling like shit, man. Bobby Anderson from Scott County's here. He said he'd give me a ride back home, if you're gonna go see Marcia Pope."
Lucas nodded: "You look bad. I can't believe the Marcia Pope thing is going anywhere, anyway. The Austin cops already talked to her twice."
Sloan took off, and Lucas, back in the truck, headed south toward the Iowa border, and the city of Austin.
MARCIA POPE LIVED IN a shingle-sided cottage on a tree-shaded street on the edge of Austin, in a subdivision built by meatpackers. The house was technically white, but probably hadn't been painted in forty years; the siding was grooved with dirt and mold, the ragged grass had only been fitfully mown, the narrow sidewalk leading to the front door was cracked and twisted.
Lucas pulled into the gravel patch that served as a driveway, and as he got out of the car, saw the curtains twitch. Until that moment, it hadn't really occurred to him that Charlie Pope might be inside. Could Charlie be stupid enough to hide out at his mother's? And here was Lucas going to the front door, no protective vest, his pistol tucked in a spot that might be a half second too slow, his mind working on other errands.
He slowed, scratched his face, miming a man who'd forgotten something, went back to the truck, pulled his gun out, and tucked it into his side pants pocket. The front sight had been smoothed to prevent hang-ups, and he kept the hammer and trigger assembly hanging out so his hand would fall on them.
Which wouldn't do him a lot of good, he thought, as he started back up the sidewalk, if Charlie was waiting behind the door with a shotgun stoked with double-ought buckshot… He saw the curtain twitch again and thought, Why would he waituntil I got to the door?
GOOD THOUGHT. But nothing happened on the way up, and at the door he stepped to one side and rang the bell. A few seconds passed, and he rang it again; then the door jerked open an inch or two, and a woman asked, "Whattaya want?"
He felt like a Fuller Brush salesman, but put on his official cop voice: "Mrs. Marcia Pope?" "Yeah?"
"I'm Lucas Davenport with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension." He held up his ID with his left hand. "We're looking for your son, Charlie. Is he here?"
"No, he's not here. I haven't seen him in more'n a month. I don't know where he is. I've already talked to the Austin police."
All he could see was one eye, a hank of steel gray hair, and the end of a short, pointed nose. "I need to interview you. Open up."
"You got a warrant?" The door opened two more inches, the better to argue.
"No, but I could get one. Then we'd come back, put handcuffs on you so all the neighbors could enjoy themselves, and take you to police headquarters to talk."
Silence, three seconds, five seconds. "You're not going to take me if I talk to you now?"
"Not if you tell me the truth," Lucas said. "Charlie's not here?"
The door opened wide enough that he could see her. She was a small, hatchet-faced woman wearing black slacks and a blue blouse that looked like a uniform from a chain restaurant. "I ain't seen that boy since the Fourth of July. He came down on the bus to see the fireworks. He always loved them."
Lucas nodded: "Can I come in?"
"The house is a mess," she said reluctantly. "I've been working all the time…"
But she backed up and he stepped inside.
SHE HAD A TV, a beat-up couch, a green La-Z-Boy, and a couple of end tables in the living room. Everything was stacked with magazines and tabloid newspapers; even more paper was stacked against the walls; decades of Us and People. The room smelled of fried meat and Heinz 57 Sauce.
Pope seemed to be looking for a place for Lucas to sit, but he said, "Never mind, I'm okay…" He eased toward the kitchen: more magazines, but no sound, or feel, or anything that indicated another person around. They stood facing each other and Lucas pushed her for names of friends, anything that might point to where Pope had gone.
"He had to have friends from high school…"
"He wasn't in high school that long. There was one boy, in grade school, but he drownded."
In the end, it seemed that she'd hardly known her child. When he was twelve, she said, he started skipping school. She didn't know where he spent his days; he simply went somewhere and hid. The school authorities hunted him down at the end of every summer, but as soon as his enrollment was counted for the state aid, they let him go. He was a pain in the ass, and always had been.
The high point of his teen years had come when he'd crashed his bike, hitting his head on at curb.
"They thought he was gonna die, but he didn't; goddamn brains almost squirted out his ear," his mother said.
In eleventh grade, Charlie Pope stopped pretending. He quit school, got a job at a McDonald's, was fired. "Never washed his hands after the bathroom, they said." He did some more time at a Burger King, was fired again, and then did whatever kind of pickup work he could get, lived however he could, Marcia said.
"His old man took off thirty years ago. Nobody knows where he is or what he's doing. He was a worthless piece of shit anyhow, but I didn't know that when I took up with him," Marcia said. "I was just a girl."