—

Jerry Krause backed the unfamiliar car out of the garage carefully, easing it into the street, watching the nearby houses for anything that looked like an alarm. He didn’t see anything. He drove back to Megan Quill’s apartment, planning to take her out—at knifepoint, if necessary. He got there just in time to see Quill get in the car with her mother.

He went after them.

He tracked them out to I-94, allowing them to get well ahead in the lane three lanes to his left. The ride to Quill’s mother’s house in White Bear Lake took half an hour. He’d been there twice. He watched as they left the car in the driveway. Quill had told him that she was meeting a girlfriend to go to the mall. He wasn’t sure which mall that was, but he could wait.

The wait wasn’t long. At a quarter to seven, Megan Quill walked out of the house and got in the car, backed out of the driveway, and drove past him out toward Highway 61. He followed, down 61, remembering then to cloak his phone with the Faraday bag, and onto I-694 East toward the Maplewood Mall. He’d been to the mall twice, both times with Quill: it was her go-to shopping destination. The possibilities played through his mind; his best bet, he decided, would be to take her in the parking lot.

He could probably kill her there, he thought, if there weren’t too many people around. The sight lines at a mall were always broken up by the ranks of cars, especially the taller SUVs and pickups. Quill had to die, but her death wasn’t the only thing he wanted.

Krause moved closer, as she got off the highway at White Bear Avenue and drove into the crowded parking lot. He took the X-Acto knife out of his pocket; it had a cylindrical cover on the blade, and he pulled it off and dropped it on the passenger seat.

Quill slowed to a creeping pace, looking down the rows of parked cars for an empty space. When she spotted one, she rolled down the aisle, with Krause thirty feet behind her. She pulled into the empty slot, with a pickup on the mall side and an SUV on the other, and Krause stopped behind her car, blocking the view of his driver’s side with the SUV.

He picked up the X-Acto knife and popped his door, and when he saw the door of Quill’s car opening, he rushed it. She was still turning out of the driver’s seat and didn’t see Krause until he grabbed her hair, yanked her out of the car. She screamed, but not loud enough to attract attention—they were, at best, a hundred yards from the mall’s entrance—and he forced her to the ground and held the X-Acto knife in front of her eyes.

“We’re going for a drive,” he said. “If you scream or fight me, I swear to God I’ll cut your fuckin’ face off.”

“Jerry—”

“Shut up!” He dragged her by the hair, and she half screamed again, and tried to scrabble along behind him. He turned the corner at the front of the SUV and pushed her into the driver’s seat, then climbed in behind her and shoved her shoulders, forcing her over the center console, and said, “On the floor. On the fuckin’ floor!”

She dropped to the floor. He let go of her hair long enough to switch the X-Acto knife to his right hand, now in front of her forehead where she could still see it, then quickly shifted the car into drive and started out of the parking lot.

“What are you doing?” Quill asked. She began to cry. “Why are you doing this?”

“You’re gonna tell the cops that you think I killed Brett. I can’t let you do that.”

“Did you?”

“Yeah, but I can’t let you tell.”

“You killed Brett?”

“He came busting into my room and saw me with the laptop. Nothing I could do about it. I told him I took it from your dad’s house when I heard he’d been killed. I said, ‘Why shouldn’t I get it if he’s never going to use it again?’ He said you told him the cops said the computer was stolen at the library and that the killer stole it. He said he’d talk to you in the morning. I couldn’t let him do that. I knew he was going out for some heroin that night, and he always slept for a long time when he did that. I also knew he usually got two or three hits at the same time, so, if he died in his sleep, it’s not like he couldn’t have overdosed—”

“Jerry, you killed your best friend—”

“—who was going to turn me in to the cops,” Krause said. “For murder. For an accident.”

They were out of the parking lot and around the corner in the park. There were some dog people there with lights around their necks, and Jerry took the SUV up on the walking path and around the lake.

“You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?”

“Maybe, maybe not. One thing I’m going to do first is finally get in your pussy. And I’m gonna like it.”

“I won’t tell anybody.”

“You might be lying.”

“DNA.”

“Got that covered.”

He stopped the truck and grabbed her hair. “Come up out of there. Come across that console.” He popped the truck door and began dragging her out, and she was crying and half screaming, and he wrestled her out of the car, and she flopped onto the ground.

“Please don’t do this. Please!”

* * *

—

Virgil and Trane, in Virgil’s truck, slewed out of the parking lot behind the Maplewood cop. They ran fast through traffic a couple blocks, cornered left around a Walgreens, went another block to a left turn into an empty parking lot next to a basketball court. Just off the court, a half dozen people were throwing Frisbees in the twilight, with a half dozen dogs running around them, both dogs and people with multicolored lights around their necks, chasing down lighted disks.

Virgil got back to the BCA phone guy, who said, “I still see her phone, on the north side of the park.”

“No time to fuck around,” Virgil said to Trane. He shouted at the Maplewood cop, “We’re taking the trail. See if you can get more cops up here. Go around the other direction. Her phone is here in the park, but on the other side.”

The cop yelled back, “The trail goes around a lake.”

A hard-surfaced walking trail, wide enough for a car, went both left and right past the parking lot. Virgil went right, toward the people with the dogs. He stopped when he got to them. Trane rolled her window down, and shouted, “Did a car just take the trail?”

“Yeah, a black SUV,” said a thin, bearded man. His dog woofed a couple of times as the man pointed farther to the right. “He went around the lake. We wondered—”

Virgil didn’t wait to hear any more, instead hammered the accelerator, leaving the dog people looking after them. The trail was perhaps ten feet wide and circled to the left. Clumps of trees, half visible in the growing darkness, dotted the banks of the small lake, and they were halfway around when they saw a black SUV pulled into the trees along the north shore.