“No joke. I mean, I guess it was a joke by her daddy, but that’s where the joke ended,” Pratt said. “There’s a story that Poole once caught up with a guy from the Bandidos who stiffed him on a money deal. One thing led to another and Box cut the Bandido’s head off with a carving knife, for no reason except that she could. No proof of that, no witnesses we know of, but that’s the story. Anyway, Box disappeared at the same time as Poole, but two years ago she went to an uncle’s funeral up in Tennessee. We didn’t find out until a week later, people around there keep their mouths shut. If Box and Poole disappeared at the same time, and she’s still alive, and even looking prosperous... you see where I’m going here.”
“Did anyone check the airlines, see where she was coming in from? Or going back to?”
“They did. She didn’t fly in or out. She came to the funeral in a taxi and left the same way. We think she probably drove from wherever they’re hiding and then caught a cab so nobody would see her car. The uncle’s funeral was four days after he died, so she could have driven from anywhere in the lower forty-eight.”
“Gotcha. Listen, if you’d have time, put together an e-mail on what you and your partner did—not every little thing, but in general, and what you think,” Lucas said. “Mostly what you think. Any hints or suggestions about how I might do this.”
“I got one hint right now: if they get on top of you, you gottashoot your way through, Marshal. Surrendering or negotiating will get you killed,” Pratt said. “Even get your head cut off. That boy is a gol-darned cottonmouth pit viper and so’s his girlfriend.”
—
BACK IN THE PAPER,Lucas made up a list of known associates, and in particular people who actually seemed to be friends of Poole. He included Poole’s parents and sister. Dora Box apparently had no living relatives. When he was finished, he had twenty-two names. He e-mailed the list to Sandy Park, the deputy marshal who’d done the computer research, and asked for reports on those people.
That done, he called the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and talked to the head of the Criminal Investigation Division.
“I wanted to tell you that I’m coming through and let you know what I’m doing,” Lucas said.
The agent, Justin Adams, knew Poole’s name and some of the details from the Biloxi murders. “You think you’ve found him, give me a call and we’ll be there. You want somebody to go around with you?”
“Maybe later,” Lucas said. “First thing up, I’m going to be talking to his parents and sister and that kind of thing—I don’t expect too much. If I get into something, though, I’ll let you know.”
—
SANDY PARKgot back late in the afternoon, with the results on the list of people who were friends or accomplices of Poole. Of the twenty-two on the list, nine were dead—some because they’d simply gotten cancer or had gotten old, like Box’s parents, while three haddied violently: two shot during robberies, one in a motorcycle accident. Dora Box’s sister had committed suicide after a long run on heroin. Of those still alive, eight were in prison, mostly serving life terms as career criminals. One was on death row in Alabama.
Of the other five, Lucas got addresses for three. Nothing was known about the location of the other two.
An e-mail came in from Pratt, the retired MBI investigator, with a few details that hadn’t been in the formal paperwork. Poole knew how to create different “looks” for himself—he’d dyed his hair at one time or another, had been both clean-shaven and bearded, sometimes lounged in jeans and boots and workingmen’s T-shirts, and sometimes appeared in expensive suits and ties. Sometimes he had white sidewalls, sometimes hair on his shoulders.
“One thing is always the same,” Pratt said. “He always shoots first.”
—
LUCAS SPENTtwo days with his son, Sam, at his Wisconsin cabin, cleaning it up and getting ready to shut it down for winter. Sam was eight, skipping school and loving it; they went fishing for an hour or two in the morning and Sam caught his first musky, a thirty-incher. Lucas was more excited than the kid was—not only was it a musky, but the kid was being imprinted with a certain kind of lifestyle, the love of a quiet lake in the early morning. Lucas showed him how to support the musky in the water, take the hook out with a pair of pliers, then release the fish back into the deep.
As they were washing the fish stink off their hands in the lake water, Sam said, “That’s the best thing I’ve ever done in my whole life.”
At night, they watched a little satellite TV and Lucas continued working through the Poole file. Done at the cabin, they drove back to the Cities, and Lucas told Weather he was leaving the following Sunday for Nashville—he wanted a full week to begin with, with all the government law enforcement offices open for business.
“How long will you be gone?” she asked. “Best estimate?”
“I’ll leave Sunday evening, make a short day of it, get to Nashville the next day. I should know in the first week or two if there’s any chance of locating him. If I get a sniff of him... could be two or three weeks.”
“Why do you think you can find Poole when nobody else can?” she asked. They were in the kitchen, loading up the dishwasher. Sam was out in the garage, and they could hear him knocking a wiffle ball around with a cut-down hockey stick.
“If he’s alive, he can be found,” Lucas said. “There’ll be people who know where he is, or at least how to get in touch with him. If he was the shooter in Biloxi, at least one guy knows where to find him, the guy who spotted the counting house. If I can squeeze between that guy and Poole... I’ll get him.”
She closed the dishwasher, pushed the programming buttons, then leaned back against it and said, “Don’t be too confident. It could get you killed.”
“I’ll be as careful as I know how. The guy’s a cold-blooded killer.” Lucas smiled at her, the wolverine smile. “The best kind.”
“God help you, Lucas,” she said.
4
LUIS SOTOwas a bad man and liked being a bad man. The badness rolled off him like a malaria sweat, a mean little rat-bastard who could walk into a bar and order a shot of Reposado Gold and everybody in the bar would figure him for a gun and a razor and an eagerness to use them.
He’d been born in Miami, and not a good part of Miami, of Cuban immigrant parents, and started his career in crime as a driver and muscle for a loan shark. He’d also burned a few buildings down for people who needed their buildings burned down, had laundered money through the Florida Indian casinos for his various bosses, had provided protection for a smuggling operation that brought Iranian turquoise in from the Bahamas. He’d spent some time robbingtourists on Miami Beach; and he’d been caught a few times, because he wasn’t the brightest.
