The next day, the local newspaper came out. Raleigh didn’t read newspapers, but they were free around the Gathering, so he took a look, to see what the cops were saying. One thing they said was that a Minnesota cop named Lucas Davenport had been working with the Sawyer and Polk county sheriffs’ offices first on the rescue of Shirley (Skye) Bellows, and later on her murder.
“Our feeling is that she knew the man who killed Henry Mark Fuller in South Dakota, and that she might have approached him about the murder,” Davenport had said. The story, and a photo, occupied the top half of the front page and the photo showed the big cop at the Gathering, with two deputies, and identified him as Davenport.
Below the story Raleigh found four police artist sketches of Pilate, Kristen, Bell, and himself: Pilate was listed as “Porter Pilate,” the only time Raleigh had ever heard of Pilate having a first name. He, Kristen, and Bell were listed only by their single names. The image of Pilate was a good one: Raleigh thought he’d be able to pick him out, on the basis of the sketch alone. The sketches of the other three were not nearly as good, except that Kristen had those filed teeth, which would give her away to anyone who saw both the teeth and the drawing. As for himself and Bell, he doubted that anyone could pick them out.
Precisely at midnight, he took out his phone, shook it out of its sack—they all had sacks that supposedly blocked cell phone signals, so they couldn’t be tracked—and turned his phone on and called Pilate, who came up immediately.
“Yeah?”
“They got one of those police drawings of you in the newspaper in Hayward,” he said. “It’s pretty good. If people see it, and you, they could pick you out.”
“Shit. But that newspaper won’t no way make it to the UP, right?”
“Probably not, but it’s not the paper’s drawings, it’s the cops’. They might be spreading them around. You got to watch all the newspapers, in case you pop up somewhere else.”
“Good information,” Pilate said. “What else?”
“That chick you whacked just before we left, the one who got hauled away by the fat man. Turns out she’s a cop’s kid. At least, I think she is. They acted that way.”
“Good. Happy to do it. What else?”
“That’s about it. Anybody in trouble?” Raleigh asked.
“Not as far as I know,” Pilate said. “They’re all calling in right now. Talk to you later.”
When Raleigh hung up, and had slipped the phone back in its sack, Linda asked, “Now what? We still camping out?”
“Nope. We’re finding a motel. I’m gonna do you.”
“Don’t hurt me,” she said.
“Gonna hurt you a little bit,” he said. “That’s what I do, huh?”
? ? ?
RALEIGH AND LINDA stayed for the whole Hayward Gathering. The Skye murder scene was still taped off on the last day of the Gathering, but there was only one sheriff’s deputy keeping an eye on it. The cops were apparently done with it, and Davenport, the Minnesota cop, was no longer around.
Raleigh talked to Pilate most nights, at midnight, usually for no more than a few seconds—Pilate was getting paranoid. The four pictures printed in Hayward had also shown up in a paper in southern Wisconsin, where some of the disciples had gone to hide out. Pilate wouldn’t say where he was.
Raleigh and Linda started out for the UP, with three days to go before the Sault Ste. Marie Gathering. They had money for food and gas, but not enough for a nightly motel. They did have a stash of weed, and just before leaving Wisconsin, managed to sell two ounces of low-grade AK-47 to a musky fisherman staying in a motel in Presque Isle.
“That only leaves us an ounce for ourselves,” Linda whined.
“Gonna have to make do,” Raleigh said. “Need the motels more’n we need the weed.”
They needed the motels because Raleigh’s sex life involved slapping Linda around, and then taking her orally or anally, which she hated. Which was why he did it. Or how he got the most pleasure out of it, when there was only one chick available, and nobody to watch. He didn’t want her to enjoy herself. He wanted to use her, and for her to know that she was being used, like an appliance. She was an appliance.
“All you gotta do is toast the bread,” he said. “You don’t have to like it. That’s what you’re for. Shut the fuck up and get to work.”
He was afraid to take that attitude in a park campground, where somebody might be watching or listening—he was not a man of the North Woods, but more of a city guy. Who was to know what might be back in all those trees?
Occasionally, at night, in a motel, after a particularly vigorous round of sex and assault, his eyes would pop open and he’d worry that Linda might wake up, while he was asleep, and stick a knife in his chest. If he got too worried, he’d wake her up and slap her around some more and maybe stick her again. ’Cause that was what he did.
They traveled like that, across Wisconsin, and then into the UP, and then to the Gathering, on its first full day.
He’d just parked, and gotten out of the car, when Davenport drifted by, paying no attention to him.
“There’s that big cop from Minnesota,” Linda said, from the passenger seat.
“Yeah. Gonna have something to tell Pilate tonight.”
Lucas shouldered through the crowd, trying not to look like a cop, but couldn’t help it. People glanced at him and gave way, sometimes with tiny smiles—I know what you are. They weren’t hostile, but they were wary.
Lucas wasn’t by nature particularly patient, except when he was working: there was a rhythm to surveillance, and when he was on the street full-time, he’d occasionally spent whole days and nights watching a person or a house or a business.