“But if you were a sociopath . . . wouldn’t that mean when those cartel killers came after the family, you would have taken care of yourself first? Instead, you got between them—the Mexicans and your family.”
Letty smiled: “I never thought of it that way. Thank you. I guess I’m not a sociopath, and I’d kinda started to worry about it.”
“I don’t know how killing somebody would make me feel, but I guess I might feel bad after a while,” Skye said. “I can see how if it was kill or be killed, I’d rather be the one who stays alive. But I believe I’d lose a lot of sleep over it.”
“Then you’re a nicer person than I am,” Letty said. “I never missed a minute’s sleep.”
? ? ?
THE NEXT MORNING, Letty drove Skye to Lucas’s office. Lucas had just gotten copies of a video taken at Regions Hospital. He’d looked at it once, and had been about to call the support services to cut some frames out of it, when Letty and Skye walked in.
“Is this the woman you call Kristen?” Lucas asked Skye, putting the video back up on his computer.
Skye crouched over the screen, watching, then said, “Yes! That’s her. For sure.”
“The video’s not so good.”
“I don’t care. That’s her. You can’t see it, but she’s got these pointy teeth. She filed them down herself.”
“All right. I’ll have the best stills printed out, and you can talk to our artist, help him make some pictures of the other people.” To Letty, he said, “This will take a while.”
“I don’t care. I want to watch.”
? ? ?
SKYE DID FOUR IDENTIKITS, of Pilate, Bell, Raleigh, and a woman named Ellen.
While she did that, Lucas had gone to check on his other cases. Jenkins and Shrake were at Ben Merion’s cabin at Cross Lake, and told him that there’d been no problem finding places in the woods that looked dug up, but, “There are about a million of them. We saw a squirrel actually making one of them, burying acorns, and there are squirrels all over the place. The idea was good, but the execution is impossible.”
“So, you’re coming back?”
“Yeah, we’ll see you tomorrow, I guess. Go back to looking for computer chips.”
Del had not yet found the guy with the safe full of diamonds.
He called Stern, who said, “We got something weird on that Roscow’s phone . . . that Bony guy.”
“Weird’s usually not good,” Lucas said.
“Not good in this case,” Stern said. “We pinged them all, and the only returns we’ve gotten so far are from California. On the most recent calls, we got nothing at all. Our guy here says they may be pulling the batteries on their phones.”
“That doesn’t help,” Lucas said. “They’ll use them sooner or later, though. Keep pinging them.”
When he came back to Letty and Skye, he checked out the identikits and said, “Not bad. We could get something from these. I’ll send them over to Stern, he said he’d plaster northern Wisconsin with them, get them in all the papers up there.”
“Are you sure they’re up there?” Skye asked.
“We’re not sure of anything, but that’s where they were headed. By now, they could be in New Orleans.”
After a fast lunch, Lucas, Letty, and Skye went over to Swede Hollow Park to look for other travelers. They found three, sitting together, passing a joint, and Skye told them about Henry—one of the three knew him—and asked about Pilate. None of them knew him, or had heard about him.
Skye caught up on gossip, then Lucas went back to work and Letty and Skye drifted off, caught a movie at the Mall of America, bought a burner phone for Skye with twenty-five hours of talk time, bought a hat for Letty, ate again, and went back to the Holiday Inn. Letty broke out her laptop to check her Facebook for news from her friends, and punched in “Pilate,” and got nothing but the wrong one.
Skye always carried one big fat paperback novel with her, and she’d spent some of the money Letty gave her on a Diana Gabaldon Outlander novel. In between spates of talk, she’d read the book, and she was reading it when Letty took a bathroom break.
During the day, nobody had wanted to talk to Skye about Henry, and she’d begun to feel that something was being hidden from her. When Letty went into the bathroom, she put the book down, stepped over to Letty’s laptop, which was showing the Google page, and typed “Henry Mark Fuller” into the search field.
The front page of the Rapid City Journal’s blog page popped up, with the headline “Murdered Man Was Crucified,” and beneath that, a bad picture of Henry, taken from his high school yearbook.
With increasing horror, she read through the news story, based on the autopsy done by a South Dakota medical examiner. Henry had been crucified, castrated, and slashed nearly to pieces.
She barely heard the toilet flush, and the bathroom door open, and then Letty, behind her, blurt, “Oh, shit.”
Skye turned around, tears streaming down her face: “You didn’t tell me.”
“You were already screwed up. You didn’t need to know the details,” Letty said.
“I needed to know . . .” Skye said. “Could you . . . uh, I want to read everything I can find, but I don’t want you here to watch me. I’m gonna cry a lot. Could you go out and get some Cokes or something? I won’t be real long.”
“Sure. Half an hour?”
“That should be enough. I want to see what all the papers say.”
When Letty was gone, Skye went to Craigslist and dropped an ad: “Going to Juggalo Gathering near Hayward? I need ride, will pay $50.”
She listed the number for the burner phone, then dropped back to Google and typed in Henry’s name again. All the daily papers in South Dakota had the story, and a couple across the border in Wyoming and down in Nebraska. They were all the same, reprints of an AP story based on the Rapid City Journal’s initial report. She read them all anyway.