“I can’t tell you that,” he said. “She was dragging around town, looking in all the places that we hang out. We do go up to that mall, sometimes, and she probably would have gone up there, sooner or later.”

“This is not good,” Letty said to Lucas.

“If you guys run into Skye, or Tony, or see Pilate, you call me.” He gave them his number, written on a page, and this time, he did wrap a fifty around it. “Please, don’t let it go.”

•   •   •

ON THE WAY BACK to Duluth, Lucas took a call from Robinson, the L.A. homicide cop. He asked, “Did you see the autopsy photos?”

“No, I’ve been on the road,” Lucas said.

“Okay. Well, we’ve got them, and we got a nine-alarm fire here. The cuts are the same. Same pattern on this kid, as they were with Kitty Place. Big knife, slashes start up around the shoulder, and then go all the way down the body in one long slash. Right across the face, too. It might not stand up if they got a good defense attorney, but I personally think it’s about ninety-nine percent that it’s the same killer. You got a walking nightmare on your hands, my friend.”

“Did they say if the kid was raped?”

“That, I don’t know,” Robinson said. “All I got were the pictures. They don’t have an autopsy report yet.”

“I’ll call them, get reports for both of us.”

“You chasing this guy?” Robinson asked.

“Looking for him.”

“Send him to South Dakota if you get him. They got the death penalty. Unlike us, they use it.”

Pilate and the disciples got out of South Dakota in a hurry, traveling in an eight-vehicle caravan spaced out over a mile or two, twelve men, seven women, leaving Sturgis and the motorcycle rally in the dust.

So far, the Great Northern Expedition had been a marginal success. They’d spent two weeks in San Francisco, buying dope, then headed east to Reno, where they peddled the weed to tourists. They ran into some Colorado competition there, but it wasn’t too bad, because the Colorado dope was fairly janky, plus, it had tax paid on it, so it couldn’t compete on price.

Pilate tried to use the money from the weed to step up to cocaine, but good clean coke was hard to find and they wound up with a small bag of coke and a fat bag of meth. They also lost two crew members, Biggie and Darrell, who wandered away one day and never came back.

From there, they had taken I-15 north all the way to Butte, Montana, mostly because Pilate didn’t like to drive across mountains if he didn’t have to. From Butte, taking their time, they’d gone to Dickinson, North Dakota, where they unloaded most of the meth, for cash, to be sold to the oil field workers, and then they turned south to Sturgis, to catch the motorcycle rally.

The meth sale in Dickinson had gone well, and they got to Sturgis with more than twenty thousand in cash and no dope at all. Pilate spent almost half the cash buying cocaine and then they’d gone through that. Then they’d gone camping up in the hills, had their fun with Henry, and then they got the fuck out of South Dakota.

•   •   •

“THIS IS SURE AS HELL the long way around,” Kristen said, looking out at the arrow-straight I-90.

Pilate said, “Well, we couldn’t go back through North Dakota. That cop was on us like Holy on the Pope.”

“Could have pulled the trigger on him,” Kristen said.

“And spend the rest of your life in a hole somewhere,” Pilate said. “Those cops are wired for sound and video. We wouldn’t have had a chance. Lucky you kept your fuckin’ mouth shut.”

They’d been hassled by a North Dakota highway patrolman. He’d been called after an argument about a restaurant bill. They hadn’t been moving at the time, so he hadn’t been able to give them a ticket, and he was late for dinner, but told them if he saw them driving in his state, they were going to jail. He said, “I’ll get a drug dog on your ass, lickety-split. We don’t care for your sort in North Dakota.”

The cop had a good eye. At that point, they’d still had a pound of meth stashed in the RV, and if the cop had pushed a search, he would have gotten both the dope and the money.

“This is not our territory, and we gotta remember that,” Pilate told his disciples, as they crossed the line into South Dakota, and set up camp. “We don’t look like these people up here, and they don’t like people who look like us. We gotta be careful when we’re hauling dope. We gotta keep the dope and the money in different vehicles.”

“Hate to be pushed by those fuckers,” Kristen said. “Fuckin’ cops. We oughta kill one sometime.”

“We will,” Pilate said.

•   •   •

AS IT TURNED OUT, South Dakota had been as bad as North Dakota. Sturgis had almost as many cops as it did bikers, although they tried to stay out of sight. Then they got into the coke, and when they left Sturgis, they had only a little more than four thousand dollars. Pilate had another connection in Wisconsin, hooked into him through a guy they knew in L.A. He could deliver wholesale coke, which they could have retailed for enough to get them back to the West Coast; except that they’d blown the money for the coke back in Sturgis.

Then there was the whole thing with Henry Fuller.

“Maybe had too much fun,” Pilate confided to Kristen, as they rolled on east. “I wish we’d put a boulder on top of that kid. Hold him down.”

“I’m worried about Laine,” Kristen said. “I could see her pullin’ back.”

“Well, it was her first time,” Pilate said.

“If we run into some cops, somewhere, she could talk. That’s what worries me.”

Pilate leaned back in the passenger seat, looking out at the gray-dirt sails of the Badlands, considering the problem. He said, finally, “She’s got that golden pussy. That’s what I’d hate to give up.”

“Pussy isn’t a problem. You said it yourself: pussy is more common than TV.”

Pilate yawned and said, “I’ll think about it.”

“We could have a really good time with her,” Kristen said. She looked hungry around the eyes.

“I’ll think about it,” Pilate said. Kristen could be a little scary.

He did think about it, though. What he thought was, if they took Laine off somewhere and cut her up, that could damage morale; the disciples all liked her, and might start wondering who was next.

He turned his head to take in Kristen. She might be down on Laine because Laine had that golden pussy. And the fact was, Kristen was the assistant principal in the group, the one who kicked ass. If they were going to have fun with anyone, maybe it should be Kristen: that’d probably help morale, instead of damaging it.

He half dozed, entertaining himself with fantasies of cutting up Kristen. The fine-woven treachery of the idea turned him on.

They’d killed a dozen people now and the numbers made him feel both powerful and comfortable. Powerful because he could do it, and make the others go along; and comfortable because he had done it, and it wouldn’t be something he’d miss in life.

Most of the victims had been chosen because they were the invisible people in the world. Street people, travelers, illegal aliens. You could stop by a Home Depot early in the morning and pick out anyone you wanted to play with. They’d jump right in the car, and the other wetbacks thought them lucky.