Gathering Prey (8 page)

“So?”

“So we sneak up on her, throw a bag on her head, and toss her in the car.”

“Man, she’s out in the parking lot,” said Bell. “There are eight million people out there.”

“No, there isn’t. Not really.” Pilate stood up, turned to Raleigh. “Let’s get your car.” To Bell he said, “Go tell Kristen to close up shop and get out of here. We’ll meet them over in Wisconsin. Tell them wait on the highway.”

The thing that Pilate liked about Raleigh was that after a decision was made, no matter how crazy it was, he’d go with you. To get through life, he needed someone to tell him what to
do
. If that were done, he’d do it: rob a bank, drown a guy, get the hammer and nails for a crucifix.

They got Raleigh’s car and started driving loops around the parking lot, and Raleigh rambled for a while: “Back in Denver I was working on this golf course, running a mower, and I met this golfer guy who said when he was playing, and had to take a leak, he’d do it right in the middle of the fairway. He’d put his bag down and stand next to it, hold his dick with one hand and with the other hand, he’d shade his eyes like he was working out his next shot. He said nobody ever paid any attention to him. But you see a guy standing in the bushes, the women start bitching and moaning about guys exposing themselves. This guy, they had no idea . . .”

“What’d you tell me that for?” Pilate asked.

“’Cause if we yank her right off the parking lot, like we were helping her in the car, people could look right at you and never have any idea.”

“You know what I like about you?” Pilate laughed. “You’re fuckin’ crazy. You’re really fuckin’ nuts.”

That’s what they did.

Pilate popped open the side door, grabbed her by the collar of her hoodie, and yanked her into the backseat before she even had a chance to scream, pushed her into the space below the seats, and popped her a few times on the cheekbone, with a fist loaded with a roll of quarters:
pop, pop, pop
. Raleigh rolled them out of the parking lot, and they were gone.

A
t the mall in Duluth, Lucas and Letty tracked down a security officer who told them that he’d heard of the group attempting to sell sex out at the edge of the parking lot, but hadn’t seen them. “A guy named Larry Royce, we’ve got his address and phone number, came in here and complained. We went right out there, four of us, but they were gone. I don’t know how long they were here, but I doubt that it was very long.”

The complainant had given them a description of the RV, but no license plate number. “It’s a Winnebago Minnie, beige. Doesn’t help much—maybe Winnebago can tell you how many they made. Royce said it was pretty beat-up. Looked like it had been pushed hard.”

Royce had seen two women with the RV, no men. He hadn’t gone inside.

The security man said they’d called the Duluth cops with the story, but he hadn’t heard back; and he didn’t have anything more. Lucas got Larry Royce’s address and phone number, and thanked him.

Back in the truck, Lucas called the sex crimes unit of the Duluth Police Department. The officer who answered knew of the call from mall security. “We had the patrol division looking for them, but nothing came back. It’s possible they crossed over into Wisconsin and headed south or east. Lotta RVs out there, and we didn’t have a tag number. We also didn’t have any information that sex had actually been sold.”

Letty had been on her iPad, and reported, “Winnebago made Minnies for a long time. They might have stopped for a while, but then they started again. Looks like they were making them for at least twenty years.”

“See if you can find this Royce guy’s address,” Lucas said.

She found it in ten seconds: they were six or eight blocks away. “We could call him . . .”

“Better to talk face-to-face, if we can,” Lucas said.

•   •   •

LARRY ROYCE LIVED
in a bluebird-blue house in a neighborhood of white clapboard houses built on small lawns. He was home, a newer Chevy van parked in front of an older Lund fishing boat, tucked tight in the cracked driveway. A jolly, balding heavyset man with blond hair and a red face, somewhere deep in his forties, he was happy to talk about the incident, but not in front of Letty—“It’s embarrassing,” he said.

Lucas suggested that Letty take a walk around the block or wait in the truck. She took her iPad for a walk.

Royce sat on his stoop and said, “There were two of them, a thin blonde and a fat redhead. They were wiping the windows of this RV with some Windex and paper towels, and they said, ‘Hi,’ when I walked past. I said, ‘Hi,’ and this blonde said something like ‘Sweaty day for a walk,’ and I said, ‘Yeah,’ and she said, ‘I wonder if you could wipe the top of that windshield for me.’ She couldn’t reach the middle of the windshield very well, so I said sure, and did that, and she said, ‘Thanks,’ and then ‘What have you been up to?’ I said I was walking over to the mall, and she said, ‘Would you be interested in a party?’ Well, I’m a salesman, I been around, and I knew what she was talking about, and I said, ‘No.’ When I got over to the mall, I told a security guy. I mean, we don’t have hookers up here . . . Not in the mall parking lot, anyway. In the afternoon.”

He came back with security and the women were gone with the RV: “I think my attitude might have scared them off. They guessed I was gonna call the cops.”

He said he was angry with himself for not getting the license plate number, but “I wanted to get out of there.” The back left corner of the RV had been hit by something, or had backed into something and was crumpled, he said. “Not bad, but there’s a pretty good-sized dent.”

Lucas took down a full description of the RV and both women; the fat redhead, Royce said, had a white scar under one eye. The blonde, “There was something wrong with her teeth.”

“You mean like rotten? Or missing?”

“No. They were pointed. Kind of freaks me out, now that I think about it.”

•   •   •

LUCAS WAS WAITING
when Letty got back, and after he told her what he’d gotten from Royce, she asked, “Now what?”

“Going home,” he said. “There’s a good chance they’ve all left for Wisconsin, and I need to talk to a whole bunch of people about this.”

“What about Skye?”

Lucas waved his hand out at the city: “How are we going to find her? She doesn’t have a phone, we don’t even know if she’s here. It’s all too big. Best thing we can do is, get back to my office and start calling. Get everybody looking for them.”

•   •   •

ON THE WAY SOUTH,
Del called and said that Honey Potts—none of the cops called her Connie Sweat—had agreed to do an interview with Daisy Jones, and Jones, in a pre-interview, had gotten her to say that she’d been sleeping with Merion all through the marriage. He hadn’t been faithful to Gloria for even a week. “They’re doing the interview this afternoon, and they’re rolling it tonight—they want to get it done before there’s any chance that Merion’s attorney finds out and tries to cut another deal with Honey,” Del said.

“Good,” Lucas said. “Still need one more thing.”

“Shrake and Jenkins are going up to Merion’s cabin tomorrow, see if they can find that club,” Del said. “Sounds like a wild-goose chase to me.”

•   •   •

BACK IN ST. PAUL,
Lucas and Letty stopped at the BCA office, where Lucas found that nothing had come in on Pilate, but he had gotten two sets of autopsy photos, one set on Henry Mark Fuller and the other on Kitty Place, the actress who’d been killed in Los Angeles. The L.A. cop was right: Lucas took fifteen seconds to decide that the same person or persons had killed them both.

The photos came up on his computer terminal. He pretended to be looking at something else and didn’t tell Letty about them. Henry Fuller no longer looked entirely human. He looked more like a badly butchered pig.

•   •   •

THE HONEY POTTS INTERVIEW
had happened, and went on at six o’clock, after an hour of promos on the early news. About one second before the interview went on the air, WCCO reporters went looking for a comment either from Merion or his attorney. Merion refused to comment, but Raines, his attorney, said, “I want to know how she cut a deal like this. Did ’CCO pay for it? Were the police in any way involved? My client is being framed here, right out in public . . .”

•   •   •

AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK
that night, Lucas got a call from a Joe Hagestrom, a highway patrolman from Wisconsin, who said he’d spoken to an agent named Bob Stern, from Wisconsin’s Division of Criminal Investigation. “He said you’d called down there earlier today, looking for a beige Winnebago Minnie with a big dent on the back left corner.”

“You find it?”

“I’m looking at it right now, or what’s left of it,” the trooper said. “It was back in the woods here . . . you know Northwest Wisconsin?”

“I’ve got a cabin up there, at Lost Land Lake.”

“You know where Highway 77 crosses the Namekagon River?” Hagestrom asked.

“Sure. I drive across there a dozen times a year,” Lucas said.

“Okay. There’s an informal campground off 77, north along the river. You can get there on a dirt trail, but it’s mostly for canoeists. We got a call that an RV was on fire back there, and the volunteer fire department went back, and it’d almost burned to the ground. The thing is, there was somebody inside.”

“You mean—dead.”

“Dead now, for sure. The firemen say the smell is unmistakable. They think the fire was deliberate. They could smell a lot of gasoline and the truck is a diesel.”

“Have they moved the body?” Lucas asked.

“Not yet. The metal part of the RV sort of shrank down and encapsulated the living quarters, where we think the body is. We’re waiting for the crime scene crew to get here.”

“What time did it blow up?”

“Around nine o’clock—couple of hours ago. The first responders were sheriff’s deputies and the fire department, and they didn’t know we were looking for a Winnebago Minnie with a dent in it. I just got here ten minutes ago, when I heard some guys talking about it on the radio.”

“All right. I’m coming.”

•   •   •

LUCAS WALKED UPSTAIRS
to the bedroom to tell Weather. She was working in the morning, cutting on somebody, he didn’t know the details, but she’d gone to bed early.

“Don’t take Letty,” she said.

“I won’t. I’m gonna sneak out,” he said. He stuffed some underwear and socks, a couple of clean shirts, a pair of clean jeans, and his dopp kit in an AWOL bag, kissed Weather, collected his gun, a leather jacket, and a ball cap, and went back downstairs.

When he rolled out of the driveway in the Benz, he could see Letty’s silhouette in the lighted window of her bedroom, looking out after him.

Lucas feared that the body in the RV was Skye’s. Some things, he thought, Letty was still too young for: like the photos of Henry Fuller, like the roasted body of a woman she thought of as a friend.

•   •   •

LUCAS RAN STRAIGHT NORTH
on I-35 to Hinckley, then east across the St. Croix River to Danbury, Wisconsin, and then farther east on Highway 77. There wasn’t much traffic and he ran with lights, but it still took him more than an hour and a half to get to the scene. A cop car was parked on the shoulder of the highway where it crossed the Namekagon, lights flashing in the night. Lucas identified himself, and the cop pointed him back into the woods, where Lucas could see light shining through the trees.

When he got there, he found Hagestrom, the highway patrolman, a couple of county sheriff’s deputies, and two firemen looking at the wreck of the Winnebago. The Winnebago had essentially melted around its core and was blackened with soot; but it was cold now, the fire thoroughly doused three hours earlier.

Hagestrom shook his hand and said, “I talked to Stern again. He said this is getting to be a big deal. He told me about California and South Dakota.” Stern was the DCI agent.

“It is,” Lucas agreed. “Does this thing have a license plate on it?”

“Doesn’t have a license plate, doesn’t have a VIN tag. I can see where it was, but somebody yanked the tag off before the fire. There should be a couple more numbers stamped on the frame rails, but we can’t get at those until crime scene is done.”

As they were talking, Lucas had circled around to the left rear corner of the RV, where he saw a bowling ball–sized and –shaped dent in the rear quarter panel. He took out his notebook, found the phone number for Larry Royce, the man from Duluth, and called him.

When Royce answered, sounding sleepy and annoyed, Lucas identified himself and said, “We might have found that RV you were talking about. You said there was a dent in the back left panel. The one I’m looking at, it’s like somebody might have whacked it with a bowling ball.”

“That’s it,” Royce said.

Lucas rang off and said to Hagestrom, “We need those VINs. They can get us to California plates and that’ll get us to the owner, and that’ll get us driver’s licenses and rap sheets and the whole thing.”

Hagestrom said, “Let me call the crime scene crew. See what they say.”

Lucas went and leaned against the fender of the Benz while Hagestrom negotiated. When he finished, he said, “They’re not happy, but I told them that the whole thing had burned, and been saturated with water and foam, and that the firemen had trampled all over the area around it . . . They said don’t mess with anything inside, but it’d be okay if we jacked up the side rails.”

“You got some jacks?” Lucas asked.

Between Hagestrom, Lucas, and the firemen, they had four car jacks, and they managed to get the RV’s side rail six inches off the wet ground, along the driver’s-side door. Hagestrom stretched out with an inspection mirror, which he carried in his car, and with a flashlight, looked at the bottom rail for ten seconds or so, then stood up and said, “Waste of time.”

“What?”

“Chiseled it off. Looks like a while ago—the chiseled part is rusty, and the number is gone. There’s another number, but we’d have to get under the engine to look at that one, and that ain’t gonna happen with a bunch of little jacks like these,” Hagestrom said. “Anyway, they wouldn’t know about the first number unless they looked it up, and if they did, they’d know about the second one. Bet that one’s gone, too.”

Lucas walked around the RV one more time, then down to the dark, shallow river flowing past the impromptu campsite. He called back to Hagestrom, “One thing you might do. This is a big canoeing river, there might be more campsites downstream.”

One of the deputies said, “There are. Half dozen of them, anyway.”

“Soon as it gets light, you might have somebody down at the different takeout sites, see if anybody saw the RV before it burned. Or people or cars who were with it.”

The deputy nodded and said, “I’ll get that going.”

“Good. That could be critical.” Lucas looked over at the RV. It’d be hours before the crime scene crew got inside it. He was fifty miles from his cabin, less than an hour with his flashers, or twenty miles back to a motel in Danbury.

“Hell with it,” he said to Hagestrom. “I’ll be back tomorrow morning. I’m going to run over to my cabin, get some sleep. I can’t think of anything else I can do here.”