“That’s not our problem. Our problem was finding the safe. Hoist it up on a truck and get it downtown.”
“They’re doing that right now,” Del said. “I’m hiding in the bedroom so the TV cameras don’t see me.”
“TV?”
“I told you. Jon’s okay, but his idea of a raid is ten people with M16s and camo and helmets and three TV trucks. We could’ve gotten the same results by knocking on the door.”
“Well, the important thing is the safe.”
“What have I been telling you, Lucas? The important thing isn’t the safe,” Del said. “Who really gives a fuck about the safe? Nobody gives a fuck about anything but the entertainment media, of which we are now a branch.”
“Del . . .”
“Wake up and smell the coffee, dipshit. You should have been here. You should be out there talking to the talking heads,” Del said. “Instead, you’re up in the UP with your dick in your hand.”
“Good night, Del . . .”
Lucas, Laurent, two regular uniformed deputies, and the five part-timers met at Laurent’s house the next morning at nine o’clock, went over their assignments one last time.
“The basic idea is to find them, watch them, isolate a few of them, who we can pick up. We talk to them about being sent back to South Dakota, where they have the death penalty, and see if that produces anything,” Lucas said. “Right now, if every one of them kept their mouths shut, we’d have a hard time proving anything—our main witness got kicked to death in Wisconsin. So, we need somebody else to turn.”
Laurent repeated the essence of it as they went out the door: “Find, isolate, detain.” Before they got to their vehicles, he said to Lucas, “I looked you up on the Internet last night. There was a story there that said you were a deputy sheriff in Wisconsin one time.”
“Yeah, for about fifteen minutes. I didn’t get paid or anything. They made me a deputy to give me some legal status.”
“And Barron County is happy to do the same, including the part about no pay,” Laurent said. “Raise your right hand and repeat after me . . .”
? ? ?
THEY DROVE OUT to Overtown Park separately and several minutes apart. When Lucas arrived, the plainclothes deputies had already disappeared into the growing crowd. The night before, there’d been a few dozen people working in the park. Now there were a hundred, and half of those wore Juggalo clown faces. The paint, mostly black and white, made it difficult to pick out individual features. A bandstand was going up, just as it had at the Wisconsin site, and Lucas spotted Sellers, the guy who owned the hardware store, apparently giving instructions to the workers putting it up.
He didn’t find a circle of cars pressing around an RV and none of the RVs he surveyed showed any activity that might be suspicious. Frisell, the teacher, ambled past, shook his hand, smiling, slapped Lucas on the shoulder with his other hand, and said, “There are two California plates down in the far corner, to the left, as you walk down there, right in front of all those pop-up tents. There’s only one car in between them. No RV.”
“Thanks, I’ll take a look,” Lucas said, smiling back. Old pals, bumping into each other in the park: Lucas thought Frisell had done it well.
Lucas wandered down to the far corner, took a look at the cars. One was a five-or six-year-old Subaru, the other an older Corolla. From what Skye had told them about Pilate’s group, that sounded right—but then, most of the cars in the parking lot were older. The Juggalos were not an affluent demographic.
He wrote the tag numbers in his notebook, then wandered off, fifty yards or so, and sat under a tree to watch them. Fifteen minutes later, a youngish woman—maybe thirty?—walked up to the Corolla, popped the trunk, took a daypack out, slammed the trunk lid, and walked away.
Lucas followed. She was slender and narrow-shouldered, with dark hair bent around her head like a bowl. He hadn’t been able to look directly at her face, but got the impression of delicate features, thin bow lips, and dark eyebrows. She was wearing a white blouse, form-fitting jeans, and rubber-soled slippers. No face paint.
They’d gotten a few general descriptions of Pilate’s disciples from the people at the Hayward Gathering, but nothing specific enough to be really identifying. One of the descriptions was for a slender dark-haired woman . . . but even standing where he was, he could see fifty of those.
The woman angled diagonally across the park to where two stoners were sitting on the grass, sharing a joint. She unzipped the pack, pulled out a thin blanket, and she and the stoners spread it. One of the stoners dropped onto his back, staring up at the sky, while the second guy sat down with his arms wrapped around his knees. The woman continued digging in the pack, chatting with the second guy, then pulled out a plastic box. She opened that up, took out a couple of tubes and a cloth, and started spreading paint on the second guy’s face.
A happy clown, but a frightening happy clown, nothing you’d want to show a little kid, in red, black, and white face paint.
Lucas watched for ten minutes and nothing more happened except that a woman wearing a cat mask and a bikini bottom, but no top, asked him if he were a cop. Looking steadily into her eyes, he said, “No. I’m actually a fashion photographer with Vogue magazine.”
“You liar.”
“Really,” Lucas said.
“How come you don’t got no camera? And why would you come here?”
“Camera’s in the van,” Lucas said. “It scares some people, who think we might be spies or cops. We want to make contact with fashion-forward young people, and arrange for the shoot later on.”
“Oh,” she said. She still looked suspicious as she faded into the crowd.
? ? ?
PETERS, THE LAWYER, went by carrying a canvas bag slung over a shoulder, and a paper-pickup stick. Lucas said, “Hang on a minute, but don’t look at me.”