Prey 25 - Gathering Prey

by John Sandford

Sands said, “Lucas, I don’t think you understand how important the Fergus Falls case is. Moore is really unhappy. He said Flowers was dragging his feet anyway, like the whole case really didn’t interest him.”

  Lucas leaned into Sands and said, “Henry, the whole Fergus Falls case is bullshit. Moore is a bullshitter. Not only are we wasting our time, we risk becoming a laughingstock out there.”

  Sands’s face flushed, and he said, “I don’t care what some hick farmer out there thinks, I care about what Moore thinks. He’s on the finance committee, and he can fuck us.”

  Lucas said, “I gotta go,” and walked away, heading for the front doors.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Michigan.”

  “What? What? What about Flowers?”

  Lucas turned and said, “Flowers is working. He’s got real work to do. Leave him alone, Henry.”

  The drive to Sault Ste. Marie was tedious. Lucas stopped twice in small towns to stretch and get a bite to eat, and along the way, made a few phone calls. He couldn’t drum up much interest from the Michigan state cops, who suggested that he talk to the local sheriff, and then he’d talk to the state cops, if that were really necessary. But the UP was such a long way from anywhere . . .

  He talked to Del and Shrake, his agents, about their ongoing cases in Minnesota, and to Letty, who was spending her time in an easy chair in Lucas’s home office, reading and doing research on the Internet when he needed it.

  Lucas had been told by several people, including Letty, Skye, and other Juggalos, that the Juggalo event was in Sault Ste. Marie. Now Letty told him that it actually wasn’t in the city itself, but at a county park in Barron County, southwest of Sault Ste. Marie.

  “I think everybody says Sault Ste. Marie because it’s the closest real city,” Letty told him on the phone. “You’re not going to like what you find in Barron County. The county seat is Jeanne d’Arc, which is the French spelling of Joan of Arc. According to the Wiki, the population in 2000 was two thousand forty-six, and in 2010 was one thousand eight hundred and four, which means the place lost ten percent of its population in ten years. It’s on Lake Michigan.”

  “The local beaver plant probably closed,” Lucas said, looking out the window at the passing landscape, which consisted of a two-lane highway, an unrelieved wall of dark green oak trees, a scattering of pines, and the taillights of a single car, far ahead of him.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Who’s the sheriff?”

  “A guy named Roman Laurent. Here’s another non-great thing. The county website sucks and I’m not sure about this, but he appears to have six deputies and a police dog. Total. There might also be some clerks and part-time help. They don’t have a jail—if they need to put somebody in jail, they rent space from Chippewa County, which is Sault Ste. Marie.”

  “Ah, boy. What about Jeanne d’Arc city cops?”

  “Let me look . . . Okay, there’s a picture, looks like they’ve got at least seven cops. But the Gathering isn’t right in Jeanne d’Arc, either. It’s ten or twelve miles out of town, at a lake at Overtown Park. I don’t know if the city cops would go there.”

  “There’s gotta be some kind of mutual aid program, if they need it,” Lucas said. “What about motels?”

  “Let me look . . . There’s a Comfort Inn and a Holiday Inn Express, both on Lake Michigan. Then there are a couple local places, it looks like.”

  “See if you can get me a room in whatever looks best . . . and find me the fastest route into Jeanne d’Arc.”

  • • •

  A WHILE LATER, remembering his stop at the bookstore in Hayward, with Letty, he called Shrake back and told him to see if there was a cadaver dog in Minnesota. “A what?”

  “A cadaver dog. I was just reading about them—about how they can sniff out even small traces of blood. Even after somebody’s been dead for a while. If there’s a bloody club buried somewhere . . .”

  “You want us to go back up to Cross Lake?”

  “We gotta try. If you find a cadaver dog, you can go play golf while the dog works,” Lucas said. “And if you find one, check around Merion’s house, too.”

  Shrake still sounded doubtful: “I suppose we could try. We’re not getting much talking to these computer-chip guys.”

  • • •

  LUCAS PULLED INTO Jeanne d’Arc a few minutes after four o’clock and followed the highway along the Lake Michigan waterfront to Main Street. Letty had said that the county courthouse was on Main, several blocks back from the water.

  Lucas turned up a shallow hill, between Main’s double line of early-twentieth-century two-story brick buildings, and found the courthouse above a narrow green lawn six blocks from the lake. A newer building, of metallic-looking purple brick, with a steel roof, the courthouse was half wrapped by a parking lot. Lucas found an empty slot, parked, and went inside.

  A guard was sitting at a desk in the lobby, doing nothing, although he seemed content. He nodded and Lucas said, “I’m an investigator with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Can you tell me where the sheriff’s office is?”

  “Yup. You go all the way to the end of the lobby, take a left, go down that hall. You’ll see the door. Roman’s in there, because I just saw him come back from Pat’s with a sandwich and a soda.”

  “Pat’s is decent?” Lucas asked.

  “The best around here, if you just want a sandwich,” the guard said.

  Lucas thanked him for the tip and walked down the lobby past the county clerk’s window—the clerk was sitting on a stool, doing nothing, and said, “Hi, there,” as he walked by. He nodded at her, turned the corner, and found the door to the sheriff’s office at the back of the building.

  Inside the door, he found himself in a small room with an empty desk, two closed doors apparently going back to other offices, two paintings of fish, one of ducks, and a DARE poster. Not exactly sure what to do, he waited, and a minute or so later, an older lady came bustling through, stopped when she saw him, and said, “Oh! I didn’t know there was anybody here.”

  Lucas identified himself and said, “I’d like to talk to Sheriff Laurent if he has a minute.”

  “I think he’s over at Pat’s.”

  “The guard at the door said he just came back.”

  “Oh!” Surprised again. “Just a second, then.” She went to one of the closed doors, opened it, stuck her head through, and called, “Hey, Rome? You back there?”

  “Yeah, I’m here.”

  “You got a fellow here to see you. He’s an investigator from Minnesota,” she said.

  “Minnesota?”

  “That’s what he says.”

  “Well, send him on back.”

  • • •

  ROMAN LAURENT WAS a tall, thin man with steel-colored hair, gray eyes, and high cheekbones; he looked like he might run marathons. He was wearing a tan sheriff’s uniform, and when he stood up to shake hands, Lucas noticed that while he was wearing a holster, it was empty.

  “Sit down, sit down. You don’t mind if I finish a late lunch? Or early dinner?” Laurent asked.

  “Go ahead. I might stop over there myself,” Lucas said, as he took a visitor’s chair. “Did you get a call from the state police this morning? About what I’m doing?”

  Laurent paused in mid-chew and shook his head. “The state police don’t call me about anything. We could have an asteroid about to hit the town and the state police wouldn’t call me.”

  “Ah, jeez. Well, I got some news for you, then. You’ve got a crazy killer on his way, with a whole bunch of assistant killers, if they’re not already here.”

  Laurent stopped eating as Lucas explained about Pilate, about the probable murders in Los Angeles, the for-sure murders in South Dakota and Wisconsin, and the peculiar findings in Baudette, Minnesota.

  He concluded by saying, “We heard they were headed here for the Juggalo Gathering. Then, when we pinged the one guy whose phone we knew, we spotted him in Ironwood and a while later
, in Bessemer, so he was coming this way.”

  “Pretty interesting,” Laurent said. He ate the final chunk of his sandwich, balled up the wrapper, bounced it off the wall and into a wastebasket. He sighed and said, “You know, I believe every word you’ve said, but I don’t need this. I’ve got six officers working for me full-time, plus four reserve deputies and a dog, and the dog got his feet cut up on broken glass yesterday and he’s out of it for a week. That means two guys for busy shifts, one guy for others. The dog has the most experience. Not counting the part-timers, he might even be the smartest. I include myself in that. I’ve never investigated anything more complicated than mailbox theft.”

  “How about the city cops?” Lucas asked.

  “About the same, except dumber than the dog, for sure.”

  They stared at each for a few seconds, then Lucas asked, “No offense . . . but how’d you get to be sheriff?”

  Laurent grinned at him and said, “I wanted to live up here near my family, my folks and brothers and sisters, and my ex-wife. This was the best job around. I was a Ranger officer in the army with three tours in Iraq, I know some things about guns and don’t mind the occasional bar fight . . . and that was good enough for the folks in Barron County. The last sheriff was both incompetent and a crook. I’m neither one. So, basically, I’m good for the job, at least in Barron County. We just don’t do what you might call your high-end investigations.”

  “I’m not sure we’d really need that here,” Lucas said. “What we need is to go out to the Juggalo Gathering and bust a few guys, if they show up there.”

  Laurent shrugged and said, “We’re good for that, if you can point them out. I’ve got a couple muscle-heads working for me who’ll do the job.”

  Lucas said, “All right. I can get you warrants from both Wisconsin and South Dakota. The Gathering starts tomorrow.”

  “It’s already started,” Laurent said. “The early birds are setting up their camps right now.”

  “Then we ought to go up and take a look. The way this wacko operates, he might be picking out a victim right now. He got pissed at this girl in Wisconsin and kicked her to death right there in the Gathering field, about a hundred feet from the bandstand.”

  “Jesus. That’s not something you see every day,” Laurent said. “You want to ride with me or go separately?”

  Lucas didn’t usually want to ride with another cop, because they’d often wind up having separate things to do. At the same time, he needed to talk more with Laurent, to figure out what the other man could do and not do. “I’ll go with you tonight,” Lucas said. “We’re just looking around.”

  “We can stop at Pat’s, if you want, get you a sandwich.”

  • • •

  LAURENT GOT HIS GUN from a desk drawer, a black Beretta of the type he probably carried in the army, and they walked out to his truck, stopped at Pat’s, where Lucas got a roast beef on rye with mustard and onions, on Laurent’s recommendation, and a Diet Coke, and they headed out to the county park.

  “Let me tell you a few things about this place, the UP,” Laurent said, as they drove out of town in his Silverado pickup. “The UP is about the most remote place in the lower forty-eight—other people make the same claim, but they don’t know about the UP. The people down in Lansing don’t give a rat’s ass about us—we’ve only got three percent of the state’s population and don’t have enough votes to worry the politicians who don’t live here, so why should they care? The UP is about the size of Massachusetts and Connecticut put together. The biggest town’s got twenty-one thousand people. It’s better than three hundred miles from one end to the other, from Ironwood to Sault Ste. Marie, and no four-lane highway, except I-75, which runs up from the south across the Mackinac Strait to Canada. That’s no more than sixty miles long, and only affects the far east part of the UP. If you want to drive from east to west, the way this guy is coming, it’d take you at least five hours. Covering that amount of territory, sixteen thousand square miles, you’ve got no more than a few hundred cops, working three shifts plus weekends, most of those concentrated in maybe a dozen towns. So, if you want to enforce the law in the UP—well, you’re on your own.”

  “If it’s so remote, why do the Juggalos come up here?” Lucas asked.

  “Because it’s nice in the summer. Most of them come up from the Detroit area, where the Insane Clown Posse comes from, which is not nice, in the summer or mostly any other time. We got good lakes and, like I said, no cops—we leave them alone,” Laurent said. “They want to smoke a little weed, no problem. Besides, everybody up here wants them to come. They’ve been up here for four years now, don’t cause us a lot of trouble, other than hauling some trash out of the park. They’ve got their own medics and if somebody ODs, they haul them off to Sault Ste. Marie—no hospital in Jeanne d’Arc. And the Juggalos probably leave a quarter million dollars behind. In Barron County, that’s big.”

  After a while, Laurent asked, “How many guys traveling with this fruitcake?”

  “Well, we killed one of them. So, not more than twenty,” Lucas said.

  Laurent said, “Wait a minute. There are twenty crazy killers coming up here?”

  “At the most,” Lucas said. “As far as we know.”

  Laurent laughed; and that reassured Lucas. He wasn’t working with someone who was easily frightened. Or maybe, Lucas thought, he really was dumber than the dog.

  • • •

  THE ENTRANCE TO the county park was a gravel road that broke off the highway, followed a winding road through a stand of oaks, and then plunged into a pine forest and emerged at a series of campgrounds spread around a lake.

  A few local families were in the nearest campgrounds, set up around picnic tables. Two small boats bobbed in the lake; judging from his own lake, at his cabin, Lucas thought it might be five hundred acres or so.

  At the far end of the road, at the end of the lake, the park opened up into a field with a baseball diamond at one end. Fifty cars and pickups and a few RVs were already scattered around the field, and a flatbed truck was unloading green fiberglass porta-potties. Laurent left his truck at the near end of the parking area, and as Lucas got out, the scent of pine trees, wood smoke, and roasting weenies hit him in the face.

  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.”

  “Di
d 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 . . .”