? ? ?
LUCAS HAD TO EXPLAIN how the electronic transmission shift worked, which Frisell thought was weird, and they left the Gathering with the silent woman in the back. Lucas called the duty officer at the BCA and asked him to ping the phone numbers he’d collected. And, “Is Barb Watson there?”
“I think so. She hasn’t checked out.”
“Ring her for me—I don’t have her number,” Lucas said.
“One second. And listen, Sands wants to talk to you. He wants you to call him at his office. You want me to put you through?”
“No. If he wants to talk to me, he has my number,” Lucas said.
“Lucas, he’s really pissed,” the duty officer said. “He asked me why we were paying for all this work for Wisconsin and now you’re in Michigan . . .”
“So he can call me. Ping those numbers. And ring Barb.”
Barb Watson was a technical specialist: when she answered her phone, Lucas described the brown bag he’d found around Raleigh Waites’s phone. “You know what that is?”
“Yes, unfortunately. It’s a kind of Faraday cage. It blocks the cell phone signals, both ways, in and out.”
“Huh. Are they legal? Where do you get them?”
“Legal as far as I know. The Museum of Modern Art used to sell them.”
“This isn’t good,” Lucas said.
? ? ?
WHEN LUCAS HUNG UP, the woman in the back said, “Found out about Raleigh’s phone bag, huh?”
Lucas half turned to look at her. “What’d you say?”
“He used to rape me all the time. He kidnapped me and he and the others used to rape me. Even the women.” She spoke in a tone so flat, so uninflected, that Lucas thought she might be telling the truth.
“Where, uh, did he kidnap you?”
“Back in California. He kidnapped me from my job,” Petrelli said.
“Doing what? Your job?”
“Worked at a Home Depot.”
“Think anybody reported it? Should we call your folks?”
“Oh, probably not,” Petrelli said. “The disciples made me go in and quit, and made me call my mom and tell her I was going to be traveling and not to call me.”
“Huh.”
“They been raping me for three years now,” she said. “All the time, every night. Raleigh used to beat me up because that’s what he got off on. They called me ‘the designated rapee.’”
“All right,” Lucas said. “We’ll want you to make a statement when we get downtown here—”
“Butt, mouth, everything,” she said.
“Okay, when we get downtown—”
She looked out the window at the trees. “It was awful,” she said. She said it in a tone that she might use to order a sandwich.
? ? ?
THE TWO GUYS they’d picked up would be held at the city police station, while they took Petrelli to the sheriff’s office, put her in the county clerk’s office while they moved a protesting Melody Walker back in the holding cell. Then they moved Petrelli to the interview room, sat her down, turned on the cameras, and Lucas said, “We read your rights to you at the park. I’ll do it again if you want.”
“Nah. I just wanted to say that I was kidnapped and raped by all the disciples,” she said. Then, “Just a minute.” She stood up and pulled her cat tail off, dropped it on the interview table, and sat down again. “That’s better.”
“Let’s go all the way back to the start,” Lucas said. “Do you know if Pilate or the disciples murdered an actress named Kitty Place last year?”
“I wasn’t there, but they told me about it,” she said. She looked at Lucas for a moment, then at Frisell, back to Lucas: “Pilate and the guys all fucked her and then they cut her up and threw her in the ocean. But—she wasn’t the start. Not even close. I think that’s what they were going to do to me, when they were done with me.”
“What was the start?” Lucas said.
“I wasn’t there for it—but way back, I don’t know . . . maybe five years? They killed some guy by bashing his head with a rock. On a beach, near Malibu. They put him in the ocean, too. See, when they kill someone, they either put them in the ocean or they bury them up in the hills.”
“How many have they done that to?” Frisell asked.
“Well, the second one they killed, one of the girls told me this, was a traveler guy, and he had this walking stick with a bird’s head on it. Pilate kept it and every time they kill someone, he cuts a notch in it. There are like maybe . . . ten notches.”
“Not really,” Frisell said.
“Really.” She nodded, and added, “I hate it when they kill somebody, because they get all excited and then they gang-rape me.”
“Do you know where Pilate is now?”
“Well, he’s around somewhere. But he’s smart—he wasn’t going to be the first person to show up at the Gathering. He sent his spies in, first. Raleigh was spying on you back at the other Gathering, he saw you and that girl that Pilate hit. Raleigh thinks she’s your daughter. Wait: he thought she was your daughter. Guess he’s not thinking anything, anymore.”
Lucas felt the chill: he didn’t want Letty and Pilate linked in any way. Didn’t want Pilate or any of his disciples even aware of Letty. “But Pilate’s around,” Lucas prompted.
“Somewhere. Up here, I think. Raleigh was supposed to call him at midnight tonight and give him the all-clear.”
“We arrested those two guys that you and Raleigh talked to, the guys on the blanket.”
“Jase and Parker, yeah, they used to rape me all the time,” she said. “Sometimes, both of them at once. They call it a double-team.”
“Were they involved in the killings?”
She considered for a moment, then said, “Jase always was, Parker, maybe a couple of times, but he wasn’t so much into it. I mean, he’d do it, but he wasn’t really all hot for it. He was afraid we’d get caught—they’d get caught—and get sent to the electric chair.”