“Okay. When they come back, hide the phone in the car, in case they search you. Leave it turned on. Now, tell me what happened.”

“They picked me up at a mall in Duluth,” Skye said. “I was walking in and this car pulls over to the side, and this guy gets out and picks me up, just picks me up and throws me in the back of the car, and Pilate was there and they beat me up and then they taped me up . . .”

They took her to Hayward, she said, where they told her that they were going to take her out in the woods for a party. She didn’t believe she’d survive it.

“Then something happened and they killed the man in the RV, where they had me. There was a fight, and Kristen got hurt. Got cut. We drove for a couple of hours, for a long time, anyway, and then they stopped at a hospital. I think we were in Minneapolis or St. Paul, we were at some ATMs and I could tell it was a big city.”

“Okay. Hide the phone. I’m going to call my dad.”

•   •   •

LUCAS WAS ON I-94, heading back to the Twin Cities, when Letty called. “Skye called me. Pilate’s got her, she thinks they’re going to kill her . . .”

She gave him the details of Skye’s call, and Lucas said, “She’s right. They’re going to kill her. I gotta call in. Good-bye.”

He got the BCA duty officer on the phone and told him the problem. “Get to Verizon, find out where they’re at.”

He gave the duty officer the number that Skye had called from, then called Stern, the Wisconsin DCI agent, and told him what had happened. “It’s possible they came back this way. We’ll know in a few minutes.”

“Keep me up.”

Lucas turned on his flashers and went past the town of Menomonie at a hundred and ten. The duty officer called back and said, “The phone’s on Highway 63 in Wisconsin, headed north, they’re south of Clear Lake.”

“I went through Menomonie a few minutes ago. I’m gonna take County Q, I think it goes north—”

“No, no. I’m looking at a map. Keep going past Q, just a couple more miles up to 128, you’ll be faster and closer.”

“Okay, you get onto the county sheriffs up there, I don’t know what counties they are, tell them to look for an old black station wagon, maybe California plates. You should be able to vector them in pretty close, tell them it might be part of a convoy, everybody in it is wanted for multiple murder . . . You gotta get me there as quick as you can. I’m going to call my guy at the DCI.”

Lucas got Stern on the phone again. Stern said, “I’ll get my duty guy on our net up there, we need to talk to your guy about what Verizon is telling them. You say this girl is a witness to the Malin killing?”

“Apparently. And I gotta go, my turn’s coming up.”

Lucas took the off-ramp, took a fast right past the convenience store, drove past a half dozen cars on the wrong side of the road, punched up the duty officer again, and said, “I’m on 128.”

“Take it right straight north to 64. They’re in Clear Lake right now. Okay, we got nothing going yet in Clear Lake, but we got a highway patrolman coming south on 63, he’s in Turtle Lake. Hang on, hang on . . . Okay, I’m talking to a guy in Madison, he’s saying that the patrolman is talking to the sheriff’s department up there, there’s a lake, right on the highway, Magnor, everything squeezes down.”

“I know it.”

“They’re going to take him there,” the duty officer said.

Lucas went past Glenwood City about as fast, he suspected, as anyone had ever done that, watching his nav system for a jog in the road, got through it just fine, then almost drove right through a T intersection, got straight, and went on.

“Lucas, the phone’s north of Clear Lake, they’re heading for a collision up at Magnor. We got two deputies coming up behind him, too.”

“Okay. You told them about the girl? The hostage?”

“Yeah, they’re all clear on that,” the duty officer said. “They’re only three or four miles out.”

Lucas came up on Highway 64, took a left, and ran hard the three or four miles to the intersection of 63. Now he was behind them, but still well back, out of the action.

“What’s happening?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know . . . Verizon . . . ah, heck, Verizon said the phone’s turned left on a back road. Turned left. They were only two miles out of Magnor, the deputies coming up behind saw him make the turn. They say he’s moving fast now, they’re strung out behind him, they’re all running behind him, chasing him.”

“Shit, one of the other cars in the convoy saw the cops and they called him.”

The duty officer went away for a minute, then came back and said, “They didn’t see anything that looked like a convoy. They’re all over this guy, they’re right behind him.”

“I’m coming, I’m coming.”

“Where are you?”

“Coming up on Clear Lake, a couple miles out,” Lucas said.

“Okay, if you see a JJ road just on the north side of Clear Lake—”

“I see it on the nav.”

“That’ll take you . . . Okay, the guy’s off the road, he ran through an intersection, he’s off the road in the ditch.”

“What about the girl?” Long silence, and Lucas repeated it, “They got the girl?”

“No. I’m hearing that the guy’s still in the car, he’s got a gun and he’s going to kill this girl if they don’t get him another car.”

Lucas took the corner at JJ and headed north. “I’m north on JJ, get me in there.”

He saw them from a mile away, what looked like ten cop cars with their flashers going. He came up fast, saw cops behind cars, saw an ancient Chevy Cavalier station wagon in a bean field at the intersection of a narrow side road. It looked as though the driver of the station wagon had tried to make the turn, but missed it, ran through a fence out into the bean field, where he bogged down.

Lucas pulled up behind the last sheriff’s patrol car, climbed out, and jogged down to the lead car, where the Wisconsin patrolman and a couple of deputies were crouched. The patrolman said, “You’re Davenport?”

“Yeah.”

“Stern is on the way. He’ll be a while, though.”

“You talking to the guy?”

“Off and on. He’ll roll down that side window and scream at us, then roll it back up. He seems . . . I mean, nuts. I mean like, you know, he needs a doctor and medication. Or maybe he’s just high. He was yelling some stuff at us, like the Fall is coming, and we’re all scared shitless, and it won’t do us any good because we’re all going down . . . Sounds crazy to me.”

“Did he say what he wants?”

“He said he wants a patrol car or he’s going to kill her. We told him a guy was coming to talk to him, and we could work something out.”

“He shoot at anybody?”

“Not yet, but he’s got a gun. Randy’s got some glasses, he’s looking at him.”

He pointed over at another car, where a deputy was sitting behind a rear wheel, looking at the car in the field with a pair of heavy binoculars. “Looks like a big old revolver.”

“I’ll go look. But what do you think?”

“Well, honest to God, you know, Phil over there is on the regional SWAT team, he’s got his rifle, he could take him out.” Lucas looked back to where a guy had a rifle propped on a sandbag over a patrol car’s bumper. “But we’re shooting through that window glass. My inclination is, if it looks like he’s going to do something . . . I’d try to take him out. I mean, if he freaks out and shoots the girl, then it’ll be too late, and he seems to be freakin’ out.”

“Let me go look,” Lucas said.

“Sheriff’s coming down, he’ll be here in five, ten minutes.”

Lucas duckwalked over to the car where the deputy was keeping watch with the binoculars. “Can I look?”

“He’s waving the gun around. Looks like he’s arguing with whoever’s in the back.”

Lucas took the glasses, focused. The car was only a hundred feet away, and with the big image-stabilized Canons, he could see individual hairs in the man’s beard. He looked like he was in his late twenties, had what appeared to be a propeller-shaped tattoo, or maybe an elongated infinity sign, on his forehead. He was shouting into the back, kept poking the gun toward the back, then swiveling to look out at the cops.