On the other hand, he did have a priority. He said, “Herb, I need to talk to you over here.”

As far from the crowd as possible: Lucas could see video cameras being pointed at them and some had zoom mikes. Laurent followed them over to the far side of the car, where Lucas quietly told them what Melody Walker had said about Linda Petrelli taking Henry Fuller’s penis as a trophy. “If she’s telling the truth, it could be in the car. Might not be obvious what it is . . . or it may be, I don’t know. If you find it, treat it with care, because it’s going to hang these assholes.”

“Gosh darnit, I’ve never . . .” Jackson said. “I mean, I’ve seen some weird things . . .”

“Yeah. I know. Just be aware of what you’re dealing with,” Lucas said.

“Peters and Sellers are still out there, looking around,” Laurent said. “Haven’t seen any more plates from California.”

“Herb needs to process the other two cars, the ones from Biggs and Collins,” Lucas said. “Collins admits he’s a dealer.” To Jackson: “Take a close look for hidden panels and so on.”

“I will. I did a class on that down in Lansing,” Jackson said.

“What are you going to do?” Laurent asked Lucas.

“Hook up with Peters and Sellers, wander around the park. Raleigh Waites recognized me because Pilate left a spy behind at the shooting scene in Hayward, and he saw me working the murder scene down there. Pilate may have another one here . . . we have to be aware of that.”

“Wish we could get our hands on that sonofabitch,” Laurent said. “Teach him he doesn’t bring this shit to the UP.”

•   •   •

NOTHING HAPPENED. They didn’t spot anybody.

Lucas, Laurent, Peters, Sellers, and Frisell walked every inch of the park, shouldering through the crowds, watching each other at the same time—looking for somebody tracking them. They saw nothing. An hour passed, and two. Lucas talked to the enormously fat man again, who’d seen nothing. The duty officer at the BCA called and said that the phones were being pinged through AT&T and Verizon, but they were seeing nothing at all.

“It’s possible that they were warned and they’ve all got their phones sewn upside those special bags—or they pulled the batteries,” Lucas told the duty officer. “Do this—get the phone companies to hammer on them from about eleven o’clock tonight until one in the morning. One of the women we picked up said Pilate might expect them to call around midnight. They might stay off the phones except for that window in the middle of the night.”

“Gotcha. I’ll pass the word along. Davy’s got the night shift, I’ll have him call either way, whether we get something or not.”

•   •   •

LUCAS GAVE IT another hour and then told Laurent, “We should leave one guy here, to look at newcomers, but send everybody else home. They need to get to bed early tonight. If we ping Pilate at midnight, and locate him, we’ll want to roll out and get on top of him. Get out to the site, wherever it is, throw a ring around it, and then hit him at first light.”

“Just like deer hunting,” Laurent said.

“Deer don’t shoot back, usually.”

“True. Okay, Peters has a court case tomorrow. I’ll have him stay late, and send the rest of them home.”

“I’ve got a question for you,” Lucas said. “What if Pilate’s not in Barron County?”

Laurent shrugged: “Up here, we have mutual aid agreements—all I have to do is call the sheriff’s office in whatever county I’m going to, they’ll say come on ahead, and I’m good. The budgets are so tight that nobody ever says no. If he’s up here in the UP, I’m happy enough to go after him. This is all . . . pretty interesting. I think the guys would go, too. I’ll ask.”

“Good. Check with them. If he’s deep in the woods somewhere, outside of Barron County, we might want help from the locals, too.”

“I’ll call around tonight, get set in advance,” Laurent said. “Let me know as soon as you find out where they are.”

“If they call me, you’ll be the first to know,” Lucas said. “Maybe it’ll all go down easy.”

“Raleigh Waites didn’t go down easy. Neither did that Bony guy in Wisconsin.”

“You really are Father Christmas,” Lucas said. “You were supposed to say, ‘Yeah, there’ll be nothing to it.’”

“When I was in Iraq,” Laurent said, “we had a standard answer for somebody who suggested that an op was going to be easy.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah: Run!”

•   •   •

LUCAS WENT BACK to the Holiday Inn, took a shower, laid out some clothes so he could get dressed in a hurry, called Weather, told her what was happening, talked to Letty for a while—she was hurting worse than she had the first day, but Weather said that was normal.

When he got off the phone, he turned off the light and tried to sleep. But it was too early, and he didn’t. Instead, he lay in bed in the dark and thought about the possibilities, and when that got boring, called Del: “Is everything okay?”

“Well, yeah. I mean there aren’t any emergencies going on. What are you up to?”

“Trying to sleep, but can’t. Almost got shot today, don’t tell Weather . . .”

He told Del about it, and Del said, “Jesus, you got lucky.”

“Yeah, somewhat.”

When he got off the call to Del, he turned the lights off again, couldn’t sleep, got his iPad out, browsed the Internet for a while, eventually worked his way around to eleven-thirty, and two minutes later, got a call from the duty officer. “We got five hits on those phone numbers, right away. Two of them were in California, but three of them are up there in the UP. We got a hit on the Pilate phone number and two others. I got the GPS coordinates figured out. You got a map?”

“Let me call one up,” Lucas said.

If the GPS locations were correct, the Pilate calls were coming out of a state park campground in the deep woods of Cray County, forty miles west and north of where Lucas was.

“Keep pinging them. We’re on the way,” Lucas said. He was on his feet, pulling on his jeans. He called Laurent and said, “We’re going to Cray County, talk to the locals there, wherever that is.”

“Already did. I called all the sheriffs in the UP and we’re good everywhere. We can pick up a couple of their deputies and maybe a couple more reserve deputies when we get there. The question is, do we want to go in there at one o’clock in the morning? We’d wind up chasing people through the woods in the dark.”

Lucas thought about it, then said, “I guess not. I’m going, but let your guys sleep. It gets light what, at six o’clock? Forty miles? Get them up at four-thirty, get out of town before five-thirty.”

“It’s a straight shot over there. We go in a convoy, with lights, we can be there in less than an hour,” Laurent said. “Peters is coming—he canceled his court date. Let me get you the names of the sheriff’s deputies over there. You probably ought to check in with them. I’ll call them and tell them you’re coming.”

•   •   •

LUCAS WAS ON THE ROAD a little after midnight, the names of the Cray County cops in his notebook and a hand-drawn map of the campground where Pilate was. There was nothing open in Jeanne d’Arc, not even the gas station, so he headed west. Twenty miles out, he spotted a combination sporting goods store–roadhouse–gas station that was still open, got a Diet Coke and a cheeseburger and fries to go, and got back on the road with a full tank of gas.

Lewis State Park was totally off the grid, on the far side of the county seat at Winter. Winter did have an open gas station/convenience store, and the clerk pointed him down the main street to the county courthouse. The annex in back, where the sheriff’s office was, showed a light, but the door was locked and nobody answered when he knocked.

He had a phone number for the deputy on duty, called it, and the deputy picked up, said, “This is Carl.”

“Carl, this is Lucas Davenport. I’m down at the sheriff’s office.”