Storm Prey

proof, and the case was so long gone, they’d just moved on, I guess.”
    “So he owes Joe,” Orff said.
    “Well, that was a long time ago. But, you know what I mean. They’re that kind of buddies. I mean them crick dicks, they get pretty harsh if you go killing a wolf.”
    “Who else?” Del asked.
    “I only know one more where he might hide, this guy named James ...”
     
     
    WHEN THEY WALKED out of the prison, leaving behind an envelope with $250, Del said, “This James guy sounds like a figment of somebody’s imagination. But I’d like to talk to Lighter.”
    “Yeah.” Lucas looked at his cell phone: call from Virgil, a half hour past. Lucas punched the redial and Virgil came up.
    “You oughta come over here,” Virgil said. “I got somebody I want you to hear.”
    “Weather’s okay?”
    “Yeah, she’s doing something right now. Some kid was messing around with a nail gun, and nailed his face.”
    “Be there in half an hour,” Lucas said.
     
     
    VIRGIL WAS SITTING in the lounge reading a Men’s Journal when Lucas and Del walked in. He dropped it on the couch and stood up and stretched and said, “Weather just called me. She’s done, but she has to hang around for a while—she needs to talk to some parents about care, and stuff.”
    “So what’s up?” Lucas asked.
    “Come on back,” Lucas said. “I got to chatting with this woman, this nurse, who was in the pharmacy when the old guy got kicked to death.”
    “Baker,” Lucas remembered.
    “Yeah. Dorothy.” Virgil led them down a couple of corridors, to a small office full of nurses looking at clipboards and files. He spotted Baker, who was staring at a computer screen, and called, “Dorothy ...”
    Baker saw him, smiled, walked across the room, and Virgil held the door so she could step into the hallway. Virgil said, “Let’s go down to the lounge in Imaging.”
    They found a waiting area for people lined up for CAT scans; nobody there, and they took chairs, and Virgil introduced them. Then Virgil said, “So I was talking with Dorothy, here, about the idea that one of these guys was a doctor. I asked her why she thought he might be a doctor.”
    He nodded at Baker, who turned to Lucas and Del and said, “I didn’t really remember why I thought that, until I was talking to Virgil ...” She patted Virgil’s arm. “... and then I remember, when we were going over everything, word for word, that one of these men asked, ‘What about this?’ And the other man said, ‘Lortab. It’s hydrocodone with acetaminophen.’ The way he knew that, and the way he said, ‘a-seat-a-min-o-phen,’ which is this funny-looking word if you don’t say it all the time, made me think he was a doctor.” She hesitated, then said, “Maybe.”
    “The next thing is, Dorothy told the Minneapolis cops that he had some kind of an accent. The guy who came in later, who they didn’t see. So, I’m pretty good with accents ...”
    She laughed, and patted his arm again. “Every one of his accents sounds exactly the same. Like Wile E. Coyote.”
    “That’s not what you said at the time,” Virgil said.
    “But she’s right,” Del said.
    Baker said, “Virgil got me laughing, and then we were trying out all those accents, you know, Mexican, German, French. And I thought, you know, he did sound like a French guy. But I couldn’t swear to it.”
    “And that’s about it,” Virgil said to Lucas. He turned to Dorothy. “You’ve been great. Thank you.”
    “If there’s anything else, just call,” she said.
    When she was gone, Virgil said, “I believe her about the doctor thing. Del says, why would a doc go down for that little money? But I just believe her. She talks to doctors and nurses and administration people and orderlies all day, and if she said the guy was a doc, I believe it. Then, when she decided that the accent might have been French ...”
    Lucas took a minute to get it: Gabriel Maret.
    He said, “Ah, boy. Do we know where Gabe was, when Weather arrived?”
    “He got there a couple minutes before she did,” Virgil said. “He was still in street clothes. They were talking outside the OR.”
    “Now I don’t know what to do,” Lucas said. “And I don’t buy it, Virgil—he’s a good man. Not only that, he’s got a load of money.”
    “For sure?”
    Lucas made a face, then, “Well, that’s what I understand.”
    “Okay. But I thought I should run it by you. You’re the big guy.”
    Lucas said, “Let’s see how