Broken Prey

cops.”
    Click.
     
    IGNACE STARED DUMBFOUNDED at the phone for a moment, then pushed himself up, unconsciously brushed the seat of his pants, took a couple of walking steps, then broke into a run, running as hard as he could, arms pumping, notebook in one hand, cell phone in the other, down to the paper, buzzing all the way: Man, man-oh-man, Jesus, man.
     
    CAROL STUCK HER HEAD in Lucas’s office and said, “If your nose doesn’t hurt too bad to talk, a guy named Rufus is on the telephone. He says he’s a reporter from the Star-Tribune and it’s urgent.”
    Lucas picked up the phone: “Davenport.”
    “He just called me,” Ignace blurted. “One minute ago. On my cell phone.”
    “Ah, shit . . . ,” Lucas said.
    “He said he took a woman whose name is Carlita Peterson, wait a minute, wait a minute, I got the number he was calling from . . .”
    Lucas sat up and shouted at Carol, “We’re gonna need a phone number run . . . Get Dave, get Dave on the line . . .”
    Ignace said, “You ready? Here it is . . .”
    He recited the number and Lucas shouted it to Carol, who shouted back, “Dave’s running it . . .”
    Lucas went back to the phone: “He said he’s already got this woman?”
    “That’s what he said. He said he’s going to take her up north and fuck with her for a while and then tomorrow morning he’s going to turn her loose and hunt her down with his razor.”
    “You’re sure it was him?”
    “Same guy as last time.”
    Carol shouted, “Carlita Diaz Peterson, Northfield. It’s a cell phone. The address is coming up.”
    Lucas yelled back, “Get the sheriff on the line. I think it’s Rice County, but it might be Dakota. Get somebody over to her house. Tell the phone guys I want to know the location of the cell phone when he called . . .”
     
    BACK TO IGNACE , the phone: “Are you at your office?”
    “Yes.”
    “Stay there. I’ll be there soon as I can. I’ll need a typescript.”
    “I’ll have it by the time you get here,” Ignace said. He suddenly left his asshole persona and sounded like a worried human being: “Jesus, Davenport, he said he had her in his car, that he was already heading north.”
     
    LUCAS BANGED OUT the number for the co-op office, talked to Ray Reese: “Pull your socks up. The Star-Trib reporter got another call from Charlie Pope; he says he’s taken a woman from Northfield and he’s in his car heading for the Boundary Waters. Pull the trigger on the network. Now.”
    “Hang on.”
    Ten seconds later, Reese was back: “We’re doing it. Anything else? You know where he’s starting from?”
    “Gonna get that in a minute. Tell everybody that Pope says he already picked up the woman. Tell them that: that he says he’s got her, that if we miss him, she’s gonna die. Tell them to be careful.”
     
    HE THREW THE PHONE back at the receiver and realized his hands were slippery with sweat: that didn’t happen often. Up and out of the office: Carol was on the phone. “Where’d it come from? Where’d it come from?”
    She waved him off.
    He walked out of the office, ten feet down the hall, and then back, anxious to move, grating, “Where’s it coming from?”
    She was taking a note, then pulled the phone away from her ear: “It came from a cell in Burnsville.” Burnsville was a big suburb right on the south side of the metro area: Pope was less than fifteen miles from where Lucas was sitting.
    “Damnit. If he’s heading north . . . He could be on either Thirty-five E or Thirty-five W . . .”
    “Or city streets,” Carol offered.
    “Yeah. Call Burnsville. Tell them that. Pull out everything.”
    He went back to the map. If Pope was on either branch of I-35, he would just about be going through the downtown area of either Minneapolis or St. Paul. But the two areas were ten minutes apart, and he might also have gone either east or west on the I-494 loop.
    Pope had called from precisely the place where they could get the least information on direction. But if he were going north, the possibilities narrowed down again once he got north of the Twin Cities. The most obvious route would be on I-35 north, but there were other major links going north.
    If he was going north. He’d never gone north before.
    Lucas thought of the bull’s-eye he’d drawn on the Minnesota map that morning. He went back to the phone, called Reese at the co-op office: “Ray, listen. He called from Burnsville. That means if he’s going