The guy said, “Shut up!”

Lucas said to the woman, “How did he punk you? Is he right here? Where is he?”

The guy said again, “Shut up!”

But the woman started to cry, and Lucas said to the deputies, “Let’s get the cuffs on them, get some pants on them, get them ID’d.”

He pulled Turner aside and said, “As soon as they’ve got some shoes on, separate them. I want to talk to the woman without the guy getting on her case.”

Turner nodded.

Lucas got the guy’s wallet before the deputies helped him pull his pants on: Kelly Bland, of Los Angeles. The woman had a black tote with a silver sun-face on the side. Inside were a cheap Phoenix .22 automatic, a clasp wallet, a plastic bag with a wad of weed, and all the rest of the crap that women usually carry in totes. Her ID said that she was Alice McCarthy of Torrance, California.

When Bland and McCarthy had their shoes on, Turner’s deputies hustled Bland to the other side of the car so that they could open the trunk. They did it smoothly, keeping Bland’s attention, and by the time they had him there, asking about drugs and Pilate, Lucas, Laurent, Bennett, and Frisell had moved the woman down a path that led from the campsite to the water.

She was a tall, thin woman with protruding brown eyes, and fingernails that had been bitten to the quick. Bennett read her rights to her, and arrested her on marijuana charges, and then Lucas said, “I think you know the charges on the weed are a little bogus. You could go to jail on them, but what we really need to know about is Pilate. If you go to jail on Pilate, you’ll never get out. Never. When this goes to court, you’ll need all the help you can get, and we can give you some, if you start cooperating right now.”

“I don’t know where he is, but I’ll cooperate,” she said.

Lucas shook his head. “That’s not good enough. You can’t just say you’ll cooperate, you’ve got to deliver something. What were all those phones for?”

“Pilate said Kelly would be our switchboard and everybody could call in to him and then he could tell everybody where to go, and then throw the phone away and nobody would ever catch us that way. The phones only cost like twenty dollars apiece. Pilate said that’s the way all the drug dealers do it.”

“Where’s Pilate?” Laurent demanded. “You’ve got to know something about that.”

“He’s around here somewhere. We have some people at the Gathering who were supposed to call us last night at midnight, and they didn’t, and Pilate was afraid to call them. But the rest of us talked at midnight, and we’re gonna try calling the Gathering people at eight o’clock this morning. If they still don’t answer, we’re supposed to call Pilate and the rest of the people, and decide what to do. Like, Pilate’s thinking that if something happened at the Gathering, we ought to scatter down into Michigan or back to Wisconsin, and then just keep going until we’re back in California.”

“What if you do get a call at eight o’clock from the people at the Gathering?” Lucas asked.

“Well, if everything is okay, then we meet there today.”

“How many more people are there? We know there were five at the Gathering yesterday, and you and Kelly make seven . . .”

“Maybe ten more,” she said. “You knew about the people already at the Gathering?”

“Yes. They’ve been arrested,” Lucas said. He didn’t mention that one had been shot and killed. “How reliable would you say that Melody Walker and Linda Petrelli are? Can we trust what they say?”

She said, “Linda, maybe. But Melody’s like one of Pilate’s main women.”

That struck Lucas as odd; backward from what he believed. They talked to her for another ten minutes, and then Frisell took a camera out of his backpack and made a video of her having her rights read to her, and then saying that she understood that she could have a lawyer but wanted to cooperate, and then they asked her all the questions over again.

When they were done, Laurent asked, “So we wait until eight o’clock? And then make up some bullshit story?”

“Let’s see what Bland has to say, and then if he’ll cooperate, we can probably nail Pilate down,” Lucas said.

“If he won’t, we could have Alice call him, tell him that Bland couldn’t call for some reason, and have her talk to him.”

“We could give it a try,” Lucas said. He turned back to Alice: “Do you know which of the numbers is Pilate’s?”

“Yes, sir . . . I can show you.”

•   •   •

BLAND WOULDN’T EVEN SPEAK to them, other than to say, “Lawyer.”

Turner had him hauled into Winter to be locked in the town holding cell, and the whole posse tracked back into Winter to wait until eight o’clock. The out-of-county deputies agreed to hang around until they knew whether they’d be needed again, and Lucas called the BCA and told them to step up the pinging on all the phone numbers they had.

McCarthy identified the number of the phone Pilate was now carrying—the numbers listed as “Pilate” were for a phone he used in California as his main number, and didn’t take on the trip, and the P, she said, was the phone he’d given to Kelly to use as a switchboard.

“He gave us this bullshit excuse, you know, about how everybody was used to calling that phone, so we should use it so there wouldn’t be any confusion. He was setting us up to see what would happen.”

At five minutes after eight o’clock exactly, prepped to give Pilate and the disciples a credible story, Alice made the first call, to disciples she said should be camping near Lake Superior. Lucas’s ear was next to hers as a man answered.

“Where’s Kelly?” the man asked.

“He’s in this store, in Winter. We’re getting gas. He was supposed to be back out by now. You know how unreliable he is. He must’ve gotten stuck at the checkout.”

“Okay. Everything straight there?”

“Everything is with us, and the guys at the Gathering say everything’s cool. If everything’s cool with you, I’ll call Pilate.”

The man said, “Everything’s clear here. We’re with Chet, so you don’t need to call him. See you at the Gathering.”

She hung up and asked, “Was that okay?”

“That was fine,” Lucas said. He cocked his head. “You’re not fucking with us, are you?”

“What?” She shook her head. “I’m cooperating, I’m cooperating.”

He peered at her, uncertain. Then, “Okay. Let’s call Pilate.”

She called and Pilate answered on the third ring: “Yeah.”

“This is Alice. Jase just called, everything’s good at the Gathering. And Richie says everything’s good with those guys.”

“Where’s Kelly?” Pilate had a rusty-gate voice, a guy who’d smoked too much dope.

“We’re in Winter, getting gas. He’s stuck in the store, there’s a line of people here, and after Richie called, I thought I’d better call right through to you. You know how unreliable Kelly is.”

“All right,” Pilate said. Pause. “See you at the Gathering, then.”

He was gone.

•   •   •

BAD VIBE FROM the phone call. Alice looked up at Lucas, and it seemed to him that she was smothering a look of triumph. What had she done? Or maybe he was reading too much into her eyes . . .

•   •   •

LUCAS GOT A CALL from the BCA a minute later, from the tech support guy: the Lake Superior group was at Munising and Pilate was close to the town of Brownsville, twenty miles west of Winter, in Hale County. There were two Hale County deputies with them, and Lucas quickly found one and got him to call the sheriff. The deputy called the sheriff’s cell, and handed his own to Lucas and said, “You’re talking to Sheriff Hugh Butcher.”

“Sheriff Butcher: we think they’re right in your town, or close by, probably four to six people, two or three vehicles, one of them an RV,” Lucas said. “The RV may have Wisconsin plates, the others, probably California. Don’t approach them, they’ve all been armed, so far. Just try to track them. We’re coming with the posse.”