Lucas, Laurent, two regular uniformed deputies, and the five part-timers met at Laurent’s house the next morning at nine o’clock, went over their assignments one last time.

“The basic idea is to find them, watch them, isolate a few of them, who we can pick up. We talk to them about being sent back to South Dakota, where they have the death penalty, and see if that produces anything,” Lucas said. “Right now, if every one of them kept their mouths shut, we’d have a hard time proving anything—our main witness got kicked to death in Wisconsin. So, we need somebody else to turn.”

Laurent repeated the essence of it as they went out the door: “Find, isolate, detain.” Before they got to their vehicles, he said to Lucas, “I looked you up on the Internet last night. There was a story there that said you were a deputy sheriff in Wisconsin one time.”

“Yeah, for about fifteen minutes. I didn’t get paid or anything. They made me a deputy to give me some legal status.”

“And Barron County is happy to do the same, including the part about no pay,” Laurent said. “Raise your right hand and repeat after me . . .”

•   •   •

THEY DROVE OUT to Overtown Park separately and several minutes apart. When Lucas arrived, the plainclothes deputies had already disappeared into the growing crowd. The night before, there’d been a few dozen people working in the park. Now there were a hundred, and half of those wore Juggalo clown faces. The paint, mostly black and white, made it difficult to pick out individual features. A bandstand was going up, just as it had at the Wisconsin site, and Lucas spotted Sellers, the guy who owned the hardware store, apparently giving instructions to the workers putting it up.

He didn’t find a circle of cars pressing around an RV and none of the RVs he surveyed showed any activity that might be suspicious. Frisell, the teacher, ambled past, shook his hand, smiling, slapped Lucas on the shoulder with his other hand, and said, “There are two California plates down in the far corner, to the left, as you walk down there, right in front of all those pop-up tents. There’s only one car in between them. No RV.”

“Thanks, I’ll take a look,” Lucas said, smiling back. Old pals, bumping into each other in the park: Lucas thought Frisell had done it well.

Lucas wandered down to the far corner, took a look at the cars. One was a five- or six-year-old Subaru, the other an older Corolla. From what Skye had told them about Pilate’s group, that sounded right—but then, most of the cars in the parking lot were older. The Juggalos were not an affluent demographic.

He wrote the tag numbers in his notebook, then wandered off, fifty yards or so, and sat under a tree to watch them. Fifteen minutes later, a youngish woman—maybe thirty?—walked up to the Corolla, popped the trunk, took a daypack out, slammed the trunk lid, and walked away.

Lucas followed. She was slender and narrow-shouldered, with dark hair bent around her head like a bowl. He hadn’t been able to look directly at her face, but got the impression of delicate features, thin bow lips, and dark eyebrows. She was wearing a white blouse, form-fitting jeans, and rubber-soled slippers. No face paint.

They’d gotten a few general descriptions of Pilate’s disciples from the people at the Hayward Gathering, but nothing specific enough to be really identifying. One of the descriptions was for a slender dark-haired woman . . . but even standing where he was, he could see fifty of those.

The woman angled diagonally across the park to where two stoners were sitting on the grass, sharing a joint. She unzipped the pack, pulled out a thin blanket, and she and the stoners spread it. One of the stoners dropped onto his back, staring up at the sky, while the second guy sat down with his arms wrapped around his knees. The woman continued digging in the pack, chatting with the second guy, then pulled out a plastic box. She opened that up, took out a couple of tubes and a cloth, and started spreading paint on the second guy’s face.

A happy clown, but a frightening happy clown, nothing you’d want to show a little kid, in red, black, and white face paint.

Lucas watched for ten minutes and nothing more happened except that a woman wearing a cat mask and a bikini bottom, but no top, asked him if he were a cop. Looking steadily into her eyes, he said, “No. I’m actually a fashion photographer with Vogue magazine.”

“You liar.”

“Really,” Lucas said.

“How come you don’t got no camera? And why would you come here?”

“Camera’s in the van,” Lucas said. “It scares some people, who think we might be spies or cops. We want to make contact with fashion-forward young people, and arrange for the shoot later on.”

“Oh,” she said. She still looked suspicious as she faded into the crowd.

•   •   •

PETERS, THE LAWYER, went by carrying a canvas bag slung over a shoulder, and a paper-pickup stick. Lucas said, “Hang on a minute, but don’t look at me.”

Peters speared a gum wrapper and looked away from Lucas, and said, “Yeah?”

“I want you to walk down past the bandstand, over on the left side but behind it, maybe twenty yards, and then yell, ‘Pilate! Pilate!’ Twice like that—like you were calling to him across the field,” Lucas said. “When you’re walking away from me, off to your right, you’ll see two guys and a woman sitting on a blanket. She’s painting their faces. They’re the ones I’m interested in. When you call for Pilate, I don’t want them to be able to see you, but I want them to hear you. As soon as you call, get into the group around the bandstand, so they can’t figure out who was calling. Got it? I want to see if they look for you.”

“I got it. Give me a minute or so.”

Peters walked off and twenty seconds later, disappeared behind the bandstand. Another fifteen seconds and Lucas heard him call, “Pilate! Pilate!”

The woman immediately looked up from her nearly finished mask and the supine man rolled up on his side, then pushed himself up, both of them looking toward the bandstand. The second man, with the half-painted face, turned and said something to them, and then got up and walked toward the bandstand, looked behind it, apparently didn’t see anything that interested him, and walked back to the first two, shrugged, and sat down on the blanket again. The woman took another long look at the bandstand, then sat down again and went to work on his face mask again.

And Lucas thought, Gotcha.

He called Laurent on the phone, and told him what had happened.

“Do we pick them up now, or wait until Pilate gets here?” Laurent asked. “It sounds like they don’t know where he is and are waiting for him. If we wait, they might take us straight to him.”

Lucas had to think about it for a moment: “If we wait,” he said, “and they take us to him, it might be impossible to isolate them later. If one of them starts screaming for a lawyer, they’ll all start. We need to get something from them, almost anything, to really go after him. As soon as they lawyer-up, though, we could have a problem.”

“What do you want to do?” Laurent asked. “You tell me.”

Lucas said, “I guess I’d really like to split the difference: watch them, and wait until one of them splits off from the other two. Pick up that one, see if we get anything, then see if the other two take us to Pilate when he shows up.”

“That’s a plan,” Laurent said. “I’ll tell the guys.”

“If we pick up one, you guys don’t have a jail . . . am I right?”

“No, but we have a holding cell and an interview room.”

“Good enough.”