Prey 25 - Gathering Prey Read online

  Weather said, “Letty, I’m begging you. Don’t hang out with Skye. Let her do her own thing. You’d stick out like a sore thumb, and the word would get around that you’re affluent, and you could get in pretty deep trouble—even without Pilate.”

  “I’d be okay if I had a carry permit . . .” Lucas opened his mouth, maybe to scream, but she grinned and said, “Just messing with you, Dad.”

  • • •

  AFTER DINNER, Letty called the Holiday Inn, Skye’s room, but she wasn’t in. She was in at eight o’clock, and said she’d had no luck talking to other travelers in St. Paul. Letty asked about the Jesus tattoo on Pilate’s shoulder and Skye said that she knew Pilate had some ink, but not the specifics. Otherwise, the description of the man in Quartzsite fit the man she knew.

  When Lucas told Skye that the guy’s name was Pilate, not Pilot, she said, “I don’t think that’s right, Mr. Davenport. He didn’t tell people his name was Pilate, he said, ‘The Pilot,’ like a title, not like a name.”

  “All right. I’ll keep looking under both names. You keep asking around,” Lucas said. “We’ll either find him, or Henry. Okay?”

  “I hope,” she said, but Lucas heard the doubt in her voice.

  For a father and daughter who had no blood relationship, Lucas and Letty not only looked alike—dark hair, blue eyes, athletic—but behaved alike, especially when it came to sleep. Both could stay up all night, neither liked to get up early. At ten-thirty, Lucas was up and had picked out a suit, was wearing the slacks and a T-shirt and was considering the dress shirt possibilities, when Letty knocked on the door to the bedroom suite.

  “Yeah, come on in,” Lucas called from the dressing room.

  Letty came in holding her phone. “I didn’t hear the phone go off, but Skye left a message. She said that early this morning she went out to Swede Hollow and met a guy who said that Henry is up in Duluth, with some other travelers,” Letty said. “She said she was going to catch a bus and go there. I called back to the hotel, but they said she’d checked out. I called the bus station, and they said a bus to Duluth left a half hour ago. She doesn’t have a cell phone.”

  “Do not go to Duluth,” Lucas said.

  “I’m not going to. I don’t expect you to, either, but it was . . . I don’t know. An anticlimax. I thought we might be getting somewhere yesterday, and now she’s gone.”

  “She’s a traveler,” Lucas said. “I suspect she’ll be back in touch.” He slipped a shirt off a hanger, held it next to the suit jacket he’d be wearing, said, “Good,” and put it on and started buttoning it up.

  “In case you’re not getting this, I’m a little concerned,” Letty said.

  “So am I—but I’m not freaking out,” Lucas said. “I’ve still got some lines out on this Pilate character and we’ll see what we see. When she finds Henry, she’ll call back and we’ll see what she has to say then.”

  “All right. Well, I’ve got things to do today. I’m hooking up with Carey and Jeff, we’re going over to the U to hang out.”

  “Don’t worry too much,” Lucas said. He held up a tie: “What do you think?”

  “I would never advise you on ties, any more than Mom would,” Letty said. “You’re better at it than we are.”

  “That’s true,” Lucas said. He looked in his tie drawer, then settled on his original choice. “I’ll call if anything comes in on Henry. Or on Pilate.”

  • • •

  LETTY LEFT, and Lucas stood in front of the mirror to tie his necktie. As he did it, he mused on what he’d almost said to her. He’d almost said, “Take your phone with you.” Of course she’d take her phone with her. She was never more than fifteen feet from it. She’d eventually have it epoxied to the palm of her hand.

  Not necessarily a bad thing, he thought. Women had been on the verge of taking over the world—the Western world, anyway. Then some sexist pig in Silicon Valley invented the cell phone and women took a sidetrack on which all four billion of them would soon be happily talking to each other twenty-four hours a day, getting nothing else done, and Men Would Be Back.

  He whistled a few bars from Lyle Lovett’s “Don’t Touch My Hat,” and checked himself in the mirror. He looked terrific. Not that any women would notice: they’d be too busy talking to each other on their fucking cell phones.

  • • •

  WHEN LUCAS GOT TO the office, a few minutes after eleven o’clock, he had a voice mail from the South Dakota cop: they’d been through a full shift cycle with the patrol, all officers had been queried about Pilate’s caravan, and there’d been no responses. “If I hear anything, I’ll call you.”

  He also had an e-mail note from the L.A. cop, Lewis Hall: “Call me.”

  The e-mail had come in at ten, eight o’clock L.A. time, so Hall had been up early. Lucas called him back.

  “Listen, I talked to some of the rough trade down in Venice last night, and your boy Pilate could be a problem,” Hall said. “I may even owe you. I talked to a guy who’s been around the beach for twenty years, runs a massage place. He says there was a rumor that Pilate knows about the Kitty Place murder. I don’t know if you heard about that . . .”

  “I heard something, I don’t know the details,” Lucas said.

  “Kitty was an entertainer . . . I don’t know what you’d say, not a hooker, or anything, she’d get small parts in movies, she had lines, now and then, she had a SAG card and she was doing some stand-up work. She had an apartment down on Main Street in Santa Monica.”

  “What’s a SAG card?”

  “She was in the Screen Actors Guild. Sort of a big deal out here, getting a card. Means you’re recognized as a human being. Anyway, she was putting that kind of life together. Then one day about a year ago, she turned up dead. Found her floating in the water off Marina Del Rey. She’d been slashed to pieces: tortured with a knife, raped. Pretty goddamn awful, even for L.A.”

  “DNA?”

  “No. She’d been in the water for a while, so we never got good DNA, and we never got a whiff of who might’ve done it. No current boyfriend. Her former boyfriend seemed like a decent guy and he had a solid alibi, he was playing trumpet up in Vegas all through that period. I was talking to my boy Ruben last night and he mentioned that some time, some fairly long time, after the body came up, he heard that some people thought she might’ve been tied up with this Pilate. I talked to the homicide guys this morning, and nobody had ever mentioned Pilate to them.”

  “Does Ruben know where Pilate used to hang? Or who he’d hang with?” Lucas asked. “If I could get car tags, we could probably run him down. He was supposedly in Sturgis, South Dakota, at the biker rally last week, probably heading east. The trouble is, we don’t have any solid ID, no solid photo, no real history, nothing we can use to get our hands on him. He claims he’s been in the movies. You think he’d have a SAG card?”

  “I could check. I got the impression from Ruben . . . and I’m not sure how much Ruben really knows, he tends to talk bigger than he is . . . but I got the impression that Pilate’s a street guy. Moves around a lot, lives here and there, and sometimes out of his car, sells a little weed. Ruben thinks he had a girlfriend named K—like the letter K—and she might still be around. I’ll try to run her down today.”

  “I’d appreciate anything you could get me,” Lucas said.

  “Not just for you, anymore. Kitty Place was a very pretty blonde, the vulnerable-looking kind, and a really nice girl. When she got all slashed up, the shit hit the media fan around here. The homicide guys want me to push it—they’d give their left nuts for a break. A good break wouldn’t do me any harm, either.”

  “All right. Call me if you hear anything, and if I get anything, I’ll call you.”

  “Talk to ya,” Hall said.

  • • •

  DEL CAPSLOCK LIMPED IN the door, carrying his cane. Lucas said, “Good thing you got that cane to hold you up.”

  “It’s become a . . . shit, I was about to say ‘crutch.’” He sat down and
said, “I talked to Honey Potts. She’s interested. I talked to Daisy Jones. She’s interested, too. I told Honey that we’d fix up a letter saying that we wouldn’t prosecute if she changed her story, and remembered something different, as long as she didn’t perjure herself.”

  “Again,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah, again. Jenkins was doing his cynical-guy act, told her that if she really thought Merion was going to share the take with her, she was crazy. She’d only get a cut if he was acquitted, and once he was acquitted, he couldn’t be tried again. Then he’d have no reason to pay her off. Jenkins asked her, does she really want to hang out with a guy who murdered his wife by beating her to death? He suggested that kind of thing tends to become a habit.”

  “She bought it?”

  “I’m not sure, but Daisy is going to talk to her tonight, see if she’ll do an interview.” Daisy Jones was a longtime reporter for WCCO television, known for her confessional talks with Twin Cities celebrities who’d managed to step on their dicks.

  Lucas said, “Worth a shot.”

  “Hey, if she says she was banging Merion after he married Gloria . . . I think we’re better than fifty-fifty.”

  “Maybe, but it’d be nice to get one more thing,” Lucas said. “Anything on Cory?”

  “As a matter of fact, there is.” Del stood and put two hands against the wall and stretched his bad leg, bouncing on it. He’d been shot up by elderly gunrunners the year before, and had gone through four operations, trying to get things straight. He now had so much metal in his pelvis that he carried a TSA Notification Card just to get on an airplane. Despite the lingering disability, he’d gone back to full-time in April. He sat back down again.

  “I found Brett Givens working as a sign man for a real estate dealership over in Edina,” he said. “He drives a pickup, goes around putting up signs, or taking them down.”

  Lucas knew Givens: “Better than working at the chop shop.”

  “Yeah. Anyway, he says Cory is definitely back, because he saw him up in Cambridge last week, at Kenyon’s. He said Cory didn’t see him, because he ducked out—I think he was afraid that Cory might try to talk him into something. He likes the sign job.”

  “Givens didn’t know where Cory’s living?”

  “No. But he said there were random people in the bar who seemed to know Cory, like he might be a regular. He said Cory doesn’t look especially prosperous, so he might still have the safe. I thought I’d go up this afternoon, have a few beers.”

  “All right. Take care. Jenkins and Shrake are out of pocket. If you need backup, call me, and I’ll either come up or get Jon to send somebody.”

  Dale Cory was believed to be in possession of a safe that contained two million dollars in diamond jewelry, at wholesale prices, taken from a jewelry store in St. Paul on the night of New Year’s Day.

  The store’s owner had been confident in the safety of his jewelry, because the safe he kept it in was made of hardened steel, weighed as much as a Hummer, and was kept in a room made of concrete block. He hadn’t counted on somebody backing a wrecker through the front wall of the store and the concrete block wall, throwing a cinch-chain around the safe, lifting it straight up, and then hauling butt.

  He hadn’t counted on it because the idea seemed so goddamn stupid.

  The wrecker had been stolen and was found behind a supermarket eight blocks from the jewelry store, where the cops also found in the fresh snow the tread marks from an eighteen-wheeler. Where it went, they didn’t know, but by the end of the week, there were rumors that tied Cory to the job. A couple of weeks later, there were also rumors that Cory couldn’t get the safe open, which made him something of a laughingstock among Twin Cities lowlifes.

  The jeweler was not laughing. His safe had been so good that his insurance-loss ceiling was lower than it should have been. Much lower. He got a third of the wholesale price back from Chubb, and that was it.

  He called Lucas once a week to ask about his safe.

  • • •

  DEL TOOK OFF, and Lucas started working through the rest of the caseload. A lot of it was more a matter of coordination than investigation, keeping the various suburban police departments up-to-date on who was doing what, and who was looking for whom. Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Bloomington could generally take care of themselves, and had their own liaisons.

  Lucas’s current priorities included two armed robbers, one who specialized in credit union branches, and another who scouted out, and then hit, businessmen who were taking money home on Sunday nights, after business hours, when they couldn’t run it out to a bank during the day.

  The credit union guy was careful, and while he claimed to be armed, he never showed a gun. Lucas thought they’d probably get him, if he didn’t move out of town, and wasn’t overly worried that he’d shoot someone: he seemed too careful.

  The other guy, he thought, would eventually kill someone. He was almost certainly an ex-con, and didn’t carry a gun. Instead, he carried a pipe. He was a big guy, dealing with businessmen who so far had all been elderly. He used the pipe for intimidation. One of the old guys had fought him, and had gotten an arm broken for his trouble. Sooner or later, Lucas thought, the thief would smack somebody in the head, and then they’d be looking for a killer . . . if the cops didn’t get him first.

  All of that was important; and it bored him.

  So did the U.S. Secret Service. Somebody in town was passing exceptional copies of fifty- and one-hundred-dollar bills, and there was some evidence that the currency was coming in from Lebanon. The Secret Service had three agents poking around, and they generally considered the BCA to be their assistants in the matter. Sort of like secretaries, or maybe receptionists. Or maybe golden retrievers.

  Lucas had been the latest designated BCA liaison, and he’d eventually handled the Secret Service information requests, which always arrived by e-mail, by referring them to his shared secretary, who was told to do the best she could. Her best sometimes involved the wastebasket.

  Jenkins called: “Shrake and I hooked up for a beer, and we got to thinking.”

  “Uh-oh, that’s not recommended.”

  “I know, we try to avoid it when we can. But, we’d like to stop by later and talk.”

  “Come ahead, I’m mostly sitting on my thumb.”

  • • •

  LETTY CALLED HIM late in the day. She was back home, and hadn’t heard from Skye. Lucas hadn’t heard from Hall, in L.A., and had gotten busy with a flurry of phone calls when another credit union went down—turned out not to be the guy he was looking for—and never called Hall back.

  Letty was unhappy with the lack of movement, but Lucas asked, “What should we do? We’re not getting anything. I suspect that Skye and Henry have hooked up, and moved on.”

  “She should have called,” Letty said.

  Lucas shrugged, though there was nobody around to see it: “She’s a traveler. Like you said, she doesn’t have a cell.”

  • • •

  SHRAKE AND JENKINS CAME IN. Jenkins did the talking. “One of the problems with the Merion case is that we could never produce the club.”

  “Probably burned it,” Lucas said.

  “Probably not. Takes too long, and he was on a tight schedule. We know he didn’t burn it in the home fireplace, because crime scene checked it, did samples, and said the last fire was a long time ago. And Merion had to drive like hell to get up to his cabin before Gloria’s daughter came home and found the body. The fireplace at the cabin was gas, not wood, so he didn’t burn it there.”

  “So . . .”

  “What we’re thinking is, he whacked Gloria in the bathroom, threw her down the stairs, pinched off her nose and mouth, wiped up the bathroom floor with that Foaming Bubbles stuff, jumped in his car and took off.”

  “Nobody saw him,” Lucas said.

  “Because Sunfish Lake is darker than the black hole of Calcutta, and he’s up on that ridge. He looks out the window, to make sure nobody is coming down that
little road, then he jumps in the car and takes off,” Jenkins said. “Once he’s out of the house, who’s going to see him, or know who’s in the car? Anyway, he goes up to the cabin, the club is in his trunk. Carefully wrapped in something, because he’s no dummy. He gets up there, knowing that the daughter could, at that point, get home anytime and find the body. When that happens, he’s going to have to drive back to Sunfish Lake right now, like a grieving husband should. So he gets to the cabin, still got the club, has to get rid of it. Can’t burn it, because it would take too long. It’s dark, he goes out into the woods with a shovel . . . some obscure spot, buries it. We’re thinking, probably in that vacant side lot. Not the front lawn, not between the cabin and the road, but in that empty lot, or maybe in the woods across the road. Doesn’t need a deep pit, the club’s only two inches in diameter. Carefully rakes some leaves over it . . . and it’s gone.”

  “Or maybe he just threw it in a ditch on the way up,” Lucas said.

  “He’s more careful than that. Throw it in a ditch, it could be found,” Jenkins said. “It’s pretty distinctive and it’d have some blood on it.”

  “So, what you want to do is . . . ?”

  “We don’t think he would have gone way deep in the woods, because he’d want to hear the phone ring. Remember, the daughter called him on the cabin phone, and then the cops called him on his cell, and they both put him up there . . . So we’re thinking, we should go up there and mark out the likely spots, and walk it inch by inch.”

  Lucas thought about it and said, “Say, aren’t there a lot of golf courses around Cross Lake?”

  “Lucas, for Christ’s sakes, we’re trying to help out here,” Jenkins said.

  “What about the computer chips?” Lucas asked Shrake.

  “Those guys are long gone. We got the word out, so people are watching for them . . . but we don’t think they’ll pop up here again. Not for a while, anyway, and the Merion trial is coming up.”