The security man said they’d called the Duluth cops with the story, but he hadn’t heard back; and he didn’t have anything more. Lucas got Larry Royce’s address and phone number, and thanked him.
Back in the truck, Lucas called the sex crimes unit of the Duluth Police Department. The officer who answered knew of the call from mall security. “We had the patrol division looking for them, but nothing came back. It’s possible they crossed over into Wisconsin and headed south or east. Lotta RVs out there, and we didn’t have a tag number. We also didn’t have any information that sex had actually been sold.”
Letty had been on her iPad, and reported, “Winnebago made Minnies for a long time. They might have stopped for a while, but then they started again. Looks like they were making them for at least twenty years.”
“See if you can find this Royce guy’s address,” Lucas said.
She found it in ten seconds: they were six or eight blocks away. “We could call him . . .”
“Better to talk face-to-face, if we can,” Lucas said.
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LARRY ROYCE LIVED in a bluebird-blue house in a neighborhood of white clapboard houses built on small lawns. He was home, a newer Chevy van parked in front of an older Lund fishing boat, tucked tight in the cracked driveway. A jolly, balding heavyset man with blond hair and a red face, somewhere deep in his forties, he was happy to talk about the incident, but not in front of Letty—“It’s embarrassing,” he said.
Lucas suggested that Letty take a walk around the block or wait in the truck. She took her iPad for a walk.
Royce sat on his stoop and said, “There were two of them, a thin blonde and a fat redhead. They were wiping the windows of this RV with some Windex and paper towels, and they said, ‘Hi,’ when I walked past. I said, ‘Hi,’ and this blonde said something like ‘Sweaty day for a walk,’ and I said, ‘Yeah,’ and she said, ‘I wonder if you could wipe the top of that windshield for me.’ She couldn’t reach the middle of the windshield very well, so I said sure, and did that, and she said, ‘Thanks,’ and then ‘What have you been up to?’ I said I was walking over to the mall, and she said, ‘Would you be interested in a party?’ Well, I’m a salesman, I been around, and I knew what she was talking about, and I said, ‘No.’ When I got over to the mall, I told a security guy. I mean, we don’t have hookers up here . . . Not in the mall parking lot, anyway. In the afternoon.”
He came back with security and the women were gone with the RV: “I think my attitude might have scared them off. They guessed I was gonna call the cops.”
He said he was angry with himself for not getting the license plate number, but “I wanted to get out of there.” The back left corner of the RV had been hit by something, or had backed into something and was crumpled, he said. “Not bad, but there’s a pretty good-sized dent.”
Lucas took down a full description of the RV and both women; the fat redhead, Royce said, had a white scar under one eye. The blonde, “There was something wrong with her teeth.”
“You mean like rotten? Or missing?”
“No. They were pointed. Kind of freaks me out, now that I think about it.”
? ? ?
LUCAS WAS WAITING when Letty got back, and after he told her what he’d gotten from Royce, she asked, “Now what?”
“Going home,” he said. “There’s a good chance they’ve all left for Wisconsin, and I need to talk to a whole bunch of people about this.”
“What about Skye?”
Lucas waved his hand out at the city: “How are we going to find her? She doesn’t have a phone, we don’t even know if she’s here. It’s all too big. Best thing we can do is, get back to my office and start calling. Get everybody looking for them.”
? ? ?
ON THE WAY SOUTH, Del called and said that Honey Potts—none of the cops called her Connie Sweat—had agreed to do an interview with Daisy Jones, and Jones, in a pre-interview, had gotten her to say that she’d been sleeping with Merion all through the marriage. He hadn’t been faithful to Gloria for even a week. “They’re doing the interview this afternoon, and they’re rolling it tonight—they want to get it done before there’s any chance that Merion’s attorney finds out and tries to cut another deal with Honey,” Del said.
“Good,” Lucas said. “Still need one more thing.”
“Shrake and Jenkins are going up to Merion’s cabin tomorrow, see if they can find that club,” Del said. “Sounds like a wild-goose chase to me.”
? ? ?
BACK IN ST. PAUL, Lucas and Letty stopped at the BCA office, where Lucas found that nothing had come in on Pilate, but he had gotten two sets of autopsy photos, one set on Henry Mark Fuller and the other on Kitty Place, the actress who’d been killed in Los Angeles. The L.A. cop was right: Lucas took fifteen seconds to decide that the same person or persons had killed them both.
The photos came up on his computer terminal. He pretended to be looking at something else and didn’t tell Letty about them. Henry Fuller no longer looked entirely human. He looked more like a badly butchered pig.
? ? ?
THE HONEY POTTS INTERVIEW had happened, and went on at six o’clock, after an hour of promos on the early news. About one second before the interview went on the air, WCCO reporters went looking for a comment either from Merion or his attorney. Merion refused to comment, but Raines, his attorney, said, “I want to know how she cut a deal like this. Did ’CCO pay for it? Were the police in any way involved? My client is being framed here, right out in public . . .”
? ? ?
AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK that night, Lucas got a call from a Joe Hagestrom, a highway patrolman from Wisconsin, who said he’d spoken to an agent named Bob Stern, from Wisconsin’s Division of Criminal Investigation. “He said you’d called down there earlier today, looking for a beige Winnebago Minnie with a big dent on the back left corner.”
“You find it?”
“I’m looking at it right now, or what’s left of it,” the trooper said. “It was back in the woods here . . . you know Northwest Wisconsin?”