“If you get the time, I’d appreciate it,” Lucas said. “He supposedly says he’s an actor.”

“What’d he do?”

“I kinda hate to tell you, because it sounds like more bullshit. We have a traveler here who says she was told that Pilot cut out her boyfriend’s heart, and keeps it in a Mason jar.”

Hall laughed and said, “You must have some extra time on your hands.”

“You know what? If I were in your shoes, I’d have said the same thing. But this girl we have here, this traveler, she’s sort of . . . convincing.”

“Uh-oh. Okay, I’ll see who I can round up in Venice and get back to you. Lord knows, we’ve got enough really weird assholes around here.”

“Thanks, I know you’re busy. If we hear anything at all, either up or down, I’ll call you,” Lucas said.

“Wait—you’ve got nothing more to go on? Nothing that would point me in any particular direction?”

“No. I’ve been doing database searches and I can’t find a single person with a Pilot alias. I’m wondering if I should start checking airports.”

Another couple seconds of silence from the other end, then Hall said, “Uh, the guy I’m talking about, it’s not Pilot, like airplane pilot. It’s Pilate, like Pontius Pilate. You know, the guy who did whatever he did, to Jesus.”

“What?”

“Yeah. P-i-l-a-t-e, not Pilot.”

“Ah . . . poop. Back to the databases,” Lucas said.

Hall laughed again. “Good luck with that.”

•   •   •

LUCAS WENT BACK to the databases and Pilate popped up immediately, and twice: once in Arkansas and once in Arizona.

The Arkansas hit was tied to a man whose real name was Rezin Carter, who had a long rap sheet that started in 1962, when Carter was twelve. Too old for Pilate, who Skye had said was probably in his early thirties.

The second was a traffic stop on I-10 in Quartzsite, Arizona, six years earlier. The driver had no license, or any other ID. He said he’d bought his car for five hundred dollars in Phoenix, and was trying to get to Los Angeles, where he had the promise of an acting job. He gave his name as Porter Pilate. The cop who’d stopped him had given him a ticket, and had the car towed to a local commercial impoundment lot that had several dozen cars inside.

At one o’clock the next morning, the night man at the impoundment lot had a pistol stuck in his face by a man wearing a cowboy bandanna as a mask. The night man was tied up and left on the floor of his hut. Keys to the impounded cars weren’t available, because they were in a drop safe, and the night man didn’t have the key. Nevertheless, the gunman drove away a few minutes later.

The night man couldn’t see which car was taken, but an inventory the next morning indicated that the 1998 Pontiac Sunfire driven by Porter Pilate was gone, which was the only reason a routine traffic stop showed up in Lucas’s database, on a warrant for armed robbery. The Sunfire was later located after it was towed in Venice, California, a week after it disappeared in Quartzsite.

Both the Arizona and California cops listed the same license tag, which tracked back to a man named Ralph Benson, a professional bowler from Scottsdale, Arizona, who said he’d left his car in the long-term parking at Sky Harbor airport.

He’d had two keys in a magnetic holder under the rear bumper. When contacted by L.A. cops, he declined to travel to Los Angeles to retrieve the car, which he said wasn’t worth the trip. The car was eventually sent to a recycling yard, and that was the end of it.

Porter Pilate.

Lucas ran the full name through the database and came up with nothing except the Arizona hit.

He called the Arizona Highway Patrol and found that the cop who’d issued the ticket had retired, but they had a phone number. The cop was in his swimming pool and his wife took a phone out to him.

“I do remember that guy, because of the robbery that night,” the cop said. “He was like an advertisement for an asshole, if you’ll excuse the expression. You know, wife-beater T-shirt, smelled like sweat, black hair in half-assed cornrows.”

“White guy?”

“Yeah. Dark complexion, but sort of dark reddish. No accent, sounded native-born. Had some prison ink, one of those weeping Jesuses, on his shoulder, crown of thorns with blood running down. From that, you might’ve thought he was a Mexican gangster, but he wasn’t.”

“No ID at all?”

“None. Not a single piece of paper. Gave him a ticket and he signed it. After the robbery, we went back to the ticket to see if he’d left prints, but there was nothing there but mine. Of course, we didn’t have the car. When they found it in California, we asked them to process it, but it wasn’t a priority. When they finally got around to it, turned out it had been wiped.”

That was it. Lucas thanked the cop, said it must be nice to be in a pool, and the cop said it was 108 on his patio: “It’s not so much nice, as a matter of survival.”

Lucas called the South Dakota highway patrolman, gave him the new name and the details, and then the L.A. cop, who said the Arizona Pilate sounded like the Pilate he’d seen.

Lucas closed up and went home.

•   •   •

LETTY WAS OUT SOMEWHERE, and the housekeeper had taken Sam to Whole Foods, and the baby was asleep, and Weather said that her back had been feeling grimy, probably from the hot weather. Lucas took her up to the shower and washed her back, thoroughly enough that she wouldn’t really need another back-washing for some time. Lucas was getting himself back together when Shrake called.

“I talked to your guy Wilfred. He said some college dropouts were making a supercomputer in a barn somewhere, but he doesn’t know what for. But: they’re paying fifty bucks for any computer, in any shape, as long as it has a certain kind of processor. I don’t know shit about computers, but have you ever heard of something called Sandy Bridge? Or Ivy Bridge?”

“That rings a bell,” Lucas said. “I think it might be some kind of Intel chip.”

“Okay. Anyway, they’re paying fifty bucks, cash money. As I understand it, those chips cost a few hundred bucks each. The cash-money aspect means that every asshole with legs is over at the university stealing computers. They met at a park-and-ride lot last week down in Denmark Township, and the story is, people had a thousand computers. Not all of them had the right chip, but most of them did. These guys paid out a shitload of money and left in a white Ford F-150 with no plates.”

“When you say a thousand, is that a guess that means ‘a lot’? Or does that mean a thousand?”

“I asked that. Wilfred actually thought it might have been more than a thousand. The buyers had a laptop with a list of every computer in the world on it, and you’d step up with your computer, and they’d tell you yes or no, and if it was yes, they’d peel a fifty off a roll and throw the computer in the back of the truck. When he said throw, that’s what he meant. He said they’d just toss it in the back, didn’t care what happened to the video screens.”

“Will there be another meeting?”

“I’m told there will be . . . but it might not be around here. The rumor is, these guys are from Iowa and they’ve been buying all over the Midwest. Wilfred will keep an eye out. Supposedly, these guys need sixteen thousand, three hundred and eighty-four processors. That’s the number Wilfred gave me, and he claims it’s exact.”

“Ah, Jesus.”

“Oh. He said the buyers had guns.”

“Ah, Jesus.”

•   •   •

LETTY WAS BACK AT DINNERTIME. Lucas told her what he’d found out about Pilate, and she asked, “What do you think now?”

“Skye has me interested. There is no doubt that hundreds of people are murdered every year, and their bodies are never found,” Lucas said. “I could even tell you where a lot of them are: if you took a search team out in the desert south of Las Vegas, and searched for a mile on both sides of the highway down to San Bernardino, you’d turn up a hundred bodies without looking too hard. The most likely victims are like Skye, because nobody ever really knows where they’re at, or where they might have gone to. If you had a serious, insane predator out there, a crazy guy, travelers are natural targets. If this guy Pilate is really like she says he is, he could be dangerous.”