Gathering Prey Read online

  “Now what?” Laine asked, when Pilate and Kristen joined Terry and her in the RV.

  “Just gonna sit and wait,” Pilate said.

  Laine peered out a window. “Bears out there, I bet. Maybe wolves.”

  “Wolves don’t eat trucks,” Pilate said. “It is really fuckin’ dark, ain’t it? Lots of stars, though.”

  • • •

  LETTY WAS HURTING when she got up in the morning, at nine o’clock. “Everything hurts. The nose hurts worst. Not the bruise, the place where the doctor cauterized it.”

  “Take some pills,” Lucas said.

  “I’ve already taken four of them,” Letty said. “The max is two.”

  “Uh-oh,” Lucas said. “You’re gonna have to stop at the drugstore.”

  “I always thought stool softener was for old people,” she said. “Maybe you could get it for me.”

  “Screw that,” Lucas said. “I’m not doing it.”

  A few minutes later, she said, “The nose . . . it really hurts. It feels like somebody stuck a blowtorch up there.”

  Neither one of them felt like eating more Cheerios, left over from Lucas’s first night at the cabin, so they drove back to the Juggalo Gathering site, which had sprung a hundred tents, and more people sleeping in cars, and, on one side, a big no-go zone defined by yellow crime scene tape and a bunch of sheriff’s patrol cars and a Wisconsin crime scene truck. A group of Juggalos was disassembling the stage, and when Lucas asked, a deputy said they were going to move the stage to the other end of the field, where the bonfire had been.

  The crime scene crew had exposed Skye’s body; her head was misshapen, like a partly deflated soccer ball. The leader of the crime scene crew said he’d heard that Lucas thought she’d been kicked to death, and he said, “I think you’re probably right. Doesn’t look like clubs, no bark or anything in her face or her arms. Skull was crushed, with impact marks everywhere. Dollars to donuts, they kicked her to death.”

  “DNA?”

  “We’re sampling everything that looks possible.”

  The deputies said that there’d been no convoys spotted overnight, but they did have tag numbers for a half dozen vehicles from California, which had been run when the cars were stopped. None of the people stopped were wearing Juggalo makeup. Nothing had come back that would allow the Wisconsin cops to hold the cars.

  The deputy said: “What are we gonna do? We got nothing to go on, but that one tag from Minnesota, and we never did spot him.”

  Lucas said, “Gimme what you got. All the California tags you stopped.”

  • • •

  BOTH LUCAS AND LETTY had to go into Hayward to make formal statements for the sheriff’s department, so they continued into town.

  The guy who would take their statements wasn’t in yet, and wasn’t expected for half an hour, so they walked over to Main Street, looking for breakfast. The Angler’s Bar and Grill, where Lucas usually ate, wasn’t open, so they settled for coffee and scones from a coffee shop around the block. Then they weren’t far from the Walgreens, so they walked across the highway, and Lucas lingered by the book rack as Letty was checking out with the stool softener.

  Outside, Lucas asked, “You got it?”

  “Yeah. I told the checkout lady that it was for you, but you were embarrassed to ask for it.”

  Made him laugh.

  • • •

  AS THEY WALKED BACK toward the sheriff’s office, they talked about the murder. Letty told Lucas, “Skye was going to stop at three Juggalo Gatherings. One here, one in the UP, and one down by Detroit somewhere. She thought Pilate might be going to them, too. All the people I saw with Pilate were wearing Juggalo gear, like they were really into it.”

  “Where is it at? And when? The next meeting?”

  “Let me look at my phone . . .”

  A half block farther along, she said, “It’s in Sault Ste. Marie. The American one. Actually, on a farm south of the town. It’s next weekend, and the Detroit one is two weeks from now.”

  “Sault Ste. Marie is a hell of a long way from here,” Lucas said. “I drove it once, years ago, on my way to New York. If I remember, it’s a six- or seven-hour drive from here. Eight hours or more from the Cities.”

  “You think you might go?”

  Lucas scratched his cheek, where a mosquito had bitten the night before, then said, “I don’t know. Maybe, if these guys haven’t turned up by then. The fastest way to get out of this area would be to go south. Once you get down to I-94 you could head down to Chicago or start back toward California. They’d have a whole choice of routes. If they drove all night after killing Skye, switching off drivers, they could be . . . through Omaha, through Kansas City, down to Chicago. Unknown California license tags would be meaningless in the big cities. Tomorrow morning, they could be damn near to Phoenix, or Vegas, or out to New York. We’ll put out watches, but our best chance of finding them would be when they go back to L.A. The California cops are really hot for Pilate.”

  “So they’re gone. As far as we’re concerned,” Letty said.

  “They might be. But if they went south, they’d be in Wisconsin for a long time, where everybody was looking for them and not finding them. So they might have headed for the nearest state lines—back to Minnesota, or east to Michigan. Depends on what this Pilate guy wants to do, I guess. If he’s really a Juggalo freak, he could show up in Sault Ste. Marie next week, and then Detroit. I’ll tell you something—you could hide a jumbo jet in the UP so nobody could find it. There’s not a lot up there. If I were them, that’s where I would have gone.”

  “What are we gonna do?” Letty asked.

  “What are we gonna do? I’ve got the Merion case hanging over my head, and a bunch of other stuff.”

  “You can’t just drop this . . .”

  “I won’t. I might ditch you at the cabin, to wait for your mom. If I leave right now, I could get over to Baudette, where those Minnesota plates came from, by early afternoon. See what I can see. Make it down to the Cities by late tonight. Then, if nothing turns up, I might zip over to Sault Ste. Marie and sniff around. Between you and me . . . if this thing is outside Sault Ste. Marie, that means the city cops won’t be covering it, and the county cops are gonna be way overloaded.”

  “But I—”

  “. . . Will not be going to Sault Ste. Marie. I’ve had busted ribs and you’re not going to want to walk around a lot. Or even hit potholes, as you’ll find out this afternoon when your mom takes you home. She’s never met one that she didn’t hit. So basically, you’ll be hanging out with your yuppie friends, trying to decide what kind of obscenely expensive hipster hi-tops you’ll wear back to your obscenely expensive college in the fall.”

  “You know I’m not like that,” Letty said.

  “You’re like that a little bit,” Lucas said. “Like me, though not as much.”

  “Thank Jesus. I really don’t know where you get the time to shop.”

  “It’s more important to look good, than to feel good,” Lucas said.

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Before your time,” Lucas said.

  • • •

  THE STATEMENTS TOOK an hour, starting with Letty’s meeting with Skye and Henry in San Francisco, through the discovery of Skye’s body. Lucas filled in bits about the discovery of Henry’s body in South Dakota, the relationship to the probable L.A. murder of Kitty Place, about the shooting of Bony.

  As they were finishing, a deputy came in and said, “They found an ID on that girl. Her name wasn’t Skye, it was Shirley Bellows. She was from Indiana, had a couple of arrests for shoplifting and minor possession. We’re trying to get in touch with her folks now, but we’re having trouble locating them.”

  Letty and Lucas looked at each other and Letty teared up, didn’t try to hide it, and Lucas said to the deputy, “Thanks for letting us know.”

  When they got out of the sheriff’s office, they walked down the street to the Angler’s Bar and Grill and got cheeseburgers
for breakfast, then Letty wanted to stop at the bookstore on the corner and get newspapers, to see if there’d been any coverage of the murder the night before.

  There had not been: “Too late,” Lucas said. “We’ll see it tomorrow.”

  Letty went to get a magazine for the trip home, and Lucas took a minute to browse the hunting and fishing books. Somebody had left a book, facing out, about cadaver dogs. He read a few pages of it, until Letty was ready to go.

  Outside, she asked, “Are you going to Baudette?”

  “Yeah, but I won’t get there until late in the day—four o’clock, if I leave the cabin as soon as I get you back there.”

  “Wish I was going,” Letty said.

  “But you’re not. You’re gonna sit on your butt until your ribs heal up,” Lucas said. “Even if I gotta handcuff you to a chair.”

  Weather was unhappy that Lucas was leaving Letty at the cabin alone, but Lucas said, with a crackle of impatience, “Listen. Nobody’s gonna find her at the cabin. We give highly detailed maps to friends and they still can’t find it. She’ll be alone for four hours, watching TV. If you insist, she can go up in the attic and pull out the shotgun. But if I’ve got to sit here, staring at her for four hours, and then go over to Baudette, I’ll have to stay overnight. I was hoping to get home tonight.”

  “All right. All right. We’ll get there as fast as we can,” Weather said. “I’ll be righteously pissed if you don’t make it home tonight, though.”

  So he left Letty at the cabin with a kiss on the forehead, with easy access to food and a Beretta 12-gauge, and headed west. He passed the Juggalo encampment, which had grown even further, still with a cluster of cop cars around the murder scene.

  As he went through Hayward, he got on the phone to Virgil Flowers: “Are you still in Fergus Falls?”

  A moment of silence: “Where the hell else would I be?”

  “Hey, you don’t have to be rude about it.”

  “Fuck you, I’m hanging up.”

  But he didn’t, not quite quickly enough. Lucas asked, “How fast can you get to Baudette?”

  “Are you kidding me? I can leave in one minute,” Flowers said. “If I have to stay here for more than another ten minutes, I’m going to start shooting at a state senator’s cousins.”

  “Use your pistol. At least that way, you won’t actually hit anyone.” Lucas and Flowers had once been in a shoot-out in which Flowers attempted to shoot a woman in the chest. He hit her in the foot.

  “I’m laughing inside,” Flowers said. “Of all the miserable, rotten, corrupt, useless, political-payoff assignments in the universe . . . I’m out spying on sheep in the middle of the night, I’m talking to a guy who says he was taken up in a flying saucer and had sexual experiments done on him—which, I got to say, is probably the only sexual experiments he’s ever had done on him, that didn’t involve a heifer, because he’s the single least likable motherfucker in the state of Minnesota.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. You weren’t really supposed to investigate, Virgil, you were supposed to pretend to investigate. You knew that. Anyway, this is serious. I’m headed over to Baudette . . .”

  He explained the situation, and Flowers asked, “Letty’s really okay?” Despite their difference in ages, there’d always been an electrical buzz between Letty and Flowers. And Flowers wasn’t that old.

  “She’s fine. She hurts, but I have to say, a little pain will probably be good for her,” Lucas said. “She walks up to an insane killer—literally insane—and gives him shit, and gets off with a black eye and some cracked ribs. I’ll take that.”

  “I wouldn’t, if I had a daughter,” Flowers said. “I’d hunt him down and shoot him. With a rifle. Or maybe just beat him into tomato paste.”

  “From what I’ve heard about Frankie, you probably will, sooner or later, have the chance to do something like that, and probably sooner. Then you’ll be begging for daughter-raising advice. Like the first time she comes home with her bra on backwards.”

  “Whatever. See you in Baudette. If I get there first, I’ll check at the courthouse and find out where this guy actually lives.”

  “See you there,” Lucas said.

  • • •

  LUCAS WORRIED ABOUT Letty all the way through Duluth, heading west and then north in the Mercedes until Weather called and said, “We’ve got her. She’s still alive. But jeez, that’s a black eye for the ages.”

  “Tell her to remember to take her stool softener,” Lucas said.

  • • •

  WITH LETTY SAFE, he worried about Flowers for a while. Flowers was one of the best investigators he’d ever met, or even heard of, and had gotten himself tangled up in some strange cases: but he’d been right about the Fergus Falls assignment. The assignment had been phony from the start and Flowers was in Fergus Falls basically as a sop to a state senator who had some influence over a piece of the BCA budget.

  The fact that the senator was crazier than a bedbug and dumber than a crescent wrench hadn’t changed that one salient fact: he had some influence.

  So Flowers had gone . . . and Lucas had been dragged under another inch.

  • • •

  THE DRIVE TO BAUDETTE was fundamentally boring, through low, swampy country for the most part, though the straight sections of the empty highway gave him a chance to blow the excess oil out of the Benz’s cylinders—he could get it to 121, but then it started to make some strange noises, and the road was rough enough that the truck was hopping around like a grasshopper on a griddle. Lucas was closing in on Baudette when Flowers called: “I’ve got the address, some satellite photos, and a search warrant. Supposedly an old farm gone to seed. Where are you?”

  “The nav system says I’m fifteen miles out,” Lucas said. “What’s this about a search warrant?”

  “The sheriff knows the place and the kid you’re looking for. Says he’s no-good white trash and probably heavily armed. I told him the situation and he took me over to a judge’s house and got us a search warrant. I didn’t see any reason to say no,” Virgil said. “If you’re fifteen miles out, you probably just passed the farm. We can either come that way—me and the sheriff’s deputy, with the warrant—or you can come on into town. I’m at a Holiday station.”

  “I need gas and something to eat. I’ll meet you there.”

  “Look for the giant walleye,” Flowers said.

  • • •

  LUCAS EASED OFF the accelerator as he came into town, eventually crossed a bridge, and simultaneously spotted the giant walleye, the Holiday station, and Virgil Flowers. Flowers was sitting on the hood of his 4Runner, in the Holiday parking lot, wearing a tan straw cowboy hat and eating an ice cream cone; his boat was hooked to the back of the truck. Seated next to him on the hood was the deputy, also licking an ice cream cone, and the first thing that Lucas noticed about her was that she was noticeable, and she was laughing at something Flowers had said.

  “Fuckin’ Flowers,” he muttered to himself.

  Lucas parked and got out of the truck, and Flowers introduced the deputy as Nancy Mahler. Mahler hopped down and shook his hand and said, “Virgie has been telling me all about you. I’m honored.”

  Lucas said, “Jesus, Virgil, what’d you tell her?” though he didn’t mind the attention.

  “About how you rescued that deputy last year,” she said. She had eyes the color of new-mown hay and blond hair cut close. “He said if you hadn’t kicked down the door and gone in there alone, she’d be dead now.”

  “Well, we don’t really know that,” Lucas said. But he clapped Flowers on the shoulder and said, “Good to see you, guy. Let me get something to eat and we’ll figure out what we’re doing.”

  • • •

  LUCAS GOT A suspicious-looking egg salad sandwich, a pack of Sno Balls, some strips of beef jerky, and a Diet Coke. They all got in his Benz, with Mahler peering over their shoulders from the backseat as they thumbed through the aerial photos Flowers had downloaded at the sheriff’s office.
/>   “The owner’s name is George Tillus, and the kid’s name is Chet, or Chester,” Flowers said. “Supposed to be a farm, but Tillus never farmed it. He always rented it out. Then, a few years ago, they quit farming altogether: don’t even rent it out anymore. He’s been on welfare, off and on, gets some medical aid, and that’s about it.”

  “Chet Tillus is a jerk, I can tell you that. We were glad to see the last of him. Likes to fight, at least, when he won’t lose—he’s a classic bully that way—and he’s been in trouble since he was a kid,” Mahler said. “All crappy stuff. Got caught doing a couple of small-time burglaries. One time, four or five years back, he broke into this guy’s house and stole a sackful of computer equipment and some other stuff, and the vic’s hat. The vic had a black cowboy hat, pretty expensive for a hat. Bought it in Denver. Chet, who’s got all the brains of an oyster, was wearing it around town. The vic sees him, called us, Chet told us he’d had the hat for years, and when we took it off his head, here was the vic’s name stamped on the hatband. Hadn’t even bothered to scrape it off.”

  “So we’re not talking about Einstein,” Flowers said.

  “We’re talking about a mean little jerk who, if you told him you were a cop, he’d spit on your shoe,” Mahler said. “The general feeling around the office was that sooner or later, he’d kill someone, or one of us would kill him. We were just waiting for it to happen. Then one day, he picks up and leaves town. This was maybe a year ago, and we haven’t seen or heard from him since.”

  “Well, you might have your murder,” Lucas said. He’d never in his life called a victim a “vic,” and it made him think that Mahler might have spent too much time looking at the TV.

  “Virgie told me about it,” Mahler said. “You think he’s back at the farm?”

  “Could be, if he thinks it’d be a good place to hide,” Lucas said. “What I’m really hoping is that he’s still running with Pilate and his gang, and we can get a cell phone number. If we can get a number for him, we can probably figure out where he is, and where the gang is.”