Storm Prey

said. “Don’t let anybody get near them: we’ll want some photos, and some crime-scene guys. I’ll make the call.”
    “Getting nasty,” Grace said.
     
     
    LUCAS AND MARCY left, and as they were going, they both turned back to look at the kid, and then walked away. “If Joe Mack did anything to that little girl’s mom, I’ll kill him,” Lucas said. He was not joking. He said, “Keep that under your hat.”
    Marcy said, “Listen, it wasn’t us. We were talking to him, had him right there, and he runs. That’s crazy. He just outran us. It happens. It’s like ... I don’t know what it’s like.”
    “Ah, man,” Lucas said. “I was just thinking that. How many people you got? How many can we put on it?”
    They ran through the resources, and Marcy asked, “What about Lyle Mack? No way his brother was in this deep and Lyle didn’t know about it. I got the feeling he’s the brains behind the operation, whatever brains there are.”
    “I don’t want to mess with Lyle at this point,” Lucas said. “I want him sneaking around. Why don’t we get your guy, and Martin, and put them on Lyle? See where he goes and who he talks to. At least for the rest of the day.”
    She nodded: “Let’s do that. What else?”
    “Well, I’m gonna stop downtown at Macy’s and see if anybody who looks like Joe Mack bought a coat. Get a guy calling around to the cab companies to see if anybody picked him up. Get the highway patrol and all the local agencies looking for MacBride’s van. There’s a chance we’ll need some DNA, so we get a warrant for Joe Mack’s apartment, or wherever, and get what we can, and start processing it. See if we can find anything from the hospital robbery.”
    “That works,” she said.
    They rode along in silence for a while, and then Lucas said, “The longer we go without hearing from MacBride, the more likely it is that he killed her. Goddamnit. Goddamnit.”
     
     
    BARAKAT KNEW he had to stay down, at least for a while. He’d nearly killed himself the night before with the orgy of cocaine, to say nothing of the McDonald’s meal afterward. One of the other docs asked him if he was ill, when he came in, and he mentioned the burgers. “All I wanted was a falafel,” he said, with a sickly grin.
    His body felt as though somebody had beaten him with a broomstick. He felt old, creaky in the joints, and like there might be something wrong with his heart rhythm. When he got up in the morning, he’d taken a couple of quick snorts, and then resolutely put the rest of the coke back in the shoe.
    He got to the hospital an hour before his shift began, went to the reference library, got an open computer, went to the Internet and began searching for Weather Karkinnen’s home address.
    He got a hundred and twelve hits on Google, and all but a handful of them referred to Weather; Karkinnen was not a common name. He crunched through the listings: papers, reports, civic honors. And way, deep down, from years back, a report of a shoot-out at Hennepin General Hospital, Karkinnen taken hostage by members of the Seed, freed with a single shot by a sniper.
    Barakat recoiled. How could that be? The Seed? The same gang? He looked for other stories about the shoot-out. Never found an address, but found a reference to her husband, who’d set himself up as bait for the sniper in the hospital. A police officer?
    He switched his search to “Lucas Davenport” and got more than four thousand hits. He read through the length of Davenport’s career: the man was a killer, and controversial, but somehow had climbed into an influential post with the state police.
    They were hunting the wife of a state police investigator... and a killer.
    He was still working through the files when Lyle Mack called. He answered on the way to the library door, and in the hallway, hissed, “Are you insane? You can’t call me—”
    “I’m on a safe phone, I’m in my garage. We’ve got big problems. The cops are all over us, and that dumb shit brother of mine ran. They don’t know anything, I don’t think, but he kidnapped a woman when he was on the run.”
    “Kidnapped ... Kidnapped?”
    “He was scared and he was running, and the cops don’t know he took her. At least, they can’t prove it.”
    “What do you mean, can’t prove it? She’ll tell them.” Silence from Lyle Mack, and Barakat caught on: “Oh, no, no. Oh ...”
    “Listen. We got one chance,” Lyle Mack said. “We’ve got to nail down that