She said, "Uh…"
Overhead, a speaker burped some static, and then a man's voice said, "All teachers, we are turning lights out. All teachers, lights out."
And the gray-haired woman said, "Oh, shit. Carl? Does he have a gun?"
"We don't know. We can't find him, but he was just here. Were you walking around here?"
"No, I was in the gym…"
Dannie Carson came out of the girls' locker room and said, "Not there."
"The 'lights out' code means we're supposed to lock down and report in," the gray-haired woman said.
"Then do that," Lucas said. "Hurry."
They tore the school apart. Lucas ran through the weight room, checked the swimming pool, and two or three cops walked each row of the huge, elaborate auditorium; every room and cubbyhole was checked. No sign of Carl Walther. Twenty minutes after the search began, a teacher walked down to the office with a student and said, "Somebody needs to hear this."
And the kid said, "You should check the parking lot for his car," the kid said. "I saw him come in this morning. He parked right next to me."
Lucas borrowed the kid and they went out to the parking lot. On the way, the kid described the location where the car was parked-and when they got there, to the exact location, they found an empty space.
"This is mine," the kid said, pointing to an aging Volkswagen Rabbit in the next slot. "He's gone. But he was right here this morning. He's got a Chevy."
The tension backed off a notch. There were now ten city cops and six or eight sheriff's deputies and a highway patrolman in the school. Parents were beginning to arrive outside; the kids had cell phones. Lucas found Hopper and told him about the car and Hopper said, "Maybe he's gone home. We'll get some guys moving. Nobody's seen him in here, thank God."
They'd put Janet Walther in the principal's office, and told her to stay there. Now they got her, and Lucas asked, "Where do you think Carl would go. Home?"
She was scared to death. "Don't hurt him. He's a good kid, don't hurt him…"
The only places she could think that he might be were at home, at the store, or possibly at Grandpa's.
Lucas, Nadya, and Carson went with Hopper first to Jan Walther's home, cleared the place, then down to the store. The store was locked, and they cleared it; at the same time, they got a call from cops clearing Grandpa's-all the doors were still sealed from the outside.
"I'll talk to the highway patrol, the roads going out," Hopper said. "He can't be far."
Janet Walther grabbed Lucas's arm: "You don't hurt him. You don't hurt him, okay. He's just scared, you're just scaring him."
"We don't want to hurt him," Lucas said sincerely. "We really don't."
They found him late in the afternoon.
They found him because the story was now all over TV and radio, and a kid came in with his father. A half dozen of them were sitting around the police station when a cop stuck his head in the door and said, "There's a guy here with his kid. They say they might know where Carl Walther is… if we haven't found him yet."
"Bring 'em in," Hopper said.
The man's name was James Wolfe, and his kid was James, Jr., another high-school boy. Wolfe said, "Jimmy here had the idea… We took Carl deer hunting out of our cabin the last couple of years. And last summer, the kids were playing paint-ball games up there."
"Carl said it would be really a neat place for a war," Jimmy said.
"Where is it?" Lucas asked.
"On the Sturgeon River west of Cook. Thirty miles."
Hopper said to Lucas, "That'd explain why nobody's spotted him anywhere. Why we can't even find the car. He'd have been halfway up there before you went out and looked in the parking lot."
"Can we send somebody to check it?" Lucas asked one of the sheriff's deputies.
"Hard to find it," the elder Wolfe said. "We were talking about it on the way over. The best way would be to go into the Magnusons' place, they're one place down from us. You could walk through the woods over this little rise and look right down on the house. See if his car is there."
Lucas said to Hopper, "I'll go, I can take a couple of guys… We can be there in half an hour, and if it doesn't pan out…"
"There's one more thing," Wolfe said. "Uh, I keep a gun up there to clean up beaver and porcupines, and I think Carl knows where it is."
"He does," the younger Wolfe said. "We sorta let it out."
"You were screwin' around with it; that's what you were doing," his father said.
"What is it?" Lucas asked. "What kind of gun?"
"A Savage. 223 bolt-action with a two-to-eight-power scope on it. Not a great scope, but the gun shoots really good. Inside a minute, anyway," the kid said.
"And there's ammo?"
Wolfe nodded. "A couple of boxes. Fast-expansion stuff to blow up the critters. You go back there, if you think he's dangerous… You best take care."
The Sheriff's Department had a designated rapid-response team for the area, and three of them, including a sniper, were pulled in for the trip. They brought rifles and the usual assault and hostage gear. Lucas led the way out, with the elder Wolfe beside him in the Acura. Nadya insisted on going, and rode in the backseat. Dannie Carson had nothing with her but city clothes, and Lucas left her to coordinate in Hibbing.
On the way up to Wolfe's cabin, Wolfe asked Lucas what he thought the kid had done. Lucas said he wasn't sure. That they wanted to question him about a killing, and maybe two killings.
"I had a feeling about him-not anything like this-but I had a feeling that he'd been abused somehow. I know his mother, she's the nicest lady in the world, but I always wondered about old Burt. Burt was polite, but you couldn't help thinking he was an asshole. You know his grandson, Roger…"
"We're looking for him, too."
"I've been reading about it. I knew Roger pretty well and he was sort of messed up, too. Of course, his parents were killed in that car wreck, but that's not what it was-there was always something else, and I always wondered if Burt didn't have something to do with it. Not physical. Psychological."
"Well. Burt was a spy," Lucas said. "If he was recruiting family members, and they'd all grown up here where everybody's got a flag and supposed to be a good American… there'd be a lot of stress." He looked over his shoulder at Nadya. "Isn't that right?"
She nodded. "This is widely recognized in the community. Family stress is a very big problem."
Wolfe nodded, looking out the window. "Just… messed up, Roger was. Never saw the man really happy, except maybe at his wedding. Wonder where he is now?"
The Magnuson house was a half mile down a gravel road from Wolfe's place, set in a deep patch of woods along a small muddy river. There was a chain on the gate, and they could see a long track down through the trees to where the house must be, but they couldn't see the house. "There's a spot over there where you can get in, where they cut the brush out for the power line," Wolfe said, pointing down the road. "You might scratch your car…"
Magnuson wouldn't care, Wolfe said, he was a good ol' boy.
The sheriff's GMC led the way through, and they stopped halfway down to Magnuson's house, at the point where the driveway came closest to Wolfe's. Lucas gathered the three deputies around him, and they went over the approach. They took a couple of flash-bangs and some tear gas, and just as they were about to start into the woods they heard a distant banging sound, metal on metal, from the direction of Wolfe's place.
"Somebody there," Wolfe said. "It's gotta be him."
"Let's go," Lucas said.
Carl had gotten into the house with a rock through the kitchen window. He cleared out the glass, boosted himself inside, turned on the water pump and the electricity, pushed the thermostat from fifty to seventy-two, found a local station on the satellite, got the gun and a box of shells out of the hideaway.