CHIPPEWA FALLS WAS an hour and fifteen minutes away, rolling fast across country on back roads, then down Highway 53. When he arrived, he found that the Chippewa cops had waited for Bob Stern, the Wisconsin investigator, to arrive from Madison. Stern had gotten to Chippewa Falls a few minutes before Lucas, had stopped at the courthouse to pick up a search warrant, and then the cops and Stern had driven in a convoy over to Malin’s apartment.
Lucas followed his nav system up the hill on the west side of town, and caught the Wisconsin cops as they were gathering on the lawn of an old clapboard mansion. Stern saw Lucas getting out of his truck and walked over to shake hands. “How’s the old lady?”
“Cutting somebody open, about now,” Lucas told him. “You divorced yet?”
“Let’s not go there,” Stern said. “I think she’s gonna get the season tickets for the Packers.”
“Man, that’s . . . inhuman,” Lucas said. He looked up at the house, which had an expansive front porch, including a comfortable-looking swing, and a bunch of white, life-sized, wooden-chicken flower boxes showing off bunches of geraniums, marigolds, and petunias. “Nobody’s gone in yet?”
“Doing that now,” a deputy said.
They watched as a sheriff’s deputy with the search warrant climbed the porch and knocked on the door. A minute later an elderly woman in an apron answered, nodded a few times, and then pushed the screen door open.
“Let’s go,” Stern said. As they crossed the porch he said, “Ugly chickens. Ugly.”
? ? ?
THE OLD LADY WAS the owner of the house. Her name was Ann Webster, and she hadn’t seen Malin in two days. Malin, she said, rented the top floor of the house, and had a separate exit out back. One of the deputies was sent around back to cover it, and the rest of the cops climbed a wide oak-floor stairway to a second entry, apparently added when the top floor had been converted into an apartment.
“I was never using it, the stairs are too high, so I thought maybe somebody would rent it,” Webster told them. “I had the nicest family here for three years, and then Mr. Malin. He’s very quiet. No wild parties or anything like that.”
She opened the apartment door with a shiny new key, and they all pushed inside. The apartment was huge, as apartments go, and oddly shaped, as it once had contained an oversized master bedroom, with four more bedrooms down a long hallway, plus two bathrooms. The former master bedroom had been converted into a living room, with a cook’s kitchen at the far end, behind a newly built partition.
One of the four bedrooms had been converted into a den, with a comfortable couch, and a compact bar, a stereo system, and a fifty-inch television; another had been converted into an office. The other two were still used as bedrooms, although Webster said she was unaware of any overnight visitors.
“Hell of an apartment,” Stern said.
Webster said Malin paid two thousand eight hundred dollars a month for it, and one of the cops said, “That might be the most expensive apartment in Chippewa.”
Webster watched as the cops probed the place; she was rolling her hands together as if washing her hands of her tenant. He was a salesman, she said, for horse barns and pole barns, at a place called Collins Metal Buildings in Chippewa.
Lucas and Stern walked through with the cops, looking behind books and under desks, and then the cops got serious about the search, and began pulling the place apart. They found four guns hidden in various drawers, all compact .38 caliber revolvers, fully loaded; and in one drawer, under the revolver, found a couple hundred packs of orange and double-wide Zig-Zags.
The main room had wall-to-wall carpeting, but one of the cops found that it hadn’t been tacked down. They rolled it one way, found nothing, rolled it the other way and found several loose floor planks. Under the planks they found twenty tightly sealed, highly compressed bags of marijuana, probably a pound each, and two kilos of cocaine.
“So it wasn’t entirely metal buildings,” Stern said.
“This is good,” Lucas said. “This gives us a contact point for Pilate, a reason for the two of them to be seeing each other.”
“Wonder if they took his truck?” Stern asked. “We got people looking for it, haven’t heard anything back.” He checked with his office, shook his head, and said to Lucas, “Nothing. If you see a two-year-old blue Ford Explorer pickup . . .”
The search continued: a half hour into it, Stern took a call, wandered into a corner, looked over at Lucas, hung up.
“Malin had a debit card with Wells Fargo. It was used twice, once just before midnight last night, then again a little while after midnight. You know, two separate days, maximum withdrawals both times, six hundred bucks each. There are recognizable photos of the woman who put the card in.”
“Excellent,” Lucas said.
“Better than that, big guy,” Stern said. “You know where they used them at?”
“Where?”
“St. Paul,” Stern said.
Lucas stepped back: “Ah, man. I probably passed them on I-35 last night. They were heading south and I was going north.”
“Ships in the night,” Stern said. “Anyway, Wells Fargo moved the photos to the St. Paul cops, and they sent them down to us. Let me get my iPad, we’ll take a look.”
He was back in two minutes with the slate. “Got her,” he said.
He passed it to Lucas.
Skye was looking straight into the ATM camera, hoodie back on her shoulders. She looked scared to death.
“Skye!”
“That’s—” Stern began.
“Oh, boy, oh boy . . . I’m going,” Lucas said.
The night before:
Neal Ray Malin felt crowded in the RV, like a big dog in a small kennel. When he shifted his weight, he could feel the RV move. He was on his feet, his hair like a haystack, fat cheeks with a bristling beard, facing Pilate, both of them angry, and he said, “I told you what the terms was: the terms was cash on the barrelhead. I don’t want to hear this bullshit about promising to pay. That’s not how we do business.”