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LUCAS WAS NOT SURPRISED when he pulled into the hospital parking lot and saw his Porsche already there. When he walked past it, he could hear the ticking as the engine cooled. Inside the emergency room, Skye was sitting on a bed, talking to Letty, who was sitting in a visitor’s chair.
A nurse called to Lucas, “Are you a relative?”
“I’m a cop,” he said.
She nodded and he got a chair from an empty bay and put it next to Letty’s. He asked Skye, “You okay? I mean, more or less?”
“Yeah. They gave me some dope. Said it would help relieve my anxiety, which is good, because I’m pretty anxious. How did Henry die?”
“Stabbed, I think,” Lucas lied. “I haven’t seen the autopsy report, they’re doing that in South Dakota. I’m sorry. I know you guys . . .”
Skye said, “Yeah,” and “His folks still live in Johnson City, Texas, if that makes any difference to anyone.”
“Somebody will contact them. Probably already have,” Lucas said.
“He was a good guy,” Skye said. “Good traveler. I think the dope is taking the edge off, but I’m . . . awful sad.”
“Proves you’re a human being,” Letty said.
Lucas said, “Some Wisconsin cops are going to talk to you . . .”
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STERN AND THE sheriff’s chief investigator arrived together twenty minutes later. They interviewed Skye for an hour, with Lucas and Letty chiming in from time to time. Pilate and his disciples had taunted her, talking about playing with her, which she understood to mean rape and murder. She’d not been raped, because the disciples had been too busy. If the dope dealer from Chippewa Falls hadn’t shown up, she said, she’d already be dead, but his murder had sidetracked Pilate’s plans.
Skye only had first names for Pilate’s crew, and not all of those. She thought they might be on the way to a county fair somewhere, and then on to a Juggalo Gathering at a farm near Hayward, Wisconsin.
Lucas volunteered a BCA artist to create portraits of Pilate, Kristen, and the others, and Stern accepted the offer.
When they were done talking, a social worker and a doctor took Skye for a private interview.
While she was being interviewed, Stern got on the phone with the sheriff at the shooting scene, and to California. He came back with a notebook and said, “The dead guy’s name was Arnaty Roscow, which might be short for some longer Russian name. But that’s the name on his driver’s license. He’s done time twice, in California, both times for burglary. The L.A. cops said he was in the commercial burglary business for years, probably knocked over a couple hundred places, mostly houses on the Westside of Los Angeles, and Malibu and Santa Barbara. There’s quite a bit on him—they’ll run down his known contacts for us, because of that Kitty Place murder. They’re hoping we’ll clear it for them.”
“If we can get our hands on Pilate, we will,” Lucas said. “That murder out in South Dakota was like a fingerprint.”
Skye was released a few minutes later and came out clutching an amber bottle with thirty blue pills.
Lucas had already suggested that they put Skye back in the Holiday Inn, and Letty said she might see if she could get an adjoining room just for the night; “and we need to get you some clothes.”
“I need everything,” Skye said. “They just burned all my stuff.”
“Macy’s, and then over to REI,” Letty said.
“Don’t need the Macy’s,” Skye said. “REI is good enough.”
“Get what you need, you’ll have lots of room in the Benz,” Lucas said. He held out his hand to Letty. “The keys.”
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IN THE BENZ, Letty asked Skye, “How are you? Really?”
“Screwed up,” Skye said. “I was bouncing around in that car like a loose tire; everything hurts. They gave me some pretty good dope, though. If I didn’t have it, they’d probably have to put me in a rubber room somewhere. Poor Henry. Poor, poor Henry. I hope he didn’t suffer.”
Letty said, “He was too young to die.”
When Letty had determined that Skye was functioning, she took her straight out of Wisconsin, to an REI store in Roseville, a suburb of St. Paul. “Go ahead and get whatever you need,” Letty said. “Dad gave me an American Express, I don’t even think he looks at the bills. Besides, he already said it was all right.”
Skye got underwear and shirts and cargo pants and six pairs of pumpkin-orange socks, and at Letty’s urging, a new pair of boots, a decent pack, a top-end three-season sleeping bag, heavy long johns, and a variety of cooking and eating gear: a compact stove, fuel bottle, camping silverware, a lightweight parka, and gloves—“I’ll be down south before I need them, but it can get pretty frosty even way down south, in Mississippi and Texas.”
And, “I need a knife.”
“Well, let’s find a good one,” Letty said.
They settled on a Gerber survival knife, with a five-inch blade, for sixty bucks.
When they left the store, Skye said, “I owe you. This isn’t just a donation. I owe you.”
“I’m okay with that,” Letty said. “You can owe us. Someday you’ll do good, and you can pay us back. I’ll get you some cash—you’re going to need to eat until everything is done with.”
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LETTY GOT TWO ROOMS with a connecting door, at the Holiday Inn, and they wound up staying two nights. Skye was an interesting talker and an interested listener, and got Letty talking about her younger days as a trapper and a shooter of crooked cops and cartel killers.
“I’d never ever shoot anyone if it wasn’t self-defense, but that’s what it was,” Letty said. “I sometimes think I might have a touch of the sociopath, or more than a touch, because none of it ever made me feel the least bit bad.”