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.

At 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.