"Thanks, Weather," Lucas said. To Sherrilclass="underline" "You wanta come?"
"Yeah, I do." She glanced at Weather and quickly nodded.
They’d just started toward a door when a middle-aged couple hurried in, and the woman, tightly controlled, went to the reception desk and said, "My daughter was just hurt in some kind of accident at St. Anne’s and we were told she was here, but I don’t see her, do you know…"
And Lucas shook his head at Sherrill and they hurried out: "I didn’t want to see that," Lucas said. "I don’t need it."
A St. Paul Lieutenant named Allport was running the crime scene at St. Anne’s when Lucas and Sherrill arrived. He spotted Lucas getting out of the car, and yelled at a patrolman, "Send that guy over here."
The patrolman whistled at Lucas to get his attention, and pointed at Allport. Lucas waved, took Sherrill by the elbow, and they walked along the side of the Residence building to a cluster of cops duckwalking around the parking lot.
"I heard," Allport said. "The nun’s an old pal of yours. She gonna be all right?"
"She’s in the OR. So’s the girl; the girl’s in trouble."
"Ah, jeez. She’s some kid from the neighborhood here. One of the neighbors said her parents sent her here because she could live close to home and it’s safe."
"You figure out what happened?" Lucas asked.
"Yeah. What there is. You ain’t gonna like it."
"I already don’t like it…"
"No, no. I mean, you really ain’t gonna like it. There’s a girl sitting in by the switchboard, she’s talking to one of her friends-they’re doing homework together. So a call comes in for Sister Mary Joseph-family emergency."
"She doesn’t have a family anymore," Lucas said.
"Yeah." Allport looked up at the night sky. "But that’s what they said. So the girl runs down and gets the sister and the sister takes the call and she listens and she freaks out and she hangs up, and she says to this girl, ‘Lucas has been shot; they’re taking him to Midway. I’ve got to go.’ "
"What?"
"So she ran to get her keys and her bag and she ran back out and the girl at the phones says to the other one, ‘I don’t think she should drive,’ and the other one says, ‘I’ll take her,’ and she runs out. Then the girl sits there by the phones, and ten minutes later… or sometimes later… another kid comes in and says there’re two people hurt on the sidewalk and to call an ambulance."
"Jesus," Lucas said.
And Sherrill said, "Itisaimed at you." To Allport: "You know Lucas’s former fiance
?e was firebombed last
Allport nodded: "I read about it. You had guys running all over town, kicking ass."
Lucas looked around at the duckwalking crime scene cops: "You finding anything?"
Allport shook his head. "Nope. Not a thing. We’re walking around the neighborhood, looking for the weapon-a ball bat, or a big stick-but we haven’t found it yet."
"Goddamnit…" A thought flew through Lucas’s head, quick as a scalded moth; he grasped at it, missed. He shook his head, turned to Sherrilclass="underline" "Nothing to do here. I’m going back to the hospital."
"I’m coming."
"You don’t have to."
"I’m coming." Allport, arms akimbo, said, "I hate this shit. If the assholes want to beat each other up, or even us, that’s one thing. A nun and a kid?"
In the car, Lucas said, "Something’s happening, and we don’t know what it is."
"I knew that a long time ago," Sherrill said.
Lucas shook his head: "I don’t mean that somebody is trying to get at me, or even get at Weather or Elle. There’s some kind of apparatus here. Somebody’s set up a machine, and it’s not some simpleminded revenge. It’s doing something…"
TWENTY-THREE
Elle Kruger came out of the operating room just after four A.M.and the doctor, yawning, came to see Lucas, Sherrill, and Weather: "I’d say the prognosis is good-she’s gonna have a few days in the ICU, but there wasn’t any direct mechanical damage that I could see. We’ve got swelling, but we’re controlling it. We’re going to keep her sedated, keep her quiet, so she won’t be talking for a couple of days."
"She’s gonna make it," Lucas said.
"Unless we missed something-or if there’s just a further natural complication. But it’s about as good as you could have hoped for, given the circumstances."
"How about the other girl?" Weather asked.
The doc shook his head: "She did have some mechanical damage. I think she’s gonna live, we’re just gonna have to wait and see. She might be fine, she might be… not so fine."
Lucas turned away, suddenly exhausted. "Man."
"Let’s go home," Sherrill said.
Weather said, "I’ll be back tomorrow-every day until she wakes up."
"You got a ride?" Lucas asked. Andi Manettte, who’d brought Weather over, had left earlier.
"I’ll get a cab. They can have one here in a minute."
"We came in the Porsche," Lucas said. Two seats: Weather smiled; she understood the math.
Out the door, walking to the car, Sherrill asked, "Did Weather and Elle have some kind of relationship?"
"Yeah, they liked each other a lot," Lucas said.
"Think Elle will like me?" Sherrill asked.
Lucas nodded. "She likes almost everybody. You two’ll get along fine."
Rose Marie Roux talked to the St. Paul Chief, and St. Paul put together a group of four detectives to work with two Violent Crimes detectives from Minneapolis.
"You can do what you want, personally, but I want you to stay clear of these guys," Roux told Lucas. "You’ve set up this paradigm: you think these attacks on Sister Mary Joseph and Weather are aimed at you. Maybe they are, but I want to keep these guys outside the paradigm. I want them to take a cold look at it."
Lucas agreed. "That’s smart. But I’m putting Del on the street, looking into a few things; and I’ll be looking around. Sherrill, Sloan, and Black are going back to Homicide now that we’re done with McDonald."
Del and Lucas spent the day cruising the street, talking to druggies, thieves, bikers, gamblers-anyone smart enough to take revenge on Lucas by attacking his friends; and checking in every hour with the hospital. No change on Elle Kruger.
At the end of the day, they sat in Lucas’s office, Del with his feet on the edge of Lucas’s desk, Lucas with his feet on an open desk drawer, looking for new ideas.
"All day, absolutely nothing. I’ve never seen it this dry. Usually there’s rumors, even if the rumors are bullshit."
"Nobody wants to get involved with a run at a cop," Lucas said.
"Tell you the truth, I’ve been thinking of terminating our friendship, at least for the time being. Maybe take out an ad in the Star-Tribune."
"I once talked to a guy, a lawyer-defense attorney- whose son was arrested for stealing some stereo gear from a Best Buy," Lucas said. "The kid was one of those ineffectual audiovisual freaks, didn’t know which way was up. Anyway, the judge gave him six months in the county jail, and this was a first offense."
"Oops."
"Yeah. And this attorney tells me, he knows it was because the judge didn’t like him, the attorney. Thought he was sleazy, because he did personal injury and DWI and made a lot of money at it. So anyway, the kid does most of the time, like four months, and gets out, and he’s okay. But the attorney spent the whole time worrying that he was gonna hang himself in his cell or something."
"Something to worry about, with kids like that," Del said.
"The attorney’d go down every day to visit the kid, keep him connected. But he still worried. And what he told me was that he decided in the middle of the kid’s jail term that if the kid killed himself, he’d kill the judge. He made the decision, he worked it all out. He wasn’t irrational about it, it wasn’t a big macho thing. He’d just do it, and try not to get caught. The first thing he’d do was, he’d wait two years before he made his move. Wait until his son’s death was way in the past. Then he’d find a way to kidnap the judge-he said that in his fantasies, he had to explain to the judge why he was going to kill him, he couldn’t sleep if he didn’t do that-and then he was gonna tie him up or chain him to a tree, and douse him with gasoline and set him on fire."