Gathering Prey (9 page)

•   •   •

HE MADE THE CABIN
by three in the morning, stopping once at an all-night gas station in Hayward for gas, Diet Coke, a quart of milk, and a box of Honey Nut Cheerios. The cabin was dark and absolutely silent as he bounced up the driveway, until he triggered the motion-sensor floodlight on the garage. The only other visible light was on his neighbor’s porch. He was unlocking the front door when the neighbor came out in a T-shirt and underpants and yelled, “Lucas?”

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“Good, I don’t have to shoot you. How long you up for?”

“Just overnight,” Lucas yelled back.

“Have a good one.”

He went inside and had a bowl of cereal, the moon hanging low out over the lake, putting a long streak of silver on it. It was cool, almost cold. He got a spinning rod from a closet, went out on the dock and spent five minutes casting a Rapala into the moonshine, trying for bass or pike, but not trying too hard, smelling the North Woods night, looking at all the little dots of light from the cabins around the lake; then he went inside and tried not to dream about Skye, and what might have happened to her.

•   •   •

HE WAS BACK AT
the burned RV seven hours later. Hagestrom was gone, replaced by another trooper, more deputies, and a DCI agent named Mike Maddox, who’d come in with the crime scene crew. The crew had cut through the melted side of the RV and a tech in white coveralls and a face mask was inside, working around the body, which was lying on one side in the center of the RV’s cramped living area.

Lucas knew right away that it wasn’t Skye inside: the victim was male.

“All we know is that the victim is male, average height,” Maddox told Lucas. “He’s too burned to get anything else, unless we get a DNA hit. No face left, fingers are gone, hair’s gone, eyes are gone, toes are gone . . . We’ll get DNA out of the body, of course, but it’s unlikely we’ll get it from anywhere else, given the fire. Identification is . . . problematic.”

“Maybe,” said the tech, from inside the van.

Lucas and Maddox stepped closer. Maddox: “Maybe? I thought you said there was no chance.”

“That’s before I turned him,” the tech said. “I think I can see the edge of something that might be a wallet. He was lying on it, protected it from the fire.”

“That would be pretty interesting,” Maddox said. “Fish it out of there.”

“I’ve got some work to do before I get there,” the tech said. “But I’ll get to it.”

•   •   •

WHILE ONE TECH
worked inside, another was working to get at the second VIN number; and when he got to it, found that it, too, had been chiseled away.

Then they got a break. The inside tech took fifteen minutes to get at it, finally extracting a thin black leather wallet. Another tech took it to a working table and after photographing it, opened it. Inside they found a slightly melted, but still readable, Wisconsin driver’s license for a Neal Ray Malin, showing an address in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, an expired membership card for an Eau Claire gymnasium, an insurance card for a two-year-old Ford pickup, and nothing else.

“No credit cards, no money. Whoever killed him took the money and credit cards, which means that they might be using them,” Lucas said. “If one of them was a debit card, and they tortured him for the code . . .”

“We could get a picture,” Maddox said. “Let me get on that.”

Maddox tracked it all down in five minutes: Malin was no longer living at the address on the driver’s license, but his ex-wife was. She wasn’t home and Maddox spoke to the babysitter. She didn’t know Malin personally, but said the ex-wife was working at a beauty parlor in Eau Claire.

“I’m going to stick here, but I’ll get an Eau Claire cop to track down his ex and give her the news, and get the credit card numbers,” Maddox told Lucas.

“Wonder what a Chippewa Falls guy was doing with these L.A. freaks?”

“A question we’re gonna ask,” Maddox said. “Maybe he was like that guy in South Dakota—picked up and killed for the hell of it.”

“Don’t think so,” said the crime scene guy inside the RV. “There’s blood everywhere. All over the place. Why would they do that, and wind up having to burn their RV?”

Lucas stuck his head inside the RV: “Have you checked all his pockets? Did he have a cell phone on him?”

“I’ve checked all the pockets, no phone.”

Lucas turned back to Maddox. “Have the Eau Claire cops ask his ex if he had a cell phone. People steal phones—if he had one, and they’re using it, we might get a GPS location on it.”

A few minutes later, Lucas, watching the slow progress inside the RV, said to Maddox, “If you don’t mind, I’m going to run down to Chippewa, just to . . . observe. You know, if they locate his apartment.”

“Fine by me,” Maddox said. “I’ll call ahead and tell them that you’re coming.”

•   •   •

CHIPPEWA FALLS WAS
an hour and fifteen minutes away, rolling fast across country on back roads, then down Highway 53. When he arrived, he found that the Chippewa cops had waited for Bob Stern, the Wisconsin investigator, to arrive from Madison. Stern had gotten to Chippewa Falls a few minutes before Lucas, had stopped at the courthouse to pick up a search warrant, and then the cops and Stern had driven in a convoy over to Malin’s apartment.

Lucas followed his nav system up the hill on the west side of town, and caught the Wisconsin cops as they were gathering on the lawn of an old clapboard mansion. Stern saw Lucas getting out of his truck and walked over to shake hands. “How’s the old lady?”

“Cutting somebody open, about now,” Lucas told him. “You divorced yet?”

“Let’s not go there,” Stern said. “I think she’s gonna get the season tickets for the Packers.”

“Man, that’s . . . inhuman,” Lucas said. He looked up at the house, which had an expansive front porch, including a comfortable-looking swing, and a bunch of white, life-sized, wooden-chicken flower boxes showing off bunches of geraniums, marigolds, and petunias. “Nobody’s gone in yet?”

“Doing that now,” a deputy said.

They watched as a sheriff’s deputy with the search warrant climbed the porch and knocked on the door. A minute later an elderly woman in an apron answered, nodded a few times, and then pushed the screen door open.

“Let’s go,” Stern said. As they crossed the porch he said, “Ugly chickens. Ugly.”

•   •   •

THE OLD LADY WAS
the owner of the house. Her name was Ann Webster, and she hadn’t seen Malin in two days. Malin, she said, rented the top floor of the house, and had a separate exit out back. One of the deputies was sent around back to cover it, and the rest of the cops climbed a wide oak-floor stairway to a second entry, apparently added when the top floor had been converted into an apartment.

“I was never using it, the stairs are too high, so I thought maybe somebody would rent it,” Webster told them. “I had the nicest family here for three years, and then Mr. Malin. He’s very quiet. No wild parties or anything like that.”

She opened the apartment door with a shiny new key, and they all pushed inside. The apartment was huge, as apartments go, and oddly shaped, as it once had contained an oversized master bedroom, with four more bedrooms down a long hallway, plus two bathrooms. The former master bedroom had been converted into a living room, with a cook’s kitchen at the far end, behind a newly built partition.

One of the four bedrooms had been converted into a den, with a comfortable couch, and a compact bar, a stereo system, and a fifty-inch television; another had been converted into an office. The other two were still used as bedrooms, although Webster said she was unaware of any overnight visitors.

“Hell of an apartment,” Stern said.

Webster said Malin paid two thousand eight hundred dollars a month for it, and one of the cops said, “That might be the most expensive apartment in Chippewa.”

Webster watched as the cops probed the place; she was rolling her hands together as if washing her hands of her tenant. He was a salesman, she said, for horse barns and pole barns, at a place called Collins Metal Buildings in Chippewa.

Lucas and Stern walked through with the cops, looking behind books and under desks, and then the cops got serious about the search, and began pulling the place apart. They found four guns hidden in various drawers, all compact .38 caliber revolvers, fully loaded; and in one drawer, under the revolver, found a couple hundred packs of orange and double-wide Zig-Zags.

The main room had wall-to-wall carpeting, but one of the cops found that it hadn’t been tacked down. They rolled it one way, found nothing, rolled it the other way and found several loose floor planks. Under the planks they found twenty tightly sealed, highly compressed bags of marijuana, probably a pound each, and two kilos of cocaine.

“So it wasn’t entirely metal buildings,” Stern said.

“This is good,” Lucas said. “This gives us a contact point for Pilate, a reason for the two of them to be seeing each other.”

“Wonder if they took his truck?” Stern asked. “We got people looking for it, haven’t heard anything back.” He checked with his office, shook his head, and said to Lucas, “Nothing. If you see a two-year-old blue Ford Explorer pickup . . .”

The search continued: a half hour into it, Stern took a call, wandered into a corner, looked over at Lucas, hung up.

“Malin had a debit card with Wells Fargo. It was used twice, once just before midnight last night, then again a little while after midnight. You know, two separate days, maximum withdrawals both times, six hundred bucks each. There are recognizable photos of the woman who put the card in.”

“Excellent,” Lucas said.

“Better than that, big guy,” Stern said. “You know where they used them at?”

“Where?”

“St. Paul,” Stern said.

Lucas stepped back: “Ah, man. I probably passed them on I-35 last night. They were heading south and I was going north.”

“Ships in the night,” Stern said. “Anyway, Wells Fargo moved the photos to the St. Paul cops, and they sent them down to us. Let me get my iPad, we’ll take a look.”

He was back in two minutes with the slate. “Got her,” he said.

He passed it to Lucas.

Skye was looking straight into the ATM camera, hoodie back on her shoulders. She looked scared to death.

“Skye!”

“That’s—” Stern began.

“Oh, boy, oh boy . . . I’m going,” Lucas said.

T
he night before:

Neal Ray Malin felt crowded in the RV, like a big dog in a small kennel. When he shifted his weight, he could feel the RV move. He was on his feet, his hair like a haystack, fat cheeks with a bristling beard, facing Pilate, both of them angry, and he said, “I told you what the terms was: the terms was cash on the barrelhead. I don’t want to hear this bullshit about promising to pay. That’s not how we do business.”

“That might not be how you do business in the backwoods, but it’s how we do it in L.A.,” Pilate said. “I got contacts all over the movie business, we get top price—”

“Excuse me,” Malin said, looking around the RV. He was a bulky man with skinny legs. Cowboy boots poked out from under his boot-cut jeans. “I gotta say, this don’t exactly look like a big-time director’s place.”

“Hey! We’re good for the money. I got a reputation in L.A.—”

“Look out the window, you fuckin’ moron, you see any skyscrapers out there?” Malin asked. “Does that look like Rodeo Drive?”

He said Rowdee-oh Drive, and Kristen smirked over her pointed teeth and said, from behind him, “That’d be Rodeo Drive, dumbass. Row-Day-Oh.”

“Fuck a bunch of roads, I’m going,” Malin said. “If you actually get the cash, I’ll be in Chippewa. You got my number.”

Pilate put his hand up, toward Malin’s chest: “Wait a minute.”

“I ain’t waiting,” Malin said. He was wearing one of those loose Tommy Bahama Hawaiian shirts and now dropped his hand down to his side, slipped it under the shirt, dropped it again, now showing a compact revolver. “I’m going.”

“So now you’re showing a gun and we’re supposed to be business partners?” Pilate said. “That’s really fucked up, man.”

“Yeah, well . . .” Malin stepped toward Pilate, who didn’t step back.

“Get the fuck out of the way,” Malin said.

•   •   •

KRISTEN WAS STANDING BEHIND HIM,
and she was such a thin woman that Malin ignored her, despite the filed teeth and all the apocalyptic-themed ink. As Malin pushed toward Pilate, she picked up a ten-inch Henckels chef knife that had been lying under a towel on a sideboard, and
stuck
it in his back.

Nothing tentative about it, she stuck it in him as hard as she could, with a hundred and ten pounds of weight behind it. The knife went through the peachy silk shirt, deflected off Malin’s spine, missed his heart to the right, took out a piece of lung, and emerged on the other side of his body, inside his right nipple.

Malin grunted, “Oh,” and with an astonished look on his face, turned to her, the gun momentarily forgotten in his hand. Kristen wrenched the knife free and stabbed him in the neck, the razor-sharp blade sliding off to the left, slicing neatly through Malin’s carotid artery.

He tried to scream but failed, turned to run from the flailing knife, blood pumping from his neck like water from a hose. He crashed into Pilate, almost fell, then threw an arm at Kristen: she fumbled the knife, flipping it up in the air, and it came down on her arm, between her elbow and hand, slicing it open. She tried to snatch at the blade and cut her hand, badly, through the palm, and Malin hit her in the face and she went down and he rumbled toward the back door, blood still pumping from his neck, his vision going gray like an Apple computer with a bad video card, and then black.

He missed the side door to the outside and crashed through a door at the end of the short hallway, into a bedroom where a young woman lay on the bed, wrapped in silver duct tape.

He never saw her, simply crashed on the bed, pushed himself up, and as Kristen followed him with the knife, blundered into Skye. Kristen stabbed him in the eye, and he managed to backhand her, then plowed all the way through the RV, almost to the front door, where Pilate whacked him with his scepter, and Malin finally went down, the flow of blood from his neck slowing to a gurgle.

Then everything stopped for a few seconds, and finally Pilate said, “Jesus H. Christ.”

Six quarts of Malin’s blood had painted the inside of the RV: the carpet, the couch, a bolster, an ottoman, the woodwork, towels, the mattress on the bed. The blood had painted all three people in the RV: Pilate, Kristen, and Skye, whom they’d picked up in Duluth.

Kristen spit on Malin’s body and said, “Suck on that, asshole.”

Pilate said, “Make sure that bitch is still taped up back there.” He felt Malin’s hip pocket, took out his wallet, extracted three hundred dollars in twenties and his credit cards, looked at a half-dozen other cards and slips of paper, and found one with four numbers: held the paper up to Kristen and said, “Does that look like an ATM code, or what?”

“I’m bleeding bad,” she said. She held her hand out, showing the bloody cut, and wrapped a towel around her forearm. “I need a hospital.”

“Not around here,” Pilate said. “Not with Malin all carved up like that.”

“I need a doc—”

“We’ll get you one,” Pilate said.

•   •   •

PILATE DROPPED THE WALLET
on the floor and said, “We need to get his keys. Can you use the phone?”

“Yeah.”

“Call the guys, tell them we’re heading down to St. Paul. We’ll get you to a doc, tell them it was Saturday-night fights at the local parking lot, and some black dude cut on you. You don’t know who it was . . .”

As she called, Pilate rolled Malin’s body, dug in his pants pocket and came up with the truck keys. Didn’t notice Malin’s wallet disappearing under his butt. When Raleigh came up on Kristen’s phone, Pilate took it and said, “We got a situation. You need to go to a gas station, tell them your buddy ran out of gas, get a five-gallon can if they got one, or a couple of two-gallon cans, get over here to the campground. Gotta be fast: we’re heading down to St. Paul.”

He rang off and Kristen, who was wrapping a towel around her arm and hand, asked, “What are we doing?”

Pilate looked around the RV. “No way we can keep this—no way we can clean it up enough. There’ll always be blood in it, and if we ever get seriously pushed by the cops, they’ll find it. And in a couple days, it’s gonna stink real bad. We’re gonna drive it out in the woods and burn it. In the meantime, you lay towels on the floor so we can walk on something clean, and get in the shower and hose yourself off. I’m going out, I’ll be back in a minute.”

“My arm is really hurting—”

“Yeah, yeah, we’ll take care of it.”

•   •   •

PILATE WENT OUT
in the cool night air, walked over to Malin’s pickup. Took a while, but in the end found a kilo of cocaine—the coke he was supposedly buying that night—and two pounds of weed.

He went back in the RV and said, “Lookee what I got.”

Kristen was just out of the shower. She still had the pillowcase wrapped around her arm, blood was showing through. She said, “Oh. My. God. I might be hurtin’, but I’m not gonna be hurtin’ long.”

Pilate laid out a few lines, and they snorted them up, then Pilate, high as a kite, went to shower and change clothes. When he was out, they piled all the bloodstained clothing on top of the body, then walked around to the cab, and rolled off into the dark. Raleigh called ten minutes later and asked, “Where you at?”

“Coming down to 77. We’re gonna go west on 77 until we find a good spot. You got the gas?”

“Four gallons. I’ll be up behind you in three minutes. The rest of them are coming along behind me. What are we burning?”

•   •   •

THEY GOT READY
to burn the RV in the campground by the river. Skye was still taped up in the back. The tape wrapped round and round her body, pinning her arms to her sides, but left her hands free. They cut the ankle wraps so she could waddle out, but left the wraps around her knees and thighs, so she couldn’t run. As she was edging past Malin’s body, she saw his iPhone lying on the blood-soaked couch, almost slipping through the couch cushions. She faked a fall.

“What the fuck are you doin’? Get up, bitch.”

“I fell . . . Don’t hurt me.” Skye managed to get the phone between her hand and her thigh, and hold it there. She struggled to her feet and waddled outside.

They put her in the back of Bony’s station wagon, and threw a wool blanket over her. Bony said, “You move that blanket, I’ll get the tire iron out and beat the shit out of you.”

Skye never saw the RV burn, but she heard the
whump
when the fire started. The four remaining cars in Pilate’s convoy fled west on 77, crossed the river into Minnesota, hit I-35, and turned south toward the Twin Cities. Skye could move her hands, from her wrists to her fingertips, but not her arms; nor could she see what her fingers were touching. The back of the old station wagon smelled like dog shit and hay and oil, and the car’s shocks were so bad that lying under the blanket was like rolling down a hill in a garbage can.

She was afraid the phone would ring and give her away. The rattling car gave her the cover she needed to turn the phone in her hand, find the power button with her index finger, and hold it down until she thought it was turned off. She then twisted around enough to see that the phone’s screen had gone dark.

Then she folded her legs at the knees, and managed to shove the phone into her sock.

In St. Paul, the convoy rolled into Regions Hospital. Kristen went in alone, and told the duty nurse a story about a fight on the Capitol lawn between a bunch of drunk street people. The cops came and took a statement, and three hours later, she was sitting on a wall outside the hospital when Pilate came back.

“Didn’t cost me anything, but I had to promise to pay,” she said. She’d used Skye’s ID, and nobody had looked too closely at the photo.

•   •   •

WHILE KRISTEN WAS
being sewn up, Bony took Skye around to two Wells Fargo ATMs, gave her the card and the number, and they pulled out six hundred dollars before midnight, and another six hundred after midnight, the single-day limit on the card. Then they taped her up again, threw her back into the station wagon, and covered her with the blanket. Skye heard Kristen talking outside the car before they were moving, and so knew the other woman had gotten out of the hospital. She felt the car take a couple of turns, then it accelerated: they were back on the freeway. Which one, she didn’t know, but she didn’t care.

She had one chance: the cell phone. She resolved to wait to use it, until she was sure it would pay off. She knew one cell number for sure: Letty’s. She mumbled it over and over as she lay under the blanket, hoping for a break.

She didn’t get it that night. They drove for no more than fifteen minutes, then pulled off and parked. Bony rolled down his window and Pilate said, “We’ll stay here for the night. We can get water and food, and they don’t give a shit how long we stay. And no cops. Give Skye some water, don’t have to waste any food on her.”

“I’m gonna go ahead and fuck her—”

“Not here, you asshole. Somebody would see the car bouncing up and down, and then we could have trouble. You can fuck her tomorrow.”

“You said we were all gonna party, we were all gonna fuck her tonight.”

“Well, you might’ve noticed we had a little problem,” Pilate said. “We don’t need to attract no cops.”

•   •   •

SKYE HAD NO IDEA
what time it must have been, but it was late. People were getting in and out of the car, talking, paid no attention to her. At some point, Bony remembered that he was supposed to get her water, and so came back and ripped some tape off her mouth and let her drink a bottle of spring water. He said, “We’re gonna get you airtight, tomorrow, bitch. Think about that.”

She slept for a while, or passed out, or something.

•   •   •

SHE GOT HER BREAK
the next morning. They were in Hudson, Wisconsin, where the convoy stopped for gas at a Kwik Trip convenience store, and breakfast at the McDonald’s next door. Before Bony got out of the car, he said, “You move and I’ll kill you. I’ll cut your fuckin’ throat.”

He got out of the car and Skye managed to pull the phone out of her sock and turn it on. When the screen lit up, she lay the phone on the floor and, using her thumb, managed to punch in Letty’s number.

Letty answered on the second ring. “Hello?”

“Letty. Pilate’s got me. They’re going to kill me. I think they killed Henry. They killed a man up by Hayward, they murdered him in the RV and set it on fire. They’ve got me in the back of Bony’s car, they’re getting gas, I stole this phone—”

“Skye! Hide the phone, but leave it on. I think they can track cell phones. You have to turn off the ringer. Do you know how to turn off the ringer?”

“No.”

“Do you know what kind of phone it is?”

“I think it’s an iPhone.”

“There should be a button on the side of it . . .” Letty talked her through it, and Skye found the button and pushed it until the ringer-tone indicator was down as far as it would go.

“Okay, I think it’s off,” Skye said.

“Look in the upper left corner of the screen. Does it say AT&T, or Verizon, or—”

“It says Verizon.”

“What kind of car are you in?”

“A station wagon, an old one, it’s black and it’s funny-looking and it stinks. But I don’t know where I am, I think we drove out of the city we were in.”