Gathering Prey (10 page)

“Okay. When they come back, hide the phone in the car, in case they search you. Leave it turned on. Now, tell me what happened.”

“They picked me up at a mall in Duluth,” Skye said. “I was walking in and this car pulls over to the side, and this guy gets out and picks me up, just picks me up and throws me in the back of the car, and Pilate was there and they beat me up and then they taped me up . . .”

They took her to Hayward, she said, where they told her that they were going to take her out in the woods for a party. She didn’t believe she’d survive it.

“Then something happened and they killed the man in the RV, where they had me. There was a fight, and Kristen got hurt. Got cut. We drove for a couple of hours, for a long time, anyway, and then they stopped at a hospital. I think we were in Minneapolis or St. Paul, we were at some ATMs and I could tell it was a big city.”

“Okay. Hide the phone. I’m going to call my dad.”

•   •   •

LUCAS WAS ON I-94,
heading back to the Twin Cities, when Letty called. “Skye called me. Pilate’s got her, she thinks they’re going to kill her . . .”

She gave him the details of Skye’s call, and Lucas said, “She’s right. They’re going to kill her. I gotta call in. Good-bye.”

He got the BCA duty officer on the phone and told him the problem. “Get to Verizon, find out where they’re at.”

He gave the duty officer the number that Skye had called from, then called Stern, the Wisconsin DCI agent, and told him what had happened. “It’s possible they came back this way. We’ll know in a few minutes.”

“Keep me up.”

Lucas turned on his flashers and went past the town of Menomonie at a hundred and ten. The duty officer called back and said, “The phone’s on Highway 63 in Wisconsin, headed north, they’re south of Clear Lake.”

“I went through Menomonie a few minutes ago. I’m gonna take County Q, I think it goes north—”

“No, no. I’m looking at a map. Keep going past Q, just a couple more miles up to 128, you’ll be faster and closer.”

“Okay, you get onto the county sheriffs up there, I don’t know what counties they are, tell them to look for an old black station wagon, maybe California plates. You should be able to vector them in pretty close, tell them it might be part of a convoy, everybody in it is wanted for multiple murder . . . You gotta get me there as quick as you can. I’m going to call my guy at the DCI.”

Lucas got Stern on the phone again. Stern said, “I’ll get my duty guy on our net up there, we need to talk to your guy about what Verizon is telling them. You say this girl is a witness to the Malin killing?”

“Apparently. And I gotta go, my turn’s coming up.”

Lucas took the off-ramp, took a fast right past the convenience store, drove past a half dozen cars on the wrong side of the road, punched up the duty officer again, and said, “I’m on 128.”

“Take it right straight north to 64. They’re in Clear Lake right now. Okay, we got nothing going yet in Clear Lake, but we got a highway patrolman coming south on 63, he’s in Turtle Lake. Hang on, hang on . . . Okay, I’m talking to a guy in Madison, he’s saying that the patrolman is talking to the sheriff’s department up there, there’s a lake, right on the highway, Magnor, everything squeezes down.”

“I know it.”

“They’re going to take him there,” the duty officer said.

Lucas went past Glenwood City about as fast, he suspected, as anyone had ever done that, watching his nav system for a jog in the road, got through it just fine, then almost drove right through a T intersection, got straight, and went on.

“Lucas, the phone’s north of Clear Lake, they’re heading for a collision up at Magnor. We got two deputies coming up behind him, too.”

“Okay. You told them about the girl? The hostage?”

“Yeah, they’re all clear on that,” the duty officer said. “They’re only three or four miles out.”

Lucas came up on Highway 64, took a left, and ran hard the three or four miles to the intersection of 63. Now he was behind them, but still well back, out of the action.

“What’s happening?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know . . . Verizon . . . ah, heck, Verizon said the phone’s turned left on a back road. Turned left. They were only two miles out of Magnor, the deputies coming up behind saw him make the turn. They say he’s moving fast now, they’re strung out behind him, they’re all running behind him, chasing him.”

“Shit, one of the other cars in the convoy saw the cops and they called him.”

The duty officer went away for a minute, then came back and said, “They didn’t see anything that looked like a convoy. They’re all over this guy, they’re right behind him.”

“I’m coming, I’m coming.”

“Where are you?”

“Coming up on Clear Lake, a couple miles out,” Lucas said.

“Okay, if you see a JJ road just on the north side of Clear Lake—”

“I see it on the nav.”

“That’ll take you . . . Okay, the guy’s off the road, he ran through an intersection, he’s off the road in the ditch.”

“What about the girl?” Long silence, and Lucas repeated it, “They got the girl?”

“No. I’m hearing that the guy’s still in the car, he’s got a gun and he’s going to kill this girl if they don’t get him another car.”

Lucas took the corner at JJ and headed north. “I’m north on JJ, get me in there.”

He saw them from a mile away, what looked like ten cop cars with their flashers going. He came up fast, saw cops behind cars, saw an ancient Chevy Cavalier station wagon in a bean field at the intersection of a narrow side road. It looked as though the driver of the station wagon had tried to make the turn, but missed it, ran through a fence out into the bean field, where he bogged down.

Lucas pulled up behind the last sheriff’s patrol car, climbed out, and jogged down to the lead car, where the Wisconsin patrolman and a couple of deputies were crouched. The patrolman said, “You’re Davenport?”

“Yeah.”

“Stern is on the way. He’ll be a while, though.”

“You talking to the guy?”

“Off and on. He’ll roll down that side window and scream at us, then roll it back up. He seems . . . I mean, nuts. I mean like, you know, he needs a doctor and medication. Or maybe he’s just high. He was yelling some stuff at us, like the Fall is coming, and we’re all scared shitless, and it won’t do us any good because we’re all going down . . . Sounds crazy to me.”

“Did he say what he wants?”

“He said he wants a patrol car or he’s going to kill her. We told him a guy was coming to talk to him, and we could work something out.”

“He shoot at anybody?”

“Not yet, but he’s got a gun. Randy’s got some glasses, he’s looking at him.”

He pointed over at another car, where a deputy was sitting behind a rear wheel, looking at the car in the field with a pair of heavy binoculars. “Looks like a big old revolver.”

“I’ll go look. But what do you think?”

“Well, honest to God, you know, Phil over there is on the regional SWAT team, he’s got his rifle, he could take him out.” Lucas looked back to where a guy had a rifle propped on a sandbag over a patrol car’s bumper. “But we’re shooting through that window glass. My inclination is, if it looks like he’s going to do something . . . I’d try to take him out. I mean, if he freaks out and shoots the girl, then it’ll be too late, and he seems to be freakin’ out.”

“Let me go look,” Lucas said.

“Sheriff’s coming down, he’ll be here in five, ten minutes.”

Lucas duckwalked over to the car where the deputy was keeping watch with the binoculars. “Can I look?”

“He’s waving the gun around. Looks like he’s arguing with whoever’s in the back.”

Lucas took the glasses, focused. The car was only a hundred feet away, and with the big image-stabilized Canons, he could see individual hairs in the man’s beard. He looked like he was in his late twenties, had what appeared to be a propeller-shaped tattoo, or maybe an elongated infinity sign, on his forehead. He was shouting into the back, kept poking the gun toward the back, then swiveling to look out at the cops.

“Doesn’t look good,” he said.

“No, it doesn’t.”

Lucas handed the binoculars back to the cop, sat with his back to the car, and called Letty. “If I message Skye, will the phone make a sound?”

“I don’t know. I think so. But you could call her—the phone won’t ring, and she should see the screen light up.”

“Give me that number again,” Lucas said.

Lucas took the number, then crawled over to the car’s bumper, whistled at the highway patrolman, and waved him over. When he got there, Lucas said, “You’re running this scene—I’ve got no jurisdiction. I think I can call her without tipping the guy off. What do you think?”

“I don’t know. What do
you
think?”

“The guy’s not just
acting
crazy—we’ve got good reason to think he
is
crazy. I think if we put the rifle on him, and if I call and he reacts, then if it looks like he’s going to use the gun, we take him.”

The cop bit his lip, thinking, then said, “We’ve got to do something. I’m not sure we can wait until the sheriff gets here.”

“The question is, can our shooter hit him through the window glass?”

“I asked him that, and he said he’s shooting solid core. He says he’s pretty square to the window glass, and if he shoots at the guy’s head, the bullet might deflect a bit, but he’ll still hit his head somewhere. A smaller target would be more of a question.”

Lucas nodded. “Okay. I’m gonna call her. You tell the rifle guy to be ready, but don’t shoot unless it looks like he’s about to pull the trigger on her.” To the cop with the glasses, he said, “Watch him. Tell me what he does.”

He called. When the phone stopped ringing, there was silence. He said quietly, “This is Lucas, Letty’s dad. If you push the round button at the bottom of the phone, the main screen will come up. Then push the green button on the screen, too. It’ll switch you to phone mode. Could you do that?”

The cop with the binoculars said, “He’s just sitting there. Looks like he’s talking to himself.”

Lucas said into the phone, “On the bottom line, there’s a square with a lot of dots in it—the keypad. Push that button. When the keypad comes up, push the bottom of the phone against your body—that’s where the keypad sound comes from. You need to muffle that. If you’ve done that, tap any button. Don’t hold it down, just tap it quick.”

A second later, he got a beep.

“Good. We’re talking. Are you hurt? If you’re hurt bad and need an ambulance right now, tap a button.”

Silence.

“Good. You’re not hurt. If you think this guy is going to shoot you, that he’s seriously going to do it, tap a button.”

Beep.

The patrolman said, “Damnit.”

Lucas said into the phone, “If you think there’s any chance that you can talk him down, give me a beep.”

Silence.

Then a man’s voice: “This is it, this is it. No way out. No way out now. They ain’t coming back for me, they ain’t comin’ back. Piece-of-shit car, piece of shit.
You
ain’t goin’ no place, don’t even think about it, bitch. I’ll blow your fuckin’ brains all over the car, that’s for sure.”

The guy with the binoculars said, “That’s him, I can read his lips when I hear the words, she’s holding the phone so we can hear him.”

A cop called, “The sheriff’s here.”

•   •   •

A MINUTE LATER,
the sheriff scuttled up, half bent over, crouched next to the patrolman. He was a short, thick man with sandy hair, a brush mustache, and round, gold-rimmed glasses. “Are we talking to him?”

“We’re yelling at him, but we’re afraid to make a move any closer,” the patrolman said. “Says he’ll kill the girl if we do. We’re talking about having Phil take him out.”

The sheriff looked back three cars, where the shooter was sitting behind a patrol car, looking at the fugitive car through a scope. “If we have to.”

“I’d really like to talk to this guy—he could probably give us all the rest of them,” Lucas said.

The sheriff looked at him and asked, “Who are you?”

Lucas gave him the five-second version, and explained the phone connection with Skye, and the sheriff said, “Phil could probably actually shoot him in the shoulder of his gun arm. I mean, shooting normally, Phil could put three shots through a dime at that range. With the window, it’s more of a problem. But if he could take that shoulder out, we could rush him—”

The phone beeped, then beeped again and Lucas said, “If there’s a problem, beep me again.”

Beep.

Then the man’s voice again, “Say good-bye, bitch, ’cause you’re going first. They’re gonna shoot me, but I don’t give a shit no more, I don’t give a shit no more . . .”

The man sounded frantic, whipping himself up for it. The deputy with the binoculars said, his voice calm enough, “He’s turning around in the seat, he’s kneeling on the seat looking toward the back . . .” and the sheriff scrambled away, toward the car where the rifleman was set up.

From where Lucas was sitting with the phone, he couldn’t see the shooter, but the patrolman could, and Lucas called, “Is he—?”

BAM!

L
ucas 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.”