The scene at the park was Hayward all over again, a shifting mass of painted-face Juggalos and Juggalettes in a semicircle around the shooting scene, a couple of uniformed deputies keeping the crowd back. A fire pile was going up at one end of the field, while a band was doing a sound check at the bandstand at the other end.
Lucas and Frisell parked and walked over to the circle. Laurent spotted them, walked around some crime scene tape and came over and said, “Herb Jackson’s down from Sault. Herb’s their crime scene guy.”
Lucas said, “Good,” and told Laurent about the half-assed interrogations at the sheriff’s office and the city jail. “It’s really a matter of rounding them up, now. Only one guy’s hanging tough, everybody else seems happy to deal.”
“What about Lyle Ellis?” Laurent asked. “Did he call you?”
“Yeah, he’s at your office now, should be interviewing the women.”
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HERB JACKSON, the crime scene tech, was a little pissy about the way the scene had been handled before he got there, but that was typical, and didn’t particularly bother Lucas: as far as he was concerned, covering the shooting scene was mostly a waste of time. There had been several witnesses to the shooting, and determining the exact location of each spent 9mm shell wouldn’t make any difference one way or the other. But, that’s what crime scene techs did, and he was usually happy enough to leave them to it. If nothing else, the county attorney could argue that the scene had been handled competently, when the county was sued by the guy who’d been shot in the lip.
On the other hand, he did have a priority. He said, “Herb, I need to talk to you over here.”
As far from the crowd as possible: Lucas could see video cameras being pointed at them and some had zoom mikes. Laurent followed them over to the far side of the car, where Lucas quietly told them what Melody Walker had said about Linda Petrelli taking Henry Fuller’s penis as a trophy. “If she’s telling the truth, it could be in the car. Might not be obvious what it is . . . or it may be, I don’t know. If you find it, treat it with care, because it’s going to hang these assholes.”
“Gosh darnit, I’ve never . . .” Jackson said. “I mean, I’ve seen some weird things . . .”
“Yeah. I know. Just be aware of what you’re dealing with,” Lucas said.
“Peters and Sellers are still out there, looking around,” Laurent said. “Haven’t seen any more plates from California.”
“Herb needs to process the other two cars, the ones from Biggs and Collins,” Lucas said. “Collins admits he’s a dealer.” To Jackson: “Take a close look for hidden panels and so on.”
“I will. I did a class on that down in Lansing,” Jackson said.
“What are you going to do?” Laurent asked Lucas.
“Hook up with Peters and Sellers, wander around the park. Raleigh Waites recognized me because Pilate left a spy behind at the shooting scene in Hayward, and he saw me working the murder scene down there. Pilate may have another one here . . . we have to be aware of that.”
“Wish we could get our hands on that sonofabitch,” Laurent said. “Teach him he doesn’t bring this shit to the UP.”
? ? ?
NOTHING HAPPENED. They didn’t spot anybody.
Lucas, Laurent, Peters, Sellers, and Frisell walked every inch of the park, shouldering through the crowds, watching each other at the same time—looking for somebody tracking them. They saw nothing. An hour passed, and two. Lucas talked to the enormously fat man again, who’d seen nothing. The duty officer at the BCA called and said that the phones were being pinged through AT&T and Verizon, but they were seeing nothing at all.
“It’s possible that they were warned and they’ve all got their phones sewn upside those special bags—or they pulled the batteries,” Lucas told the duty officer. “Do this—get the phone companies to hammer on them from about eleven o’clock tonight until one in the morning. One of the women we picked up said Pilate might expect them to call around midnight. They might stay off the phones except for that window in the middle of the night.”
“Gotcha. I’ll pass the word along. Davy’s got the night shift, I’ll have him call either way, whether we get something or not.”
? ? ?
LUCAS GAVE IT another hour and then told Laurent, “We should leave one guy here, to look at newcomers, but send everybody else home. They need to get to bed early tonight. If we ping Pilate at midnight, and locate him, we’ll want to roll out and get on top of him. Get out to the site, wherever it is, throw a ring around it, and then hit him at first light.”
“Just like deer hunting,” Laurent said.
“Deer don’t shoot back, usually.”
“True. Okay, Peters has a court case tomorrow. I’ll have him stay late, and send the rest of them home.”
“I’ve got a question for you,” Lucas said. “What if Pilate’s not in Barron County?”
Laurent shrugged: “Up here, we have mutual aid agreements—all I have to do is call the sheriff’s office in whatever county I’m going to, they’ll say come on ahead, and I’m good. The budgets are so tight that nobody ever says no. If he’s up here in the UP, I’m happy enough to go after him. This is all . . . pretty interesting. I think the guys would go, too. I’ll ask.”
“Good. Check with them. If he’s deep in the woods somewhere, outside of Barron County, we might want help from the locals, too.”
“I’ll call around tonight, get set in advance,” Laurent said. “Let me know as soon as you find out where they are.”
“If they call me, you’ll be the first to know,” Lucas said. “Maybe it’ll all go down easy.”
“Raleigh Waites didn’t go down easy. Neither did that Bony guy in Wisconsin.”
“You really are Father Christmas,” Lucas said. “You were supposed to say, ‘Yeah, there’ll be nothing to it.’”
“When I was in Iraq,” Laurent said, “we had a standard answer for somebody who suggested that an op was going to be easy.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah: Run!”