Gathering Prey (20 page)

Lucas said to Frisell, “Eject the round from the chamber—don’t lose it—and give your gun and the round to Rome. I’ll be right back.”

He jogged across the field to where the man was sitting on the ground, pushed his way through the growing circle of Juggalos around him, squatted and said, “I’m a police officer.”

“I think he’s shot,” the woman said. What Lucas had thought was a T-shirt was actually a roll of toilet paper.

Lucas said, “Let me see.”

The man nodded, wordlessly, and took the roll away from his face.

“Not bad,” Lucas said. “But you need some stitches. We will get you there right now. Do you have somebody to ride with you, or follow us?”

“Me,” the woman said. She was absolutely calm. “I’m with him. I knew something like this would happen. I told him before we came. I said, ‘Andy, we’ll get in trouble.’ He said, ‘No we won’t, it’s just a goof.’ So, here we are, and sure enough, he gets shot . . .”

She was babbling. Lucas got on the phone and called Laurent, who said, “We got the girl. The guy’s dead.”

“I saw that,” Lucas said. “We’ve got a guy here who might have been nicked by one of the shots. He’ll need a ride up to Sault.”

“I’ll get a squad over there. One minute.” He was gone.

Lucas said to the man and woman, “A cop car will be here in one minute. He’ll ride you up to Sault Ste. Marie, and bring you back, if you don’t need to stay overnight.”

“What happened? Who was shooting?” the woman asked.

“You’ll read about it,” Lucas said.

•   •   •

HE JOGGED BACK
toward the shooting scene, where a crowd had gathered in a circle around the dead man’s car. As he ran, he saw a squad car headed for the wounded man. When Lucas came up, Laurent asked, “How bad?

“Guy was nicked in the lip,” Lucas said. “If it had been a quarter inch the other way, it would have missed.”

“Of course, if it had been a quarter inch the
other
way, he might have lost his jaw.”

“Gee, you’re just like Father Christmas,” Lucas said. “Call Bennett and Barnes. I hope the hell they stayed with the other two, ’cause they’re likely to take off.”

While Laurent did that, Lucas glanced at the woman, who was now sitting on the front passenger seat of the car, and then walked over to Frisell, who tried to explain. “They kept telling us, ‘Watch the background,’ and I, shoot, I completely—”

“Man, you saved my life,” Lucas said. “He was ten feet from me when you fired and I was late with my gun. He would have shot me for sure, might have killed me.”

“He knew you,” Frisell said.

“Yeah. I don’t know why.” Lucas looked at him closely. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” Frisell said.

“A lot of guys sort of lose their shit after a shooting.”

Frisell shrugged: “Maybe I would, if I’d killed somebody innocent, or a bystander.”

Sellers and Peters were there, and they both slapped Frisell on the back, and Sellers said, “Good shooting, dude.”

“Okay. Frisell, keep an eye on the woman,” Lucas said. “Get her out of the car, pat her down, sit her on the ground if you have to. I’d hate to have her pull another piece out from under the car seat. Sellers, Peters, keep the crowd off us.”

They all did that, and Lucas took another quick look at the guy on the ground, and his gun—a chromed .38 revolver. That would have done the trick, Lucas thought, if he’d gotten a shot off.

Laurent came over and said, “Bennett and Barnes are on the job. They said the two guys are still there, they’re standing up and looking over here, but they haven’t left. Neither one has made a phone call.”

“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 numbers. 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.”