Prey 25 - Gathering Prey

by John Sandford

  Lucas told Laurent, “You gotta warn everyone to be careful about what they say. You’ll get a hundred professional assholes landing on you. It’d be best if you did most of the talking, and your reserve guys, because they’ll not only be the ones the media want to talk to, but they’re all pretty smart. Don’t let any bullshitters get in front of a camera or you’ll pay for it later.”

  “They’ll want to talk to you,” Laurent said.

  “Not so much and I’m going back home,” Lucas said. “This is a Michigan deal. There’s three dead in Wisconsin, eight or nine dead in Michigan, more dead in South Dakota and California, so far, and none dead in Minnesota. Guess where I’m from? I’m just here helping out . . .”

  “You gotta stay at least until the state cops get here, because, uh, if I remember right, you shot two of those dead people yourself,” Laurent said. “As long as you’re waiting, you might as well help us chase down Pilate.”

  “Not much I can do to find Pilate—he’s out in the wind now,” Lucas said. “You’re right about making the statement, though. I’ll stay for that.”

  • • •

  PILATE AND KRISTEN had gone out the window on the lower level of the inn, had run to the creek, then up the creek until they were deep in the trees. Pilate turned up the far bank and Kristen hissed, “Where’re you going?”

  “Down the highway.”

  “Listen—you’re going the wrong way. They’re gonna eventually figure out that we ran for it, and they’re gonna expect that we ran away from the town. What we gotta do is, we gotta run around the town, and go out the other way.”

  Pilate said, “You might be right . . . I was thinking about doing that.”

  “Then let’s go. We got no time. Every cop in the world’s gonna be jammin’ in here.”

  They ran halfway around the town—three hundred yards, all back in the woods—when Kristen, who was leading the way, froze and held up a finger. Human voices. Kristen jerked a finger to the left, and they moved deeper into the woods, as quietly as they could.

  Another hundred yards around, they reached a tree that had fallen, but was caught three-fourths of the way down in the crotch of another tree. Pilate climbed up on the trunk, tested it for stability, then climbed as high as he could on the slanting trunk. When he’d gone as far as he could, he peered back to where they’d heard the voices.

  A minute later, he climbed back down and said to Kristen, “Bunch of guys with guns. They’re looking at the town. They’re surrounding it.”

  “We gotta keep moving.”

  • • •

  FIFTEEN MINUTES OUT, they saw a uniformed cop with a car parked across the highway, turning around a car that had wanted to drive through. They walked for another half an hour, a mile at most, slow going in the woods. They heard several random shots from town, then a long sustained burst of gunfire. Kristen looked back and said, “That didn’t sound good.”

  “We gotta get out to the road and grab a car,” Pilate said. “You gotta do it. You run on one side, you see a car coming, you flag it down. When the guy rolls the window down to see what the problem is, you shoot him.”

  She nodded. “I can do that.”

  “Then let’s get closer to the road, where you can move out when a car comes.”

  The first car came from behind them, followed quickly by another moving fast. Pilate said, “Not them. They gotta be cops.”

  Ten minutes on, a pickup came down the road toward them and Kristen broke out of the trees and ran toward it, waving frantically. The truck slowed. A big guy sat behind the wheel, the only person inside. He stopped, rolled down the window, and asked, “Are they still fightin’ in—”

  Kristen pulled the gun from her back waistband and BANG!

  Kristen shot him in the head from three feet and the man fell back onto the center console.

  Pilate was there, ran around the nose of the truck, yanked the door open and shouted, “Help me drag him, help me drag him out.”

  Kristen ran around and together they dragged him through the roadside ditch and behind some brush, then ran back to the truck. They turned, and headed back the way they’d come that morning, moving fast, now.

  Kristen was driving and Pilate climbed into the back of the double cab, where he found a toolbox and a tire. He pushed the tire up on the seat, with the toolbox, and said, “Listen, they won’t be as worried about a woman driving alone. If we come up to a roadblock that we can’t beat, I’m gonna lay on the floor back here and pull the toolbox and tire on top of me. You be polite and talk us through.”

  “Fat chance,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, keep the gun under your leg. If it’s one cop, take him, but shoot either high or low. With all this shooting, he’ll be wearing a vest, so you got to go over it or get under it.”

  “They’ll kill us,” Kristen said.

  “They’ll kill us no matter what,” Pilate said. “Right now, we at least got a chance.”

  They made it down to Engadine in twenty-five minutes, and an hour later, were coming up to St. Ignace, where the Mackinac Bridge came up from Lower Michigan on I-75.

  “Once we get across that fuckin’ bridge, we’re free,” Pilate said, his first show of enthusiasm since he’d kicked Skye to death. “Once we get out of shitkicker heaven, they ain’t gonna find us. We got a thousand roads we can take back to L.A.”

  “You think they won’t know about us in L.A.?”

  “Shut up and learn something. My wholesaler brings the dope up from Mexico. He goes back and forth all the time. He can get us down to Mexico.”

  “What would we do there?”

  “Shit, I don’t know,” Pilate said. “We could figure out something. We’ll still have our guns—”

  Kristen said, “There’s a gas station. We need gas . . . and what the hell is that?”

  Straight ahead, a couple hundred yards beyond a truck stop, they were looking at the back end of what looked like an L.A. traffic jam.

  “I don’t like it,” Pilate blurted. “Pull into the pumps. Pump some gas and ask somebody what’s going on.”

  Kristen pulled in and pumped gas while Pilate lay below window level in the truck. He could hear her talking to somebody and then he heard nothing for five minutes. When she got back in the cab with a sack full of junk food and a six-pack of Budweiser and another of Coke, Pilate asked, “What?”

  She muttered, “Stay down and don’t talk.”

  She pulled back on the highway, and Pilate sat up and looked back. “What was that?”

  “The cops have blocked the bridge. They’re shaking down every car coming out of the UP.” She looked at him: “So what’s the plan now?”

  He thought about it, then said, “First, we need a different car.”

  The media came in like a bad rain, barely preceded by the Michigan State Police, who took over the town and began organizing a countywide house-by-house search for Pilate and Kristen.

  The surviving disciples couldn’t or wouldn’t provide a last name for either one of them. “That’s not something we did—we all had one name,” said Laine Archer, of Eugene, Oregon, when she talked to the state cops at the hospital in Munising, before being taken into surgery to repair her shoulder. She was sure Pilate and Kristen were on foot: they’d snuck out of the lower floor of the inn just a few minutes after they’d gone to their assigned spots in the triangle of buildings.

  When the state police began arriving, Laurent took Lucas aside and said, “Look, when you make your statement, they’re gonna want to know how all this happened—why it didn’t happen some other place. And maybe they’ll be looking for somebody to blame.”

  “I can handle that,” Lucas said.

  “Why would you want to get tangled up in it?” Laurent asked. “We tell them that you came here to provide us information about a group of roaming killers, and to identify Pilate and his crew—but that I was running the show. Nothing wrong with any of that. That I made the decision to take them out, right here. That we
believed that they were about to kill the two artists, and I’m sure the artists will back us up on that. If we do it that way, they won’t have anybody to hang. One local cop is dead, three more are shot, all of them were shot without warning or mercy. We give them a choice: they can either celebrate what we did or take Pilate’s side in a media war. I don’t think they’ll choose door number two.”

  “You’re a smart guy,” Lucas said. “We’ll do it your way.”

  And that’s what they did. As state cops raced from one house to another, in a circle thirty miles across, a captain named Ferguson took Lucas aside for a statement, and Lucas followed Laurent’s proposed story. When they were done with him, they told him to hang around for a while, they were having the interview transcribed and he’d have to sign it.

  Laurent had been given the same treatment, as was everyone else who’d been involved in actual shooting, including three civilians from the bar who’d opened up on the naked disciples after the deputies were shot.

  The lady artist’s camera and memory card were confiscated, over her protests. The state cops told her that she’d probably get them back, sooner or later.

  • • •

  AFTER THE INTERVIEW, Lucas was out in the street when two TV cameramen came jogging up, led by good-looking women with microphones: “Officer Davenport . . . could you give us a comment, your version—”

  “I better leave that to the Michigan state police. I understand that they’re planning a press conference.”

  He saw Laurent and Frisell watching and he waved them over and said to the reporters, “Here are two of the main men in the whole operation. What they did, taking out this gang . . . it was right on the edge of unbelievable. I’ve never seen anything quite like it, to tell you the truth. Everybody in Michigan should be proud about what they did up here today.”

  The reporters got a more extensive commentary out of Laurent and Frisell, and then Laurent called Barney Peters over, and Lucas told the story of Peters doing first aid on the wounded.

  Late that afternoon, a woman named Constance Frey called to say that her husband, Louis Frey, had heard about the shoot-out in Mellon, and despite her protests, had gotten his gun and jumped in his truck to help out. He had not come home, and was not answering his cell phone.

  During his debriefing, Lucas had mentioned that they’d tracked some of the disciples with cell phones. A state police officer approached Lucas, and asked if Lucas could ping Louis Frey’s cell phone to see where he was. “We could do it ourselves, but since you’re already set up to do it . . .”

  Lucas did and was told that the cell phone was a mile or so south of town, right on the road. When they went to look, they couldn’t find Frey. They began calling his phone, as they walked along the road, and eventually heard it ringing from behind some brush across the roadside ditch.

  He’d been shot once in the head, but for some reason, was still alive, though he couldn’t move and he couldn’t talk. They loaded him into a police car and sent him to the hospital in Munising.

  One of the state cops told Lucas, “I know you were doing the right thing by chasing these assholes down, but I wish you’d done it in some other state.”

  Lucas thought, Fuck it, declined a ride back to town and walked back by himself.

  • • •

  HALFWAY BACK, he took a phone call from Jenkins. “I’m standing here with Shrake and Julie Katz and her cadaver dog.” Lucas had lost track of who was doing what with the Merion case: it seemed like he’d last talked to Jenkins or Shrake about a hundred years earlier.

  “At Merion’s cabin?”

  “Across the road from his cabin. The fuckin’ dog indicated . . . is that what they call it? Indicated? Yeah, anyway, he indicated, and we’re looking at the end of one of those banister things. I don’t see any blood, but the dog says it’s there. We’ve stopped digging, we’re getting the crime scene crew out there.”

  “Good doggy,” Lucas said. “Listen: my buddy Park Raines is going to claim that you guys planted it. It won’t work, because if there’s blood, we’ll get DNA from it, and if Merion handled it, we could have his DNA, too. But Park’s gonna say that you planted it. So don’t touch anything.”

  “We haven’t touched anything.”

  “Good. Call the sheriff’s department and ask them to send a couple of deputies to stand guard, so you won’t be involved anymore,” Lucas said.

  “What about you?”

  “What do you mean?” Lucas asked.

  “You oughta be here for this, when the news gets out,” Jenkins said. “You know, for the glory.”

  “Yeah, whatever,” Lucas said. “Get the ball rolling. For Christ’s sakes, don’t contaminate anything . . . Hey, Jenkins: you got him. You fuckin’ got him.”

  Made him happy, and he picked up the pace. Called Weather with the news, and told her, “I can’t get back tonight. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  “You don’t have to hurry—don’t try to drive back at a hundred miles an hour.”

  • • •

  WHEN LUCAS GOT BACK to Mellon, Peters and Frisell were sitting on a bench outside the convenience store eating ice cream cones. It was a hot day and Frisell said, “You better get one if you want one, This place doesn’t usually have a herd of reporters and cops hanging around, and they’re going fast.”

  “Everything’s going fast,” Peters added.

  Lucas got the last Diet Coke and the second-to-last cone, and came back out, and Frisell and Peters moved over so he’d have a place to sit. Frisell looked down the street, to where state crime scene people were making measurements and calculating angles and taking photographs.

  “I think Clooney will probably play me in the movie,” he said. Frisell looked at Peters and Lucas. “How about you guys?” Peters said, “Tom Cruise.” Lucas thought for a moment and said, “Scarlett Johansson.”

  Frisell said, “Really? Is there something you haven’t told us?”

  “No, no. It’s just that I’m sure she’d need first-person coaching through the part, some in-depth consultation,” Lucas said.

  “Probably,” Peters said, catching a drip that was running down the side of his cone. To Frisell he said, “I’m changing mine to Angelina Jolie.”

  • • •

  AT THE HOLIDAY INN that night, Lucas had just gotten out of the shower, when Weather called and said, “Is there any way to see Channel Three up there?”

  “I don’t know how,” he said. “Why?”

  “Because you’re in a couple of big stories,” she said. “We just saw the promo for them . . . Hang on, Letty wants to talk to you.”

  Letty came on and said, “Dad . . .”

  “You still hurting?”

  “Yeah, but never mind. Can you get online?”

  “I got Wi-Fi in the room,” he said.

  “Then you can watch Channel Three online. You gotta hurry.”

  • • •

  LUCAS WAS RIGHT at the top of the news, in a way.

  First was the story out of Michigan, video from the reporters who’d talked to Lucas, Laurent, Frisell, and Peters that afternoon, about the fight in Mellon, which was being headlined as High Noon in the UP.

  The second item was a press conference called by the BCA, to announce that further important evidence had been discovered in the Ben Merion murder case, in the shape of a bloody club found near Merion’s Cross Lake cabin.

  Henry Sands made the announcement, attributing the find to “hardworking BCA detectives” without mentioning names but his own, and to BCA laboratory personnel who would be processing the evidence through the St. Paul laboratory.

  “We won’t know the DNA results for some days, but I have been told that there is a substantial evidentiary sample available to us.”

  He talked for a while, with the TV people calling out, “Director Sands . . . Director Sands . . . Director Sands . . .”

  Pilate and Kristen worked their way north to Prospect Avenue, got on I-75 and headed for Sault Ste
. Marie, away from the blockaded bridge. They drove around town, and found what they were looking for on Tenth Avenue West, an area of older homes, probably from the post–World War II era, small houses on large lots.

  They spent some time cruising the whole area, then did it again, and then a third time, until Pilate pointed and said, “There. Right there.”

  A white-haired woman was pulling her Taurus station wagon into a detached two-car garage. There were no lights in the house and Pilate said, “She either lives alone or her old man ain’t home yet.”

  The old lady dropped the garage door and limped into the house, carrying a bag of groceries. They waited until she was inside, parked the truck in the street, and walked up to the door and knocked.

  The old lady came to the door and asked, “Can I help you?”

  Pilate said, “Yeah, you can.”

  He’d already checked the screen door to make sure that it was unlatched. Now he yanked it open, put his hand in the old lady’s face, and hurled her back against the entry wall, where her head rebounded with a wet smack. Kristen came in behind Pilate and shut the door while Pilate kicked the old lady in the head three or four times. When Pilate was pretty sure she was dead, the two of them checked out the house.

  Everything suggested that the old lady lived alone, including a single plate and a cup and saucer sitting in the kitchen sink. They dragged the old woman to the basement stairs and threw her down, then went outside to move the vehicles. The second slot in the garage was half full of crap—boxes of family photographs, thirty-year-old skis, corroding bicycles. They managed to clear enough space to fit the truck inside, and pulled the doors down.

  Back inside, they checked the grocery bag—potatoes, grapes, milk, cereal. They found a couple of chicken pot pies in the refrigerator, and half of a quart bottle of bourbon in the cupboard.