Prey 25 - Gathering Prey

by John Sandford

  Virgil squared up the photos, tapped the top one, and said, “The farm’s this fuzzy square you see here. They were fields once, but now they’re getting overgrown with trash trees. You can still see the outlines. At some point, I was told that George Tillus . . .”

  “He’s called Pap,” Mahler said.

  “. . . tried to start a cheap RV campground down there, but that went nowhere. He’ll still get a camper now and then, but it’s the bottom of the campground heap.” He touched the map: “Here’s the house, it’s pretty far back, a couple hundred yards, so he’ll see us coming. And then way back, by this pond, there are actually two campgrounds. The back one looks like it’s got four single-wides. I don’t know what they’re about. They’re not RVs.”

  Lucas looked at the photos, and touched a wide, dark stream that showed up a few hundred yards north of the farm. “Is that the Rainy?”

  “Yeah, it is,” Mahler said.

  Lucas said to Mahler, “Virgil once illegally shot a guy, I think it was across the Rainy, wasn’t it, Virgil? You were in Minnesota, the guy was in Canada?”

  “Purely self-defense,” Flowers said.

  “Gee, I’d like to hear about that,” Mahler said to Flowers. She was close enough to him, leaning over the backseat, that she could have stuck her tongue into his ear.

  “We better get going. I want to get back home tonight,” Lucas said. He added, “I suspect Frankie’s probably pining for you, too . . . Virgie.”

  • • •

  THEY WENT OUT SEPARATELY, led by the deputy, Lucas behind her, Flowers trailing with his 4Runner and boat. The farm was fifteen minutes east of Baudette. Mahler signaled the turn well before they got to it, and they followed her bouncing down a dirt track into what looked like a forest, but was actually a fairly thin tree line that opened out into swampy-looking onetime fields now dotted with short evergreens.

  Farther back, a weathered, dirty two-story farmhouse dominated the fields, with crumbling outbuildings off to the left side of the dirt patch that surrounded the house. Lucas could see that the driveway led past the house, back toward the campgrounds.

  They pulled into the dirt parking area, and a few seconds later, an older man stumbled out of the house: George Tillus had hair longer than Flowers’s, and hadn’t shaved for a week or so, the gray beard making him look even older than he was. He was wearing overalls over a stained white T-shirt, and rubber boots. “What the hell’s going on?”

  Mahler said, “Pap, we’ve got a search warrant for the house. Looking for that boy of yours.”

  “He’s not here and I ain’t seen him. What’d he do?” He was talking to Mahler and Lucas, but his eyes kept sliding over to Flowers. Flowers was standing next to the open driver’s-side door of his truck, watching the confrontation across the hood. He had a shotgun lying across the front seat.

  “Might be involved in a murder,” Mahler said. “We’re gonna have to take a look inside.”

  “Well, now, I’d have to talk to my attorney about that.” His eyes shifted again.

  “As far as I know, you don’t have an attorney,” Mahler said. “We’ll get one for you, but we get to look inside right now. So, if you’ll show us the way . . .”

  She stepped forward, toward the house, but Tillus moved in front of her and shouted, “Is this what America has come to? The cops—”

  Lucas looked at Flowers and called, “He’s stalling.”

  “I’m gone,” Flowers said. He grabbed the shotgun and jogged down the far side of the house and disappeared.

  Tillus stepped back and shouted, “What’s going on? I know my rights. I want an attorney—”

  Mahler: “You’ll get an attorney—”

  Lucas hooked her by the arm, said, “Get behind my truck, pull your firearm, I’ve got to cover Virgil.”

  “What?”

  “Just do it.”

  Lucas pulled his gun and ran past Tillus, down the near side of the house. At the back, he saw a line of people running, seven of them, strung out toward the campgrounds. Flowers had passed two of them, women wearing long dresses and head scarves, and then slowed and pointed his shotgun into the air and fired a shot.

  BOOM!

  The 12-gauge sounded like an artillery piece, and the five runners ahead of Flowers slowed, and looked back, and one cried out something that Lucas didn’t understand, and they slowed and finally stopped on the dirt track. Far down the track, Lucas saw two young children and a woman run into a clump of trees.

  Ahead, Flowers was shouting, and the runners now had all their hands in the air. They were tall, thin people, frightened. Lucas came up and Flowers said, “Illegals. He’s running a campground for Somalis coming across from Canada. Goddamnit.”

  They got the Somalis back to the house, checked them for weapons, had them sit on the porch with Tillus, who’d gone silent, and left them with Mahler, who said more cops were on the way.

  • • •

  FLOWERS GOT AN M16 out of the back of his truck, gave it to Lucas, and the two of them walked back to the campground, where they found seven more Somalis, four women and three children, hiding in the single-wides. No guns, anywhere. They waited until the women had packed up some clothing, then escorted them back to the house.

  On the way, Flowers said, “They come in by ship, get dropped off on the Canadian North Shore, get trucked over here, and cross the river at night. Next day, they’re in Minneapolis.”

  “How do you know all that?”

  “From a story in Musky Hunter magazine,” Flowers said. Then: “Just kiddin’. Saw it on Channel Two.”

  At the house, two more sheriff’s cars had arrived, and the late-arriving deputies were chatting with Mahler, and watching the Somalis.

  Mahler asked, “That all of them?”

  “Might be some hiding out in the weeds, I don’t know,” Lucas said. He didn’t much care, either.

  “I called the Border Patrol. Ought to have somebody here in ten minutes,” Mahler said. Another sheriff’s car turned in the driveway.

  “All I want to do is look in the house,” Lucas said.

  “Fuckin’ Nazis,” Pap shouted at them.

  • • •

  HE AND FLOWERS went into the house, stepping through the Somalis now clustered despondently on the porch. One of the kids was crying and Flowers said, “I kinda wish we hadn’t done this.”

  Lucas nodded. “Didn’t want to. As far as I’m concerned, they can put them in a bus and haul them down to Minneapolis and turn them loose.”

  Not going to happen; they were now in the system.

  “Stinks,” Flowers said, as they stepped into the house.

  The interior of the house was old, moldy, and poorly kept. The kitchen appeared to have been built in the 1930s, and not cleaned since, smelling of bacon grease, fried eggs, and flatulence. The refrigerator was full of ready-to-microwave frozen food, in the top compartment, and a dozen eggs and the remains of a pound of butter in the lower. An overflowing trash can smelled of rotten coffee grounds.

  Tillus had used what had once been a parlor as storage for every kind of paper—bills, magazines, catalogs, newspapers; the rug on the parlor floor was not much thicker than a sheet, most of the nap worn through. The living room featured an oversized television, two chairs facing it, and probably thirty fox tails pinned to the crown molding, so that they hung down all around the room like fuzzy red icicles.

  As they walked around, pulling drawers, looking in corners, they found a half dozen guns—three rifles, three revolvers, ranging in age from old to ancient.

  A wired telephone sat on a side table in the living room. Lucas went there while Flowers, still with his shotgun, crept up the stairs, ready for trouble if any was up there.

  Lucas found a sheet of paper under the phone and the stub of a pencil off to one side. A dozen phone numbers were written on the paper, a doctor, the “county,” a few names that meant nothing to Lucas, and one that might have said “Chet.”

  Lucas wrote down
the Chet number, and started for the door, when Flowers called from the second floor: “Hey, Lucas. You better come up here.”

  Lucas turned back and climbed the stairs. Halfway up, a long strip of wallpaper had fallen from the wall, and now seemed to be mostly held up by spiderwebs. At the top of the stairs, he found two bedrooms and a bathroom. Flowers was standing in the front bedroom, shotgun over his shoulders, next to an antique single bed with flat springs and a two-inch-thick mattress, like an army bunk. It was covered with a dirt-gray sheet, flocked with dust bunnies.

  Lucas recognized the symptoms: “What have you done, Virgil?”

  Flowers said, “There’s a roll of carpet under the bed.”

  “What?”

  “A roll of carpet under the bed.” Flowers was smiling, sort of, but his voice wasn’t.

  Lucas knelt next to the end of the bed, saw a carpet roll—and in the middle of the roll, a fold of clear plastic, maybe Saran Wrap, now as dusty as the top sheet, but very clearly wrapped around the bones of a human foot, which were held in place by the wrapping plastic.

  Lucas stood up and brushed off his knees and said, “You know what? We ought to sneak out of here and let the deputies find the body.”

  Flowers said, “Even if we could work it . . .”

  “Yeah. We’re too straight,” Lucas said. “Goddamnit, all I wanted was a fuckin’ phone number.”

  “You get it?” Flowers asked.

  “Maybe. Gotta check.”

  Flowers said, “We better go tell them.”

  • • •

  LUCAS LET FLOWERS HANDLE THAT, while he walked to his car and got on the phone to the BCA duty officer and asked him to check the owner of the phone number he’d found. As he waited, he saw a couple of deputies, including Mahler, follow Flowers into the house. Tillus was still sitting on the steps with the Somalis; a moment later, a Border Patrol truck rolled into the yard, followed by another sheriff’s car.

  The duty officer came back and said, “Goes to a Chester Tillus, on Verizon.”

  “Good. Get onto Verizon and tell them to ping it. We need to know where the phone is, right now. And tell them that this is official business and the phone owner is not to be notified . . . however you do that. As soon as you hear back, call me.”

  That done, he got out of his truck, met Flowers coming out the door.

  Flowers asked, “Now what?”

  “I’ll call Sands and see if we can unload this on the Bemidji guys, and get the hell out of here,” Lucas said. Sands was the BCA director. Bemidji was the BCA’s northern outpost.

  Flowers looked around the yard: there were now five or six deputies and a couple of Border Patrol guys wandering around.

  “Quite the little party you got going here, Lucas,” Flowers said. “Reminds me of the stuff I do every day.”

  “Thank you.”

  A little while later, the sheriff arrived, followed by a white bus-like conversion van to transport the Somalis. Lucas and Flowers chatted with the sheriff for a few minutes, and the sheriff went up to look at the foot in the carpet roll.

  A few minutes later, he came back and said he suspected that it was George Tillus’s mother, who hadn’t been seen for a couple of decades. She supposedly had gone to California to live with her sister; but now, it appeared, might not have gotten out of the driveway.

  They were still chatting when the duty officer called back and told Lucas, “He’s off the grid right now, but they had him last night, first in Ironwood, and then a few minutes later, in Bessemer. Looks like he was heading east into the UP.”

  “Tell them to keep pinging him. I want to know if he comes back up,” Lucas said. To Flowers: “My boy is on his way to Sault Ste. Marie. I will see you later.”

  “I’m not going back to Fergus Falls,” Flowers called after him.

  “You got anything else to do?” Lucas asked, turning back around.

  “Lucas . . .” Flowers always had things to do. He covered roughly one-third of a large state.

  “Then go do them. If Moore calls, I’ll personally tell him to go fuck himself,” Lucas said. Moore was the state senator who had influence on the budget.

  • • •

  LUCAS HEADED HOME, driving fast, stopped once to pee and buy an ice cream cone, cut I-35 at Moose Lake, and made it into St. Paul a few minutes before eleven o’clock. He’d driven a little over six hundred miles since leaving the cabin that morning, and he was beat.

  Letty was still up: she met him at the door from the garage, and he looked at her face and said, “Wow.”

  “Yeah, he really plugged me,” Letty said. Her black eye extended probably two inches down from her eye, and was a deep blue-black. “Mom’s in bed. She’s working early tomorrow.”

  “And you’re okay?”

  Letty nodded. “Mom took me all over the place, an eye doctor because she wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to have a detached retina, which I don’t and won’t have, and an ENT guy. The ENT guy said it’ll be three days before the nose stops hurting inside and three weeks before the black eye is gone.”

  “Sounds about right. At least he didn’t break your nose. I can tell you, that hurts.”

  “What happened in Baudette?” Letty asked.

  Lucas told her about it as he led her into the kitchen, where he stuck his head into the refrigerator looking for something substantial to eat. He told her about the phone number and the body under the bed. “Beneath its blond exterior, Minnesota is a very weird place,” Letty said.

  “On the basic weird-shit-o-meter, you’re going to college in a state that’s probably an eleven. They don’t notice it so much, because they’ve gotten used to it.”

  “Are you going to Sault Ste. Marie?” she asked.

  “Don’t know. I’ll talk to some people in Michigan, but I might run over there, depending on what the Michigan cops say. Put more of a point on things.”

  “Not because Pilate punched me out.”

  “A little bit because Pilate punched you out,” Lucas said. “The main reason is, everything is now so bureaucratic, so much talking on telephones and sending e-mails, that I don’t know if anybody else has . . . the feeling . . . I’ve gotten about this. This guy is a major-league wacko. There are three dead in Wisconsin, counting that Bony guy, and even Stern is acting like it’s another day in the flour mill. And Stern’s a good guy.”

  • • •

  WEATHER GOT UP at six o’clock, moving quietly by habit, but Lucas woke up and caught her naked in the bathroom for a little squeeze. “Letty is hoping you’re going to Michigan,” she said.

  “Maybe. I’ll check at the office first,” Lucas said.

  “You’re gonna fly?”

  “Probably not. I looked online last night, and the absolutely fastest way I can fly there from here goes through Detroit, and from the time I have to be at the airport, until I get off the plane, is going to be seven hours or more. I can drive it almost as fast, and take all my gear.”

  “You mean your guns.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Don’t get shot, it’d be really inconvenient for everybody.”

  • • •

  LUCAS GOT CLEANED UP and slid out of the house before seven o’clock, Letty still sound asleep. At the office he checked notes and e-mails from his agents, got a note from Flowers that had come in before seven, saying that he was heading back to Mankato, where he lived.

  Lucas called him, caught him in a diner: “What about the body?”

  “Tillus said it was his mother. Said he went up to her bedroom one morning when he didn’t hear her stirring around, and she was dead. He was planning to bury her there on the farm, but never got around to it. He eventually got tired of looking at her up there, wrapped in a sheet, so he rolled her up in that rug.”

  “You believe him?”

  “Yeah, I guess. Ol’ Mom was just another pain in his ass. Tillus also mentioned something about her Social Security checks—he might still have been cashing them.”


  “Good ol’ Mom, the gift that keeps on giving.”

  “Yeah. Her arms and legs were mostly gone, but there was some mummification around her head and chest, so they’re shipping her down to the medical examiner to see if there are any wounds,” Flowers said. “But I kinda believe him.”

  “Okay.”

  “What about you?” Flowers asked. “What are you doing up at this time of day?”

  “Going to Sault Ste. Marie, if I can get out of town. Gonna talk to Michigan about meeting somebody up there.”

  “Yeah, good idea. It’s just a teeny bit out of your jurisdiction,” Flowers said. “You’ve cleared this with Sands, right?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Lucas: clear it with Sands. Please, I’m beggin’ you.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Lucas said.

  • • •

  LUCAS FIGURED THAT if he could get out of the office before eight-thirty, he could make it into Sault Ste. Marie before five, which would give him some office hours’ time to talk to the local sheriff and scout the site of the Juggalo Gathering.

  Michigan was an hour later than Minnesota, but when he called State Police Headquarters in Lansing, he got kicked around between offices for a while, and finally gave up. He’d call from the truck, he thought.

  Jon Duncan, one of the senior case coordinators, was in his office, and Lucas told him about the situation in Baudette. Duncan said he’d tell the Bemidji office to get in touch with the local sheriff, and see if any BCA help was required.

  He left a message at Hennepin County Medical Center for Weather, telling her he was on his way to Michigan, and was on his way out the door when he ran into Henry Sands, the BCA director, coming up the steps.

  Sands was unhappy: “Senator Moore got me out of bed this morning. He said Flowers ditched them for some other case.”

  “I had to pull him off—not Virgil’s fault,” Lucas said. “Something came up, up in Baudette, and he was the closest one of my guys.”