In addition to a psychological patience, he’d found, the biggest assets in surveillance were an interest in faces, a decent novel, and a strong bladder. Not a big intellectual, he’d nevertheless spent an entire summer reading an English translation of Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust’s à la recherché du temps perdu while knitting together the web of a major crack gang that spread over the Twin Cities. He couldn’t read French, but the book had made him want to learn the language; he’d just never had time.
Now he ambled through the crowd, not in any particular hurry: he knew now that Pilate was coming, just a matter of time. The part-time deputies, Barnes, the Subway owner, and Bennett, the postmaster, were watching the two guys who’d been with Melody Walker.
Lucas spotted Randy, the fat man, still riding in the back of the John Deere Gator, still throwing out bottles of Faygo, and went that way. As he came up, the fat man shook his head. “Not a thing.”
Lucas hadn’t had much time to talk to him, but now he did: “What’s up with you?” he asked. “What do you do for a living? You can’t spend all your time passing out bottles of pop.” He quickly amended that to “I mean, bottles of soda,” remembering that he was now on the soda side of the soda/pop linguistic border.
Randy shook his head. “No, no. I manage a self-storage place down in Ann Arbor. Not much to do, you know. Keep the college kids from trying to live in the place, make sure nobody’s running a meth lab. That’s about it. ’Course, the pay’s for shit. Sleep a lot. Play a little music.”
“Yeah? What do you play?” Lucas asked.
“Guitar.”
“Guitar? Tell you what: I owe you big for helping Letty. I’m serious. I owe you bigger than you know. How about I buy you a guitar? Something you don’t have.”
The fat man looked at him for a long moment, then said, “You’re shittin’ me.”
“No. I’m not. You got a guitar that you want?”
“About fifty of them. You could get a Mexican version of a Gibson Les Paul for a few hundred bucks. Do that, I’d drive over to your house, wherever it is, and kiss you on the lips.”
“That wouldn’t be necessary,” Lucas said, suppressing a shudder. He took a card out of his pocket and handed it to him. “Write your name and address on it, and the name of the guitar. I’ll drop-ship it to you.”
“How does a cop afford—”
“I have some money of my own,” Lucas began. His phone rang and he said, “I gotta take this,” and stepped away, into the privacy of a crowd that didn’t care who he was talking to.
Laurent: “We have a problem. I talked to the sheriff over in Sawyer County about all those John Doe warrants and told him we had a name to fill in—Melody Walker. Ten minutes later I got a call from an assistant county prosecutor, whatever they call them over there. A punk. I told him we were offering breaks to the first people we picked up, if they weren’t directly involved in the killings, because we need to know the names and other information. He said they won’t recognize any kind of a deal we make with anybody.”
“Goddamnit. What’d you tell him?”
“I told him our interview video might get accidentally erased because I don’t know how to run the cameras so good, and then he’d have a known killer he’d have to let go, for lack of evidence, and everybody in Sawyer County would know it, because I’d tell everybody, and I’d tell everybody that it was his fault,” Laurent said. “He said we’d better not do that, or he’d put all our asses in jail. I told him to go fuck himself, and he said, ‘Hey, fuck you, too, you hick motherfucker.’”
“So as professional law-enforcement exchanges go, this wouldn’t be in the top five,” Lucas said. “Or even the top ten.”
“No. He wound up telling me he’d get back to us after he talked to his boss,” Laurent said. “Actually, he’s going to get back to you, because I don’t know the ins and outs of this cross-border stuff. I gave him your phone number.”
“When’s he calling back?” Lucas asked. “We gotta know what we can do.”
“Didn’t say. He sorta hung up on me.”
“Okay. Listen, it’s gonna be dark in a couple of hours,” Lucas said. “We need to pick up those two guys, Melody’s friends, if they don’t, uh, you know, contact anyone from Pilate’s group before dark.”
“All right. I could call this Wisconsin asshole and give him a deadline, I suppose.”
“Let’s not annoy them. Let’s wait an hour, and if they haven’t called, then I’ll call, and kiss a little lawyer ass.”
“Okay. Better you than me.”
“Yeah. I’m used to it,” Lucas said.
He rang off and went back to Randy, who handed him back his card, with a name and address, and said, “One thing to keep in your mind: Mexican. If you order a straight-up made-in-USA Les Paul, you’ll wind up filling your pants when you get the bill.”
Lucas grinned and said, “That wouldn’t be an entirely new experience for me. I almost did last week, with Letty.”
The fat man nodded and said, “Say, you want a Faygo?”
“No, thanks. I had one last week.”
? ? ?
LUCAS CRUISED FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES, then took a call from Barnes, the Subway owner. “We got one male and one female subject approaching the two men under surveillance. They know each other. The two unsubs are both in Juggalo masks. Jim’s watching from the other side.”
“Call Laurent.”
“Already did, he’s moving up, but said to tell you he’ll stay far enough back that they won’t see him.”
“Good. Call Frisell, Peters, and Bennett, tell them to get in a big outer circle so they can track the new people if they walk away.”
“Do that,” Barnes said, and he was gone.
Lucas made his way through the thickening crowd, thinking, Unsubs? Unknown subjects? Did everybody watch TV? Like the Minnesota deputy, with her vics? It wasn’t dark yet, but the sun probably wasn’t more than thirty degrees above the horizon, and the shadows were getting long. If they were going to move before dark, it’d have to be soon.
He saw Laurent in the crowd, who was as tall as Lucas, and so could look over the heads of most people. Lucas moved up to him and asked, “What do you think?”