“I’ll tell you what she was doing,” Sherwood said.
“I wish you would,” Lucas said.
“The uninjured guy drove the worst-hurt guy to Kansas City,”Sherwood said. “She didn’t have a car but needed to evacuate the other shot guy, because she knew there’d be a door-to-door search in the Orono area, with the information from the doctor. She came here and rented one. Then she abandoned it because she was afraid these guys here”—he nodded at the rental agents—“would be contacted by the cops and they’d remember her and the car.”
“How’d she get here?” one of the rental agents asked.
Sherwood shrugged. “I don’t know. How would you do it?”
Lucas and the two agents looked at each other and simultaneously said, “Uber.”
“And now she’s at the mall? With a shot guy?” Lucas asked.
“Dunno about that,” Sherwood said. “She drove that big fast loop for a reason.”
• • •
Lucas called St. Vincent,had to wait five minutes for the AIC to come to the phone.
When St. Vincent picked up, Lucas said, “We think the woman who rented the car was the Russian. We more or less spotted where they were in the Orono area, but it’s not in Orono, it’s in the town called Minnetrista…”
“Let me look at my map…” St. Vincent went away for a minute, then came back. “We’re working way the hell northeast of there. Take us a while to regroup. You sure about this?”
“They track their cars, and we’re looking at the track superimposed on a Google map,” Lucas said, standing in front of a laptop in the back of the Hertz rental station. “We think the woman got a ride down here, maybe a cab, or Uber? I don’t know. Anyway, she rentedan Infiniti QX-60 SUV, white, new last year, then we think she drove it back to where they’d been hiding. The farmhouse Juarez talked about. Then she drove it back here, for some reason, and probably ditched it at the Mall of America, where it’s still sitting.”
“You think she’s at the mall?”
“Who knows, but I doubt it. The Hertz guys tell me that the car’s in a big empty area close to 494, but not that close to the mall. It looks like she was dumping it, unless she’s sitting there waiting for someone to pick her up.”
“Tell me about the Minnetrista site…”
Lucas explained that the track was somewhat crude, but: “If you look at city hall, that’s the middle of town, I guess, it’s on County Road 110. Now track about two miles west, there’s a side road next to a hinky little bump in the highway, where the highway turns a little south…”
“I see it,” St. Vincent said; he was looking at the same Google map image.
“There’s a road going north. The car seems to have gone a few hundred yards down the road, where she apparently made the U-turn and came back to the mall. Juarez said a farmhouse and it looks like there are a couple of them back there, maybe three, it’s hard to tell from the overhead view. Two are on the west side of the road, another on the east. That’s all we can see on the Google satellite, and that’s just an eyeball comparison to the car track from Hertz.”
“Okay, I’ve switched over to a satellite view, and I see them. We can throw crews around all of them in an hour or two. What are you doing?”
“We can check out the car,” Lucas said. “Don’t think that’llamount to much. It’s been sitting there for quite a while. Think she probably dumped it and got a ride out of there with somebody else.”
“Okay. You get a sniff of anything, call me. Don’t go tearing around like a maniac, goddamnit.”
“Never.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Listen, David, we’ll cruise it…Sherwood’s with me…and if there’s anything definite, we’ll back off and call for help.”
“Do that. I’m heading out to this Minnetrista place. Stay in touch.”
• • •
There was anotherQX-60 still on the lot, and Lucas and Sherwood walked out with the desk clerk to look at it. “Identical vehicles, except for the color. Hers is white,” Loftus said.
“Can’t miss it; big as a school bus,” Sherwood said.
Sherwood followed Lucas four miles west, along I-494, then into the mall complex. North of the mall was a sprawling, mostly empty parking lot, with a couple of dozen cars scattered across it. Sherwood went one way, Lucas another, and after three or four minutes, Sherwood called and said, “I’ve got it. Looks empty. Can you see me?”
