Gathering Prey (17 page)

Laurent asked, “Now what?”

“We know that they had an RV when they left Wisconsin. Let’s kinda cruise those. We’re looking for a tribe of people, who hang together. Probably look a little more California than the locals. The Pilate guy dressed as a priest at the Wisconsin Gathering. As I understand it, the RV was at the center of a cluster of cars in Wisconsin.”

They cruised the RVs and found no cluster of cars, or anyone dressed as a priest. In fact, they found only a few people in Juggalo makeup: most of the people were involved in setting up. They’d just taken a look at the last of the RVs when Lucas spotted a green John Deere utility cart bouncing down the field with the fat man in the back.

Lucas headed them off, flagged them down. “You remember me?” he asked the fat guy.

The fat guy pointed a finger-pistol at him and said, “The cop from Minneapolis with the daughter. How is she?”

“Got a big black eye and some cracked ribs. Listen—it’s Randy, right?—we’re looking for those guys who killed the girl down in Wisconsin. You see anyone like them?”

“Not yet—I’ve been too busy setting up. Give me your cell phone, and if they come in, I’ll call you.”

“We especially want the guy who dressed like a priest,” Lucas said, as he scribbled the cell number on the back of a business card.

“I will do that,” the fat man said.

•   •   •

AFTER A LAST WALK-THROUGH,
Lucas and Laurent left the park. “You think they’ll still show up?”

“Don’t know,” Lucas said. “We’ll catch up with them somewhere, but it’d be nice if we could take them down right now. I’ll tell you, Rome, the ideal thing would be to bust a bunch of them, and get one to turn.”

“Did anyone turn in the Charlie Manson bunch?”

“Yeah. One woman, big-time. And a few other people who knew about Manson, but weren’t part of the gang. These guys are not quite the same thing. They’re a little more careful, even if they’re not a lot smarter. But from what the L.A. cops tell me, they’re off in the same direction.”

“Oh, boy.” Laurent scrubbed at his upper lip with a knuckle. “Let me call some folks, my reserve deputies. They’ll help. Why don’t we get together at my place, tonight, see what we can figure out. You know, scenarios.”

“Why the reserves?”

“Because they’re all smart guys,” Laurent said. “I think we need smart guys for this.”

•   •   •

LUCAS GOT THE LAST ROOM
at the Holiday Inn Express, which turned out to be a handicapped room. That was fine, because it had a better shower than the standard rooms and apparently there were no handicapped people who really needed it. He got cleaned up, and took a phone call from Del about the guy who stole the safe full of diamonds.

“I found Cory.”

“Where is he?” He was looking out a window, at cold, steel-gray waves marching across Lake Michigan.

“In a house out in the sticks west of Wyoming, backing up to Carlos Avery. Since that’s public land, I snuck up on his place, from the back, with a pair of binoculars. Never saw him, but guess what: there’re two standard oxygen tanks lying on the back porch. I think he’s running an oxyacetylene torch in the garage, trying to cut the safe open. Since he technically became a fugitive when he stopped talking to his PO, we don’t even need a search warrant.”

“Goddamnit. I’m over in the UP,” Lucas said. “You’re gonna have to talk to Jon, organize a raid on the place.”

After a long silence, Del said, “I’m not sure that’s a good idea, Lucas.”

“We can’t wait, Del. It might already be too late,” Lucas said. “If he’s cutting that safe open, he could get through it anytime, and once he does, the diamonds are gone.”

“Yeah, but . . .”

“What?”

“Sands is really pissed at you for going up to the UP and at Flowers for dumping that state senator’s investigation,” Del said. “He called Flowers and jacked him up, and Flowers apparently told him to suck on it. What I’m saying is, this is a fairly high-profile case and you guys could use the credit for busting it. If we get Jon involved . . . I mean, he’s not a bad guy, but if he sees a commendation coming down the road, he’d be the first guy to jump in front of it.”

Lucas laughed: “You really think I need to blow Sands?”

“No. He’s got his own political problems. What I’m saying is,
Davenport
could use some . . . some . . . image-building. Flowers will be okay: everybody loves Virgil. But you’ve got a U.S. senator who hates you, you’ve got a big newspaper that’d fuck you any way they could . . .”

“Governor sort of likes my ass.”

“Yes, he does. That’s why you’re still working here,” Del said. “But he’s gone in a year and Rose Marie goes with him, and then you’re out there naked. So . . .”

“Del, I appreciate what you’re saying—but fuck it. I don’t care much about the credit,” Lucas said. “Talk to Jon. He can have Jenkins and Shrake help, if you can hit Cory tonight, but tomorrow, Jenkins and Shrake might be out-of-pocket on another thing. If Jon gets you and Jenkins and Shrake to go on the raid, then everybody will know it’s our group who took Cory.”

Another silence, then Del said, “This feels bad to me.”

“Do it, okay? I’ve got a real headache over here. So just do it.”

“I’ll try to get Jon to do it tonight, and I’ll call Jenkins and Shrake,” Del said. “Goddamnit, man . . .”

“Yeah, I know, Del. Call me when it’s done.”

•   •   •

LUCAS HAD WORN
tan slacks, a Façonnable shirt, and a blue knit sport jacket on his drive over to the UP, an effort to look somewhat official when meeting out-of-state cops. Having checked out Laurent, he decided that wasn’t necessary, and changed into jeans, a pullover shirt, and a light leather jacket that hung down over his .45.

Laurent had given Lucas directions to his house and Lucas arrived a couple of minutes after seven o’clock, as a pizza truck was pulling away from the curb. Laurent lived in a fifties ranch house, with an add-on three-car garage at one end. Two guys in casual dress were standing outside Laurent’s side door, drinking beer from bottles, and when Lucas got out of the Benz, one of them said, “Must be the guy,” and the other called, “Wish I was a Minnesota cop, get a Benz like that.”

“I was too tall for the sports cars,” Lucas said. He came up and one of the men, a short bald guy, stuck out his hand and said, “Jim Bennett,” and the other said, “Doug Sellers.” They shook hands and Sellers said, “Rome is down the basement, probably suckin’ down those pizzas already.”

Sellers ran a hardware store, he said, and Bennett ran the post office.

Lucas followed them through the door and down to the basement, which had been converted into a recreation room. Along one wall were a number of photos, Laurent on deployment with the army, most of the photos showing him with camo’d-up guys with M-4s.

Laurent, as Bennett and Sellers had suggested, was loading up a plate with pizza from three boxes sitting on a Ping-Pong table. Three other men were sitting on a couple of couches and a La-Z-Boy facing a TV, and were eating or drinking beer.

Laurent saw Lucas and the others come down the stairs, and said, “Beer and Pepsi in the fridge, pepperoni and mushroom pizza. Come on over and meet the guys.”

Lucas shook hands with Barney Peters, a lawyer; Rick Barnes, who ran a Subway store; and Jerry Frisell, a high school teacher and coach. The guys turned out to be friends of Laurent. All of them were military veterans, all of them had been deployed in Iraq and were familiar with weapons, but only two, plus Laurent, had seen any combat. Another member of the group had gone south across the bridge to a family affair, and couldn’t come.

“This is my posse,” Laurent said. “They’re all deputized, they’ve all taken law enforcement courses, they’ve all qualified with handguns. We don’t want any shoot-outs, but I thought we could put them in the Gathering, in plainclothes, walking the place, looking for this Pilate guy. The main thing being . . . they don’t look like cops. You and I do.”

Lucas looked at the group and said, “Guys, I appreciate it, but are you sure you want to do this? Pilate is major trouble. He’s dangerous, almost certainly a psycho.”

Peters peered at Lucas through thick glasses and said, “We know we’re not exactly combat troops anymore, but that’s the point, isn’t it? If somebody has to go after Pilate mano a mano, that would be you or Rome. We’re sort of . . . pointer dogs.”

Laurent said, “One of the perennial problems with the Gathering is the trash that gets thrown around. We thought we could put one of the guys in there with paper pickup sticks, you know, those things with nails on the end, and some bags. A garbageman. Nobody’ll look at him twice. You and I, they’ll make us as cops, if they see us . . . but they won’t make these guys. The park is close enough to town that we’ll have cell service, so we can stay in touch.”

“Let’s talk about it,” Lucas said.

•   •   •

THEY DID THAT,
and Lucas felt himself nodding. They were serious guys: smart and reasonably tough. They agreed that they wouldn’t initiate any action, even if they saw Pilate. They would carry guns: they all had concealed carry permits and Laurent had set up a combat shooting course at a local landfill.

“When we get tired of punching paper, we go after the rats,” Sellers said. “Rats are hard to hit with a pistol, but we do it.”

“Sometimes, anyway,” Frisell amended.

“We don’t want anybody shooting anybody, if we can avoid it,” Lucas said. “What we want is to spot these guys and drop a net on them.”

“We all agree on that,” Laurent said. “But we’ve got to work with what we’ve got and this is what we’ve got. My regular deputies—two of them, anyway—will be on duty at the park just as a regular thing. They’ll know what’s going on, so we’ll have four full-time cops, including you and me, right there. The posse will purely be for recon and backup.”

Lucas said, “Well . . . let’s get another beer.”

•   •   •

WHEN LUCAS LEFT,
he felt that they had a plan: his biggest worry was that one of the part-timers would get hurt if there was a confrontation. They weren’t worried, though, and Laurent was confident that they could handle it. They agreed to rendezvous at Laurent’s house at nine o’clock the next morning, for a last talk, and then go on out to the park.

Back at the motel, Lucas got on the phone and talked to Letty and then to Weather, who said that Letty was doing all right, but getting cranky about it. “I don’t think she’s sat in one place longer than an hour in her whole life—those cracked ribs are getting her down. It’s gonna be a few more days before even the ibuprofen helps.”

“Every once in a while, without being a jerk about it, remind her of what can happen if you rush in on something without thinking. If she’d handled this better, she wouldn’t have gotten hurt, and the entire Pilate crew might be in jail. Instead of getting in Pilate’s face, she might have gone around their camp and written down all the numbers of the car tags—”

“Lucas, that would be mean.”

“And the experience, and the results, and the after-action analysis might just save her life sometime. Our little sweetie thinks she might want to become a cop, or an intelligence agent, or something. Something exciting. The thing is, if you really want to do something exciting, then you gotta be conservative about it. Be cautious-crazy. It’ll keep you alive. Any asshole can get an exciting job that kills him.”

“I’ll think about that. You might be right. I mean, if she doesn’t go to medical school . . .”

“And as far as medical school is concerned, you’ve got a couple of other kids to work with,” Lucas said. “Letty’s a lost cause. Unless there’s a job like Navy SEAL doctor.”

Silence, for a few moments, listening to Weather breathe, then she said, “Okay.”

•   •   •

DEL CALLED AN HOUR LATER,
as Lucas was watching a West Coast baseball game. “I’m standing in Cory’s bedroom,” he said, his voice pitched low. “We got Cory, his wife, and his son, who’s legally an adult, though he’s telling us he never looked in the garage. The safe was in the garage and it’s seriously screwed up—I don’t know if anybody’ll
ever
be able to open it. Cory learned how to use a cutting torch by watching videos on YouTube. He managed to weld it into a blob.”

“That’s not our problem. Our problem was finding the safe. Hoist it up on a truck and get it downtown.”

“They’re doing that right now,” Del said. “I’m hiding in the bedroom so the TV cameras don’t see me.”

“TV?”

“I told you. Jon’s okay, but his idea of a raid is ten people with M16s and camo and helmets and three TV trucks. We could’ve gotten the same results by knocking on the door.”

“Well, the important thing is the safe.”

“What have I been telling you, Lucas? The important thing
isn’t
the safe,” Del said. “Who really gives a fuck about the safe? Nobody gives a fuck about anything but the entertainment media, of which we are now a branch.”

“Del . . .”

“Wake up and smell the coffee, dipshit. You should have been here. You should be out there talking to the talking heads,” Del said. “Instead, you’re up in the UP with your dick in your hand.”

“Good night, Del . . .”

L
ucas, Laurent, two regular uniformed deputies, and the five part-timers met at Laurent’s house the next morning at nine o’clock, went over their assignments one last time.

“The basic idea is to find them, watch them, isolate a few of them, who we can pick up. We talk to them about being sent back to South Dakota, where they have the death penalty, and see if that produces anything,” Lucas said. “Right now, if every one of them kept their mouths shut, we’d have a hard time proving anything—our main witness got kicked to death in Wisconsin. So, we need somebody else to turn.”

Laurent repeated the essence of it as they went out the door: “Find, isolate, detain.” Before they got to their vehicles, he said to Lucas, “I looked you up on the Internet last night. There was a story there that said you were a deputy sheriff in Wisconsin one time.”

“Yeah, for about fifteen minutes. I didn’t get paid or anything. They made me a deputy to give me some legal status.”

“And Barron County is happy to do the same, including the part about no pay,” Laurent said. “Raise your right hand and repeat after me . . .”

•   •   •

THEY DROVE OUT
to Overtown Park separately and several minutes apart. When Lucas arrived, the plainclothes deputies had already disappeared into the growing crowd. The night before, there’d been a few dozen people working in the park. Now there were a hundred, and half of those wore Juggalo clown faces. The paint, mostly black and white, made it difficult to pick out individual features. A bandstand was going up, just as it had at the Wisconsin site, and Lucas spotted Sellers, the guy who owned the hardware store, apparently giving instructions to the workers putting it up.

He didn’t find a circle of cars pressing around an RV and none of the RVs he surveyed showed any activity that might be suspicious. Frisell, the teacher, ambled past, shook his hand, smiling, slapped Lucas on the shoulder with his other hand, and said, “There are two California plates down in the far corner, to the left, as you walk down there, right in front of all those pop-up tents. There’s only one car in between them. No RV.”

“Thanks, I’ll take a look,” Lucas said, smiling back. Old pals, bumping into each other in the park: Lucas thought Frisell had done it well.

Lucas wandered down to the far corner, took a look at the cars. One was a five- or six-year-old Subaru, the other an older Corolla. From what Skye had told them about Pilate’s group, that sounded right—but then, most of the cars in the parking lot were older. The Juggalos were not an affluent demographic.

He wrote the tag numbers in his notebook, then wandered off, fifty yards or so, and sat under a tree to watch them. Fifteen minutes later, a youngish woman—maybe thirty?—walked up to the Corolla, popped the trunk, took a daypack out, slammed the trunk lid, and walked away.

Lucas followed. She was slender and narrow-shouldered, with dark hair bent around her head like a bowl. He hadn’t been able to look directly at her face, but got the impression of delicate features, thin bow lips, and dark eyebrows. She was wearing a white blouse, form-fitting jeans, and rubber-soled slippers. No face paint.

They’d gotten a few general descriptions of Pilate’s disciples from the people at the Hayward Gathering, but nothing specific enough to be really identifying. One of the descriptions was for a slender dark-haired woman . . . but even standing where he was, he could see fifty of those.

The woman angled diagonally across the park to where two stoners were sitting on the grass, sharing a joint. She unzipped the pack, pulled out a thin blanket, and she and the stoners spread it. One of the stoners dropped onto his back, staring up at the sky, while the second guy sat down with his arms wrapped around his knees. The woman continued digging in the pack, chatting with the second guy, then pulled out a plastic box. She opened that up, took out a couple of tubes and a cloth, and started spreading paint on the second guy’s face.

A happy clown, but a frightening happy clown, nothing you’d want to show a little kid, in red, black, and white face paint.

Lucas watched for ten minutes and nothing more happened except that a woman wearing a cat mask and a bikini bottom, but no top, asked him if he were a cop. Looking steadily into her eyes, he said, “No. I’m actually a fashion photographer with
Vogue
magazine.”

“You liar.”

“Really,” Lucas said.

“How come you don’t got no camera? And why would you come here?”

“Camera’s in the van,” Lucas said. “It scares some people, who think we might be spies or cops. We want to make contact with fashion-forward young people, and arrange for the shoot later on.”

“Oh,” she said. She still looked suspicious as she faded into the crowd.

•   •   •

PETERS, THE LAWYER,
went by carrying a canvas bag slung over a shoulder, and a paper-pickup stick. Lucas said, “Hang on a minute, but don’t look at me.”

Peters speared a gum wrapper and looked away from Lucas, and said, “Yeah?”

“I want you to walk down past the bandstand, over on the left side but behind it, maybe twenty yards, and then yell, ‘Pilate! Pilate!’ Twice like that—like you were calling to him across the field,” Lucas said. “When you’re walking away from me, off to your right, you’ll see two guys and a woman sitting on a blanket. She’s painting their faces. They’re the ones I’m interested in. When you call for Pilate, I don’t want them to be able to see you, but I want them to hear you. As soon as you call, get into the group around the bandstand, so they can’t figure out who was calling. Got it? I want to see if they look for you.”

“I got it. Give me a minute or so.”

Peters walked off and twenty seconds later, disappeared behind the bandstand. Another fifteen seconds and Lucas heard him call, “Pilate! Pilate!”

The woman immediately looked up from her nearly finished mask and the supine man rolled up on his side, then pushed himself up, both of them looking toward the bandstand. The second man, with the half-painted face, turned and said something to them, and then got up and walked toward the bandstand, looked behind it, apparently didn’t see anything that interested him, and walked back to the first two, shrugged, and sat down on the blanket again. The woman took another long look at the bandstand, then sat down again and went to work on his face mask again.

And Lucas thought,
Gotcha
.

He called Laurent on the phone, and told him what had happened.

“Do we pick them up now, or wait until Pilate gets here?” Laurent asked. “It sounds like they don’t know where he is and are waiting for him. If we wait, they might take us straight to him.”

Lucas had to think about it for a moment: “If we wait,” he said, “and they take us to him, it might be impossible to isolate them later. If one of them starts screaming for a lawyer, they’ll all start. We need to get something from them, almost anything, to really go after him. As soon as they lawyer-up, though, we could have a problem.”

“What do you want to do?” Laurent asked. “You tell me.”

Lucas said, “I guess I’d really like to split the difference: watch them, and wait until one of them splits off from the other two. Pick up that one, see if we get anything, then see if the other two take us to Pilate when he shows up.”

“That’s a plan,” Laurent said. “I’ll tell the guys.”

“If we pick up one, you guys don’t have a jail . . . am I right?”

“No, but we have a holding cell and an interview room.”

“Good enough.”

•   •   •

LAURENT GOT A SPOT
at the end of the field, where he could look down at the three people on the blanket, while Lucas watched from the other side. The two uniformed cops stayed down by the end of the field, near the car where the woman had gotten the backpack.

The woman finished putting the mask on the first man, put one on the second man, then packed up her makeup kit and put it in the backpack. She said something to the men, one of them nodded and dug into a bag he’d had beside him, and sparked off a fatboy.

The woman took a long drag, then another, passed the joint back, said something else, and started back toward her car. Lucas’s phone beeped: Laurent. “She’s moving, you see her?”

“I got her. She’s going back to her car,” Lucas said. “Let’s close in on her, see if we can grab her without too many people noticing. Let’s you and I do it. Tell the uniforms to get a car ready, but not to move until they see us grab her. We want her in the car, cuffed and gone in ten seconds, no muss, no fuss.”

“Got it.” Laurent rang off, and Lucas ambled down the field, twenty or thirty yards in front of the woman. She was moving a bit faster than he was, and he slowed enough that she’d catch him about the time she got to the car. As he came up to the car, he glanced back and saw Laurent moving up on the woman. Lucas angled toward the car. From where he was, she’d walk down the far side of it; he touched the call button on his phone, and Laurent said, “Yeah?”

“Follow her as she goes around the car. I’ll be on the other side, we’ll have her between us. Roll the patrol car.”

The woman never saw them until they were right there. She popped the trunk lid, and Laurent came up beside her, and Lucas slightly behind her. The cop car was already rolling up, and Laurent said, “Excuse me, miss,” and when she looked up, he showed her his badge and said, “I’m the Barron County sheriff, and you’re under arrest. Put your hands on the trunk lid, please.”

She sputtered, “What? What? What did I do?”

She tried to back away, but bumped into Lucas, who said, “Put your hands on the trunk lid, please.”

She put her hands up on the trunk lid as the patrol car stopped directly behind her and the driver got out. Laurent quickly patted her down, and then the deputy cuffed her as a crowd started to congeal down around the squad car.

A woman called, “What’d she do?”

“She escaped from the hospital,” Laurent said. “She’s a nurse, she’s got the Ebola virus. We’re trying to keep her away from contact with other people. We don’t think she’s really a danger, so don’t be worried. Well, not too worried.”

The crowd thinned, and the cuffed woman said, “I do not, I do not—”

Lucas said, “They all say that,” to the crowd, and to the woman, “Do what the doctor says. We’re trying to help you.”

The uniformed cop read her rights from a recital card—more mumbled than read, Lucas thought—and five seconds later, she was in the back of the patrol car, on her way out of the park. Lucas and Laurent followed, leaving the reserves behind to watch the park, and keep an eye on the woman’s two clown-faced friends.

•   •   •

THE UNIFORMED COP
had been told not to talk to the woman; they wanted what they had to say to be a shock. They caught up with the patrol car halfway to town, and followed it in.

At the sheriff’s office, a female clerk gave the woman a more thorough search, took a thin back-pocket wallet away from her, and a cell phone, and then the uniformed deputy locked her in the holding cell.

Lucas and Laurent walked over to Pat’s to get sandwiches and soft drinks, sat at a picnic table outside on the sidewalk, ate, and took their time getting back to the woman. Lucas checked her wallet: it had seventy dollars in cash, a California driver’s license for a Melody Walker, and a Visa and Macy’s credit card for the same name.

Lucas called the driver’s license information into the BCA and asked for a complete sheet on the woman. She’d been in the holding cell for more than half an hour before they turned on the video camera in the interview room, then went down to the holding cell.

She was frightened. When they opened the door, she was huddled in a corner, her hands in fists in front of her chest, her head slumped down. “I didn’t do anything,” she wailed. “What are you doing to me?”

That was an opening that Lucas had hoped for: she’d had her rights read to her, now the problem was to get her to ask questions and to talk.

“We’re taking you to an interview room—it’s just down the hall,” Laurent said. They escorted her out of the cell and down to the interview room, and Lucas said, “Sit down.” He pointed at a chair on the far side of a narrow table. She quickly sat down, while Lucas and Laurent loomed over her.

“You’ve been arrested on suspicion of murder on a Wisconsin warrant, Melody. That woman at the Hayward Gathering died. But you know that, because you helped kick her to death.”

“I did not. I wasn’t there, I didn’t even know about it until yesterday,” she blurted. “I was down by the bonfire, they had to come and get me.”

Lucas looked at Laurent and spread his hands, a “There it is, and on tape” gesture. Laurent tipped his head and then nodded.

The woman said, “What?”

“When were you expecting Pilate to get here?” Lucas asked. “Or is he already here?”

“What do you know about Pilate?” she asked.

“Quite a bit. We know all about your little ritual out in the Black Hills, when you crucified Henry on that pine tree. We know about the dead drug dealer in Hayward, and we know about Skye. We believe you killed an actress out in Los Angeles. I might mention that both California and South Dakota have the death penalty—”