Storm Prey

involved,” Letty said, nodding. “She’s not even thinking about somebody trying to kill her. She thinks that’s all over, or that you guys will take care of it. She’s, like, totally focused on the twins.”
     
     
    IN THE MORNING, Lucas called Frank Harris, the BCA gang guy, and told him what they’d learned.
    “Pretty interesting,” Harris said. “What do you want to do?”
    “My other guys are either working nights, or are covering Weather,” Lucas said. “I can pull Del Capslock, have him help out, but I won’t be able to get him until later. We could use one more BCA guy. I’ll get Minneapolis to kick in a guy.”
    “I’ll send Dan Martin over. He knows most of the Seed guys by sight.”
    When he was done with Harris, Lucas called Marcy Sherrill at home, filled her in. “Do we have enough for a search warrant?” she asked.
    “Not yet. I went over it with Weather. She says it could be him, but she wouldn’t swear to it in a court.”
    “So what do you want to do?”
    “Jack him up,” Lucas said.
    “I’ll come with you.”
    “I thought you might. Listen, we’re thinking we should leave a team behind, in case we stir something up. If you’ve got a guy...”

    THEY GOT LETTY off to school, and Sam went with the housekeeper to toddler playtime at the Episcopal Church, and Virgil, Lucas, Shrake, and Jenkins did the caravan down to the hospital. Jenkins would stay with Virgil and Weather, they decided, while Shrake and Lucas went over to Minneapolis, where they’d hook up with Marcy and one of her investigators, and Martin, the BCA gang investigator.
    Marcy showed up in her ass-busting outfit, lady-cop slacks with Spandex panels and shoes that looked like women’s flats, until a closer look revealed the Nike swoosh on the back and a wedge-shaped aluminum toe—pants and shoes that you could run and fight in. She had her gun clipped on her hip, under a green military-style sweater with nylon elbow patches, which complemented her dark hair and eyes.
    After everybody was introduced, with a certain amount of dog-sniffing—Lucas didn’t know Phil Dickens, the detective she’d brought along, and the Minneapolis cops hadn’t known Martin—they agreed that Lucas, Marcy, and Shrake would confront Joe Mack, while Dickens and Martin bracketed the front and back doors, close enough that they could be called for help, far enough away that they could watch the bar after Lucas, Marcy, and Shrake left, in case the Macks did something interesting ... like try to run.
    “We’re not expecting an arrest, unless he blurts something out,” Marcy said. “We’re hoping he reacts somehow. Does something that’ll give us something.”
    “Do we know where he is right now?” Shrake asked.
    “No. The first thing we need to do is nail down his location,” she said. “The bar doesn’t open until three o’clock, but Lucas gets the idea that he’s there quite a bit of the time. We check the bar first, then go on over to his apartment in Woodbury. The cops there know we might be coming.”
     
     
    THE SUN was climbing out of the deep well of winter, but it was still brutally cold. Old saying: As the days get longer, the cold gets stronger. Still, if Lucas pretended hard enough, he could smell the early edge of spring. Something, somewhere, was beginning to melt—probably, he thought, in Missouri. Just not here.
    The five of them went in four cars, Lucas and Shrake together, Marcy, Dickens, and Martin in separate cars, out of Minneapolis, through St. Paul, south on I-35E. They’d made the turn south when Lucas’s cell phone burped: Marcy, calling from her car.
    “What’s up?”
    “We got the lab report from your DNA people,” she said. “We got a match on Haines. He was the guy scratched by Peterson.”
    “Excellent. We’re tying it up,” Lucas said.
    “I’m going to use it on Mack,” she said.
     
     
    THE BAR in daylight looked like most crappy bars look in daylight: crappy. Purple paint and concrete block and dirty snow piles and neon signs; though it might be possible to believe that you were honky-tonkin’ if you only saw it at night; in daylight, it was clear that you were actually arm-pittin’.
    Martin and Dickens set up first, one watching the back of the bar, the other the front. Martin called Lucas and said Joe Mack’s van was parked in back, along with an SUV owned by a Harriet B. Brown and a fifteen-year-old Chevrolet owned by a guy named Lenert from Rochester.
    “I’m