Gathering Prey Read online

  They spotted the streak of orange again, and two of the deputies lit it up from different sides, and then the third deputy held Lucas’s belt, at the back, so he could lean far into the pile without touching anything, and he pushed aside some bark and pine needles and said, “It’s a foot. There’s a body under here.”

  “We gotta get her out,” Letty cried. “It hasn’t been long. She could still be alive.”

  “Don’t think so,” Lucas said. “Can’t take the chance. Let’s see if we can spot how she’s oriented under there.”

  They pulled out a few more tree limbs, discovered a lower arm, and Letty, standing next to Lucas, with both hands now clutching her chest, saw the plastic exercise bracelet she’d given Skye in San Francisco.

  “Oh my God, it’s her, it’s her, it’s her . . .”

  She was babbling, and knew it, but couldn’t stop. One of the deputies put an arm over her chest and pulled her away. Lucas decided where Skye’s head must be—the body was hardly buried, mostly just covered with damp leaves, pine needles, and brush. When Lucas found Skye’s face, the first thing he saw was one dead blue eye, nearly popped from its socket, behind a crushed zygomatic bone.

  • • •

  WHEN HE SAW IT, and the graying flesh behind it, the anger finally ripped through him. It had been a year since he’d felt anything like it: since the fight in a madman’s basement. Letty’s actions had frightened him, but he’d always known, through the series of phone calls, that she was all right.

  But Skye . . . a young woman who had no parent or anyone else to look after her, except his daughter; and this could have happened to Letty, if a fat man hadn’t been there.

  If they’d dragged her off between the cars . . .

  For a whole year, he’d been stuck in bureaucratic mode, running down little ratshit criminals. Even in the larger cases, like the Merion murder case, the trial would turn on sleazy money-conflicted witnesses. This was different. This was a kid . . .

  He backed away: “She’s gone. She’s gone. Goddamnit. We need to get a crime scene crew out here . . . Ah, Jesus Christ . . . she’s gone.”

  He wrapped an arm around Letty and one of the deputies went running to his car, to call more cops. In the background, the rap went on, and the strobe bounced its wicked multi-multicolored light off all the clown faces around them.

  Letty started to cry into Lucas’s shoulder.

  Lucas told the deputies that he had to take Letty to the hospital, right now, and he pried Letty loose from the murder scene and half dragged her across the parking lot to where she’d parked the SUV. The only thing Letty said on the way out of the parking lot was “Take it slow.”

  Her nose was bleeding again and she tipped her head and pushed Kleenex into her nostril.

  “What was I thinking about?” Lucas asked, pounding the steering wheel as they headed out the highway toward town. “What the fuck was I thinking about?”

  He had his flashers on, but the highway was crowded with people heading into the Juggalo Gathering, or leaving it, and he never got any speed.

  “You should have been at the goddamn hospital a half hour ago,” he groaned. “What the fuck was I thinking about . . . ?”

  “Had to find Skye.”

  “Somebody else could have found her,” Lucas said. He turned sideways: “Tell me the truth. How bad?”

  “It hurts, but he never hit me or kicked me square, except that first punch, and that didn’t knock me out or anything, I kept moving—”

  “Get the fuck out of the way, you asshole,” Lucas shouted at a slow-moving car ahead of them. “Get the fuck out of the way.” He crowded the car until it pulled off onto the shoulder, then accelerated away until he caught the next slow-moving vehicle.

  “He could have killed you if that fat guy hadn’t helped you,” Lucas said. “Letty: you’re not a cop. Maybe you will be, but you’re not now. What you did . . .”

  He trailed off, and she said, “Stupid.”

  Lucas banged the steering wheel with the heels of his hands: “Motherfuckers. Get out of the fuckin’ way.”

  • • •

  AS THEY GOT CLOSE to Hayward, Letty said, “You’re mad now.”

  “Yes,” Lucas said.

  “I don’t want to . . . sound like a jerk, but I don’t think the sheriff’s deputies up here will find Pilate. They don’t do that kind of thing. They don’t track people. They’ve got their county and that’s it.”

  Lucas nodded. She was right.

  “So you’re gonna have to do it.”

  He didn’t have an answer to that.

  They crossed Highway 63 and pulled into the hospital emergency room, and Lucas led her in. A nurse went to wake up the night doc and a couple minutes later he came in and took Letty away, while Lucas went to fill out some paperwork.

  The doc was back in five minutes and said, “We’re going to do some X-rays. She got hit hard, by that eye, I want to make sure nothing’s broken, and I want to take a look at her ribs. I think she’s probably got a cracked rib or two, we need to make sure there’s nothing sticking into a lung.”

  “What are the chances of that?”

  The doc shook his head: “Small. The X-ray’s more of a precaution, than anything. We’ll know right away if there’s a problem.”

  • • •

  HALF AN HOUR LATER, Letty was back. The doc was with her, and said, “She’s got two cracked ribs, but they’re not displaced at all. Judging from the placement of the bruise where she was kicked, I don’t think there’ll be any complications: it was well away from the kidneys or liver. We already talked about it, she knows what to do, and what to look out for. And there’s not much to do, except try not to sneeze or cough or laugh too hard.”

  “What about her face? Her nose?” Lucas asked.

  “Nothing broken, but she’s got a small natural bone spur inside the nasal vault.” The doc tapped the bony top of his own nose to show Lucas what he was talking about. “When she got hit, the spur apparently cut through a part of her nose lining, and that’s where the blood is coming from. It didn’t look like it was going to stop, so I put a little dab of chemical cautery up there, to seal it up. It won’t bleed anymore, but it’s going to hurt when the anesthetic wears off. I got her some pills for pain, more for the nose, than the ribs.”

  “How long to heal up?” Lucas asked.

  “Maybe three days for the nose to stop hurting. The ribs are going to hurt for a while. She’s got a big bruise on her rib cage, and that’ll add some pain in addition to the ribs, and she’ll have a heck of a shiner. She’s gonna be creaky in the morning. Nothing dangerous—but it’s gonna hurt.” He looked at Letty and said, “Remember what I told you about, mmm, the side effects.”

  “What side effects?” Lucas asked.

  “Side effects of the drugs,” the doc said.

  Out in the truck, Lucas asked, “What side effects? The doc was tap-dancing back there.”

  “He was afraid he’d embarrass me,” Letty said. “If I use the pain pills, I might not be able to poop. He said I should get something called a stool softener.”

  “Does that embarrass you?”

  “No.”

  “Good. If you get to be a cop, and things get rough—they stick tubes into all kinds of places that could be embarrassing, if you’re the embarrassing type. I’ve had a few of them,” Lucas said. And, “I’m gonna call your mom.”

  “She’s gonna scream,” Letty said.

  “Yeah, well—it’s her turn.”

  • • •

  LUCAS CALLED WEATHER, then gave his phone to Letty, who talked to her mother for another five minutes, telling her the whole story, downplaying her injuries. A cop car with flashing red lights whipped past them as they drove back toward the Juggalo campground.

  When Letty was finished talking, Lucas took the phone back and said, “She’s hurt more than she told you. She’s not feeling too bad right now, but she will in the morning. She’s not going to be driving anywhere.
We’re gonna need somebody to come up here and get the truck, or the Porsche.”

  Weather said that Letty should stay at the cabin until the next afternoon, then she’d be up with either Lucas’s old friend Sloan, or with Del’s wife, to get the extra car.

  A minute after he rang off, Lucas took a call from Stern.

  “Clark Chapman called, he said you’ve got a body,” Stern said. Chapman was the county sheriff.

  “Yeah. Skye. Pilate apparently killed her by kicking her to death. My daughter might actually have witnessed the murder. She didn’t know it at the time, only found out later.”

  “Jesus. Is Letty okay?”

  “More or less. Got beat up,” Lucas said. He described the scene, and how Letty was assaulted by Pilate.

  “Oh, boy. Okay, we’re blocking off all the major roads around there, making people go through the checkpoints. I understand we’re looking for a guy dressed as a priest.”

  “Might not be, anymore,” Lucas said. “After they killed Skye, they left in a hurry. They’re running.”

  “I’m rolling the crime scene crew,” Stern said. “But, uh, what are you doing up there?”

  “Letty came up after Skye and I got worried,” Lucas said. “I’m sort of up here as her dad. I’m gonna stand back now and let the deputies do it.”

  “Don’t stand too far back,” Stern said. “They might need a little advice. Weren’t you technically a deputy sheriff up there once? Seems like I remember something like that.”

  “Yeah, but that was years ago, a different county, and it was pretty technical. Didn’t get paid, or anything.”

  “Okay. But hang around for a while. I’m still in Madison. Talk them through it, until I can get up there.”

  Lucas said he would.

  • • •

  THEY CAME UP to the Gathering site, and Lucas asked Letty, “How bad do you hurt right now?”

  “Not terrible.”

  “I need to pull in here for a minute. Kick the seat back and sit here. Don’t get out.”

  “’Kay.”

  Lucas parked and said, again, “Do not get out.”

  • • •

  THE DEPUTIES HAD taped off the area of the murder and Pilate’s encampment, and were waiting for the crime scene crew.

  Lucas had one of the plainclothes deputies interrupt the rap concert. The deputy went onstage and told the crowd that a Juggalo woman had been murdered by some outsiders from California and that if anyone had taken any photos that showed a circle of cars parked over there—he pointed—“we would be desperately anxious to see them.”

  The announcement cast a temporary pall over the concert—the pall lasted for more than twenty minutes, before the music got back to where it’d been—and a half dozen Juggalos wandered over to the cops to show off cell phone photos.

  One of them, by a Hayward Juggalo named Betty Morrow, had a snapshot that showed her girlfriend in the foreground, and a license tag in the background, on a car that appeared to be in the Pilate circle.

  They couldn’t make out the tag on the phone screen, but a deputy had Morrow e-mail the photo to a friend of his in Hayward, an amateur wildlife photographer, who ran the shot through Lightroom and two minutes later came back with both the license plate number and a make and model on the car, an aging Subaru Forester.

  “Here’s the thing. The plate’s not from California,” the deputy said. “I’ll give you one guess where it’s from.”

  “I don’t want to guess,” Lucas said. “Where’s it from?”

  “Would you believe . . . Minnesota?”

  “Goddamnit—they’re from California,” Lucas said. “If it’s a Minnesota guy, he might not be related.”

  “He was parked in the circle,” the deputy said.

  “Give me the number—I’ll call the office and have them run it,” Lucas said.

  Lucas called the BCA duty officer in St. Paul, and said, “Everything you’ve got. E-mail it to me.”

  The duty officer could give him one bit immediately: the car was registered to a Chester Tillus, who lived east of Baudette in Lake of the Woods County.

  “I’ll get you a driver’s license photo in ten minutes, if he’s got one.”

  “Hang on.” Lucas got an e-mail address for the sheriff’s office from the deputy, and passed it on to the duty officer. “Send copies of everything to both me and the sheriff’s office. They’re looking for the guy over here in Wisconsin, could be a murder charge involved.”

  “I’ll do that. Are you at the scene?”

  “Yeah, but I’m going over to my cabin,” Lucas said. “Right now, it’s a snake hunt, and the cheeseheads got it.”

  The deputy said to Lucas, when he rang off, “Nothing I like better than a nice Brie.”

  “I believe it,” Lucas said. He called Stern to fill him in, and said, “I can’t think of anything else. I’m gonna get Letty back to my cabin and get some sleep myself.”

  “See you in the morning,” Stern said. “I’m catching an early plane out.”

  • • •

  LUCAS DROVE OUT to his cabin, lit it up, offered to put together a cheeseburger, but Letty declined and said, “I’m gonna go sit on the dock for a few minutes.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yup.”

  When Lucas followed her out, carrying a beer and his iPad, she’d unfolded a second deck chair for him. He sat down and sighed and said, “You do have the ability to piss me off from time to time.”

  “I know,” she said. “I don’t think I can be any other way. Or you, either.”

  “Probably not,” he said.

  “You know how she was killed?”

  “We’ll know in the morning, when crime scene gets a look,” Lucas said. “From what you saw, and what I saw, I believe she was probably kicked to death.”

  “Ah, jeez.” She was quiet for ten seconds, then said, “I’ve been sitting here, wondering if me meeting her had anything to do with her getting killed. The closest I can get is, if I hadn’t given her my phone number in San Francisco, she might never have found out that Henry was dead. Or she might have stayed in South Dakota looking for him, and she never would have run into Pilate at all. You follow all the bread crumbs through the woods, that’s what comes out.”

  “That’s a good way to drive yourself crazy,” Lucas said. “I talked to Bob Shaffer before he went off and got murdered last year. We could have done twenty other things that day and he’d still be alive. I believe there was one second, one tiny moment, that decided whether he’d live or die—if he hadn’t gone into a supermarket for a jelly donut, he’d have lived. He was a pretty good husband and father, and he still would be.”

  “Yeah, but if he’d lived, you wouldn’t have been so involved, and maybe Catrin Mattsson would have died.”

  “I don’t know. She might have, or maybe Shaffer might have found her sooner,” Lucas said. “Impossible to know. The thing is, you take a fork in the road, it doesn’t always work out for the better . . . but sometimes it does. It must.”

  They were quiet for a couple of minutes, then Letty asked, “You get the e-mail yet? From the office?”

  “Let me check.” He turned on the iPad to check his mail. The download was slow, with only two bars on phone reception, but in five minutes he had a long file on Chester Tillus. Lucas scanned it and said, “He’s with them. With Pilate.”

  He got on his cell and called the sheriff’s office, talked to the duty sergeant and told him the same thing. “You find him, hold him, because he’s part of the bunch. He’s got two burglary convictions and two assault convictions in Minnesota, and a fighting charge in California, and that was only two months ago. He’s been out there, he just didn’t buy the California plates.”

  “We’re looking for him,” the deputy said.

  • • •

  AS LUCAS AND LETTY sat talking on the dock, Pilate was on a back highway crossing into Michigan. The rest of the crew had scattered. Skye had been with the cops for a full
day before the disciples killed her, and they had no idea what she might have told them. But she knew some names, for sure.

  After kicking her to death, they’d gotten scared: Pilate pretended he wasn’t, but he was. All the other murders had been in quiet spots, with nobody around but the disciples. This time, they’d killed a woman next to a large crowd.

  Then the dark-haired Juggalo chick had shown up and started yelling at him about Skye. Pilate had punched her: couldn’t help himself, chicks did not get up in his face like that, and walk away.

  He was lucky, in a way, that the fat guy had shown up, because he was so buzzed on kicking the first girl to death that he might’ve killed the second one, right there in front of the crowd.

  But the fat guy did show up and the Juggalo chick was taken away and they’d hauled ass.

  • • •

  WITH EVERYBODY ELSE going every which way, Pilate headed east in his Firebird, followed by only one other vehicle, the new RV, driven by Terry and Laine. They stuck to back roads but hurried to get across a state line. In Pilate’s experience, which mostly came down to watching Cops on television, the police did not talk well across state lines.

  Once in Michigan, at midnight, they found . . . almost nothing. Trees.

  “Jesus, it’s dark. Aren’t even any cars,” Kristen said, peering into the darkness through the Firebird’s windshield. “It’s like somebody’s pulled a black sack over your head.”

  Dark as the L.A. people had ever seen the world; even the cars’ headlights didn’t seem to punch much of a hole in it. A few miles into Michigan, they saw a narrow dirt track in their headlights, heading off to the left, with a sign and an arrow that said something that they were going too fast to read. They took the turn, and found that it led to a boat landing. They couldn’t see anything of the lake, but there were no lights anywhere. They got flashlights, found a spot where people had camped out, and rolled the two vehicles back into the trees.