Hidden Prey

followed quietly behind.
    “What do you want now?” Walther demanded.
    “We’ve got a search warrant for your son,” Lucas said. “A warrant to search his person for bodily injuries, and to take a blood sample for DNA studies. We came to invite you to come with us. If you don’t wish to come with us, we’ll leave a police officer with you, to make sure you don’t try to warn Carl that we’re coming.”
    “Carl? Carl’s a child!”
    “Well, he’s not quite a child. You keep saying a child, but he’s old enough to drive. He does drive. I’ve seen his driver’s license and the registration for a car.”
    “What—” She began, and then her eyes suddenly flinched to the side, and Lucas thought she’d remembered something.
    “What?”
    “You said bodily injuries . . .”
    “Does he have a knife cut on his arm, Mrs. Walther?”
    “What do you think he did? What do you think . . . ?”
    So he did, Lucas thought. He turned to the chief and nodded, and the chief nodded back. “We think he killed the Russian man in Duluth, and maybe the police officer. Possibly under the direction of Burt Walther.”
    “That’s crazy . . .” But the fear shone from her eyes.
    “Do you wish to come?” Lucas asked formally. The kid was toast, so he would be as formal as possible from now on. “We could also see that a public defender, a defense attorney, is waiting at the police station when we get there.”
    “At the police station . . .” Her eyes flooded with tears, and she covered her face with both hands. “At the police station . . .”
     
    S HE RODE WITH Hopper to the high school, a huge old building famous for its art deco auditorium. They all went trooping inside, down a long hall to the office. The principal met them, went back to her desk, looked at a piece of paper and said, “He’s in gym class.”
    The principal led them to the gym, where a teacher pointed them outside. They found a group of kids standing around, in gym shorts and sweatshirts, flags hanging from the sides of their shorts, all staring at the line of cops. The gym teacher said, “He said he was sick. He went back inside.”
    “When was this?” Lucas asked.
    “Ten minutes ago.”
    Lucas looked out at the street, turned to Dannie: “Shit. He saw us coming. He’s running. I hope he’s running.”
    Hopper looked at the school, a looming brick pile with kids visible in the windows. “You don’t think he could . . . oh, shit,” and he started running toward the school, his two cops trailing behind.
    “What, what?” Janet Walther screamed after them.
    Lucas trotted after Hopper, Dannie Carson, jogging alongside, Nadya hurrying to keep up.
    Nadya: “You think he’s in the school? With a gun?”
    “I hope not. I hope he just took off. But I don’t know. We can’t take a chance . . . I’m trying to think, I’m just trying to think . . .” He looked up. “The place is just so goddamn big.”

     32 
    C ARL W ALTHER ALMOST stopped thinking when Grandpa killed himself.
    He spent the night wide awake, sprawled on the bed, looking at the clock; the next morning he felt like he had gears in his head, turning slowly, full of sand; the world was not quite in sync.
    His mother fussed at him, argued that he should stay home, but he drove into school. Random images popping up as he drove: Grandpa and Grandma dead, the images imagined. His father dead, the image right there, replaying itself—the warmth of his body, his lonely grave out in the clear-cut. The woman he killed in Dad’s bed; the lady vagrant on the street, the feel of the wire cutting into her neck; the Russian agents going down.
    A car in front of him had a fading WWJD sticker on the back bumper: What Would Jesus Do? And he thought, What would Grandpa do? Grandpa would . . . work it. He’d play it like a chess game.
    But exactly what would he do ? In all the years they’d been together, Grandpa kept telling him what to think, but had never quite told him how .
     
    H E WAS PLAYING flag football, still in silent, robot mode—no one at the school had said anything at all about Grandpa being a spy, although he could feel eyes following him in the hallways—when he saw the parade of cars turn the corner and pull up outside the main entrance.
    The cars were almost a block away, and there were no sirens or lights, so nobody else paid any attention. But Carl noticed them, and focused, and saw his mother get out of the lead car with