“Would you mind doing something? We’ve got things to do around here.”
“Depends on what you got,” Lucas said.
Lamb took a chair: “Every year, around this time, I have to kick your ass. You get down in the winter and you freeze up.”
“Winter’s not a happy time for me,” Lucas said. “Everything closes in.”
“Come see me in my office in fifteen minutes,” she said, and heaved herself out of the chair.
Lucas was an independent agent, and some members of the Marshals Service were unhappy about that. Some other members weren’t—and those members included the director, the deputydirector, the general counsel, the associate director for operations, and so on.
Using his badge, and some peculiar circumstances, Lucas had built strong allies in the U.S. Senate, and the Senate paid the Service’s bills. If a serious bureaucratic problem flared up, Lucas was happy to call his Senate contacts for a chat. Sometimes, not always, the chats paid off for the Service.
Lamb was the U.S. Marshal for the Minnesota district, and something of a friend. Fifteen minutes after she caught him with the Box novel, Lucas was in her office, where he told her about being disinvited from the FBI coverage of the Sokolovs. They were chatting about what he might do next. The hit team was somebody else’s problem, although their freedom continued to nag at him.
Lamb, in her office, had produced an FBI report of a man named George DeWitt Horn Jr. “Horn is assessed by the FBI to be in the Alexandria area at a…hmmm…sixty percent confidence level,” Lamb said, peering at the FBI report.
“In other words, he probably isn’t,” Lucas said. “The FBI always cheats on those assessment levels.”
“Yeah, but if he is, and you tracked him down, that’d be a nice feather in our caps. Especially since the FBI can’t find him.”
Horn had murdered three young women in the Chicago area, according to DNA samples taken from their bodies and matched to Horn’s DNA, a sample that had been taken after his first conviction for child molestation.
When a task force comprising FBI and local cops broke into his cubicle at a transient hotel, they found nothing but a full-color photocopy of Horn’s asshole taped to one wall, and a photocopy of hisright middle finger taped to another. The task force surmised that Horn had seen them coming; he was in the wind, with no known car.
He had been born and raised in Alexandria, Minnesota, a small city a hundred and thirty miles northwest of Minneapolis. He was known to have gone back several times since graduating from Alexandria Area High School, Iowa Lakes Community College with an AAS degree in wind energy and turbine technology, and from Lino Lakes Correctional Facility in Minnesota on the molestation change.
“If I went to Alexandria this week, I’d most likely freeze to death,” Lucas said.
“As far as I know, this office has nothing going in Miami or Los Angeles, so it’s Alexandria or nothing. I really would like to catch this asshole.” She held up a photo of the asshole that Horn had left for the FBI.
“Jesus, put that back in the file. I don’t want to look at it,” Lucas said. “I’ll make some phone calls, I know a couple of guys out there.”
“I hoped you’d say that. If you go, you could take Shelly with you. She bagged that guy in Grand Marais.”
“Good. Let me make my calls.”
• • •
Lucas spent theday working phones, getting nowhere. He took a call from Jon Duncan at the BCA, who said that BCA agents and local cops had raided three Russian-run dating services, and returns were spotty. Lucas also checked with two marshals who worked with the Special Operations Group in Louisiana to see if they had anything really good. They didn’t; but they had good gossip, which was mostly why he called them.
Sherwood called to say that the CIA lab had looked at the two Sokolovs’ DNA, and had confirmed that Bernie was Leonid’s son. “There’s probably some kind of deep psychological trauma there, that we’ll never find out about,” Sherwood said.
“Not until you get Bernie to a black site.”
“We don’t have those anymore,” Sherwood said. “Cost-cutting measures.”
Lucas went home early, did a three-mile run during which he froze his face, shot one basket with a basketball that had frozen solid behind a bush in the backyard, ate dinner with Weather, watched a movie, sent the kids to bed, and then suggested that he and Weather go upstairs and fool around for a while.
“Almost too late, but not quite,” Weather said, checking her watch. “Let’s get up there. Time’s a-wastin’.”
• • •
The next morning,he was eating a late breakfast while reading theWall Street Journalon his laptop when he took a call from a number that rang a bell, but that he didn’t recognize.
“This is Lawrence Bell…”
“That’s why your number rang a bell,” Lucas said. “The guy with the whorehouse…”
