Storm Prey Part 25

He checked the woodshed, supposed that something might have been concealed under the three or four face-cords of hardwood, but if so, it hadn't been concealed since the hospital robbery. Snow had been blown in from the sides and had crusted over the lower layers of wood. Not much way to fake that.

Farther back, a cop was looking into what had been a chicken house. He walked away, shook his head at Lucas, and said, "I'm going to walk the perimeter, see if there are any tracks heading back into the woods."

A cinder-block incinerator sat next to the chicken house, and Lucas went that way. There were fresh ashes, signs of burned garbage--orange peels, the odor of burned coffee grounds. Lucas looked around, got a short downed tree branch, and stirred through the debris.

Came up with a partially burned piece of black nylon fabric. Heavy, with a piece of charred strap across it. Like a nylon bag.

The robbers, Dorothy Baker had said, had come in with black bags; had dropped the bags on the floor before they'd taped up Baker and Peterson.

Lucas stirred a bit more, started finding more fragments. Stood up, walked back to the house: "Marcy, Bill ..."

Marcy and the sheriff came over, and Lucas showed them the strap. "Looks like it came off a nylon bag. The ashes are fresh."

"Dorothy Baker ..." Marcy began.

Lucas nodded, and said to Stephaniak, "The nurse who was in the pharmacy said the robbers brought big black nylon bags, or packs, to carry the drugs. There are more pieces out there in the ash. We need your crime-scene guy to go through it."

"It's suggestive," Stephaniak said. He meant, That doesn't prove much. That doesn't prove much.

"It'll worry them," Lucas said. "If it's the bags, it'll help crank the pressure. And if we find there's more than one bag, then we'll know. The s.h.i.+t came through here. Ike's involved. That's always a help."

The sheriff nodded. "I'll get my boy on it."

A deputy said, "Ike's here."

IKE WAS A STOUT MAN, but hard fat, beer-belly fat, with a s.h.i.+ny red bald head and black-plastic-rimmed gla.s.ses on a full nose; with little yellow shark teeth under the nose, and water-green shark eyes. He was wearing a sixties army parka over a T-s.h.i.+rt. He was angry but was suppressing it: he'd dealt with the cops before.

Marcy held up her badge and said, "We're picking up evidence that your boys were here with the drugs. We're talking about murder, Ike. You're, what, sixty-five? We'll slam you in Stillwater for thirty years if you're in on it. So: where's Joe?"

"I ain't seen him." He put on a phony wild-eyed look, appealing to the cops. "I ain't ain't seen him. He ain't been here. He knows better'n to draw the s.h.i.+t down on his old man." seen him. He ain't been here. He knows better'n to draw the s.h.i.+t down on his old man."

Lucas said, "We're gonna get him, Ike. He's killed three or four people now. We're tearing the country up, and he's gonna fall. And when we get the lab results back, on these straps, your a.s.s is gra.s.s."

"You find any dope? You won't find dope here, nosir. You'll find some Millers, but there's no dope. I don't allow it."

"Well, shoot, Ike, you made meth for ten years," one of the deputies said. "Everybody in the county knows it. You could smell it all the way down to Barronett."

"I don't know anything about any meth--"

"Ah, bulls.h.i.+t, you're wasting our time, Ike," Stephaniak said. "You could cooperate for fifteen seconds and we'd let you skate on the murder."

"... Maybe ..." Marcy said.

"Maybe," Stephaniak agreed. "But if you don't talk to us, and we find out you been hiding that boy, or that you know where he is ..."

"You went and burned the bags out in the incinerator, but you didn't burn them well enough," Lucas said. "We'll get them identified by the witness, and you're done."

Ike didn't ask, "What bags?" but said, "I don't know everything that goes in the fire. If Joe was up here, he didn't tell me. I work all day. I don't know everything that happens out here." He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, sniffed, and said, "I'm old. I'm gonna go lay down. If you don't mind."

"Put a cold rag on your head and think about it," Marcy said. "If you talk to us before I leave, we can deal. Once we're gone, you're toast. You get no second chances."

Ike looked around at all the cops, shook his head, muttered "f.u.c.kin' ..." and stalked through the house to the back bedroom.

When he was out of earshot, Stephaniak said to Lucas, "You were right about the bags. That's them, and he knows it."

IKE WAS IN the bedroom for fifteen minutes, then came out, got a beer, and sat in a platform rocker in front of the television and watched the cops take the place apart. No drugs. No anything, but the bag straps from the incinerator.

Marcy got her coat on, said to Ike, "We're leaving. Your last chance is walking out the door."

"Don't let it hit you in the a.s.s," Ike said.

WEATHER AND VIRGIL got the names of French-pa.s.sport employees. Virgil called Jenkins, who'd been down in the cafeteria, and went off to talk to some of the employees. Jenkins showed up, leaned against a wall. Weather put a copy of the list in her briefcase, and then went down and found the Rayneses, Jenkins tagging behind. She'd thought the Rayneses seemed sh.e.l.l-shocked before, and they weren't getting better.

"Those poor little babies," Lucy Raynes said. "They hurt so bad, I can see it in their eyes. Sara knows what's going on, I can see it, she knows her heart isn't working right. She's really scared."

Weather explained about pain control, ground that Maret had already been over, but she wasn't convincing because she really didn't know for sure what the twins were experiencing. They might be, she thought, in some kind of inexpressible pain, though the cardiologist said they were comfortable. But then, he didn't know, either, Weather thought. "G.o.d, this is awful," she said aloud. "We'd hoped to get through it in a hurry, but Sara's heart ... We should finish tomorrow. I really believe we will. We were ready to go this afternoon, but they started doing better. By this time tomorrow, we'll be done, and then the medical guys can really get in there with individual treatments ..."

"Just want to get done," Larry Raynes said. "Just ... over."

[image]

WEATHER FOUND a spot in an empty waiting lounge and took the paper out of her briefcase and looked it over: seventeen names, French nationals working in the hospital. All French nationals, not just doctors, of whom there were four.

She knew one of them, vaguely, an ENT guy who thought he was also a plastic surgeon. He had, in Weather's estimation, bungled a nose job or two or three. One of them, a black woman who found herself with a nose the size of a peanut, had been referred to Weather for help. Weather had reworked the nose, but the result, while better, had still been poor.

In general, Weather decided, if some French doc had to fall on a robbery charge, he was the one she'd pick. Not because she really thought he'd done it, but because it might save somebody's nose.

Jenkins was reading The Complete Idiot's Complete Idiot's Guide to the Middle East Guide to the Middle East Conflict, Conflict, and she stood up and said, "Give me a half hour. I need one more consult." and she stood up and said, "Give me a half hour. I need one more consult."

"Right here?"

"Upstairs."

"I'll come along."

"Jenkins..."

"Look, if you get killed, Lucas is gonna pound me on my annual review. Okay?"

THEY TOOK the elevator up two floors, and she left him sitting in a broken-down corridor chair while she went into the office of the head of surgery, a woman named Marlene Bach. Bach's secretary's desk was vacant, but Weather could see the other woman sitting in her office, her back to the door. She knocked: "Marlene?"

Bach turned in her chair and called, "Come on in, Weather."

Bach was a tall, thin woman, with a small head and dark hair, which gave her somewhat the aspect of a stork. She usually had a yellow No. 2 pencil stuck behind one ear, and had a reputation for efficiency and speed in the operating room. And, the OR nurses said, she listened to cla.s.sic Whitesnake while she worked.

She had pinned a half-dozen large-format photos of a burn victim onto a corkboard on her office wall. The torso was nude, and the top half was covered with snarky black burns. Weather looked at them and said, "Electrical?"

"Yes. Blew him right off a power pole," Bach said. "He was hanging upside down for fifteen minutes before somebody went up after him."

"He gonna make it?"

"I don't know. He's forty-four, he's got fifty percent third-degree burns. Gonna be close." Rule of thumb: if the burns covered more of your body than your age deducted from one hundred, you'd probably die. Forty-four deducted from one hundred was fifty-six. Close.

"Looks like a lot of work," Weather said. She sat down and said, "Listen, I have a personal concern."

Bach nodded. "I heard. Somebody's trying to kill you. Or tried to, anyway."

"Yes. There's been some talk that the person in the pharmacy, who opened the pharmacy for the robbers, was a physician, and the witness thinks he might have had a French accent. And you know who I thought of ..."

"Halary," Bach said. "You really think ... ?"

"Not really. But I was wondering what you think? You know him better than I do."

"He's a weasel, but I don't believe he'd do anything like that," Bach said. "For one thing, his wife's a dermatologist with a big practice out in Edina. He really wouldn't need the money."

"I didn't know that," Weather said.

"And he's not a bad ENT, if he'd lay off the plastic surgery," Bach said. "I know that thing with the noses irritated you."

"Not as much as it irritated the owners of the noses," Weather said. And she said, "Hmm. How about a guy named Albert Loewe? Supposed to be a ..."

Bach was shaking her head: "Got hit by a car a month ago. In a supermarket parking lot. Broke both his legs. He was a mess, and he's still in casts."

"All right. Look, check this list. You know anybody else?"

Bach knew two more people on the list, a male nurse and a third doc named Martin, but she didn't know either of them well enough to make a judgment. "Let me ask around."

"Discreetly," Weather said. "This guy did try to kill me."

"I'll be very discreet," Bach said. "I'm too good-looking to die." She looked back up at the burn photos. "Unlike Bob. Bob's not too good-looking to die."

OUT IN THE HALL, Jenkins asked, "You done?"

Weather said, "Yes. A burn victim. We'll be moving some skin around on him, if he makes it through the next couple weeks."

Didn't want to worry him, to think she was investigating.

[image]

THAT NIGHT, at the dinner table, Lucas told them about the proposed raid on Mack's place. "If Weather weren't going to the hospital every day, I'd back off," he said. "We know who did it--it's the whole d.a.m.n Mack family, plus Haines and Chapman. We'll never prove anything about those bags, but we know what they were, and why they burned them. The drugs went through Ike's place, and from there, probably over to the Seed headquarters in Milwaukee, and down to the Outlaws, and they're probably all over Illinois and the East Coast by now."

"Still gotta find the guy in the hospital," Virgil said.

"All we have to do is nail one of the Macks--any one of them--and we'll get him."

"Could be done with the hospital tomorrow," Weather said. "I cleared out two weeks, just in case. If we get it done, we could take off for a week."

Lucas's eyebrows went up, and he said to Letty: "Disney World."

She stopped with a fork spun full of spaghetti, halfway to her mouth, and said, "Instead of St. Paul in January? I'd buy that."

"You'd be willing to leave the case?" Weather asked Lucas.

"My main concern in this, is you. If we take off, and n.o.body knows where we are, what're the Macks going to do? They won't have any way to find you," Lucas said. "If you're done with the babies, we could take off."

"I think we will be," Weather said. "One way or another, we can't wait much longer."

13.

BARAKAT WALKED down the hall in his stocking feet and took a seat in the ER next to an unconscious woman with a temperature of 104; a saline bag hung overhead and was dripping into her arm. Another doc was looking at her chart. Barakat sniffed at one of his shoes, said, as he pulled it on, "I require some shoe spray ..." And, "So, what do you think?"

"You started the antibiotics?"

"Yes. She was here two days ago with a urinary tract infection and we gave her a prescription, but I think she didn't fill it. She has no insurance and probably no money, looking at her, so I think she tried to get along without the pills and it got away from her."

The other doc nodded and said, "No pain?"

"No. The woman who came with her said this one kept getting hotter and sleepier and finally fell asleep watching TV, and then she couldn't wake her up when it was time to go to bed."

The other doc nodded and snapped the chart shut and said, "Willing to bet you're right. Wish I could talk to her."

"If I'm right, she'll be talking in an hour," Barakat said. "No sign of lung congestion, so I don't think it's the flu ..."