Collins was shakier. Frisell said, “Screw him. Why should we give him a break? We got everything we need from Melody and Linda. I’d stick the needle in this guy myself.”

“What’re you talking about?” Collins whined. “What’d those bitches tell you? They are the craziest bitches I ever seen.”

Lucas said, “Ten dead, and they’re crazy? You miserable piece of shit, I wish I’d shot you back in the park.”

“I had nothin’ to do with no killings. I was along for the ride, ’cause I knew some guys who could get us some dope along the way. I heard somebody say they killed this boy out in South Dakota and I took right off, I didn’t want to hear about that shit.”

“What about Neal Malin in Hayward? Was he your boy? One of your dope guys?”

Collins’s eyes slid away. “I heard about that, too. They told me there was an accident. I wasn’t there, but they said they was freebasin’ or something and the RV exploded.”

“What kind of freebasing gets your throat cut?” Lucas asked. “What kind of freebasing do you do with gasoline?”

“I don’t know nothin’ . . . I gotta have a lawyer. I can tell you about this, but I gotta have a lawyer first.”

They backed out of the cell and Lucas told the others, “He might be the most reliable one. Let’s keep him away from everyone else.”

Bennett came up and gave Lucas a page ripped from a legal pad: “The phone numbers from their cell phones. The Collins guy had a ‘Pilate.’”

“Excellent.”

The city cop said, “We don’t have facilities to keep people here. You gotta talk to Rome, tell him we need to start shifting people up to Sault Ste. Marie.”

“I got that,” Barnes said. “I’ll talk to Rome, but we can probably borrow a bus from the school, or maybe get Amos Krall’s van and haul them up in that.”

They were still figuring out the logistics of it, when Lucas’s phone rang and “Unknown” showed up in the caller field. “Yeah?”

“Lyle Ellis here—I’m the defender. I’m over at the sheriff’s office. I was told you wanted to speak to me?”

“Yeah, Mr. Ellis. Listen, we’ve got two people there, where you are, and two more locked up at the city,” Lucas said. “It would be good if you could rep them all, at least for the time being. Did the sheriff explain the problem to you?”

“Yes. As he sees it, anyway,” Ellis said. “I understand you’re from Minnesota, but I don’t quite understand your status up here.”

“We can talk about that later,” Lucas said. “The two women being held at the sheriff’s office tell us there are nineteen traveling killers, with maybe ten bodies behind them: think the Manson gang, but worse, with the leader still running around loose here in the UP. What I want to tell you is that you’re dealing with people who in my opinion are probably insane. Literally insane and proven killers. You have to take care about your own safety. Do not get crosswise with them. In my opinion, you may want to take a cop in with you for the preliminary talk, and then, after they’re transferred up to Sault Ste. Marie, talk to them privately only when you can have a bodyguard with you.”

“You’re not scaring me, Officer Davenport,” Ellis said. “This ain’t exactly my first rodeo.”

“Maybe not your first, but it’s different from anything else you’ve handled, because it’s different from what anybody has handled, anywhere,” Lucas said. “Nobody’s dealt with this rodeo before. They’re nuts. You need to protect yourself.”

“All right. I’ll think about what you’ve said.”

“Mr. Ellis, I’ll tell you what—you sound like a guy who’s so sure of himself that he could get killed. Don’t do that. There’s one man who was crucified in South Dakota, before he was castrated and slashed to death, another who got his throat slit in Wisconsin, and a woman who was kicked to death.”

“I’ll try not to be stupid,” Ellis said.

“Try real hard,” Lucas said, and hung up.

Barnes said, “That must have been Lyle Ellis. He really isn’t the sharpest knife in the dishwasher. I’ve known him for years. I’ll . . . talk to him.”

•   •   •

THEY LEFT BARNES and Bennett and the city cop to figure out a safe way to transfer the four disciples to Sault Ste. Marie—Barnes was arguing that the best way would be chain up each one in the back of different SUVs, and drive them up separately. That would have all four of them in jail in three hours or so, and they wouldn’t be able to communicate with each other. Lucas thought that was the best idea he’d heard so far, and said so.

While Barnes and Bennett handled that, Lucas and Frisell headed back out to the park. Frisell no longer had a weapon, but Lucas suggested that if he could handle it, having already been involved in a shooting, he could be useful walking around the park, keeping an eye on things.

“I don’t want you to think I’m a cold-blooded killer,” Frisell said. “But, look, Lucas—shooting that guy really doesn’t bother me. Just doesn’t. I got a kid hurt in a sophomore football game last year, and he tried to tough it out and didn’t tell me, and got hurt worse. Cracked two vertebrae. That’s been tearing me up for a year. I should have seen it. I should have known. He’s still walking around in a girdle, almost a year later, and I kick myself in the ass every time I see him. But this Raleigh guy? Not a problem.”

Lucas half laughed and said, “You and me both. I don’t meet many people like us. I’ve been in some shootings, and they were all good, and the thing that bothered me most about them was all the fuckin’ paperwork. On the other hand, I see cops who shoot somebody, perfectly good shooting, and they’re never the same again. And it’s real, they’re not faking it.”

“I believe that,” Frisell said. “Not me, though. I didn’t go there to shoot anyone. I feel about as bad as I would if a drunk driver crossed the road and crashed into me, and he died and I didn’t. I mean, not very. And I’ll tell you, Rome’s the same way. And the other guys, too, I think.”

“I hope it’s really that way, that you don’t wake up and find your ass has fallen off,” Lucas said. Lucas called the new list of phone numbers into the BCA: “Ping them all. Let me know.”

The scene at the park was Hayward all over again, a shifting mass of painted-face Juggalos and Juggalettes in a semicircle around the shooting scene, a couple of uniformed deputies keeping the crowd back. A fire pile was going up at one end of the field, while a band was doing a sound check at the bandstand at the other end.

Lucas and Frisell parked and walked over to the circle. Laurent spotted them, walked around some crime scene tape and came over and said, “Herb Jackson’s down from Sault. Herb’s their crime scene guy.”

Lucas said, “Good,” and told Laurent about the half-assed interrogations at the sheriff’s office and the city jail. “It’s really a matter of rounding them up, now. Only one guy’s hanging tough, everybody else seems happy to deal.”

“What about Lyle Ellis?” Laurent asked. “Did he call you?”

“Yeah, he’s at your office now, should be interviewing the women.”

•   •   •

HERB JACKSON, the crime scene tech, was a little pissy about the way the scene had been handled before he got there, but that was typical, and didn’t particularly bother Lucas: as far as he was concerned, covering the shooting scene was mostly a waste of time. There had been several witnesses to the shooting, and determining the exact location of each spent 9mm shell wouldn’t make any difference one way or the other. But, that’s what crime scene techs did, and he was usually happy enough to leave them to it. If nothing else, the county attorney could argue that the scene had been handled competently, when the county was sued by the guy who’d been shot in the lip.