Текст книги "Gathering Prey"

Автор книги: John Sandford

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

Lucas saw the sheriff bolt toward the target car, pistol in his hand, and Lucas followed, well back. The sheriff stumbled through the beans and almost went down, and Lucas worried that he’d shoot himself, or somebody else, but he didn’t, and a few seconds later, they were looking through the side window at a dead guy in the front seat of the car. The rifle round had struck him in the cheekbone and gone through his head, knocking him back into the front seat.

Lucas said, “The girl’s in the back,” and a deputy arriving at that moment yanked on the back hatch, but it was locked, and the sheriff pulled open the driver’s-side door and reached across the dead man’s legs to pull the keys out of the ignition, and they all went around to the back of the car and unlocked the hatch.

They could see the unmoving body in the back, covered with a green woolen blanket. Lucas pulled it off and Skye was looking up at him, eyes wide with fear.

Lucas said, “Skye: you’re okay.”

The sheriff said, “Don’t let her see that,” and tipped his head toward the front of the car. And, “Tom, get that tape off her.”

A deputy produced a switchblade and began cutting the tape off Skye’s legs and she said, “They were going to kill me. Last night Pilate told Bony to give me some water but he wouldn’t have to bother with feeding me, they were going to kill me today . . .”

“Gonna get you to the hospital, honey,” the sheriff said. “You gotta be pretty shook up.” To Lucas he said, “We called in an ambulance, they’re on the way, oughta be here . . .”

•   •   •

THE DEPUTY FINISHED taking the tape that bound her arms to her body, and Skye tried to get out of the car, but when she put her feet down, nearly collapsed. Lucas caught her under the arms and pushed her back until she was sitting on the edge of the trunk. He said, “Letty told me that you were a witness to a killing last night.”

“Who’s Letty?” the sheriff asked. Lucas gave him another five-second explanation, and then Skye said, “I heard it all, and saw the end of it. I was taped up in the back bedroom and the doors on that thing were about as thick as tinfoil. Pilate got connected to some dope dealer here and was going to buy some cocaine from him, but when the dope dealer got here, Pilate didn’t have the money. He was trying to buy on credit—”

“On credit?” the sheriff said. “Dope?”

“That’s what he tried, and the guy tried to get out, I guess he had a gun. Pilate said something about him having a gun, but then there was a fight and this guy came crashing through the bedroom door and there was blood gushing out of his neck, like they cut his throat or something, and Pilate told Kristen—Kristen got cut bad, they talked about that, they took her to a hospital, I think in St. Paul, last night. Anyway, Pilate said that the RV wouldn’t be safe anymore because there was no way they could clean up all the blood. I mean, there was blood everywhere, you wouldn’t believe it, so he decided to burn it . . .”

She told the story, sitting on the edge of the car, of how she got the phone, and how she called Letty, and how they took her off the street in Duluth. Then she turned her eyes up to Lucas and said, “I think they might have killed Henry. Have you heard?”

Lucas shook his head. “Henry . . . didn’t make it.”

She’d been stressed and talking fast but showing no tears . . . until Lucas told her that Henry hadn’t made it, and then she suddenly began leaking tears and flopped backward into the trunk space, sobbing. The sheriff pulled on Lucas’s sleeve and Lucas stepped back and the sheriff whispered, “We gotta talk. Who in the heck is Henry?”

“Her companion. They killed him in South Dakota. Let’s get her on the way to the hospital, and I’ll fill you in.”

•   •   •

THE AMBULANCE ARRIVED, and though Skye said she wasn’t hurt, Lucas put her in the ambulance and told her, “Just ride along with this. You don’t have to be bleeding to be hurt.”

She no longer had her pack—she thought it might have burned in the RV—but her walking staff was in the backseat of the car in the bean field.

“If I could get that . . . I’ve had it a long time.”

“I’ll see to it,” Lucas said. “They’ll probably want to take fingerprints off it, in case one of the other people handled it. So, it could be a while.”

“Okay. Call Letty,” Skye said. “Tell her what happened. She saved my life.”

“I will,” Lucas said.

The ambulance left for the hospital in Menomonie and Lucas stepped away from the deputies and the post-shooting bureaucracy, and called Letty. Letty answered halfway through the first ring and Lucas said, “We got her. The guy she was with was killed.”

He told her what had happened, and Letty said, “I’m coming to the hospital.”

“Not a bad idea, you might be her only friend. Uh, take your mom’s car.”

“Mom’s not here.”

“Letty . . .”

“I’m coming,” she said.

She hung up and Lucas looked at the phone and said, “Ah, shit.”

She’d be coming, all right, in his Porsche.

She had a right foot like a ship’s anchor.

•   •   •

LUCAS GAVE THE SHERIFF everything he knew, from the murder in Los Angeles to the crucifixion in South Dakota, to the murder of Malin the night before, the search of Malin’s apartment, and the phone call to Letty.

The sheriff stuck a wad of Copenhagen under his tongue as he listened, chewed, spit once, and then said, “Those sonsofbitches come to this county, they won’t be walking away.”

“I don’t think they’re looking to walk away,” Lucas said. “They’re like a tornado: they don’t think about too much at all. They just kill and move on.”

“So we’re shifting this basically over to the DCI? To Stern?”

“I guess. Nobody knows exactly where these people are, or what their cars look like. Probably get Skye to do some identikits.”

Another car came rolling fast from the south, grille lights flashing, and the sheriff said, “That’s probably Stern now.”

•   •   •

IT WAS. STERN LOOKED at the body in the car and said, “One down. Would have liked to have talked to him.”

“I made the call,” the sheriff said, spitting again. “We thought he was about to shoot the girl.”

Stern slapped him on the shoulder and said, “I’m not criticizing, Jim, we all would’ve done the same thing.” He turned to Lucas: “Did the girl give us anything useful?”

“One thing. There were two people present at the murder last night, this Pilate guy, and one of the women, named Kristen. Skye said she got cut pretty bad and she was treated at an emergency room, probably in the Twin Cities. We should get some video of her.”

“We need that right now,” Stern said.

“I’ll call on my way down to Menomonie,” Lucas said. “About Skye. You guys are going to want to wring her out, but when you’re done . . . she’s sort of a friend of my daughter. If you want, I’ll put her in a hotel in St. Paul and we’ll keep an eye on her.”

“Probably as good as it’s gonna get, if she doesn’t have an address,” Stern said. “Appreciate the offer.”

Before Lucas left, he took the highway patrolman aside and asked, “Are you guys running any speed traps down on I-94?”

“Just curious?”

“Well, my daughter’s coming over, she’s a friend of Skye’s. She’s probably upset and driving too fast, because she’s kinda freaked out. If I could slow her down a bit . . .”

The patrolman checked and found a trap near Exit 10, at Roberts, Wisconsin, not far from the Minnesota line. Lucas called Letty from his truck: “Where are you?”

“I-94.”

“But not in Wisconsin, yet,” Lucas said.

“Not yet. Not quite.”

“The Wisconsin highway patrol is running a trap near Exit 10, that’s ten miles on the other side of the river. Watch the mile signs.”

“Got it. I’m driving slow. I’ll tell you, though, a seven-speed manual seems a little overcooked for this bitch. You can keep it in fifth and still blow the doors off anything else on the road.”

“Letty, goddamnit . . .”

“Just honking your horn, Dad. I’ll see you in Menomonie.”

•   •   •

LUCAS HAD JUST GOTTEN in the Benz when he saw Stern jogging toward him. He rolled down the window, and Stern came up and said, “He had a cell phone. We looked at the recents and he had a call just a minute or so before he got off the highway. That had to be somebody else in the caravan who spotted the roadblock being set up.”

“Had to be,” Lucas said.

“I’ll get the numbers down to Madison and we’ll start pinging them,” Stern said. “We oughta have a location pretty quick.”

•   •   •

LUCAS WAS ALMOST AS FAR from the hospital as Letty was, the difference being that she was driving a Porsche on an interstate highway and he was driving an SUV on back roads. On the way down, he called the BCA duty officer and told him about the woman who’d been treated for knife cuts, and asked him to check the local hospitals.

“Sometime right before or after midnight, probably,” he said.

“We’ll get it going.”

•   •   •

LUCAS WAS NOT SURPRISED when he pulled into the hospital parking lot and saw his Porsche already there. When he walked past it, he could hear the ticking as the engine cooled. Inside the emergency room, Skye was sitting on a bed, talking to Letty, who was sitting in a visitor’s chair.

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.