Prey 25 - Gathering Prey

by John Sandford

  “All right. But—come with me tomorrow.”

  • • •

  LUCAS MOVED HIS MEETINGS around and at noon the next day, he and Letty were in Minneapolis. The Jefferson Lines shared a terminal with Greyhound off Tenth Street, a relatively cheerful place compared to most bus stations, built under a parking garage.

  They could see the green-glass top of the IDS tower peeking over the surrounding buildings as Lucas parked his Mercedes SUV on the street. He and Letty walked over to the station, where they were told that the bus was running forty-five minutes late. “Hasn’t even gotten to Burnsville yet. There was a big accident out on I-90. The driver’s trying to make up time, though, so they won’t be in Burnsville for more’n a couple minutes,” said the guy behind the Jefferson Lines desk.

  They decided to kill the time by walking over to the downtown shopping strip, so Letty could check out new arrivals at the Barnes & Noble and Lucas could look at suits at Harry White’s.

  The Harry White salesman was happy to see him, as always: “You’re running late in the season this year, but I snuck a suit off the rack, put it in the back, until I could show it to you. Italian, of course. It’s not quite as dark as charcoal, you couldn’t call it charcoal, but it’s a touch deeper than a medium gray, with a very fine almost yellow pinstripe, more beige, I’d say.”

  Lucas was a clotheshorse, and always had been. He spent a half hour looking at suits, had a couple of them put back for further examination on the following Saturday, spent five minutes looking at ties, another five with shoes, checked out a black leather jacket—$2,450 and soft as pudding. He spent nothing, and walked across the street to Barnes & Noble, where he found Letty checking out with a Yoga tome and a book on compact concealed-carry firearms.

  “You’re not going to start carrying a gun,” Lucas said.

  “Of course not, but I want to stay informed,” Letty said. “We oughta go out to the range this weekend, if it doesn’t rain.”

  “Let’s do that,” Lucas said. “It’s been a while.”

  • • •

  SKYE WAS THE LAST PERSON off the bus. She was wearing the same outfit as in San Francisco, but smelled like soap. She and Letty shared a perfunctory hug, Letty introduced Lucas, and they waited until Skye’s bag was unloaded. Lucas said, “We got you a hotel room in St. Paul. We’ll drop your stuff there and grab something to eat, and figure out what we’re doing.”

  “That’s great, but I really don’t think I can afford—”

  “We got it,” Lucas said. “For two or three days, anyway.”

  “Appreciate it,” Skye said. She’d learned not to decline kindnesses; they might not be offered a second time.

  A half an hour later, they’d checked her into a Holiday Inn on the edge of St. Paul’s downtown area, and from there went to a quiet Bruegger’s Bagels bakery on Grand Avenue to talk. They all got baskets of bagels and Lucas and Letty got Diet Cokes and Skye a regular Coke—the calories thing again—and as they settled down at a corner table, Lucas said, “You’re worried about your friend.”

  “One of Pilot’s disciples—one of the women he sleeps with—told me they cut out Henry’s heart and put it in a Mason jar and they take it out at night and worship it.”

  Lucas stared at her for a moment, then asked, “Do you believe that?”

  She held up her hands, palms toward Lucas, like a stop sign. “I know what you’re thinking. It’s all road bullshit. But I’m telling you, Mr. Davenport, this is not like that. We go back a way with Pilot, all the way back to Los Angeles, and there are stories about him. That he kills people, that they all join in, killing people. Not like some black Masses or something, that weird shit. They do it because they like it, and because it makes them feel important. I call him the devil because that’s what he wants people to think about him. He loves that. He loves that whole idea of being evil to people, and have people talking about him.”

  Lucas leaned back and smiled, and offered, “He does sound pretty unlikable. You know his real name?”

  “No. Everybody calls him Pilot. He has this tie-dyed sleeveless T-shirt that he wears all the time, it’s yellow with a big red P on it. The P is made to look like blood, and he tells people it is blood.”

  “You think it is?” Letty asked.

  “Looks like regular tie-dye to me, kind of faded out.” She turned back to Lucas: “Mr. Davenport, Pilot is full of shit. He’s a liar and he’s lazy and he’s crazy and he sells dope, but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t do some of the stuff he says he does. I know for sure that they have all these food-stamp cards, and they sell them for money at these crooked stores in L.A. They’ve been running that scam for a couple of years. He talks about how the Fall is coming, and how the only way to survive will be to join up with the outlaws . . . and you gotta be willing to kill in cold blood. They’ve got guns, and everything.”

  “The Fall?”

  “Yeah, you know, when everything blows up and all the survivors wear camo and drive around in Jeeps.”

  • • •

  LUCAS AND LETTY threw questions at her for fifteen minutes, and when they were done, they had character sketches of Pilot and four of his disciples, named Kristen, Linda, Bell, and Raleigh, no last names. “Raleigh plays a guitar and Pilot calls him Sledge, like a combination of Slash and Edge, and Kristen used a steel file to sharpen her teeth into points, and she’s like inked from head to toe,” Skye said, but she had few hard facts.

  She knew that Pilot’s group traveled in a caravan of old cars, including at least one RV, and she thought they’d been hassled by the South Dakota highway patrol at some point, because Henry, before he disappeared, but after he spotted Pilot at the rally, said they never stopped talking about it. “They had all kind of drugs in their cars, and they almost got busted by a South Dakota highway patrolman, but they didn’t because the cop was on his way home for dinner.”

  “That sounds real enough,” Letty said, glancing at Lucas.

  In the end, Lucas said, “All right. You’ve got me interested. Let me take a look at the guy. I need to know Henry’s full name, and it would be good if we could get the license plate numbers on Pilot’s vehicles.”

  “It’s Henry Mark Fuller and he’s from Johnson City, Texas. He went to Lyndon B. Johnson High School, but I think he dropped out in eleventh grade. I don’t know any license plate numbers.”

  Lucas wrote Henry’s name in his notebook, and then said, “If you ever see any of Pilot’s people, take down the license plate numbers, if you have a chance. That can get us a lot of information. If you run into friends you trust, ask them to keep an eye out.”

  “I will.”

  “If Pilot was ever in serious trouble, where would I most likely find a police report?” Lucas asked.

  Skye considered that for a moment, then said, “I heard that he was originally from Louisiana, somewhere, but he claimed that he was an actor in Los Angeles for a long time. I think Los Angeles. I don’t know where in Louisiana.”

  Letty asked, “Will you see any more travelers here?”

  “I think so. The St. Paul cops are mellower than the Minneapolis cops, so people come here and hang out in Swede Hollow. I’ve been there a couple times.”

  “You can walk there from the hotel,” Lucas said. He said, “Check around, but don’t be too obvious about it. Don’t ask about Pilot, ask about Henry. Mostly just listen.”

  “I can do that,” Skye said. “I’ve been asking about Henry everywhere.”

  • • •

  LETTY DIDN’T WANT to end the interview there, so they all drove back to the house, where Letty borrowed the SUV to take Skye to a laundromat.

  “I’ll drop her at the Holiday Inn after we finish with her clothes,” Letty told Lucas. “Meet you back here.”

  • • •

  LUCAS WENT ON DOWNTOWN in his Porsche, made calls to friends in Los Angeles, and talked to one of his agents, Virgil Flowers, who had good connections in South Dakota, and then ran a database sea
rch on “Pilot” as a known alias.

  Oddly enough, nothing came up. Lucas had been under the impression that almost any noun in the dictionary had been, at one time or another, given to the cops as a fake name.

  Flowers called back with the name of a South Dakota highway patrol officer working out of Pierre, and when Lucas called him, he said he’d put out a statewide request for information based on Lucas’s description of the caravan. Lucas especially wanted license plate numbers. “Won’t take long,” the cop said, “unless whoever saw them is off-duty and off-line. I’ll call you, one way or another.”

  Lucas also asked him to put out a stop-and-hold on a Henry Mark Fuller of Johnson City, Texas.

  Late in the day, he got a call from a lieutenant in the L.A. Special Operations Bureau, who said he should call an intelligence cop named Lewis Hall in Santa Monica. Lucas did, and Hall said, “You’re looking for a guy named Pilate?”

  “We’re interested in him. Don’t know where to look. He apparently travels with a band of followers in a bunch of beat-up old cars and an RV. Some of the women with him may be turning tricks.”

  “Yeah, I know about that guy. I’ve seen him a couple of times,” Hall said. “Never talked to him. Somebody would come in and say that he’d heard that Pilate had a satanic ritual somewhere. I’m not real big on tracking down satanic rituals, since they usually involve people who know the governor.”

  “I hear you,” Lucas said. “Any indication of violence? I mean, specific reports?”

  “Nothing specific. Rumors,” Hall said. “I know they used to hang out in Venice for a while. I know some people down there I could ask.”

  “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 g
uys 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.”

  Letty said, “Good. You’re interested. That’s all I wanted.”