• • •
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.”
Skye got underwear and shirts and cargo pants and six pairs of pumpkin-orange socks, and at Letty’s urging, a new pair of boots, a decent pack, a top-end three-season sleeping bag, heavy long johns, and a variety of cooking and eating gear: a compact stove, fuel bottle, camping silverware, a lightweight parka, and gloves—“I’ll be down south before I need them, but it can get pretty frosty even way down south, in Mississippi and Texas.”
And, “I need a knife.”
“Well, let’s find a good one,” Letty said.
They settled on a Gerber survival knife, with a five-inch blade, for sixty bucks.
When they left the store, Skye said, “I owe you. This isn’t just a donation. I owe you.”
“I’m okay with that,” Letty said. “You can owe us. Someday you’ll do good, and you can pay us back. I’ll get you some cash—you’re going to need to eat until everything is done with.”
• • •
LETTY GOT TWO ROOMS with a connecting door, at the Holiday Inn, and they wound up staying two nights. Skye was an interesting talker and an interested listener, and got Letty talking about her younger days as a trapper and a shooter of crooked cops and cartel killers.
“I’d never ever shoot anyone if it wasn’t self-defense, but that’s what it was,” Letty said. “I sometimes think I might have a touch of the sociopath, or more than a touch, because none of it ever made me feel the least bit bad.”
“But if you were a sociopath . . . wouldn’t that mean when those cartel killers came after the family, you would have taken care of yourself first? Instead, you got between them—the Mexicans and your family.”
Letty smiled: “I never thought of it that way. Thank you. I guess I’m not a sociopath, and I’d kinda started to worry about it.”
“I don’t know how killing somebody would make me feel, but I guess I might feel bad after a while,” Skye said. “I can see how if it was kill or be killed, I’d rather be the one who stays alive. But I believe I’d lose a lot of sleep over it.”
“Then you’re a nicer person than I am,” Letty said. “I never missed a minute’s sleep.”
• • •
THE NEXT MORNING, Letty drove Skye to Lucas’s office. Lucas had just gotten copies of a video taken at Regions Hospital. He’d looked at it once, and had been about to call the support services to cut some frames out of it, when Letty and Skye walked in.
“Is this the woman you call Kristen?” Lucas asked Skye, putting the video back up on his computer.
Skye crouched over the screen, watching, then said, “Yes! That’s her. For sure.”
“The video’s not so good.”
“I don’t care. That’s her. You can’t see it, but she’s got these pointy teeth. She filed them down herself.”
“All right. I’ll have the best stills printed out, and you can talk to our artist, help him make some pictures of the other people.” To Letty, he said, “This will take a while.”
“I don’t care. I want to watch.”
• • •
SKYE DID FOUR IDENTIKITS, of Pilate, Bell, Raleigh, and a woman named Ellen.
While she did that, Lucas had gone to check on his other cases. Jenkins and Shrake were at Ben Merion’s cabin at Cross Lake, and told him that there’d been no problem finding places in the woods that looked dug up, but, “There are about a million of them. We saw a squirrel actually making one of them, burying acorns, and there are squirrels all over the place. The idea was good, but the execution is impossible.”
“So, you’re coming back?”
“Yeah, we’ll see you tomorrow, I guess. Go back to looking for computer chips.”
Del had not yet found the guy with the safe full of diamonds.
He called Stern, who said, “We got something weird on that Roscow’s phone . . . that Bony guy.”
“Weird’s usually not good,” Lucas said.
“Not good in this case,” Stern said. “We pinged them all, and the only returns we’ve gotten so far are from California. On the most recent calls, we got nothing at all. Our guy here says they may be pulling the batteries on their phones.”
“That doesn’t help,” Lucas said. “They’ll use them sooner or later, though. Keep pinging them.”
When he came back to Letty and Skye, he checked out the identikits and said, “Not bad. We could get something from these. I’ll send them over to Stern, he said he’d plaster northern Wisconsin with them, get them in all the papers up there.”
“Are you sure they’re up there?” Skye asked.
“We’re not sure of anything, but that’s where they were headed. By now, they could be in New Orleans.”
After a fast lunch, Lucas, Letty, and Skye went over to Swede Hollow Park to look for other travelers. They found three, sitting together, passing a joint, and Skye told them about Henry—one of the three knew him—and asked about Pilate. None of them knew him, or had heard about him.
Skye caught up on gossip, then Lucas went back to work and Letty and Skye drifted off, caught a movie at the Mall of America, bought a burner phone for Skye with twenty-five hours of talk time, bought a hat for Letty, ate again, and went back to the Holiday Inn. Letty broke out her laptop to check her Facebook for news from her friends, and punched in “Pilate,” and got nothing but the wrong one.