? ? ?
LAURENT CAME BACK in the room. “He’s on the way. He told me no more questions until he gets here.”
“All right.” Lucas looked at the woman and said, “Melody, umm . . . I think you’d be a lot happier in here than in the holding cell. It’s kind of dark and cold in there. If we leave you in here, you won’t try to run away or anything?”
“No, no, no, no . . .”
“We could probably get you some magazines,” Laurent said, speaking for the camera. “The lawyer will be here in an hour or so and he has told us not to talk to you anymore, so we won’t. If you need a bathroom or anything, knock on the door. Our clerk will hear you, and somebody will take you down to the restrooms.”
? ? ?
THEY TOLD THE CLERK to get the woman some magazines, then went back to Laurent’s office.
“We got everything but an explicit confession,” Laurent said. “Melody wasn’t exactly a grim-faced Pilate loyalist, she was quick enough to unload on him . . .”
“Yeah, I think we got him, if we can find him,” Lucas said. “I see two possible problems, though. I got the feeling that she’s not all there, which is why I wanted her to have a lawyer—the lawyer’s for our sake, not for hers. The other thing was, she wasn’t specific enough. We got a good piece of it, but we need specifics, and if she’s challenged on grounds of mental incompetence, and the decision goes against us, we’re back to zero. We need to use her as a crowbar to get somebody else talking.”
“Names and specific acts.”
“Yeah. We need to pinpoint the actual guys who did the killings, and the people who inspired them to do it,” Lucas said. “That means Pilate, if he didn’t actually use a knife. The small fry, we need to keep them talking.”
? ? ?
LAURENT CALLED THE DEPUTIES still at the Gathering. None of them had seen anybody who might be Pilate. The two men who’d been with Melody Walker had gone to look for her, after a while, and seemed puzzled by her absence. They’d walked down to the car to look around, but then had gone back to their blanket with a bunch of hot dogs and Dr Peppers and were still sitting there.
“You want to bust them?” Peters asked.
“Not yet, but you guys stay close to them,” Lucas said. “I would really like them to point us at Pilate. But be careful: keep in mind that they’re nuts.”
“We’ll do that, but unless these guys are really, really stupid, their girlfriend’s disappearance is going to start to worry them.”
“I know: we’re walking on a thin edge here,” Lucas said. “We may change direction later in the day, so stay cool and keep watching.”
When everybody at the park knew what they were doing, Lucas and Laurent spent a few minutes looking at Melody Walker’s cell phone, and Lucas noted the numbers in her favorites list, but no names were associated with the favorites. Lucas called the numbers into the BCA duty officer, and asked that they all be pinged, with the results called back to him as soon as they came in.
“What next?”
“We need to get a response on those cell phone numbers, and we need to get back out to the park. If Pilate comes in, we want to be there.”
Raleigh and Linda crossed the UP like Columbus crossing the Ocean Sea, not knowing exactly where they were going, or what they’d find at the end, but dumbfounded by the lack of people: they were from L.A., and had never been in a place where you might find a square mile of space, or four or five, all to yourself.
Even the towns weren’t really towns. Santa Monica was a town. Venice was a town. Marina Del Rey was a town. But the towns in the UP?
“Most of the goddamn buildings in Santa Monica got more people in them than that town,” Raleigh said, looking back at the cluster of shops and houses around a convenience store, where they’d stopped for gas. He was right.
? ? ?
RALEIGH HAD HUNG AROUND the Hayward Gathering, staying back in the crowd in his face paint, as instructed by Pilate. Linda was with him, a sad, heavy woman face-painted as a cat. During the Gathering, she wore a skintight black suit with a long cat’s tail and black combat boots. Before she hooked up with the disciples, she’d been working retail at a Home Depot in Glendale, California, and hadn’t been good at it. She’d never been able to remember what products were in which aisle.
She and Raleigh were in the crowd when Lucas and Letty found Skye and watched as the local cops poured in, with the big dark-haired plainclothes cop directing traffic. The dark-haired girl was the same one that Pilate had punched out. Raleigh could tell that she was hurting from the kicks in the ribs and she was already showing a massive welt under one eye.
He was at first puzzled by the big cop’s relationship to the girl. He’d seemed angry when they found Skye, but controlled. His attitude toward the dark-haired girl was different: he was more upset by her beating than by Skye’s death and he kept coming back to her, over and over. Raleigh had been watching them, and the other cops, for an hour, before he tripped off on it. Of course! She was the big cop’s daughter. They looked alike, acted alike. They were close.
Interesting, he thought, but not critical. Pilate wanted the disciples to stay off their phones as much as they could, in case the cops had some way of tracking them, despite the phone shields, so he didn’t bother to call in that night.