“Uh-oh, that’s not recommended.”
“I know, we try to avoid it when we can. But, we’d like to stop by later and talk.”
“Come ahead, I’m mostly sitting on my thumb.”
? ? ?
LETTY CALLED HIM late in the day. She was back home, and hadn’t heard from Skye. Lucas hadn’t heard from Hall, in L.A., and had gotten busy with a flurry of phone calls when another credit union went down—turned out not to be the guy he was looking for—and never called Hall back.
Letty was unhappy with the lack of movement, but Lucas asked, “What should we do? We’re not getting anything. I suspect that Skye and Henry have hooked up, and moved on.”
“She should have called,” Letty said.
Lucas shrugged, though there was nobody around to see it: “She’s a traveler. Like you said, she doesn’t have a cell.”
? ? ?
SHRAKE AND JENKINS CAME IN. Jenkins did the talking. “One of the problems with the Merion case is that we could never produce the club.”
“Probably burned it,” Lucas said.
“Probably not. Takes too long, and he was on a tight schedule. We know he didn’t burn it in the home fireplace, because crime scene checked it, did samples, and said the last fire was a long time ago. And Merion had to drive like hell to get up to his cabin before Gloria’s daughter came home and found the body. The fireplace at the cabin was gas, not wood, so he didn’t burn it there.”
“So . . .”
“What we’re thinking is, he whacked Gloria in the bathroom, threw her down the stairs, pinched off her nose and mouth, wiped up the bathroom floor with that Foaming Bubbles stuff, jumped in his car and took off.”
“Nobody saw him,” Lucas said.
“Because Sunfish Lake is darker than the black hole of Calcutta, and he’s up on that ridge. He looks out the window, to make sure nobody is coming down that little road, then he jumps in the car and takes off,” Jenkins said. “Once he’s out of the house, who’s going to see him, or know who’s in the car? Anyway, he goes up to the cabin, the club is in his trunk. Carefully wrapped in something, because he’s no dummy. He gets up there, knowing that the daughter could, at that point, get home anytime and find the body. When that happens, he’s going to have to drive back to Sunfish Lake right now, like a grieving husband should. So he gets to the cabin, still got the club, has to get rid of it. Can’t burn it, because it would take too long. It’s dark, he goes out into the woods with a shovel . . . some obscure spot, buries it. We’re thinking, probably in that vacant side lot. Not the front lawn, not between the cabin and the road, but in that empty lot, or maybe in the woods across the road. Doesn’t need a deep pit, the club’s only two inches in diameter. Carefully rakes some leaves over it . . . and it’s gone.”
“Or maybe he just threw it in a ditch on the way up,” Lucas said.
“He’s more careful than that. Throw it in a ditch, it could be found,” Jenkins said. “It’s pretty distinctive and it’d have some blood on it.”
“So, what you want to do is . . . ?”
“We don’t think he would have gone way deep in the woods, because he’d want to hear the phone ring. Remember, the daughter called him on the cabin phone, and then the cops called him on his cell, and they both put him up there . . . So we’re thinking, we should go up there and mark out the likely spots, and walk it inch by inch.”
Lucas thought about it and said, “Say, aren’t there a lot of golf courses around Cross Lake?”
“Lucas, for Christ’s sakes, we’re trying to help out here,” Jenkins said.
“What about the computer chips?” Lucas asked Shrake.
“Those guys are long gone. We got the word out, so people are watching for them . . . but we don’t think they’ll pop up here again. Not for a while, anyway, and the Merion trial is coming up.”
“If you motherfuckers play more than one round a day . . .”
? ? ?
SKYE DIDN’T CALL the next day, either, or the next.
On the morning of the fourth day, the South Dakota highway patrol guy called and asked, “I threw away the note you gave me, but you were looking for a Henry Mark Fuller, correct?”
“That’s my guy. You got him?”
“A body came up in Sheridan County. The DCI’s got him, you need to talk to a guy named Steve Clemmens. The word I get is that the body has been identified as Fuller.”
Lucas took a few seconds to digest that, and then asked, “How long has he been dead?”
“I guess he looks like he’s been down for a week or so. They’ll be doing an autopsy today or tomorrow, crime scene is out there now. I heard that it was really rough, what they did to him.”
Lucas got a number for Clemmens, called him, got him on his cell phone. Clemmens was in rural Butte County, north of Sturgis, up in some piney hills, looking at the crime scene. Lucas explained who he was and why he’d been looking for Fuller.
“We need to talk to that Skye, if you can find her,” Clemmens said. “Doesn’t look like a domestic, though, no way. This wasn’t one guy cutting him up. This took at least two or three, that’s why we’re looking at the bikers, or a group of people. And if you can track down this Pilate . . .”
Clemmens said Fuller’s body had been found by a couple of Indian kids who’d been out with .22s, shooting around the countryside. Whoever had buried Fuller had only gone down a couple of feet before they hit rock, and the body had been partly uncovered by coyotes.