Shrake: "We're on 94 North, I'm about a quarter mile behind Jenkins. I could do it for a while, but he's driving right at fifty-five. If I hang back here, he could get suspicious. We need Jane and Sarah right now."

Bradley: "We're getting on the ramp now... . We're coming."

Lucas said, "Jenkins, go ahead and buzz him. We need to know if both of them are in there."

Lucas walked down to Del's car and Del opened the passenger-side door and asked, "What are we doing?"

"I can't find Carver. Nobody's waiting for him, because they think he already went."

"Is it possible he split?"

"You mean, called a cab or took a bus?"

"Okay, that doesn't seem likely," Del said.

Lucas looked at the phone message again: Dannon will kill Carver tonight at the hotel and bury him in the perfect graveyard. Best wishes, Taryn.

"He could be dead," Lucas said.

"That would take balls the size of the Goodyear blimp," Del said.

"I might have put Carver in the shit," Lucas said. "I was trying to drive a wedge between them, but what if he said something, or made some kind of threat, and they decided they needed to get rid of him immediately? What if he tried to blackmail them? What if he gave them a deadline?"

"Then ..." Del said.

Lucas said, "Let's go back to my car."

"You're going after them?"

"We're both going," Lucas said. "We don't need to track Green. But if Dannon killed Carver, he's going to dump him. We need to be there-we need everybody to be there."

"I could drive," Del said.

"They're too far ahead of us," Lucas said. "I need to drive."

"Goddamnit. I hate it when you drive," Del said. "I get so puckered up that I've got to pull my asshole back out with a nut pick."

"Thanks for the image," Lucas said. "Let's go."

CHAPTER 26

They left Del's car in the garage and took off in Lucas's Lexus, lights and siren, Lucas turning the corner and busting the red light and then off through traffic to I-94, Del braced against collision, hanging on to his seat-belt strap with one hand, the other hand braced against the dashboard.

"Ask them where Dannon is at," Lucas said, as they rolled onto the interstate.

Del got on the handset, and Shrake came back with a mileage marker and Del said, "They've got seventeen miles on us."

"But they're going fifty-five and we're going ninety-five." Lucas did some math in his head and said, "We'll be catching up two-thirds of a mile every minute, so we'll catch them in more or less twenty-five minutes. That's not fast enough."

He dropped the hammer and the big Lexus groaned as it edged past a hundred miles an hour, then to a hundred and five.

"How do you do that?" Del asked.

"Do what?"

"That math?"

"The same way you would have done it, if you'd had nuns beating fractions into your head in third, fourth, and fifth grades," Lucas said.

"How fast will it take us to catch them at a hundred and five?"

"Uh, about ... five-sixths of a mile every minute ... we're about sixteen miles behind them now ... you take sixteen divided by five and multiplied by six ... about nineteen and one-fifth minutes ... more or less."

"How do you know it's five-sixths of a mile every minute?"

"Because sixty miles an hour is a mile a minute. We're going fifty miles an hour faster than they are, and that's five-sixths of sixty ... so we catch up five-sixths of a mile every minute."

"Well, hell, even I could do that."

"Yeah, if you knew how."

JENKINS CALLED. "There's one guy in the truck. I came up fast with my high lights on and illuminated the truck, then passed him in a hurry, like I was an asshole. There's only one guy in the truck."

Lucas took the handset from Del: "Get as far out in front of him as you have to, to lose his headlights. Then find a side road and dodge off on it, until he passes. Then get behind again. Where in the hell are Jane and Sarah?"

"Jane is a mile behind Shrake, and I'm right behind her," Bradley said. "I'm going to start falling back in case she has to pass Dannon."

Shrake said, "I'm gonna have to pass in the next couple of minutes. I'm coming up on him."

Stack: "I'll tell you what-he's not going to Taryn Grant's place. Not unless he's taking the way-scenic route."

THAT'S THE WAY IT went for sixteen minutes. At four minutes, Shrake had to pass. He also reported one person at the wheel, and that he was sure it was Dannon. Stack moved up until she was running a half-mile behind Dannon, and Jenkins, coming off a side road, fell in behind Stack and ahead of Bradley. Bradley passed him, so that Jenkins could hang back longer. By then they were well up I-94, running parallel to the Mississippi River.

At sixteen minutes, Jenkins called to say that he could see Lucas's flashers. Lucas turned off the lights and eased off the gas. They passed Monticello, the city lights spreading off to the right, toward the Mississippi, and then plunged back into the dark. Five minutes later, he came up behind Jenkins and dropped his speed to fifty-five. They ran like that for another fifteen minutes, and as Stack was coming up on Dannon, she called and said, "I think he's getting off at the exit... . He's getting off. I'm going straight."

Lucas: "Jenkins, pull off and kill your lights. Sarah, keep going behind Jane, turn around as soon as you can."

As Jenkins moved to the shoulder, Lucas pulled over behind him, then fished an iPad out of the seat pocket behind Del.