Gathering Prey Read online

  • • •

  SKYE DIDN’T CALL the next day, either, or the next.

  On the morning of the fourth day, the South Dakota highway patrol guy called and asked, “I threw away the note you gave me, but you were looking for a Henry Mark Fuller, correct?”

  “That’s my guy. You got him?”

  “A body came up in Sheridan County. The DCI’s got him, you need to talk to a guy named Steve Clemmens. The word I get is that the body has been identified as Fuller.”

  Lucas took a few seconds to digest that, and then asked, “How long has he been dead?”

  “I guess he looks like he’s been down for a week or so. They’ll be doing an autopsy today or tomorrow, crime scene is out there now. I heard that it was really rough, what they did to him.”

  Lucas got a number for Clemmens, called him, got him on his cell phone. Clemmens was in rural Butte County, north of Sturgis, up in some piney hills, looking at the crime scene. Lucas explained who he was and why he’d been looking for Fuller.

  “We need to talk to that Skye, if you can find her,” Clemmens said. “Doesn’t look like a domestic, though, no way. This wasn’t one guy cutting him up. This took at least two or three, that’s why we’re looking at the bikers, or a group of people. And if you can track down this Pilate . . .”

  Clemmens said Fuller’s body had been found by a couple of Indian kids who’d been out with .22s, shooting around the countryside. Whoever had buried Fuller had only gone down a couple of feet before they hit rock, and the body had been partly uncovered by coyotes.

  “What they did was, or what it looks like, is that they nailed him to a tree, and then took their time cutting him up. We got the tree, signs of blood on the bark, no weapon, we got a few tracks, but we got nothing definitive, what might be a pair of Nike athletic shoes, and a boot mark. There was a campfire right there, and fresh, we think it’s related, but no way to tell for sure. There was some partly burned trash in the fire, food wrappers, we’re processing those for fingerprints, but like I said, we’re not sure it’s related.”

  “When you say he was cut up, do you mean, dismembered?”

  “No. Slashed. Long cuts running all down his body. Looks like he was castrated, but we’re not sure about that, because that part of the body and the stomach area was worked over pretty good by the coyotes. His hands and arms were in good enough shape to take prints . . . that’s how we got the quick ID. He was arrested in Johnson City, Texas, for burglary, three years ago, fingerprinted. We got a hit in the first ten minutes. We can still see the spike holes in his wrists, below the heels of his hands.”

  “Pretty crude,” Lucas said. “Listen, there was a woman killed out in L.A. . . .”

  He told Clemmens about the Kitty Place murder. “I’m worried because both you and the L.A. guy used the word ‘slashed.’ I’d like to see the autopsy photos of the wounds, and have the L.A. homicide guys take a look.”

  “We’ll get them to you,” Clemmens said. “You’re the guy involved in that Black Hole case last year, right? The guy who got that female cop back?”

  “Yeah, that was me,” Lucas said.

  “Hell of a thing,” Clemmens said.

  • • •

  LUCAS CALLED HALL in L.A., told him about the find in South Dakota. “I’m going to hook you up with the homicide guys,” Hall said. “This is something.”

  An L.A. homicide detective named Rick Robinson called Lucas back a few minutes later and Lucas gave him the story. “They’re doing the autopsy later today. We should be able to get the raw digital photos right away—the South Dakota guy said he’d make it a priority. If you want to call him, I’ve got a number, he could send them directly to you.”

  “Need to see ’em,” Robinson said. “Sounds like the same thing somebody did to Kitty Place—long slashes across her body. She wasn’t crucified or anything, though.”

  After he got off the line with Robinson, Lucas called Letty to tell her what had happened. His daughter was not a typical teenager: she’d seen violent death, up close and personal; she could handle the news about Henry.

  Letty: “Why did somebody say they’d seen Henry up in Duluth? It sounds to me like they were setting her up. They’re afraid that she’ll talk about Henry. Dad, we’ve gotta get up there.”

  “I can go up there,” Lucas said. “You can stay here.”

  “Dad, I’m not going to mess with you—but you sort of need me,” Letty said. “I’ve met some of these people and I can talk to them when you’d just scare them. They don’t like people like you.”

  Lucas said, “If I put you on a bus home, you stay on the bus. I don’t want you running around the countryside—”

  “I’ll come home. I will. I’ll come home when you say so.”

  • • •

  THEY DROVE UP to Duluth that afternoon, in Lucas’s truck. Lucas called ahead, to a friend on the Duluth police force, and was told that they should check out Leif Erikson Park on the lake.

  Lucas got directions, and they rolled into town a few minutes before three o’clock, on a day that had been hot in the Cities. In Duluth, an east wind off Lake Superior had kept things cool. They found a meter on East Superior Street, cut through a parking lot, and took a footbridge into the park.

  A few dozen people were scattered around the grassy lakefront, throwing Frisbees, looking at the lake, or doing nothing at all. They didn’t see anybody who looked like a traveler, but they did see a uniformed cop, and they went that way, and Lucas pulled out his ID.

  “I never heard them called travelers, but we got some,” the cop said. He waved off to the north. “They got a spot up there, I don’t know, maybe ten minutes up the Lakewalk. There’s a little beach up there. They sit around under the trees talking, mostly. Might smoke a little dope.”

  Lucas thanked him and they went that way. Lucas had dressed down for the trip, in jeans and a golf shirt and a light nylon jacket to cover the gun, but still, Letty said, he looked like a cop.

  “And you look like a snotty college kid,” Lucas said.

  “Do not.”

  “Where’d those jeans come from? Neiman Marcus? I think I saw some Neiman Marcus on your Amex.”

  “Did not.”

  “Neiman fuckin’ Marcus. La-de-fuckin’-da.”

  “Shut up.”

  • • •

  A HALF A DOZEN TRAVELERS were sitting in a lakeside copse. Two benches looked out over the lake toward the Wisconsin shore, where a green-and-rust-colored freighter was maneuvering in toward the docks. A couple of the travelers were smoking cigarettes—Lucas couldn’t smell any weed—and two of them had tough-looking, medium-sized dogs that showed pit bull in the eyes.

  They really didn’t look like street people, Lucas thought, although they obviously lived outdoors. They had big functional packs, wide-brimmed hats, wore heavy hiking boots, and a couple of them had six-foot-long walking sticks. Their ages ranged from the late teens to the mid-forties. Two were women, four were men. What they really looked like, he thought, were dusty long-distance walkers.

  Which they were.

  They all stirred restlessly when Lucas and Letty cut toward them, like leaves rippling in a light wind. Town people tended to stay away, unless they were cops, and the big guy looked like a cop.

  When they came up, Lucas said, “We need to talk to you guys. I’m a state police officer and this is my daughter. We’re looking for a friend of ours, a traveler, who might be in serious trouble.”

  One of the men, probably in his thirties, sounded skeptical: “Well, what’s up, doc?”

  Lucas looked at Letty, and she took it: “We have a friend named Skye. I talked to her four days ago down in St. Paul—we met in San Francisco in June, when she was going through. She was traveling with a guy named Henry Mark Fuller, from Texas. They were out in Sturgis at the motorcycle rally, and Henry disappeared. Somebody—she said another traveler—told her that he’d seen Henry here in Duluth, and she came up here to find him. But Henry was mur
dered near Sturgis. They just dug up his body. We’re worried that the people who killed Henry might try to hurt Skye. They know her, she doesn’t like them, and they might try to shut her up about Henry.”

  Another stir rippled through the group; a man said, “Shit, somebody killed Henry?” and one of the women said, “We know Skye. We knew Henry. I haven’t seen them since we were in Eugene, but we were going to meet up in Hayward, Wisconsin, next weekend. There’s a Juggalo Gathering. We’re all going to that.”

  Lucas said, “You’re Juggalos?”

  One of the men said, “I am, these guys are just freeloaders—”

  “Hey!” said the woman. “This isn’t funny.”

  Lucas: “You didn’t see her here?”

  They all shook their heads: “We just got here yesterday. We were going to hang around until we left for Hayward.”

  One of the men said, “You know, she could have gone up to Two Harbors. I ran into Ranger yesterday when I was coming in. He said a bunch of guys were going up there. There’s a county fair going on, it’s supposed to be pretty good, you can get a job.”

  “Bet she went there with them,” the woman said. “She knows Ranger, for sure, and he’s a safe guy.”

  They had no other ideas, but one of the men asked, “Who do you think killed Henry?”

  Lucas said, “We don’t know anything for sure, but there’s this guy who travels in a caravan . . .” He told them what he knew about Pilate and his group—none of them knew the name—then ripped a page from his notebook, wrote his cell phone number on it, and said, “Could I give my number to somebody? If you see her? Or if you see Pilate?”

  A couple of the men shrugged, and Lucas asked, “How about if I wrap it in a fifty?”

  “Shouldn’t take money for trying to help Skye,” the woman said. “Give me the number. If I see her or hear from her, or about her, I’ll call you.”

  “You can get phones at bus stations . . .” Letty began.

  The woman said, “My mom gave me a cell phone. I don’t call anybody but her, but I got it, and I keep it charged up.”

  “Good,” Lucas said. “Listen, the people who killed Henry . . . they are bad people. They might be killing people for the fun of it. Travelers are natural targets. Nobody knows where you’re at, and if you don’t show up, nobody worries, because they figure you’re out traveling. Take care, until we figure out what’s going on here.”

  They all nodded and one of the men said, “We’ll tell other people we know. If we get enough of us, we ought to be able to spot this guy.”

  “Call us, but don’t mess with him,” Lucas said. “You could be dealing with the worst kind of crazy.”

  • • •

  LUCAS LOOKED AT his watch as they walked away, and said, “Two Harbors is only a half hour from here. Maybe we can catch her there.”

  On the way north, Letty asked, “Have you run into any Juggalos?”

  “I prefer Aerosmith.”

  “So you know who they are?”

  “Sure. Followers of the Insane Clown Posse,” Lucas said. “Most of the Juggalos are okay—unusual, even strange, but okay. They have meetings around the country that they call Gatherings. The feds say some Juggalos have formed themselves into a criminal gang. I don’t know about those.”

  “I didn’t know the gang part. I’ll look them up,” she said, taking out her iPad.

  • • •

  AT TWO HARBORS, they found three travelers, including the one called Ranger, working with a county fair cleanup crew. Ranger said, “Yeah, I seen her down in Duluth yesterday. She asked me about Henry. Nobody had seen him and she was talking about going back to the Black Hills. She thinks he might be sitting on a bench at their backup spot.”

  Lucas told them about Henry. They were visibly shocked, but when he told them about Pilate, Ranger said, “Hey, that guy was in Duluth. I seen that guy. They were peddlin’ puss . . .” His eyes clicked over to Letty: “No offense . . .”

  She shook her head.

  “. . . out of that RV, up on the hill by the big mall. Tony and me—”

  “Who’s Tony?” Lucas asked.

  “Just . . . Tony. He’s one of us guys. We were walking through there, and this guy seen us, and said we could get some puss for seventy-five dollars. They were workin’ it out of an RV. We didn’t have seventy-five dollars, and if we did, I wouldn’t have spent it on that skanky chick he had. I said no, and we kept on walking. But it was like he knew who we were. I mean, travelers.”

  “Where’s Tony now?”

  Ranger shrugged. “He was planning to go over to Hayward for the Juggalo Gathering. If he got some money, he could’ve gone back to the mall. He’s kind of a puss hound.”

  “You think these women could have baited Henry in?” Lucas asked.

  Ranger shook his head. “No, Henry was a nice guy, but he was kinda gay.”

  “Gay?”

  “Yeah. He didn’t really do nothin’ about it, but we all knew,” Ranger said. “You know, he was like from Texas, cowboy boots and jeans, but sooner or later, he was going to find out . . .”

  Letty looked at Lucas and said, “Skye kind of hinted at it when I was talking to them in San Francisco. I didn’t pick up on it, though.”

  Lucas asked Ranger, “You think they might’ve run into Skye?”

  “I can’t tell you that,” he said. “She was dragging around town, looking in all the places that we hang out. We do go up to that mall, sometimes, and she probably would have gone up there, sooner or later.”

  “This is not good,” Letty said to Lucas.

  “If you guys run into Skye, or Tony, or see Pilate, you call me.” He gave them his number, written on a page, and this time, he did wrap a fifty around it. “Please, don’t let it go.”

  • • •

  ON THE WAY BACK to Duluth, Lucas took a call from Robinson, the L.A. homicide cop. He asked, “Did you see the autopsy photos?”

  “No, I’ve been on the road,” Lucas said.

  “Okay. Well, we’ve got them, and we got a nine-alarm fire here. The cuts are the same. Same pattern on this kid, as they were with Kitty Place. Big knife, slashes start up around the shoulder, and then go all the way down the body in one long slash. Right across the face, too. It might not stand up if they got a good defense attorney, but I personally think it’s about ninety-nine percent that it’s the same killer. You got a walking nightmare on your hands, my friend.”

  “Did they say if the kid was raped?”

  “That, I don’t know,” Robinson said. “All I got were the pictures. They don’t have an autopsy report yet.”

  “I’ll call them, get reports for both of us.”

  “You chasing this guy?” Robinson asked.

  “Looking for him.”

  “Send him to South Dakota if you get him. They got the death penalty. Unlike us, they use it.”

  Pilate and the disciples got out of South Dakota in a hurry, traveling in an eight-vehicle caravan spaced out over a mile or two, twelve men, seven women, leaving Sturgis and the motorcycle rally in the dust.

  So far, the Great Northern Expedition had been a marginal success. They’d spent two weeks in San Francisco, buying dope, then headed east to Reno, where they peddled the weed to tourists. They ran into some Colorado competition there, but it wasn’t too bad, because the Colorado dope was fairly janky, plus, it had tax paid on it, so it couldn’t compete on price.

  Pilate tried to use the money from the weed to step up to cocaine, but good clean coke was hard to find and they wound up with a small bag of coke and a fat bag of meth. They also lost two crew members, Biggie and Darrell, who wandered away one day and never came back.

  From there, they had taken I-15 north all the way to Butte, Montana, mostly because Pilate didn’t like to drive across mountains if he didn’t have to. From Butte, taking their time, they’d gone to Dickinson, North Dakota, where they unloaded most of the meth, for cash, to be sold to the oil field workers, and then they turned sout
h to Sturgis, to catch the motorcycle rally.

  The meth sale in Dickinson had gone well, and they got to Sturgis with more than twenty thousand in cash and no dope at all. Pilate spent almost half the cash buying cocaine and then they’d gone through that. Then they’d gone camping up in the hills, had their fun with Henry, and then they got the fuck out of South Dakota.

  • • •

  “THIS IS SURE AS HELL the long way around,” Kristen said, looking out at the arrow-straight I-90.

  Pilate said, “Well, we couldn’t go back through North Dakota. That cop was on us like Holy on the Pope.”

  “Could have pulled the trigger on him,” Kristen said.

  “And spend the rest of your life in a hole somewhere,” Pilate said. “Those cops are wired for sound and video. We wouldn’t have had a chance. Lucky you kept your fuckin’ mouth shut.”

  They’d been hassled by a North Dakota highway patrolman. He’d been called after an argument about a restaurant bill. They hadn’t been moving at the time, so he hadn’t been able to give them a ticket, and he was late for dinner, but told them if he saw them driving in his state, they were going to jail. He said, “I’ll get a drug dog on your ass, lickety-split. We don’t care for your sort in North Dakota.”

  The cop had a good eye. At that point, they’d still had a pound of meth stashed in the RV, and if the cop had pushed a search, he would have gotten both the dope and the money.

  “This is not our territory, and we gotta remember that,” Pilate told his disciples, as they crossed the line into South Dakota, and set up camp. “We don’t look like these people up here, and they don’t like people who look like us. We gotta be careful when we’re hauling dope. We gotta keep the dope and the money in different vehicles.”

  “Hate to be pushed by those fuckers,” Kristen said. “Fuckin’ cops. We oughta kill one sometime.”

  “We will,” Pilate said.

  • • •

  AS IT TURNED OUT, South Dakota had been as bad as North Dakota. Sturgis had almost as many cops as it did bikers, although they tried to stay out of sight. Then they got into the coke, and when they left Sturgis, they had only a little more than four thousand dollars. Pilate had another connection in Wisconsin, hooked into him through a guy they knew in L.A. He could deliver wholesale coke, which they could have retailed for enough to get them back to the West Coast; except that they’d blown the money for the coke back in Sturgis.