“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.”