“Soon as it gets light, you might have somebody down at the different takeout sites, see if anybody saw the RV before it burned. Or people or cars who were with it.”
The deputy nodded and said, “I’ll get that going.”
“Good. That could be critical.” Lucas looked over at the RV. It’d be hours before the crime scene crew got inside it. He was fifty miles from his cabin, less than an hour with his flashers, or twenty miles back to a motel in Danbury.
“Hell with it,” he said to Hagestrom. “I’ll be back tomorrow morning. I’m going to run over to my cabin, get some sleep. I can’t think of anything else I can do here.”
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HE MADE THE CABIN by three in the morning, stopping once at an all-night gas station in Hayward for gas, Diet Coke, a quart of milk, and a box of Honey Nut Cheerios. The cabin was dark and absolutely silent as he bounced up the driveway, until he triggered the motion-sensor floodlight on the garage. The only other visible light was on his neighbor’s porch. He was unlocking the front door when the neighbor came out in a T-shirt and underpants and yelled, “Lucas?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“Good, I don’t have to shoot you. How long you up for?”
“Just overnight,” Lucas yelled back.
“Have a good one.”
He went inside and had a bowl of cereal, the moon hanging low out over the lake, putting a long streak of silver on it. It was cool, almost cold. He got a spinning rod from a closet, went out on the dock and spent five minutes casting a Rapala into the moonshine, trying for bass or pike, but not trying too hard, smelling the North Woods night, looking at all the little dots of light from the cabins around the lake; then he went inside and tried not to dream about Skye, and what might have happened to her.
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HE WAS BACK AT the burned RV seven hours later. Hagestrom was gone, replaced by another trooper, more deputies, and a DCI agent named Mike Maddox, who’d come in with the crime scene crew. The crew had cut through the melted side of the RV and a tech in white coveralls and a face mask was inside, working around the body, which was lying on one side in the center of the RV’s cramped living area.
Lucas knew right away that it wasn’t Skye inside: the victim was male.
“All we know is that the victim is male, average height,” Maddox told Lucas. “He’s too burned to get anything else, unless we get a DNA hit. No face left, fingers are gone, hair’s gone, eyes are gone, toes are gone . . . We’ll get DNA out of the body, of course, but it’s unlikely we’ll get it from anywhere else, given the fire. Identification is . . . problematic.”
“Maybe,” said the tech, from inside the van.
Lucas and Maddox stepped closer. Maddox: “Maybe? I thought you said there was no chance.”
“That’s before I turned him,” the tech said. “I think I can see the edge of something that might be a wallet. He was lying on it, protected it from the fire.”
“That would be pretty interesting,” Maddox said. “Fish it out of there.”
“I’ve got some work to do before I get there,” the tech said. “But I’ll get to it.”
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WHILE ONE TECH worked inside, another was working to get at the second VIN number; and when he got to it, found that it, too, had been chiseled away.
Then they got a break. The inside tech took fifteen minutes to get at it, finally extracting a thin black leather wallet. Another tech took it to a working table and after photographing it, opened it. Inside they found a slightly melted, but still readable, Wisconsin driver’s license for a Neal Ray Malin, showing an address in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, an expired membership card for an Eau Claire gymnasium, an insurance card for a two-year-old Ford pickup, and nothing else.
“No credit cards, no money. Whoever killed him took the money and credit cards, which means that they might be using them,” Lucas said. “If one of them was a debit card, and they tortured him for the code . . .”
“We could get a picture,” Maddox said. “Let me get on that.”
Maddox tracked it all down in five minutes: Malin was no longer living at the address on the driver’s license, but his ex-wife was. She wasn’t home and Maddox spoke to the babysitter. She didn’t know Malin personally, but said the ex-wife was working at a beauty parlor in Eau Claire.
“I’m going to stick here, but I’ll get an Eau Claire cop to track down his ex and give her the news, and get the credit card numbers,” Maddox told Lucas.
“Wonder what a Chippewa Falls guy was doing with these L.A. freaks?”
“A question we’re gonna ask,” Maddox said. “Maybe he was like that guy in South Dakota—picked up and killed for the hell of it.”
“Don’t think so,” said the crime scene guy inside the RV. “There’s blood everywhere. All over the place. Why would they do that, and wind up having to burn their RV?”
Lucas stuck his head inside the RV: “Have you checked all his pockets? Did he have a cell phone on him?”
“I’ve checked all the pockets, no phone.”
Lucas turned back to Maddox. “Have the Eau Claire cops ask his ex if he had a cell phone. People steal phones—if he had one, and they’re using it, we might get a GPS location on it.”
A few minutes later, Lucas, watching the slow progress inside the RV, said to Maddox, “If you don’t mind, I’m going to run down to Chippewa, just to . . . observe. You know, if they locate his apartment.”
“Fine by me,” Maddox said. “I’ll call ahead and tell them that you’re coming.”
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