Prey 25 - Gathering Prey

by John Sandford

“Gotta take them,” Lucas said. “They’ll find out soon enough. We don’t want them warning Pilate.”

  “What should I do with Jerry’s gun?”

  “I don’t know. Whatever department policy is.”

  Laurent showed a thin slice of a smile: “Now you’re fuckin’ with me.”

  • • •

  THEY DRAPED THE dead man’s body with a car cover that somebody had in a truck, and Laurent called a photographer from a local portrait studio to come out and take pictures of the scene. “It’s not like we don’t know what happened,” he said.

  “We still want lots of photos,” Lucas said. “Especially of the gun and its relationship to the dead man’s hand, and any other weapons you find. Bag anything like that. If you don’t have bags, have a deputy go to a grocery store and buy some gallon Ziplocs. You want to document everything that tells our side of the story, that this guy was about to open fire into a crowd. We’ll want some general crowd shots, too.”

  “But we know—” Laurent began.

  “Because the guy with the lip is gonna sue your ass,” Lucas said.

  Laurent sighed: “Shoot. Man, if it’s not one thing . . .”

  “Let’s go get the other two assholes,” Lucas said. “We’ll haul them all downtown and do the interview room trick again.”

  “Maybe you better do that,” Laurent said. “I better stick around here until this whole . . . body thing . . . is taken care of. I already called the funeral home.”

  “Okay,” Lucas said. And, “Rome: the posse’s done good. I’m proud to work with you all.”

  Laurent nodded: “Thank you. I’ll tell them you said that.” His phone rang and he answered and listened for a moment, then said, “Those two guys have picked up the blanket and they look like they’re headed for Melody’s car.”

  “Can’t leave Frisell by himself . . . need witnesses that he didn’t mess with the scene.”

  “He wouldn’t—”

  “I know that. You need witnesses for when it gets to court,” Lucas said.

  “Ah . . .” Laurent called the three men over, explained Lucas’s suggestions, and Peters, the lawyer, said, “Smart. We’ll keep Jerry away from the car.”

  Laurent said to Lucas, “So we’re good here. I’ll come back here while you go to town, but right now, I’m coming with you. Four-on-two.”

  They pushed through the crowd and a couple people asked what had happened, but they kept moving, and when they got to a thinner spot, started jogging, Laurent on the phone with Barnes, who said that the two men were almost at the car.

  “We’re coming,” Laurent said. “Don’t do anything until we get there.”

  Thirty yards out, Lucas saw the two men approaching the line of parked cars. One of them split off to the second car with California tags, while the other went to Melody Walker’s car. Lucas said over his shoulder to Laurent, “I’ll take the guy on the right. You guys get the other one.”

  Laurent nodded and they split up, and as Lucas came up to his man, he saw Laurent, Barnes, and Bennett surround theirs. Lucas’s man saw them surrounding his friend, and he turned to run, nearly bumping into Lucas, who had his gun out and shouted, “Freeze. Freeze.”

  The man threw up his hands and screamed, “Whoa, whoa, whoa . . .”

  A minute later, they were both cuffed. Lucas said to Barnes and Bennett, “Take them back to your trucks, both of you ride together, put them in the back. If they fuck with you, shoot them.” His back was to the two men, as he faced Bennett and Barnes, and he winked. They nodded and Barnes said, “After what they did to that little girl, it’d be a pleasure.”

  One of the men said, “Wait, what girl?”

  Laurent said to Bennett and Barnes, “I’ll call Cronhauser, tell him we need to borrow his holding cell and interview room, and a guy to watch the doors. I’ll tell him what happened, get you some help.”

  Lucas: “Who’s Cronhauser?”

  “Police chief. We got a co-op deal on lockups, when we get an overflow.”

  • • •

  THEY WALKED WITH Bennett and Barnes to Bennett’s SUV, got all four men loaded. Lucas said, “I’ll catch you guys in town. Isolate them until I get there.”

  “What about Jerry?” Barnes asked. “Is he okay?”

  “He says he’s okay, but I’ll take him along with me, get him away from the scene,” Lucas said.

  On the way back to the dead man’s car, Lucas said, “Normally we’d leave this for a crime scene crew, but . . .”

  “We can get a guy from Sault Ste. Marie,” Laurent said. “The cops up there have a guy.”

  “Then get him started. Don’t move the body until he gets here. Call whatever judge you use and get a search warrant for those two cars—Walker’s and the other guy’s. I want to pull the dead guy’s wallet now, get him ID’d, take a look at his cell phone, if he has one. They were looking for Pilate. I hope he’s not in the crowd, watching this, or he’ll take off like a big-assed bird.”

  Back at the scene, Lucas checked the man’s wallet, which identified him as Raleigh Waites, with an address in Reseda, California. Lucas didn’t know where that was. Waites didn’t have a cell phone in his pockets, but Lucas found one on the floor under the front seat, along with a misdemeanor amount of marijuana and a box of .38 shells.

  The phone was wrapped in a stiff brown fabric bag with a Velcro snap. Lucas could feel a network of wires beneath the surface of the bag, but didn’t know what that meant.

  When he opened the phone, he found fourteen names in the directory, and a long list of recents. Lucas copied all the recents for the past three weeks—most were duplicates, and most went to numbers in the directory. None of them went to a “Pilate,” but one phone number went to a P. When he checked, he found that P had been called at midnight every day since Hayward, and at random times before that.

  Pilate.

  “I’ll call this into my office, we’ll ping him, figure out where he is,” Lucas told Laurent.

  “Good. I’ll get on the mutual aid net and let everybody in the UP know what’s going on. If we can find him, we should be able to grab him pretty quick.”

  • • •

  SELLERS, PETERS, and a uniformed deputy were still on crowd control. Laurent asked the woman her name, and she said, “Linda.”

  “Last name?”

  “Petrelli.”

  Laurent read her rights to her, and cuffed her. Lucas peered at the woman’s face: she showed no sign of tears or even fear. Her purse was sitting in the footwell of the car, and he dipped into it, found another wallet, and her driver’s license. Linda Petrelli, as she said, with an address in Glendale, a town he had heard of.

  He noted her name and address and the tag number on the car, and then he and Frisell escorted her through the crowd to Lucas’s Benz, and put her in the backseat. Lucas asked, “You think you can drive?”

  Frisell said, “Sure. Hey, I’m fine.”

  “You might not be as fine as you think you are.”

  “Well . . . how could you tell that? If I feel fine, and act fine . . .”

  “All right, drive. I’ve got to make phone calls.”

  • • •

  LUCAS HAD TO EXPLAIN how the electronic transmission shift worked, which Frisell thought was weird, and they left the Gathering with the silent woman in the back. Lucas called the duty officer at the BCA and asked him to ping the phone numbers he’d collected. And, “Is Barb Watson there?”

  “I think so. She hasn’t checked out.”

  “Ring her for me—I don’t have her number,” Lucas said.

  “One second. And listen, Sands wants to talk to you. He wants you to call him at his office. You want me to put you through?”

  “No. If he wants to talk to me, he has my number,” Lucas said.

  “Lucas, he’s really pissed,” the duty officer said. “He asked me why we were paying for all this work for Wisconsin and now you’re in Michigan . . .”

  “So he can call me. Ping those n
umbers. And ring Barb.”

  Barb Watson was a technical specialist: when she answered her phone, Lucas described the brown bag he’d found around Raleigh Waites’s phone. “You know what that is?”

  “Yes, unfortunately. It’s a kind of Faraday cage. It blocks the cell phone signals, both ways, in and out.”

  “Huh. Are they legal? Where do you get them?”

  “Legal as far as I know. The Museum of Modern Art used to sell them.”

  “This isn’t good,” Lucas said.

  • • •

  WHEN LUCAS HUNG UP, the woman in the back said, “Found out about Raleigh’s phone bag, huh?”

  Lucas half turned to look at her. “What’d you say?”

  “He used to rape me all the time. He kidnapped me and he and the others used to rape me. Even the women.” She spoke in a tone so flat, so uninflected, that Lucas thought she might be telling the truth.

  “Where, uh, did he kidnap you?”

  “Back in California. He kidnapped me from my job,” Petrelli said.

  “Doing what? Your job?”

  “Worked at a Home Depot.”

  “Think anybody reported it? Should we call your folks?”

  “Oh, probably not,” Petrelli said. “The disciples made me go in and quit, and made me call my mom and tell her I was going to be traveling and not to call me.”

  “Huh.”

  “They been raping me for three years now,” she said. “All the time, every night. Raleigh used to beat me up because that’s what he got off on. They called me ‘the designated rapee.’”

  “All right,” Lucas said. “We’ll want you to make a statement when we get downtown here—”

  “Butt, mouth, everything,” she said.

  “Okay, when we get downtown—”

  She looked out the window at the trees. “It was awful,” she said. She said it in a tone that she might use to order a sandwich.

  • • •

  THE TWO GUYS they’d picked up would be held at the city police station, while they took Petrelli to the sheriff’s office, put her in the county clerk’s office while they moved a protesting Melody Walker back in the holding cell. Then they moved Petrelli to the interview room, sat her down, turned on the cameras, and Lucas said, “We read your rights to you at the park. I’ll do it again if you want.”

  “Nah. I just wanted to say that I was kidnapped and raped by all the disciples,” she said. Then, “Just a minute.” She stood up and pulled her cat tail off, dropped it on the interview table, and sat down again. “That’s better.”

  “Let’s go all the way back to the start,” Lucas said. “Do you know if Pilate or the disciples murdered an actress named Kitty Place last year?”

  “I wasn’t there, but they told me about it,” she said. She looked at Lucas for a moment, then at Frisell, back to Lucas: “Pilate and the guys all fucked her and then they cut her up and threw her in the ocean. But—she wasn’t the start. Not even close. I think that’s what they were going to do to me, when they were done with me.”

  “What was the start?” Lucas said.

  “I wasn’t there for it—but way back, I don’t know . . . maybe five years? They killed some guy by bashing his head with a rock. On a beach, near Malibu. They put him in the ocean, too. See, when they kill someone, they either put them in the ocean or they bury them up in the hills.”

  “How many have they done that to?” Frisell asked.

  “Well, the second one they killed, one of the girls told me this, was a traveler guy, and he had this walking stick with a bird’s head on it. Pilate kept it and every time they kill someone, he cuts a notch in it. There are like maybe . . . ten notches.”

  “Not really,” Frisell said.

  “Really.” She nodded, and added, “I hate it when they kill somebody, because they get all excited and then they gang-rape me.”

  “Do you know where Pilate is now?”

  “Well, he’s around somewhere. But he’s smart—he wasn’t going to be the first person to show up at the Gathering. He sent his spies in, first. Raleigh was spying on you back at the other Gathering, he saw you and that girl that Pilate hit. Raleigh thinks she’s your daughter. Wait: he thought she was your daughter. Guess he’s not thinking anything, anymore.”

  Lucas felt the chill: he didn’t want Letty and Pilate linked in any way. Didn’t want Pilate or any of his disciples even aware of Letty. “But Pilate’s around,” Lucas prompted.

  “Somewhere. Up here, I think. Raleigh was supposed to call him at midnight tonight and give him the all-clear.”

  “We arrested those two guys that you and Raleigh talked to, the guys on the blanket.”

  “Jase and Parker, yeah, they used to rape me all the time,” she said. “Sometimes, both of them at once. They call it a double-team.”

  “Were they involved in the killings?”

  She considered for a moment, then said, “Jase always was, Parker, maybe a couple of times, but he wasn’t so much into it. I mean, he’d do it, but he wasn’t really all hot for it. He was afraid we’d get caught—they’d get caught—and get sent to the electric chair.”

  Frisell: “You said this Pilate guy’s got ten notches . . . How many were you there for?”

  She stuck out her lip, considering again. “Maybe four? They were doing it a long time before they kidnapped me.”

  Lucas said, “Sit here for a minute. We’ll be right back.”

  Petrelli said, “Hey, I’m helping you guys. What do I get out of it? I want something . . .”

  “We’ll talk to your lawyer about it,” Lucas said. “He’s on his way here.”

  He led Frisell out in the hall and Lucas said, “She’s worse than Walker. There’s something wrong with her.”

  “If she’s been raped by everybody, for years . . .”

  “Could be trauma,” Lucas agreed. “After a while, your brain blows up. On the other hand, she could be trying to manipulate us—she knows the jig is up. Let’s see if Walker’s lawyer is here yet. If he’s not, we could get her out—”

  “I thought you said we weren’t supposed to talk to her.”

  “We’re not supposed to ask her any more questions—but we can talk to each other while she’s around. If she blurts something out, I mean, we’ve told her not to talk to us anymore. On the video.”

  “What would we be talking about?” Frisell said.

  • • •

  THEY GOT WALKER OUT of the holding cell and took her to the back of the building to the vending machines where Lucas bought her a Diet Dr Pepper and a sack of Cheez-Its. He said to Frisell, “If Linda’s telling the truth, we’ll get everybody for rape, too. Not that we really need it.”

  “At least ten murders,” Frisell said. “They really are going to get the needle. All of them. Ten. Fuckin’. Murders. Just unbelievable.”

  Walker said, “Linda? You got Linda?”

  Lucas: “Yeah. Probably shouldn’t tell you this, but one of your pals, what’s his name . . . ?”

  Frisell: “Raleigh?”

  Walker said, “You got Raleigh and Linda?”

  “Raleigh tried to shoot his way past us,” Lucas said. “He was killed.”

  Her mouth dropped open: “You’re lyin’.”

  “No. He was shot. Had a great big chrome revolver under the front seat of his Subaru, tried to pull it on us,” Lucas said. “Now Linda’s telling us the whole story: ten murders, at least. She’s been kidnapped and raped—”

  “Linda? Linda’s the worst one,” Walker said, gaping at them over the Dr Pepper. “She wasn’t raped: she’d fuck anything that moved. Any way they wanted it. She’s the one, you know, that boy out in the Black Hills, she’s the one who cut off his cock. She was dancing around with it, and he was still alive. If you look in her car, you might find it. She said she was going to make a leather weed pouch out of it.”

  They stared at her for a while, then Frisell said, “Oh, boy.” And a few seconds later, to Lucas, “Where do these people come f
rom? How do they get like this?”

  “I don’t know,” Lucas said. “I told my daughter you’d hear all these urban legends, all these bullshit stories. I told her they never turned out to be true. Well, guess what?”

  Frisell looked at Walker, then at Lucas and asked, “How do we know which one is lying? One of them must be.”

  “We got more people to question,” Lucas said. “We better motor on over there.”

  • • •

  THEY TOOK PETRELLI to the holding cell and locked her in, and put Walker in the interview room, locked up, and told the night deputy that the lawyer could talk to Walker, and probably Petrelli, but that he should talk to Lucas before he spoke to either of the women. “Tell him it’s important to call me,” Lucas said.

  • • •

  THE TWO MEN at the city lockup were named Jason Biggs and Parker Collins; the city had two holding cells, both as bleak as the tan-tiled cell at the sheriff’s office, designed to fend off vomit and urine in the most efficient way possible. Biggs was in one cell, Collins in the other.

  Barnes and Bennett, who transported them down from the park, said, “They’re pretty hard-core. We tried to chat and Biggs told Collins to ask for a lawyer. They asked us for a lawyer. I told him that we didn’t know anything about that, and you’d tell them, or Rome would.”

  Lucas asked Frisell, “You up for another conversation?”

  “Sure.”

  A city officer asked if they wanted to use the interview room, and Lucas said, “Not yet.” And to Barnes and Bennett, “You guys get their cell phones?”

  “Yeah.” Barnes nodded. “We bagged them.”

  “Look at all their recents and write them down. See if any of them list a P or a Pilate.”

  The city cop took them down to the first holding cell, where Biggs was locked up. They stepped inside, and Biggs, sitting on the tile bench, still wearing the vicious happy clown face, said, “You’re not a lawyer.”

  “I’m a cop. You’ve got the right—”

  “No shit. I want a lawyer. Now.”

  “Absolutely right,” Frisell said from Lucas’s shoulder. “Screw him. Why should we give him a break? We got everything we need from Linda and Melody. I’d stick the needle in this guy myself.”