Hidden Prey

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.”
     
    T HEY 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.”
     
    T HE S HERIFF ’ S D EPARTMENT 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