Prey 25 - Gathering Prey

by John Sandford

  A nurse called to Lucas, “Are you a relative?”

  “I’m a cop,” he said.

  She nodded and he got a chair from an empty bay and put it next to Letty’s. He asked Skye, “You okay? I mean, more or less?”

  “Yeah. They gave me some dope. Said it would help relieve my anxiety, which is good, because I’m pretty anxious. How did Henry die?”

  “Stabbed, I think,” Lucas lied. “I haven’t seen the autopsy report, they’re doing that in South Dakota. I’m sorry. I know you guys . . .”

  Skye said, “Yeah,” and “His folks still live in Johnson City, Texas, if that makes any difference to anyone.”

  “Somebody will contact them. Probably already have,” Lucas said.

  “He was a good guy,” Skye said. “Good traveler. I think the dope is taking the edge off, but I’m . . . awful sad.”

  “Proves you’re a human being,” Letty said.

  Lucas said, “Some Wisconsin cops are going to talk to you . . .”

  • • •

  STERN AND THE sheriff’s chief investigator arrived together twenty minutes later. They interviewed Skye for an hour, with Lucas and Letty chiming in from time to time. Pilate and his disciples had taunted her, talking about playing with her, which she understood to mean rape and murder. She’d not been raped, because the disciples had been too busy. If the dope dealer from Chippewa Falls hadn’t shown up, she said, she’d already be dead, but his murder had sidetracked Pilate’s plans.

  Skye only had first names for Pilate’s crew, and not all of those. She thought they might be on the way to a county fair somewhere, and then on to a Juggalo Gathering at a farm near Hayward, Wisconsin.

  Lucas volunteered a BCA artist to create portraits of Pilate, Kristen, and the others, and Stern accepted the offer.

  When they were done talking, a social worker and a doctor took Skye for a private interview.

  While she was being interviewed, Stern got on the phone with the sheriff at the shooting scene, and to California. He came back with a notebook and said, “The dead guy’s name was Arnaty Roscow, which might be short for some longer Russian name. But that’s the name on his driver’s license. He’s done time twice, in California, both times for burglary. The L.A. cops said he was in the commercial burglary business for years, probably knocked over a couple hundred places, mostly houses on the Westside of Los Angeles, and Malibu and Santa Barbara. There’s quite a bit on him—they’ll run down his known contacts for us, because of that Kitty Place murder. They’re hoping we’ll clear it for them.”

  “If we can get our hands on Pilate, we will,” Lucas said. “That murder out in South Dakota was like a fingerprint.”

  Skye was released a few minutes later and came out clutching an amber bottle with thirty blue pills.

  Lucas had already suggested that they put Skye back in the Holiday Inn, and Letty said she might see if she could get an adjoining room just for the night; “and we need to get you some clothes.”

  “I need everything,” Skye said. “They just burned all my stuff.”

  “Macy’s, and then over to REI,” Letty said.

  “Don’t need the Macy’s,” Skye said. “REI is good enough.”

  “Get what you need, you’ll have lots of room in the Benz,” Lucas said. He held out his hand to Letty. “The keys.”

  • • •

  IN THE BENZ, Letty asked Skye, “How are you? Really?”

  “Screwed up,” Skye said. “I was bouncing around in that car like a loose tire; everything hurts. They gave me some pretty good dope, though. If I didn’t have it, they’d probably have to put me in a rubber room somewhere. Poor Henry. Poor, poor Henry. I hope he didn’t suffer.”

  Letty said, “He was too young to die.”

  When Letty had determined that Skye was functioning, she took her straight out of Wisconsin, to an REI store in Roseville, a suburb of St. Paul. “Go ahead and get whatever you need,” Letty said. “Dad gave me an American Express, I don’t even think he looks at the bills. Besides, he already said it was all right.”

  Skye got underwear and shirts and cargo pants and six pairs of pumpkin-orange socks, and at Letty’s urging, a new pair of boots, a decent pack, a top-end three-season sleeping bag, heavy long johns, and a variety of cooking and eating gear: a compact stove, fuel bottle, camping silverware, a lightweight parka, and gloves—“I’ll be down south before I need them, but it can get pretty frosty even way down south, in Mississippi and Texas.”

  And, “I need a knife.”

  “Well, let’s find a good one,” Letty said.

  They settled on a Gerber survival knife, with a five-inch blade, for sixty bucks.

  When they left the store, Skye said, “I owe you. This isn’t just a donation. I owe you.”

  “I’m okay with that,” Letty said. “You can owe us. Someday you’ll do good, and you can pay us back. I’ll get you some cash—you’re going to need to eat until everything is done with.”

  • • •

  LETTY GOT TWO ROOMS with a connecting door, at the Holiday Inn, and they wound up staying two nights. Skye was an interesting talker and an interested listener, and got Letty talking about her younger days as a trapper and a shooter of crooked cops and cartel killers.

  “I’d never ever shoot anyone if it wasn’t self-defense, but that’s what it was,” Letty said. “I sometimes think I might have a touch of the sociopath, or more than a touch, because none of it ever made me feel the least bit bad.”

  “But if you were a sociopath . . . wouldn’t that mean when those cartel killers came after the family, you would have taken care of yourself first? Instead, you got between them—the Mexicans and your family.”

  Letty smiled: “I never thought of it that way. Thank you. I guess I’m not a sociopath, and I’d kinda started to worry about it.”

  “I don’t know how killing somebody would make me feel, but I guess I might feel bad after a while,” Skye said. “I can see how if it was kill or be killed, I’d rather be the one who stays alive. But I believe I’d lose a lot of sleep over it.”

  “Then you’re a nicer person than I am,” Letty said. “I never missed a minute’s sleep.”

  • • •

  THE NEXT MORNING, Letty drove Skye to Lucas’s office. Lucas had just gotten copies of a video taken at Regions Hospital. He’d looked at it once, and had been about to call the support services to cut some frames out of it, when Letty and Skye walked in.

  “Is this the woman you call Kristen?” Lucas asked Skye, putting the video back up on his computer.

  Skye crouched over the screen, watching, then said, “Yes! That’s her. For sure.”

  “The video’s not so good.”

  “I don’t care. That’s her. You can’t see it, but she’s got these pointy teeth. She filed them down herself.”

  “All right. I’ll have the best stills printed out, and you can talk to our artist, help him make some pictures of the other people.” To Letty, he said, “This will take a while.”

  “I don’t care. I want to watch.”

  • • •

  SKYE DID FOUR IDENTIKITS, of Pilate, Bell, Raleigh, and a woman named Ellen.

  While she did that, Lucas had gone to check on his other cases. Jenkins and Shrake were at Ben Merion’s cabin at Cross Lake, and told him that there’d been no problem finding places in the woods that looked dug up, but, “There are about a million of them. We saw a squirrel actually making one of them, burying acorns, and there are squirrels all over the place. The idea was good, but the execution is impossible.”

  “So, you’re coming back?”

  “Yeah, we’ll see you tomorrow, I guess. Go back to looking for computer chips.”

  Del had not yet found the guy with the safe full of diamonds.

  He called Stern, who said, “We got something weird on that Roscow’s phone . . . that Bony guy.”

  “Weird’s usually not good,” Lucas said.

  “Not good in this case,” Stern
said. “We pinged them all, and the only returns we’ve gotten so far are from California. On the most recent calls, we got nothing at all. Our guy here says they may be pulling the batteries on their phones.”

  “That doesn’t help,” Lucas said. “They’ll use them sooner or later, though. Keep pinging them.”

  When he came back to Letty and Skye, he checked out the identikits and said, “Not bad. We could get something from these. I’ll send them over to Stern, he said he’d plaster northern Wisconsin with them, get them in all the papers up there.”

  “Are you sure they’re up there?” Skye asked.

  “We’re not sure of anything, but that’s where they were headed. By now, they could be in New Orleans.”

  After a fast lunch, Lucas, Letty, and Skye went over to Swede Hollow Park to look for other travelers. They found three, sitting together, passing a joint, and Skye told them about Henry—one of the three knew him—and asked about Pilate. None of them knew him, or had heard about him.

  Skye caught up on gossip, then Lucas went back to work and Letty and Skye drifted off, caught a movie at the Mall of America, bought a burner phone for Skye with twenty-five hours of talk time, bought a hat for Letty, ate again, and went back to the Holiday Inn. Letty broke out her laptop to check her Facebook for news from her friends, and punched in “Pilate,” and got nothing but the wrong one.

  Skye always carried one big fat paperback novel with her, and she’d spent some of the money Letty gave her on a Diana Gabaldon Outlander novel. In between spates of talk, she’d read the book, and she was reading it when Letty took a bathroom break.

  During the day, nobody had wanted to talk to Skye about Henry, and she’d begun to feel that something was being hidden from her. When Letty went into the bathroom, she put the book down, stepped over to Letty’s laptop, which was showing the Google page, and typed “Henry Mark Fuller” into the search field.

  The front page of the Rapid City Journal’s blog page popped up, with the headline “Murdered Man Was Crucified,” and beneath that, a bad picture of Henry, taken from his high school yearbook.

  With increasing horror, she read through the news story, based on the autopsy done by a South Dakota medical examiner. Henry had been crucified, castrated, and slashed nearly to pieces.

  She barely heard the toilet flush, and the bathroom door open, and then Letty, behind her, blurt, “Oh, shit.”

  Skye turned around, tears streaming down her face: “You didn’t tell me.”

  “You were already screwed up. You didn’t need to know the details,” Letty said.

  “I needed to know . . .” Skye said. “Could you . . . uh, I want to read everything I can find, but I don’t want you here to watch me. I’m gonna cry a lot. Could you go out and get some Cokes or something? I won’t be real long.”

  “Sure. Half an hour?”

  “That should be enough. I want to see what all the papers say.”

  When Letty was gone, Skye went to Craigslist and dropped an ad: “Going to Juggalo Gathering near Hayward? I need ride, will pay $50.”

  She listed the number for the burner phone, then dropped back to Google and typed in Henry’s name again. All the daily papers in South Dakota had the story, and a couple across the border in Wyoming and down in Nebraska. They were all the same, reprints of an AP story based on the Rapid City Journal’s initial report. She read them all anyway.

  When Letty got back, Skye gestured at the laptop and said, “Nobody cares. They wrote one story and everybody copied it, and that’s the last we’ll hear about Henry Mark Fuller, because nobody gives a shit about people like him. Like us.”

  “That’s not true,” Letty said. “A lot of people give a shit, which is how you got pulled out of the back of that car.”

  Skye dropped onto one of the beds and cried, “Ah, jeez . . .”

  • • •

  THEY TALKED OFF AND ON until midnight and then Skye went off to her room and flopped on the bed and failed to sleep. Letty managed to sleep, after two o’clock. Skye got a phone call at seven, a male voice: “This is Juggalo Central, two of us going today. We’ve got two seats.”

  She arranged to get picked up at nine, at Mears Park, said she’d buy both seats, got them for thirty-five dollars each, but she wanted to take a pack. “We got that much room.” Skye slipped out and ran to Swede Hollow, where she found some friends, including a reliable guy named Carl. When she asked if he wanted to go to the Juggalo Gathering, he said, “I was thinking I might.”

  “I’ve got two seats,” Skye said. “I got a motel room, you can take a shower so you don’t smell too much.”

  Carl said sure, and they hurried back to the motel. Carl showered with the motel’s perfumed soap, put on his cleanest clothes, and at eight-fifteen, they were gone. Skye left a note for Letty that said: “Thanks for everything, I will pay you back someday. You’re a good friend, but I just can’t handle this. I got to travel on.”

  Letty found the note when she walked through the connecting door at nine o’clock, as Skye and Carl loaded into the ride.

  Carl said, “This is gonna be great, huh? Jug-A-Lo, know what I’m saying?”

  • • •

  LETTY RAN DOWN to the Benz and headed to Swede Hollow. She spotted a guy they’d talked to the day before, sitting on a sleeping bag playing a recorder, and hurried over. “I’m looking for Skye. Has she been by?”

  “She’s gone,” the guy said. “She came down and got Carl, said she had a ride waiting. Don’t know where they were going, but they were in a hurry.”

  “Goddamnit.” Letty walked back to her car, sat and called Lucas, and told him that Skye had taken off.

  Lucas said, “How’d she arrange a ride?”

  “Well . . . I don’t know. Maybe she knew somebody.”

  “I thought you were with her.”

  “I was, until midnight. She found an online newspaper article about the autopsy on Henry and kinda freaked out. Anyway, she’s gone.”

  “Damnit, we need her here,” Lucas said. “If you’re down there anyway, ask around. Maybe somebody else knows where she went.”

  “All right.”

  “Be careful.”

  Letty got fifty feet back into the park, when a thought struck her, and she turned, went back to the car, turned on her laptop and called up the browsing history. The link was right at the top: Craigslist. She drove five minutes to a Caribou Coffee, got online, went to Craigslist and to Rideshare, and found Skye’s advertisement from the night before.

  She called Lucas back: “I know where she went.”

  She told him how she found out, and he said, “Good. Stern will be up there, or at least have some guys up there and they know what she looks like. I’ll get them to track her down.”

  “They won’t recognize her if she goes as a Juggalo,” Letty said. “I’ve been doing some research on them. They wear costumes and clown faces. It’s hard to recognize anybody.”

  “Well, we gotta look,” Lucas said. “We really need her back.”

  “That’s your last word? ‘We really need her back’?”

  “Well, what the heck am I supposed to say?” Lucas asked. “We do need her back. And we’ll find her.”

  Letty was fuming when she got off the phone. Lucas had gone bureaucratic on her and Skye was headed for serious trouble. She didn’t want to do it. She knew Lucas would go ballistic—but she pulled out and headed for I-35.

  The Juggalo Gathering was two and a half hours away.

  Pilate and his crew freaked when they learned what had happened to Bony and that the cops had gotten Skye back.

  Chet found out at a convenience store, where a television was tuned to a Duluth station. The shooting and rescue were big news. He drove back to the new campground at eighty miles an hour, about all he could get out of the aging Corolla, to tell the others.

  Pilate was gone when he got there—the rest of the crew said that he and Kristen had gone to cruise used-RV lots, planning to trade a half kilo of li
ghtly cut cocaine for an RV, if they could find the right guy.

  The crew stood around remembering Bony and some of the stunts he’d pulled. Like the time he screwed this lady teacher and then told her that he was a student at her school—he looked young enough—and blackmailed her into what he called Stupid Teacher Tricks. And he did mean tricks.

  The new campground was fifteen miles east of Hayward, Wisconsin, and was mostly empty, except for a carnival crew setting up a Tilt-A-Whirl in one corner of the open field, getting ready for the Juggalo Gathering that would start the next day. They were still standing in a semicircle, talking about Bony, when Pilate and Kristen pulled in, Pilate driving what turned out to be another Winnebago Minnie, this one a 1999 model with eighty-six thousand miles on it, but otherwise, cherry.

  He got out, grinning, picked up on the vibe and the grin drained away: “What?”

  “The cops shot Bony. He’s dead,” Laine said. “Chet saw it on the TV.”

  “What!”

  “Dude, they shot him. It’s on TV,” Chet said. “The cops got that chick back, and she’s gonna tell them everything.”

  “He was my main man,” Pilate wailed, spittle flying around the semicircle of disciples. “They gunned him down?”

  • • •

  PILATE, RALEIGH, AND RICHIE piled into Chet’s car, and they went back to the gas station, where the story never did show up again. They waited so long that the guy behind the counter finally asked them what they were watching for, and Pilate told him that they thought they might have known the girl rescued by the cops, who was a Juggalo. The counter man pulled an iPad out from behind the cigarette rack, called up the TV station’s website, and let them look at the cached news story.

  The reporter had heard from a sheriff’s deputy that the kidnapping victim had managed to conceal and turn on a cell phone, which the authorities had then tracked to the ambush point. The victim had told them that her kidnappers had been responsible for murdering a Chippewa Falls man who’d been found dead in a burning RV.