A half block farther along, she said, “It’s in Sault Ste. Marie. The American one. Actually, on a farm south of the town. It’s next weekend, and the Detroit one is two weeks from now.”
“Sault Ste. Marie is a hell of a long way from here,” Lucas said. “I drove it once, years ago, on my way to New York. If I remember, it’s a six-or seven-hour drive from here. Eight hours or more from the Cities.”
“You think you might go?”
Lucas scratched his cheek, where a mosquito had bitten the night before, then said, “I don’t know. Maybe, if these guys haven’t turned up by then. The fastest way to get out of this area would be to go south. Once you get down to I-94 you could head down to Chicago or start back toward California. They’d have a whole choice of routes. If they drove all night after killing Skye, switching off drivers, they could be . . . through Omaha, through Kansas City, down to Chicago. Unknown California license tags would be meaningless in the big cities. Tomorrow morning, they could be damn near to Phoenix, or Vegas, or out to New York. We’ll put out watches, but our best chance of finding them would be when they go back to L.A. The California cops are really hot for Pilate.”
“So they’re gone. As far as we’re concerned,” Letty said.
“They might be. But if they went south, they’d be in Wisconsin for a long time, where everybody was looking for them and not finding them. So they might have headed for the nearest state lines—back to Minnesota, or east to Michigan. Depends on what this Pilate guy wants to do, I guess. If he’s really a Juggalo freak, he could show up in Sault Ste. Marie next week, and then Detroit. I’ll tell you something—you could hide a jumbo jet in the UP so nobody could find it. There’s not a lot up there. If I were them, that’s where I would have gone.”
“What are we gonna do?” Letty asked.
“What are we gonna do? I’ve got the Merion case hanging over my head, and a bunch of other stuff.”
“You can’t just drop this . . .”
“I won’t. I might ditch you at the cabin, to wait for your mom. If I leave right now, I could get over to Baudette, where those Minnesota plates came from, by early afternoon. See what I can see. Make it down to the Cities by late tonight. Then, if nothing turns up, I might zip over to Sault Ste. Marie and sniff around. Between you and me . . . if this thing is outside Sault Ste. Marie, that means the city cops won’t be covering it, and the county cops are gonna be way overloaded.”
“But I—”
“. . . Will not be going to Sault Ste. Marie. I’ve had busted ribs and you’re not going to want to walk around a lot. Or even hit potholes, as you’ll find out this afternoon when your mom takes you home. She’s never met one that she didn’t hit. So basically, you’ll be hanging out with your yuppie friends, trying to decide what kind of obscenely expensive hipster hi-tops you’ll wear back to your obscenely expensive college in the fall.”
“You know I’m not like that,” Letty said.
“You’re like that a little bit,” Lucas said. “Like me, though not as much.”
“Thank Jesus. I really don’t know where you get the time to shop.”
“It’s more important to look good, than to feel good,” Lucas said.
“What?”
“Never mind. Before your time,” Lucas said.
? ? ?
THE STATEMENTS TOOK an hour, starting with Letty’s meeting with Skye and Henry in San Francisco, through the discovery of Skye’s body. Lucas filled in bits about the discovery of Henry’s body in South Dakota, the relationship to the probable L.A. murder of Kitty Place, about the shooting of Bony.
As they were finishing, a deputy came in and said, “They found an ID on that girl. Her name wasn’t Skye, it was Shirley Bellows. She was from Indiana, had a couple of arrests for shoplifting and minor possession. We’re trying to get in touch with her folks now, but we’re having trouble locating them.”
Letty and Lucas looked at each other and Letty teared up, didn’t try to hide it, and Lucas said to the deputy, “Thanks for letting us know.”
When they got out of the sheriff’s office, they walked down the street to the Angler’s Bar and Grill and got cheeseburgers for breakfast, then Letty wanted to stop at the bookstore on the corner and get newspapers, to see if there’d been any coverage of the murder the night before.
There had not been: “Too late,” Lucas said. “We’ll see it tomorrow.”
Letty went to get a magazine for the trip home, and Lucas took a minute to browse the hunting and fishing books. Somebody had left a book, facing out, about cadaver dogs. He read a few pages of it, until Letty was ready to go.
Outside, she asked, “Are you going to Baudette?”
“Yeah, but I won’t get there until late in the day—four o’clock, if I leave the cabin as soon as I get you back there.”
“Wish I was going,” Letty said.
“But you’re not. You’re gonna sit on your butt until your ribs heal up,” Lucas said. “Even if I gotta handcuff you to a chair.”
Weather was unhappy that Lucas was leaving Letty at the cabin alone, but Lucas said, with a crackle of impatience, “Listen. Nobody’s gonna find her at the cabin. We give highly detailed maps to friends and they still can’t find it. She’ll be alone for four hours, watching TV. If you insist, she can go up in the attic and pull out the shotgun. But if I’ve got to sit here, staring at her for four hours, and then go over to Baudette, I’ll have to stay overnight. I was hoping to get home tonight.”
“All right. All right. We’ll get there as fast as we can,” Weather said. “I’ll be righteously pissed if you don’t make it home tonight, though.”
So he left Letty at the cabin with a kiss on the forehead, with easy access to food and a Beretta 12-gauge, and headed west. He passed the Juggalo encampment, which had grown even further, still with a cluster of cop cars around the murder scene.
As he went through Hayward, he got on the phone to Virgil Flowers: “Are you still in Fergus Falls?”
A moment of silence: “Where the hell else would I be?”