3

MARGARET TRANE nearly ran over Lucas as she trotted out of the federal building, a solidly built cop in a hurry. She grabbed his jacket lapels and said, “Jesus, Davenport,” at the same instant Lucas grabbed her shoulders and kept her upright and said, “Easy, Maggie.”

They backed away from each other and she said, “Hey. Been a while. Was that girl down in Missouri as young as they say?”

“She was young, she says fifteen,” Lucas said. “Sort of horrifying, if you know what I mean.”

“I do,” Trane said. She smiled up at him—they’d always had good chemistry, even when Lucas was Minneapolis’s top violent-crimes investigator and she was stuck in precinct investigations. They’d both moved on, Trane to Minneapolis Homicide, Lucas to Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and then to the U.S. Marshals Service. “I hear things have been a little tense up in the marshals’ office.”

“Ah, you know. It’ll work out, eventually,” Lucas said.

“You got Bowden behind you and she’s gonna be President. That oughta help.”

“I try not to lean on that too hard,” Lucas said. “But . . . yeah.”

“If you want to talk to some real cops, stop by Homicide. Happy to have you.”

They chatted for another minute, spouses and kids, then Trane said she had to run, she had a conference call on a guy who was being bad in both Minneapolis and Denver. She jogged away and Lucas went on into the federal building.

Talking to Trane had cheered him up. Because of the way he’d been appointed to the Marshals Service, he wasn’t the most popular guy in the place. He’d been dropped in from the top, a deputy U.S. marshal who sat in the Minneapolis office but worked independently and took no orders from anyone in Minneapolis, although he occasionally took recommendations and requests for help. His most direct contact was with a service bureaucrat in Washington named Russell Forte. He and Forte had met only briefly, and had gone to lunch, and Lucas had gotten the impression that Forte was the best kind of apparatchik: efficient, connected, more interested in results than in methods or style.

So far, they’d gotten along.

—

LUCAS HAD an office on the fourth floor of the sorta-modern-looking Minneapolis federal building, down the hall from the U.S. marshal for the District of Minnesota and the other deputy marshals. The arrangement was complicated and one source of bad feelings on the part of a few deputies.

The Marshals Service had a politically appointed U.S. marshal at the top of each of the ninety-four federal judicial districts. They were appointed much as federal judges were—nominated by the President, usually at the recommendation of a U.S. senator, and confirmed by the Senate. Below them were the civil service deputies, including a chief deputy, and below him, supervisory deputies, and below that, the regular deputy marshals.

Lucas stood outside that normal bureaucratic pecking order; and some in the Minneapolis office thought he might be a spy. For whom, he had no idea, but that was the rumor.

—

IN ADDITION, there was Lucas’s private office, which had been, until recently, a windowless storage room. Still, it was private. The resentment was further exacerbated by the fact that he didn’t have to put up with the bureaucratic rigors of the other deputies, the bad hours, crappy assignments. He didn’t serve warrants, he didn’t transfer prisoners.

On top of it all, he was personally rich and arrived at work in either a Mercedes-Benz SUV or a Porsche 911. A federal judge with whom he was friendly had suggested a modest American car would be more discreet, until he was better known inside the service.

Lucas said, “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.”

The judge had said, “It ain’t them who’s getting fucked, m’boy.”

—

THE UNEASINESS wasn’t confined to the other deputies: Lucas had wanted a good badge after leaving the BCA and had grabbed the first one offered. He really didn’t mind the temporary isolation—he thought that would break down in time—but he’d surprised himself with the feeling that he was seriously adrift.

From his first day as a Minneapolis cop, he’d worked to understand his environment. He’d eventually understood Minneapolis–St. Paul and its population of bad people. If someone told him that an unknown X had murdered a known Y, he’d usually know a Z that he could talk to, to begin figuring out what had happened.

That wasn’t always true, but it was true often enough to give him a clearance rate that nobody in the department could touch.

When he’d moved to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, a statewide organization, he’d struggled toward the same kind of comprehensive understanding, but this time, of the entire state of Minnesota. He’d never gotten as comfortable with the state as he had with the metro area, but he’d worked at it. As part of that, he’d developed a database of shady individuals with whom he’d pounded out private understandings. He’d call, they’d talk; if they got in trouble themselves, Lucas would have a chat with a judge, as long as the trouble was minor.

With the help of other agents, he’d eventually put together a roster of snitches with at least a couple of names in every single Minnesota county, and for larger cities, like Duluth or Rochester, he had an entire roll call. Included in the database were several dozen cops who formed a web of personal relationships tight enough that Lucas could get help anywhere in the state, at any time.

Even in his new job as a deputy marshal, he was taking calls from BCA agents who wanted into his database: “Who do you have in Alexandria who might know about the chicle coming across from Canada?”

Didn’t work that way with the Marshals Service. His jurisdiction was the United States of America, including the various territories. There was no possibility of comprehending it, in any real way: he’d fallen into a morass. He could call for help from the FBI, the DEA, the Border Patrol, all the alphabet agencies enforcing the nation’s laws, but he didn’t know the individuals. He couldn’t count on them—they were just voices on the far end of a cell phone call, and would get around to helping him as their own schedules permitted. He didn’t know the bad guys at all, or who were the baddest.

He was, as his wife, Weather, had said, out there on his lonesome.

And he didn’t understand the “out there.”

—

HAL ODER, the marshal for the district, resented Lucas’s independent status. Lucas took no orders or assignments from Oder, and, to Oder, had looked like a job threat. That hadn’t eased, even though Lucas made it clear that he had no interest at all in Oder’s job.

“I hate the shit you have to put up with,” Lucas told the other man. “I wouldn’t do it. I’d quit first. All I want to do is hunt. The bureaucratic bullshit is the reason I quit the BCA.”

“Just hunt.”

“That’s right.”

“If you screw up, it’ll make this office look bad,” Oder had said.

“I might screw up, but if I do, I’ll make it clear that it has nothing to do with you or your office, that my people are in Washington, not in Minnesota,” Lucas had said.

“Who’s your contact in Washington?”

“Russell Forte,” Lucas said.

“Don’t know him,” Oder said. “Are you sure he’ll be happy to take the responsibility if you mess up?”

“Well, he is a bureaucrat. You’d know more than me about the likelihood of his taking the blame.”

Oder had been tapping on a legal pad with a mechanical pencil. He thought about Lucas’s comment, then said, “Look, Lucas, I know what happened when you quit the BCA, and I’m up-to-date with what happened down in Iowa. You saved Mrs. Bowden’s life and you got a badge because of it. The way it looks, she’s going to be President, and I don’t want to fight with a friend of Bowden. But I feel like I’m stuck in the middle. I don’t want to get blamed for things I don’t do. But when you fuck up, and you will, it’s inevitable with the job, I’ll get blamed. I hate that.”

“I won’t be a problem,” Lucas promised. “You’ll hardly ever see me around the place.”

—

ODER HAD seemed to accept that, but, in the way of bureaucrats, he let it be known that Davenport was not really one of us.

In an effort to further smooth things over, Lucas had offered to help out in unusual situations. The Minnesota Marshals office was perpetually short-handed, and that was how he’d wound up as a rich-guy decoy in Missouri.

Lucas and another deputy had also run down an embezzler who’d skipped his date in Minneapolis federal court in favor of a new name and a new home in Idaho, and had recovered a chunk of the embezzled cash from an Idaho safe-deposit box, which had made everyone look good.

He’d helped locate, with his Minnesota database, a redneck who didn’t like federal wildlife laws and had decided to eliminate wolves and eagles in his personal hunting grounds. The guy’d been busted by the Fish and Wildlife Service, but had forfeited a $2,500 bond rather than show up for trial in federal court.

He’d told acquaintances that the feds would take him when they “pried my cold dead hands” off his black rifle, and had suggested that he was polishing up a special bullet for the U.S. attorney. Lucas and two other deputies had hauled his ass out of a bar in Grand Marais, blubbering about his rights.

They were good arrests . . . but not what Lucas had been looking for.

Still, he’d been useful enough that he and Carl Meadows, the chief deputy, had begun taking an occasional lunch together.

—

THE DAY AFTER he returned from St. Louis, a bright and cool autumn Monday in Minneapolis, he and Meadows walked over to the food trucks on Second Avenue and bought brats and Lucas told the other man about the Missouri sting.

“That’s all good,” Meadows said, when Lucas finished, “but have you found anything to dig into? You’ve been sitting on your ass for a while.”

“I know, but I might be on to something now,” Lucas said. “Have you ever heard of a guy named Garvin Poole?”

Meadows frowned and looked down at his brat, as though it might hold an answer. “The name rings a bell, back a while, but I can’t place it. Maybe a Southerner? He was on our Top Fifteen list for a while?”

“Yeah. Everything I know came out of a conversation with Jim Duffy down in St. Louis, and what I fished out of the online records this morning. Poole was an old-style holdup man down in the Southeast—Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, North Florida. Came out of Tennessee originally, but didn’t operate much there, at least not after he did four years in a Tennessee prison. He dropped out of sight five years ago. He was tentatively identified in an armored car robbery in Chattanooga, and nothing after that. Lot of his pals have been busted and questioned, but they all agree that he’s gone. Nobody knows where. Lot of people thought he was dead. Then, ten days ago, a dope counting house down in Biloxi was knocked over. The robbers killed five people, including a six-year-old girl.”

“Yeah, jeez, I heard about that. That’s ugly,” Meadows said.

“One of the victims apparently got off a shot before he was killed,” Lucas said. “The crime scene people found a few drops of blood, ran it through the DNA database, and got a hit—they think it was Poole.”

“Think? DNA’s supposed to be for sure,” Meadows said.

“Not this time,” Lucas said. “The DNA match came from the armored car robbery in Chattanooga. The truck had internal cameras that the robbers couldn’t get at. The video showed one of the robbers banging his forearm against a door frame when he was climbing out of the truck with a bag of cash. They got some skin off the frame, ran the DNA. They didn’t get a hit, but believe it was Poole on the basis of height and body type and the robbery technique. They couldn’t see his face, and he was wearing gloves, so there’s no fingerprints, no definitive ID. Both drivers were shot to death with .40 caliber handguns, as were the five people killed in Biloxi. Poole favors .40 caliber Glocks.”

“Same as we carry.”

“Yeah. Well, you, anyway.” Lucas carried his own .45, which was against regulations, but nobody had tried to argue with him about that.

“Any federal warrants on him?” Meadows asked.

“Old ones, but still good. Nine years ago, he and a guy named Charles Trevino robbed a mail truck out of St. Petersburg,” Lucas said. “The truck was carrying a bunch of registered mail packages after a stamp-collectors convention. Trevino was busted a year later when he tried to unload some of the stamps. He said Poole was the other guy, and there was a third guy, whom he didn’t know, who did the research and the setup. The U.S. attorney filed an indictment on Poole and a warrant was issued, but he hasn’t been picked up since then.”

“Sounds like a smart guy who works with other smart guys, if they spotted a particular mail truck full of old stamps,” Meadows said.

“Apparently he is a smart guy, besides being a cold-blooded killer,” Lucas said. “That’s one of the reasons he interests me. That and the little girl.”

“You’ve got a daughter, right?” Meadows asked.

“Three of them,” Lucas said. “One’s going to college, one’s about to go, and I’ve got a five-year-old. A son, too.”

“Huh. Here’s a change of direction,” Meadows said. “You hear that Sandy Park got hit by a bicyclist?”

Sandra Park was another deputy marshal. Lucas had nodded to her in the hallway.

“What? A bicycle?”

“Yeah. Jerk on one of those fat-tire mountain bikes, rolling down a hill, blew through a stop sign. Sandy was out jogging and got T-boned. Anyway, she’s not hurt bad, but one ankle and one knee are messed up. She’s going to be off them for a couple of weeks. She’s good with computers. If you need some backup, she knows all the law enforcement systems inside and out. I can tell her to give your questions a priority . . . if you need that,” Meadows said.

“Thanks,” Lucas said. “I’ll talk to her this afternoon.”

“I’ll tell her you’re coming around.”

—

LUCAS TALKED to Park, and found himself smoothing more ruffled feathers. Park was not being asked to do secretarial-type work because she was a woman, she was being asked to do it because Lucas didn’t know how, she had expertise that he didn’t, and she was working while injured, and because blah blah blah.

Feathers smoothed, Lucas asked her to dredge up everything she could find in the federal systems on Poole. Park said she would, and would have a brick of paper and a flash drive by the next day.

—

THAT NIGHT, Lucas told Weather about Poole.

“He’s an old-fashioned kind of crook. Guns and holdups, armored cars and banks or anywhere else that has cash—he likes cash. He held up the box office at a country music show one time. Doesn’t have a problem with killing people. Doesn’t do anything high-tech.”

He told her about the little girl killed in Biloxi, and she shook her head. “Brutal.”

“Yeah.” They both glanced toward their daughter Gabrielle, who was sitting on a corner chair going through a beginning-reader book with a fierce concentration, paying no attention to her parents.

“You could be going out of town for a while,” Weather said. They were sitting on the front room couch, her head on his shoulder. Weather was a short woman, a plastic surgeon. Pretty, with cool eyes and a nose she thought over-large but Lucas thought was striking.

“I could be—no longer than I have to be, but it could be a couple of weeks. I don’t think a month. I’ll probably drive, instead of flying,” Lucas said. He got up and wandered around the living room, looking at books, putting them down, thinking about it.

“Not your part of the country,” she said. “That Southern thing is different.”

“I know.”

“You think this could really interest you?” she asked.

“If a guy is bad enough . . . he’ll interest me. Poole is bad, and nobody’s been able to lay hands on him.”

“A challenge,” she said.

“Yeah.”

Weather said, “I don’t like the idea of you going away too often, but it’s better than having you sitting around, brooding. You’re getting to be a pain in the ass.”

Lucas nodded: “I get that way when I’m not doing what I’m supposed to be doing.”

“Hunting.”

“Yes.”

—

LUCAS CALLED Russell Forte the next morning to tell him what he was planning to do. Forte worked at the U.S. Marshals Service headquarters in Virginia, across the Potomac from Washington, D.C.

“I remember Poole,” Forte said. “He was on our Top Fifteen list for a long time. We let him drift off because we had nothing to work with. If you find him, that’d be a major feather in your cap. All of our caps. Do not try to take him alone. He’s a killer. The first sniff you get, call me and we’ll get you a team from the Special Operations Group.”

“I will do that,” Lucas said.

Later, at the federal building, he found Park standing over a hot printer, putting what looked like a ream of paper between hard covers. “There’s more,” she said. “This is the good stuff, so far. I was reading through it while I dug it out, and I’ll tell you, Lucas, Poole started out as a mean kid, and he stayed that way. His father worked off and on for the state of Tennessee, different low-level jobs, but he was also a small-time crook. Got busted for scalping tickets, once for selling driver’s licenses out of the DMV where he worked, but he was acquitted on that and got his job back. Was arrested a couple of times for selling stolen merchandise, but never convicted. His sister supposedly boosted a truckload of racing tires one time, but the charges were dropped, doesn’t say why. Garvin stepped up from that, but he didn’t come from the best of families.”

“His folks still alive?” Lucas asked.

“Don’t know, but I suppose so—Poole’s only forty-two, if he’s not dead himself,” Park said. “I could find out.”

“Do that, and print it all,” Lucas said. “If there’s anything on the parents and any brothers and sisters, I’ll want it. Files on any associates, girlfriends, everything.”

Park patted the Xerox machine: “I’ll do it, as long as this machine doesn’t break down.”

—

WHEN PARK finished, she handed Lucas a couple of reams of paper that must have weighed ten pounds. Lucas took it home and settled into his den to read.

First up were crime scene photos out of Biloxi. Lucas had seen thousands of crime scene photos over his career, and these were nothing like the worst. All five victims had been shot in the head, and had died instantly. One of them, the little girl, looked like a plastic doll, lying spread-eagled on a concrete floor, faceup, a hole in her forehead like a third eye. She was wearing a white dress with lace, full at the knees. Lucas had seen a lot of pictures of dead kids: he glanced at the photo, and then went on to the next.

And yet . . .

He kept coming back to it. The little girl had been connected by DNA to one of the other counting-house victims, a much older man—the DNA analysts said she was his granddaughter. The grandfather may have been a dope-selling asshole, but the girl wasn’t. In the photo she was lying flat on her back, her eyes half-open. They still shone with the innocence of the very young, and with the surprise of how their lives had ended so early.

The dress had something to do with it, too. It reminded Lucas of the dresses worn by Catholic schoolmates, little girls going off to First Communion. Crime scene techs had found a smear of blood on the dress, where somebody—had to be one of the killers—had ripped off a piece, probably to use as a bandage.

The girl on the floor began to work on him. He made a call to Biloxi, found that nobody had claimed any of the bodies. “We don’t really expect anybody to show up and say, ‘Yeah, I’m with all those dope guys, we want to give them a nice church funeral.’”

Now Lucas began to feel something of a personal hook: get the guy who’d killed this little girl. He hadn’t had to, but he’d done it anyway. Why? Maybe simple efficiency, maybe she’d seen the killer’s face and would be able to identify him, maybe because the shooter or shooters just liked killing people.

Pissed him off, in a technical cop way. At the same time, despite the growing spark of anger, Lucas thought, Good shooting. The killer, whether it was Poole or not, was a pro—efficient, well schooled, remorseless.

—

LUCAS PUT the photos aside, all but the one of the girl. He kicked back at his desk, looked at that for a final minute or two, then flicked it onto the pile of other photos. Neither the photos nor the investigation reports told him much, possibly because there wasn’t much to tell, other than what he could see for himself.

The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation had handled much of the work, and had done it professionally enough. When Lucas had finished reading through the reports, he called the MBI agent who’d signed off on them. It took a few minutes to get through the MBI phone system, then Elroy Martin picked up the phone and said, “This is Martin.”

Lucas identified himself and said, “I’m looking into this because of his federal fugitive status. I’ve got all your reports, unless there’s something new since yesterday.”

“There isn’t,” Martin said.

“So what do you think?”

“If you can find Poole, the DNA will take him down. I’m positive of that. But finding him is the problem. People have been chasing him for years. Good people. Guys who knew what they were doing.”

“Your notes say you don’t think he did the Biloxi thing on his own.”

“That’s right. We don’t know how many were on the job, but I don’t believe it would be less than two or three. The five dead were killed with two different guns, both .40 caliber. All the slugs and brass came out of the same batch, and all were reloads. It seems possible that two shooters would share a batch of ammo, but, you know . . .”

“Probably not.”

“Yeah. Probably not. Whoever did this had to spot that drug counting house—that’s what it was—and we don’t think it was Poole. We think it was probably somebody who knew about the counting house from a drug connection, maybe because he lives around there, in Biloxi,” Martin said. “It’s possible that it was a professional spotter, a planner. A setup guy. We know he used a setup guy in the stamp robbery. We don’t think Poole would touch anything where he lives, because he’d know that we’d be all over it. We think he was brought in as the shooter. We don’t have any idea of who the spotter was, though.”

“Maybe somebody in the cartel who decided he wanted a bigger piece of the action and decided to take it?”

“We talked about that, but then, why bring in Poole? That Biloxi drug stuff comes through a Honduras cartel, a real professional operation,” Martin said. “If you’re in that cartel, you’d know plenty of guys with guns, but you wouldn’t know Poole. Poole’s not a drug guy, he’s a Dixie Hicks guy. A holdup man. Completely different set of bad guys. They really don’t intersect.”

“Huh. If we could find the spotter, that’d be a big step,” Lucas said.

“Yeah, it would, but we haven’t come up with anything yet,” Martin said. “We’d do anything we could to get our hands on Poole. We think he killed one of our guys a few years ago.”

“I saw that.”

They talked for a few more minutes, but Lucas got the impression that Mississippi was running out of possibilities. He thanked Martin and went back to the paper on his desk.

Poole first ran into the law when he was eleven years old, after a schoolyard fight. Unlike most schoolyard fights, this wasn’t two punches with the loser swearing to get the other guy. Poole knocked the loser down, then kicked him in the face and ribs and back, until a teacher dragged him off. The loser went to the hospital in an ambulance.

There were no more fights until high school. Then, there was only one, with the same result: the loser went to the hospital. A witness told a juvenile court that Poole had “gone psycho.” Poole, who’d been a running back on the junior high and then sophomore football teams, was kicked out of school.

A few weeks later, he held up a dry cleaner’s with a toy pistol. The dry cleaner had a lot of cash and no protection at all: Poole hadn’t gone after a place that might be ready for him, like a liquor store or a convenience store.

The holdup also demonstrated his youthful inexperience. Although he’d picked on a store well north of his home in a Nashville suburb, he hadn’t known about video cameras, and two cameras were mounted on a Dunkin’ Donuts store in the same shopping center and picked up Poole’s face.

He looked very young and the cops took photos around to the high schools and arrested Poole the same day as he’d done the robbery, with most of the money still in his pocket. He was sent to the Mountain View Youth Development Center, where he spent nine months working the woodshop and talking to other teenage felons about the best way to proceed with a life of crime.

Three years after his release, he was arrested again after he and two other men cut though a roof into the box office of a country music venue and robbed it. They got away with a hundred and ten thousand dollars, but one of the men, Boyd Harper, had an angry girlfriend named Rhetta Ann Joyce, who ratted out Harper to the cops.

She did that after learning Harper had spent thirty thousand dollars, virtually his entire cut of the country music money, on cocaine and hookers, and she hadn’t been invited. She had, however, contracted a fiery case of gonorrhea, passed on from one of the hookers and not, as Harper tried to tell her, from a toilet seat.

Harper, in turn, ratted out Poole and an accomplice named Dave Adelstein in return for a shorter sentence. Poole and Adelstein did four years at West Tennessee State Prison. Harper got only a year and a day, at Southeastern Tennessee Regional Correctional Facility, where he studied culinary arts. He’d served only four months when a person unknown stuck the sharpened butt of a dinner fork into his heart. Poole and Adelstein couldn’t have done that themselves, but Tennessee state cops believed that they paid for the killing through a contractual arrangement between Tennessee prison gangs.

They also believed that Poole and/or Adelstein might have had something to do with the demise of Rhetta Ann Joyce, who either jumped or was thrown off the New River Railroad Bridge a month after the two men were released from prison. They believed she was thrown because of the rope around her neck.

The rope might possibly have shown some intention to commit suicide, except that suicides rarely use mountain climbing ropes a hundred and ten feet long. Joyce’s neck hit the bottom of the noose so hard that her head popped off. The head wasn’t found until two weeks after the body, a half mile farther down the New River Gorge, washed up on a sandbar.

Lucas, looking at the riverbank crime scene photo of Joyce’s head, muttered, “That’s not nice.”

—

POOLE HAD not been arrested again, but was widely understood by state and federal law enforcement officials to have been a prime mover of the Dixie Hicks, a loose confederation of holdup men working the lower tier of Confederate states.

He was also believed by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation to have murdered a highway patrolman named Richard Wayne Coones, shot one night on lonely Highway 21 between Bogue Chitto and Shuqualak, Mississippi. The cops got his name from Al Jim Hudson, who said in a deathbed confession that he was in the car when Poole shot Coones. Hudson died shortly thereafter of internal injuries he had suffered while resisting arrest.

FBI intelligence agents learned from a source unnamed in Lucas’s papers that Poole had eventually accumulated over a million dollars in gold—maybe well over a million—on which he intended to retire to Mexico or Belize. Neither the Mexican nor the Belize cops ever got a sniff of him, not that they admitted to, anyway. Lucas knew nothing about Belize cops, but he’d met a high-level Mexican police-intelligence officer and had been impressed. If the Mexicans didn’t know about Poole, he probably wasn’t in Mexico.

Then rumors began to circulate that Poole had been murdered by a Dixie Hicks rival named Ralph (Booger) Baca. According to the source, Baca threw Poole’s body into the Four Holes Swamp in South Carolina, from which it was never recovered. A few months after he allegedly murdered Poole, Baca died in a freak accident when he turned the key on his Harley-Davidson and the Fat Bob extra-capacity tanks inexplicably exploded in his face, turning Baca into a human torch. He lingered, but not long.

Poole had not been seen or heard of again, until the killings in Biloxi. If, in fact, that was Poole at all.

Whether or not it was, Lucas thought, people died around Poole, both his friends and his enemies, including one little girl who had the bad luck to have a dope dealer as a grandfather. But if the DNA and video-camera connection was correct, Poole wasn’t dead. Not yet.

—

IN READING through Poole’s history, Lucas found several notes by a retired MBI investigator named Rory Pratt. Lucas got a number from the MBI and called him.

“Tracked him all over the South,” Pratt said in a deep Mississippi accent. “We didn’t always know who or what we were chasing, but we weren’t gonna quit after Dick Coones got shot down. That was as cold-blooded a killing as you’re likely to find. We looked at everything, but it was like chasing a shadow. We’d hear rumors that he’d been involved in a robbery at such-and-such a place and we’d be there the next day. Never really got hold of anything solid. We talked to guys who were actually involved in some of these holdups and they always denied knowing Poole—but being of that element, they knew what had happened to people who had talked about Poole.”

“You get any feel for whether he was actually involved in any of the robberies you checked?” Lucas asked. “Lot of people think he’s dead.”

“He’s not dead. I guarantee that. Not unless someone snuck up behind him and shot him and buried the body in the dark of the moon, and never told anyone. Another thing is, he’s got a girlfriend named Pandora Box . . .”

“I read that, but I thought it was a joke,” Lucas said.

“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 gotta shoot 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 PARK got 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 had died 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 SPENT two 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.