Laurent grinned at him and said, “I wanted to live up here near my family, my folks and brothers and sisters, and my ex-wife. This was the best job around. I was a Ranger officer in the army with three tours in Iraq, I know some things about guns and don’t mind the occasional bar fight . . . and that was good enough for the folks in Barron County. The last sheriff was both incompetent and a crook. I’m neither one. So, basically, I’m good for the job, at least in Barron County. We just don’t do what you might call your high-end investigations.”
“I’m not sure we’d really need that here,” Lucas said. “What we need is to go out to the Juggalo Gathering and bust a few guys, if they show up there.”
Laurent shrugged and said, “We’re good for that, if you can point them out. I’ve got a couple muscle-heads working for me who’ll do the job.”
Lucas said, “All right. I can get you warrants from both Wisconsin and South Dakota. The Gathering starts tomorrow.”
“It’s already started,” Laurent said. “The early birds are setting up their camps right now.”
“Then we ought to go up and take a look. The way this wacko operates, he might be picking out a victim right now. He got pissed at this girl in Wisconsin and kicked her to death right there in the Gathering field, about a hundred feet from the bandstand.”
“Jesus. That’s not something you see every day,” Laurent said. “You want to ride with me or go separately?”
Lucas didn’t usually want to ride with another cop, because they’d often wind up having separate things to do. At the same time, he needed to talk more with Laurent, to figure out what the other man could do and not do. “I’ll go with you tonight,” Lucas said. “We’re just looking around.”
“We can stop at Pat’s, if you want, get you a sandwich.”
? ? ?
LAURENT GOT HIS GUN from a desk drawer, a black Beretta of the type he probably carried in the army, and they walked out to his truck, stopped at Pat’s, where Lucas got a roast beef on rye with mustard and onions, on Laurent’s recommendation, and a Diet Coke, and they headed out to the county park.
“Let me tell you a few things about this place, the UP,” Laurent said, as they drove out of town in his Silverado pickup. “The UP is about the most remote place in the lower forty-eight—other people make the same claim, but they don’t know about the UP. The people down in Lansing don’t give a rat’s ass about us—we’ve only got three percent of the state’s population and don’t have enough votes to worry the politicians who don’t live here, so why should they care? The UP is about the size of Massachusetts and Connecticut put together. The biggest town’s got twenty-one thousand people. It’s better than three hundred miles from one end to the other, from Ironwood to Sault Ste. Marie, and no four-lane highway, except I-75, which runs up from the south across the Mackinac Strait to Canada. That’s no more than sixty miles long, and only affects the far east part of the UP. If you want to drive from east to west, the way this guy is coming, it’d take you at least five hours. Covering that amount of territory, sixteen thousand square miles, you’ve got no more than a few hundred cops, working three shifts plus weekends, most of those concentrated in maybe a dozen towns. So, if you want to enforce the law in the UP—well, you’re on your own.”
“If it’s so remote, why do the Juggalos come up here?” Lucas asked.
“Because it’s nice in the summer. Most of them come up from the Detroit area, where the Insane Clown Posse comes from, which is not nice, in the summer or mostly any other time. We got good lakes and, like I said, no cops—we leave them alone,” Laurent said. “They want to smoke a little weed, no problem. Besides, everybody up here wants them to come. They’ve been up here for four years now, don’t cause us a lot of trouble, other than hauling some trash out of the park. They’ve got their own medics and if somebody ODs, they haul them off to Sault Ste. Marie—no hospital in Jeanne d’Arc. And the Juggalos probably leave a quarter million dollars behind. In Barron County, that’s big.”
After a while, Laurent asked, “How many guys traveling with this fruitcake?”
“Well, we killed one of them. So, not more than twenty,” Lucas said.
Laurent said, “Wait a minute. There are twenty crazy killers coming up here?”
“At the most,” Lucas said. “As far as we know.”
Laurent laughed; and that reassured Lucas. He wasn’t working with someone who was easily frightened. Or maybe, Lucas thought, he really was dumber than the dog.
? ? ?
THE ENTRANCE TO the county park was a gravel road that broke off the highway, followed a winding road through a stand of oaks, and then plunged into a pine forest and emerged at a series of campgrounds spread around a lake.
A few local families were in the nearest campgrounds, set up around picnic tables. Two small boats bobbed in the lake; judging from his own lake, at his cabin, Lucas thought it might be five hundred acres or so.
At the far end of the road, at the end of the lake, the park opened up into a field with a baseball diamond at one end. Fifty cars and pickups and a few RVs were already scattered around the field, and a flatbed truck was unloading green fiberglass porta-potties. Laurent left his truck at the near end of the parking area, and as Lucas got out, the scent of pine trees, wood smoke, and roasting weenies hit him in the face.
Laurent asked, “Now what?”
“We know that they had an RV when they left Wisconsin. Let’s kinda cruise those. We’re looking for a tribe of people, who hang together. Probably look a little more California than the locals. The Pilate guy dressed as a priest at the Wisconsin Gathering. As I understand it, the RV was at the center of a cluster of cars in Wisconsin.”
They cruised the RVs and found no cluster of cars, or anyone dressed as a priest. In fact, they found only a few people in Juggalo makeup: most of the people were involved in setting up. They’d just taken a look at the last of the RVs when Lucas spotted a green John Deere utility cart bouncing down the field with the fat man in the back.
Lucas headed them off, flagged them down. “You remember me?” he asked the fat guy.