THE DEPUTIES HAD taped off the area of the murder and Pilate’s encampment, and were waiting for the crime scene crew.
Lucas had one of the plainclothes deputies interrupt the rap concert. The deputy went onstage and told the crowd that a Juggalo woman had been murdered by some outsiders from California and that if anyone had taken any photos that showed a circle of cars parked over there—he pointed—“we would be desperately anxious to see them.”
The announcement cast a temporary pall over the concert—the pall lasted for more than twenty minutes, before the music got back to where it’d been—and a half dozen Juggalos wandered over to the cops to show off cell phone photos.
One of them, by a Hayward Juggalo named Betty Morrow, had a snapshot that showed her girlfriend in the foreground, and a license tag in the background, on a car that appeared to be in the Pilate circle.
They couldn’t make out the tag on the phone screen, but a deputy had Morrow e-mail the photo to a friend of his in Hayward, an amateur wildlife photographer, who ran the shot through Lightroom and two minutes later came back with both the license plate number and a make and model on the car, an aging Subaru Forester.
“Here’s the thing. The plate’s not from California,” the deputy said. “I’ll give you one guess where it’s from.”
“I don’t want to guess,” Lucas said. “Where’s it from?”
“Would you believe . . . Minnesota?”
“Goddamnit—they’re from California,” Lucas said. “If it’s a Minnesota guy, he might not be related.”
“He was parked in the circle,” the deputy said.
“Give me the number—I’ll call the office and have them run it,” Lucas said.
Lucas called the BCA duty officer in St. Paul, and said, “Everything you’ve got. E-mail it to me.”
The duty officer could give him one bit immediately: the car was registered to a Chester Tillus, who lived east of Baudette in Lake of the Woods County.
“I’ll get you a driver’s license photo in ten minutes, if he’s got one.”
“Hang on.” Lucas got an e-mail address for the sheriff’s office from the deputy, and passed it on to the duty officer. “Send copies of everything to both me and the sheriff’s office. They’re looking for the guy over here in Wisconsin, could be a murder charge involved.”
“I’ll do that. Are you at the scene?”
“Yeah, but I’m going over to my cabin,” Lucas said. “Right now, it’s a snake hunt, and the cheeseheads got it.”
The deputy said to Lucas, when he rang off, “Nothing I like better than a nice Brie.”
“I believe it,” Lucas said. He called Stern to fill him in, and said, “I can’t think of anything else. I’m gonna get Letty back to my cabin and get some sleep myself.”
“See you in the morning,” Stern said. “I’m catching an early plane out.”
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LUCAS DROVE OUT to his cabin, lit it up, offered to put together a cheeseburger, but Letty declined and said, “I’m gonna go sit on the dock for a few minutes.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yup.”
When Lucas followed her out, carrying a beer and his iPad, she’d unfolded a second deck chair for him. He sat down and sighed and said, “You do have the ability to piss me off from time to time.”
“I know,” she said. “I don’t think I can be any other way. Or you, either.”
“Probably not,” he said.
“You know how she was killed?”
“We’ll know in the morning, when crime scene gets a look,” Lucas said. “From what you saw, and what I saw, I believe she was probably kicked to death.”
“Ah, jeez.” She was quiet for ten seconds, then said, “I’ve been sitting here, wondering if me meeting her had anything to do with her getting killed. The closest I can get is, if I hadn’t given her my phone number in San Francisco, she might never have found out that Henry was dead. Or she might have stayed in South Dakota looking for him, and she never would have run into Pilate at all. You follow all the bread crumbs through the woods, that’s what comes out.”
“That’s a good way to drive yourself crazy,” Lucas said. “I talked to Bob Shaffer before he went off and got murdered last year. We could have done twenty other things that day and he’d still be alive. I believe there was one second, one tiny moment, that decided whether he’d live or die—if he hadn’t gone into a supermarket for a jelly donut, he’d have lived. He was a pretty good husband and father, and he still would be.”
“Yeah, but if he’d lived, you wouldn’t have been so involved, and maybe Catrin Mattsson would have died.”
“I don’t know. She might have, or maybe Shaffer might have found her sooner,” Lucas said. “Impossible to know. The thing is, you take a fork in the road, it doesn’t always work out for the better . . . but sometimes it does. It must.”
They were quiet for a couple of minutes, then Letty asked, “You get the e-mail yet? From the office?”
“Let me check.” He turned on the iPad to check his mail. The download was slow, with only two bars on phone reception, but in five minutes he had a long file on Chester Tillus. Lucas scanned it and said, “He’s with them. With Pilate.”
He got on his cell and called the sheriff’s office, talked to the duty sergeant and told him the same thing. “You find him, hold him, because he’s part of the bunch. He’s got two burglary convictions and two assault convictions in Minnesota, and a fighting charge in California, and that was only two months ago. He’s been out there, he just didn’t buy the California plates.”
“We’re looking for him,” the deputy said.
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