Prey 25 - Gathering Prey

by John Sandford

  Then there was the whole thing with Henry Fuller.

  “Maybe had too much fun,” Pilate confided to Kristen, as they rolled on east. “I wish we’d put a boulder on top of that kid. Hold him down.”

  “I’m worried about Laine,” Kristen said. “I could see her pullin’ back.”

  “Well, it was her first time,” Pilate said.

  “If we run into some cops, somewhere, she could talk. That’s what worries me.”

  Pilate leaned back in the passenger seat, looking out at the gray-dirt sails of the Badlands, considering the problem. He said, finally, “She’s got that golden pussy. That’s what I’d hate to give up.”

  “Pussy isn’t a problem. You said it yourself: pussy is more common than TV.”

  Pilate yawned and said, “I’ll think about it.”

  “We could have a really good time with her,” Kristen said. She looked hungry around the eyes.

  “I’ll think about it,” Pilate said. Kristen could be a little scary.

  He did think about it, though. What he thought was, if they took Laine off somewhere and cut her up, that could damage morale; the disciples all liked her, and might start wondering who was next.

  He turned his head to take in Kristen. She might be down on Laine because Laine had that golden pussy. And the fact was, Kristen was the assistant principal in the group, the one who kicked ass. If they were going to have fun with anyone, maybe it should be Kristen: that’d probably help morale, instead of damaging it.

  He half dozed, entertaining himself with fantasies of cutting up Kristen. The fine-woven treachery of the idea turned him on.

  They’d killed a dozen people now and the numbers made him feel both powerful and comfortable. Powerful because he could do it, and make the others go along; and comfortable because he had done it, and it wouldn’t be something he’d miss in life.

  Most of the victims had been chosen because they were the invisible people in the world. Street people, travelers, illegal aliens. You could stop by a Home Depot early in the morning and pick out anyone you wanted to play with. They’d jump right in the car, and the other wetbacks thought them lucky.

  He’d made one mistake, though. He’d once acted out of a powerful impulse, rather than calculation.

  He’d been cruising down Sunset, stopped at a light, middle of the day, minding his own business. Okay, a little whacked on Skywalker OG. Then this blond chick, probably an actress, pulls up behind him in a BMW convertible, top down, sunglasses, red lipstick, white blouse, the whole bit. The light turned green and swear to God, she honked her horn like one split second after the light changed. He was a little doggy off the line, so what’d she do next? Dropped the hammer on the bimmer and, BOOM!, she was around him like he was a tourist and gone.

  Pissed him off so badly that he had to hold on to the steering wheel with both hands to keep himself from shaking to pieces.

  Took it as a sign.

  The next sacrifice would be a woman.

  A blonde. Most definitely an actress. They picked her up outside a yoga center on Melrose, hauled her up into the hills. They had a lot of fun with her before she died, begging them not to hurt her anymore.

  But then . . . then the shit had hit the fan. They’d been lucky to get out of that one clean.

  • • •

  HE WOKE UP when Kristen said, “Look at this.”

  They were dropping headlong into a deep, broad river valley, with a small town on the far side. “The Mississippi River,” Pilate said, in his most solemn voice. “The zipper on the United States of America.”

  They went on a bit, and a sign said: “Missouri River.” Kristen glanced at him, but didn’t correct him. He said, “I meant, Missouri,” but still, it ruined it for him.

  They stopped on the other side of the Missouri for a root beer and a cheeseburger, then pushed on into the evening, across the Minnesota line, camped out overnight at the Walmart Supercenter in Worthington.

  From Worthington they went north on Highway 60 and then 71, running up a very long state, and pulled into Bemidji at two o’clock on a fine, sunny afternoon, ate more cheeseburgers and got some pork chops and beer and potato chips and headed north again, still on 71, to the intersection of 72, and then north all the way to Highway 11, where they ran out of state.

  “That’s Canada, right there,” Kristen said, pointing out the window.

  “Never been there,” Pilate said. “The USA is good enough for me.”

  They took Highway 11 into Baudette, stocked up on food and beer, then turned around on Highway 11 and ran back east a few miles on the two-lane, following behind Chet on land that was as flat as a tabletop, but dark: dark trees, dark fields, past marshes, shallow lakes, small farms. Fifteen minutes out of town, Chet swerved off on a dirt track past a rusty mailbox that led through a narrow crack in the roadside tree line. Two hundred yards back, they came to a dirty white house surrounded by a dirt patch on which two dirty old Chevy pickups were parked.

  Chet got out of the car and an old man came to the front door of the house, pushed the screen door open, and stepped out. He had a mustache over a three-day beard, watery blue eyes behind plastic-rimmed glasses. He was wearing overalls and rubber boots, and carrying a pump shotgun, a 12-gauge. He asked Chet, “Where’n the hell you been? And what do you want?”

  “Been in Los Angeles, Pap. Worked on some movies.”

  The old man looked at the other cars in the caravan and said, “Must not of made any money on them. What do you want, anyway?”

  “We was hoping to use the campground for a couple of days, rest up,” Chet said. “We’ve been on the road for a while.”

  “Well . . . Go on ahead.” The old man waved at a farther track that led away from the house into the trees. “Makes no nevermind to me.”

  “Thanks, Pap. Can we use the water hose when we need to?”

  “Yeah, I guess. Be sure you turn it off. And don’t bother me no more. And stay off the bridge.”

  Chet walked out to where everybody could see him and yelled, “Follow behind. Road’s kinda rough.”

  They all followed him down through the trees to a small lake, and a puddle of cracked blacktop at lakeside, where they parked, and piled out of the cars. A single phone pole stuck out of one side of the parking lot; a single strand of wire threaded through the trees, and ended at a box on the phone pole, with four outlets. At the other side of the parking lot was an outhouse, a two-holer, the first the Californians had ever seen.

  The overhead line continued to the corner of the lake, jumped over a fifteen-foot-wide creek, and disappeared into the trees on the other side. A narrow wooden bridge crossed the creek under the wire.

  • • •

  “NOT GREAT, but I can live with it,” Pilate said.

  They partied for the next three days. Couldn’t afford any more cocaine, but they still had the weed, and all the beer they could drink. They had more women than the men could keep up with, but the women, even if not all of them were entirely happy about it, would go both ways.

  They also had to deal with the question of whether Minnesotans were actually aliens. Terry brought it up: “You know what? Everybody I seen around here has big heads. You seen that?”

  They did, on their runs into town for food and beer: Minnesotans all had big heads. When they spotted a guy with a cowboy hat and a small head, they asked him if he was from Minnesota, and he told them no, he was from Montana.

  “Food for thought, that’s what it is,” Pilate said.

  On the morning of the second day, a white van bumped past them, crossed the bridge, and fifteen minutes later, bumped back out.

  “What’s over there?” Pilate asked.

  “Another campground,” Chet said. “Pap doesn’t want us disturbing the customers.”

  “I can’t fuckin’ believe he has customers,” Pilate said.

  Later that day, when he hadn’t seen anybody around, Pilate walked across the bridge and found another campground, with another
phone pole with outlets, and three single-wide trailers up on blocks. The trailers were locked, and nothing was stirring around them. A garbage can sat near the entrance road, half full of trash, mostly food wrappers.

  • • •

  THEY WEREN’T LONG for Minnesota.

  The first of three Juggalo Gatherings was coming up, in Wisconsin, and Pilate didn’t want to miss it. When they picked up the cocaine in Wisconsin, they could cut it by half, and still push it out to the Juggalos for twice as much as they paid for the uncut stuff. After three days, they left the campsite, never said good-bye to Pap, heading first for Duluth, then over to Wisconsin.

  In Duluth, they rambled around town for a while, rodeoed at a McDonald’s for cheeseburgers, fries, and malts, then stumbled over a busy mall. Pilate ordered Ellen and Kristen and Linda to set up shop, and though they were doubtful, they found a spot where cross-street foot traffic might give them a chance.

  Pilate, in the meantime, went inside the mall with Raleigh, to look around. They were still there when Bell went by at a jog, spotted them, turned around and came back and said breathlessly, “You know who’s here?”

  “Who?” Pilate asked.

  “That traveler chick who was with Henry. She’s out in the parking lot.”

  “Shit. She could cause us some trouble,” Pilate said. “She’s probably looking for him. Or us.”

  “Yeah, after that crazy fuckin’ Kristen told her that we cut his heart out,” said Raleigh. “She’s probably got the cops right behind her.”

  Pilate said to Raleigh, “She doesn’t know your car, far as we know.”

  “So?”

  “So we sneak up on her, throw a bag on her head, and toss her in the car.”

  “Man, she’s out in the parking lot,” said Bell. “There are eight million people out there.”

  “No, there isn’t. Not really.” Pilate stood up, turned to Raleigh. “Let’s get your car.” To Bell he said, “Go tell Kristen to close up shop and get out of here. We’ll meet them over in Wisconsin. Tell them wait on the highway.”

  The thing that Pilate liked about Raleigh was that after a decision was made, no matter how crazy it was, he’d go with you. To get through life, he needed someone to tell him what to do. If that were done, he’d do it: rob a bank, drown a guy, get the hammer and nails for a crucifix.

  They got Raleigh’s car and started driving loops around the parking lot, and Raleigh rambled for a while: “Back in Denver I was working on this golf course, running a mower, and I met this golfer guy who said when he was playing, and had to take a leak, he’d do it right in the middle of the fairway. He’d put his bag down and stand next to it, hold his dick with one hand and with the other hand, he’d shade his eyes like he was working out his next shot. He said nobody ever paid any attention to him. But you see a guy standing in the bushes, the women start bitching and moaning about guys exposing themselves. This guy, they had no idea . . .”

  “What’d you tell me that for?” Pilate asked.

  “’Cause if we yank her right off the parking lot, like we were helping her in the car, people could look right at you and never have any idea.”

  “You know what I like about you?” Pilate laughed. “You’re fuckin’ crazy. You’re really fuckin’ nuts.”

  That’s what they did.

  Pilate popped open the side door, grabbed her by the collar of her hoodie, and yanked her into the backseat before she even had a chance to scream, pushed her into the space below the seats, and popped her a few times on the cheekbone, with a fist loaded with a roll of quarters: pop, pop, pop. Raleigh rolled them out of the parking lot, and they were gone.

  At the mall in Duluth, Lucas and Letty tracked down a security officer who told them that he’d heard of the group attempting to sell sex out at the edge of the parking lot, but hadn’t seen them. “A guy named Larry Royce, we’ve got his address and phone number, came in here and complained. We went right out there, four of us, but they were gone. I don’t know how long they were here, but I doubt that it was very long.”

  The complainant had given them a description of the RV, but no license plate number. “It’s a Winnebago Minnie, beige. Doesn’t help much—maybe Winnebago can tell you how many they made. Royce said it was pretty beat-up. Looked like it had been pushed hard.”

  Royce had seen two women with the RV, no men. He hadn’t gone inside.

  The security man said they’d called the Duluth cops with the story, but he hadn’t heard back; and he didn’t have anything more. Lucas got Larry Royce’s address and phone number, and thanked him.

  Back in the truck, Lucas called the sex crimes unit of the Duluth Police Department. The officer who answered knew of the call from mall security. “We had the patrol division looking for them, but nothing came back. It’s possible they crossed over into Wisconsin and headed south or east. Lotta RVs out there, and we didn’t have a tag number. We also didn’t have any information that sex had actually been sold.”

  Letty had been on her iPad, and reported, “Winnebago made Minnies for a long time. They might have stopped for a while, but then they started again. Looks like they were making them for at least twenty years.”

  “See if you can find this Royce guy’s address,” Lucas said.

  She found it in ten seconds: they were six or eight blocks away. “We could call him . . .”

  “Better to talk face-to-face, if we can,” Lucas said.

  • • •

  LARRY ROYCE LIVED in a bluebird-blue house in a neighborhood of white clapboard houses built on small lawns. He was home, a newer Chevy van parked in front of an older Lund fishing boat, tucked tight in the cracked driveway. A jolly, balding heavyset man with blond hair and a red face, somewhere deep in his forties, he was happy to talk about the incident, but not in front of Letty—“It’s embarrassing,” he said.

  Lucas suggested that Letty take a walk around the block or wait in the truck. She took her iPad for a walk.

  Royce sat on his stoop and said, “There were two of them, a thin blonde and a fat redhead. They were wiping the windows of this RV with some Windex and paper towels, and they said, ‘Hi,’ when I walked past. I said, ‘Hi,’ and this blonde said something like ‘Sweaty day for a walk,’ and I said, ‘Yeah,’ and she said, ‘I wonder if you could wipe the top of that windshield for me.’ She couldn’t reach the middle of the windshield very well, so I said sure, and did that, and she said, ‘Thanks,’ and then ‘What have you been up to?’ I said I was walking over to the mall, and she said, ‘Would you be interested in a party?’ Well, I’m a salesman, I been around, and I knew what she was talking about, and I said, ‘No.’ When I got over to the mall, I told a security guy. I mean, we don’t have hookers up here . . . Not in the mall parking lot, anyway. In the afternoon.”

  He came back with security and the women were gone with the RV: “I think my attitude might have scared them off. They guessed I was gonna call the cops.”

  He said he was angry with himself for not getting the license plate number, but “I wanted to get out of there.” The back left corner of the RV had been hit by something, or had backed into something and was crumpled, he said. “Not bad, but there’s a pretty good-sized dent.”

  Lucas took down a full description of the RV and both women; the fat redhead, Royce said, had a white scar under one eye. The blonde, “There was something wrong with her teeth.”

  “You mean like rotten? Or missing?”

  “No. They were pointed. Kind of freaks me out, now that I think about it.”

  • • •

  LUCAS WAS WAITING when Letty got back, and after he told her what he’d gotten from Royce, she asked, “Now what?”

  “Going home,” he said. “There’s a good chance they’ve all left for Wisconsin, and I need to talk to a whole bunch of people about this.”

  “What about Skye?”

  Lucas waved his hand out at the city: “How are we going to find her? She doesn’t have a phone, we don’t even know if she
’s here. It’s all too big. Best thing we can do is, get back to my office and start calling. Get everybody looking for them.”

  • • •

  ON THE WAY SOUTH, Del called and said that Honey Potts—none of the cops called her Connie Sweat—had agreed to do an interview with Daisy Jones, and Jones, in a pre-interview, had gotten her to say that she’d been sleeping with Merion all through the marriage. He hadn’t been faithful to Gloria for even a week. “They’re doing the interview this afternoon, and they’re rolling it tonight—they want to get it done before there’s any chance that Merion’s attorney finds out and tries to cut another deal with Honey,” Del said.

  “Good,” Lucas said. “Still need one more thing.”

  “Shrake and Jenkins are going up to Merion’s cabin tomorrow, see if they can find that club,” Del said. “Sounds like a wild-goose chase to me.”

  • • •

  BACK IN ST. PAUL, Lucas and Letty stopped at the BCA office, where Lucas found that nothing had come in on Pilate, but he had gotten two sets of autopsy photos, one set on Henry Mark Fuller and the other on Kitty Place, the actress who’d been killed in Los Angeles. The L.A. cop was right: Lucas took fifteen seconds to decide that the same person or persons had killed them both.

  The photos came up on his computer terminal. He pretended to be looking at something else and didn’t tell Letty about them. Henry Fuller no longer looked entirely human. He looked more like a badly butchered pig.

  • • •

  THE HONEY POTTS INTERVIEW had happened, and went on at six o’clock, after an hour of promos on the early news. About one second before the interview went on the air, WCCO reporters went looking for a comment either from Merion or his attorney. Merion refused to comment, but Raines, his attorney, said, “I want to know how she cut a deal like this. Did ’CCO pay for it? Were the police in any way involved? My client is being framed here, right out in public . . .”