LUCAS, BOB, AND RAEwere eating breakfast at Happy Frank’s Barbeque and Flapjacks when the patrolman called Lucas.
“Got her, got Box,” Lucas told Bob and Rae, when he was off the phone. “No sign of Poole, she was all alone. We gotta get out there.”
“How far? This is a big state,” Rae said. “We need a helicopter?”
Lucas ran out to the Jeep and got his iPad, brought it back to the table, and as he explained how Box had been spotted, he poked in Gordon, Texas, and found that it was a bit more than an hour away, by car, from Happy Frank’s. He called Forte in Washington to tell him about Box, and Forte went away for five minutes and came back with the name and a direct phone number for the head of the Dallas Region of the Texas Highway Patrol, a Major Louis Highstreet.
Lucas explained the situation to Highstreet, the urgency of catching up with Poole. Highstreet was a slow-talking man with a dry Texas accent, but moved quickly enough.
“You just sit right where you’re at and eat those flapjacks, Marshal, and I’ll have a patrol car there in a few minutes. He’ll run you back to your motel with his sy-reen, and then back through Fort Worth out toward Gordon. I’ll have the boys in Gordon transport Miz Box to the city of Weatherford, which is the closest nearby jailhouse, if I am recollecting correctly. You can interview her there. If you get out of that motel right quick, you’ll be talking to her in forty-five minutes. Then they can transport her to the federal facilities in Fort Worth or Dallas, at their leisure.”
“Man, that would be great,” Lucas said.
“And, Marshal Davenport?”
“Yes?”
“Say hello to Happy Frank for me, would you do that?”
Lucas got off the phone and said to Bob and Rae, “I love this fuckin’ state.”
—
LUCAS, BOB, AND RAEhad come to Happy Frank’s in a single vehicle, Lucas’s Jeep, because they hadn’t planned to do anything but eat and talk. Lucas didn’t like to ride with other investigators when they were working a case, because much of the time they wound up having to do different things, in which separate cars were necessary. They needed to get back to the hotel to get cars and clothes for the chase, wherever it might take them.
“The problem is,” Lucas said, as they hastily worked their waythrough the flapjacks and sausage, “Poole is getting further away every goddamn minute. We need to squeeze Dora, and we don’t have much time to get it done.”
“I’ve been reading your paper on her,” Rae said. “She could be tough.”
Bob said, “Yeah, I saw that thing about her cutting some guy’s head off.”
Rae: “I was thinking about her being a homecoming queen. Takes a mean, hard-eyed bitch to be homecoming queen. In my opinion.”
“I haven’t explored this area with you,” Bob said. “I take it you weren’t the queen?”
“Queen’s court,” she said. “This girl who beat me? If you’d told her that to be homecoming queen she had to kill her mom and grind her up to link sausage, her mom would have been a dead Little Sizzler the next day.”
Lucas looked at the remnants of his sausage and said, “Thanks for that.”
The highway patrolman arrived as they were waiting for the check: Lucas threw some bills at the table and they talked with the patrolman for a moment, got a cell phone number, then fell in behind him in the Jeep.
They were back at the hotel in ten minutes, out of it in five, and headed west for Weatherford, three vehicles tagging behind a cop with lights and a sy-reen, pushing aside the mostly incoming traffic until they were on the interstate, and after that, across suburban countryside mixed with small farms and blocks of dark green woodlots at a steady ninety into Weatherford.
The Parker County jail in Weatherford was a low beige building that looked like it might be used for the storage of cardboard boxes, or something equally innocuous. The sheriff came out to see them and take them to the interview room where Box was being held.
Lot of cops were hanging around: this all felt like something large. Lucas, Bob, and Rae filed into the interview room. They’d taken the cuffs off Box, but she sat behind an interview table looking like an elf, a small slender woman with an oval face who’d been crying hard enough to mess up her eye makeup, giving her a raccoon-like appearance.
Lucas said, “I’m Lucas Davenport, I’m a federal marshal, and these are Bob and...”
Box interrupted: “I want a lawyer.”
—
THE COLLEGE-SOUNDING GUYcalled Annie and said, “The highway patrol has arrested Dora Box.”
“Damnit. Where are they?”
“They’re at Gordon, Texas,” the College-Sounding Guy said.
