“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.