The surviving disciples couldn’t or wouldn’t provide a last name for either one of them. “That’s not something we did—we all had one name,” said Laine Archer, of Eugene, Oregon, when she talked to the state cops at the hospital in Munising, before being taken into surgery to repair her shoulder. She was sure Pilate and Kristen were on foot: they’d snuck out of the lower floor of the inn just a few minutes after they’d gone to their assigned spots in the triangle of buildings.
When the state police began arriving, Laurent took Lucas aside and said, “Look, when you make your statement, they’re gonna want to know how all this happened—why it didn’t happen some other place. And maybe they’ll be looking for somebody to blame.”
“I can handle that,” Lucas said.
“Why would you want to get tangled up in it?” Laurent asked. “We tell them that you came here to provide us information about a group of roaming killers, and to identify Pilate and his crew—but that I was running the show. Nothing wrong with any of that. That I made the decision to take them out, right here. That we believed that they were about to kill the two artists, and I’m sure the artists will back us up on that. If we do it that way, they won’t have anybody to hang. One local cop is dead, three more are shot, all of them were shot without warning or mercy. We give them a choice: they can either celebrate what we did or take Pilate’s side in a media war. I don’t think they’ll choose door number two.”
“You’re a smart guy,” Lucas said. “We’ll do it your way.”
And that’s what they did. As state cops raced from one house to another, in a circle thirty miles across, a captain named Ferguson took Lucas aside for a statement, and Lucas followed Laurent’s proposed story. When they were done with him, they told him to hang around for a while, they were having the interview transcribed and he’d have to sign it.
Laurent had been given the same treatment, as was everyone else who’d been involved in actual shooting, including three civilians from the bar who’d opened up on the naked disciples after the deputies were shot.
The lady artist’s camera and memory card were confiscated, over her protests. The state cops told her that she’d probably get them back, sooner or later.
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AFTER THE INTERVIEW, Lucas was out in the street when two TV cameramen came jogging up, led by good-looking women with microphones: “Officer Davenport . . . could you give us a comment, your version—”
“I better leave that to the Michigan state police. I understand that they’re planning a press conference.”
He saw Laurent and Frisell watching and he waved them over and said to the reporters, “Here are two of the main men in the whole operation. What they did, taking out this gang . . . it was right on the edge of unbelievable. I’ve never seen anything quite like it, to tell you the truth. Everybody in Michigan should be proud about what they did up here today.”
The reporters got a more extensive commentary out of Laurent and Frisell, and then Laurent called Barney Peters over, and Lucas told the story of Peters doing first aid on the wounded.
Late that afternoon, a woman named Constance Frey called to say that her husband, Louis Frey, had heard about the shoot-out in Mellon, and despite her protests, had gotten his gun and jumped in his truck to help out. He had not come home, and was not answering his cell phone.
During his debriefing, Lucas had mentioned that they’d tracked some of the disciples with cell phones. A state police officer approached Lucas, and asked if Lucas could ping Louis Frey’s cell phone to see where he was. “We could do it ourselves, but since you’re already set up to do it . . .”
Lucas did and was told that the cell phone was a mile or so south of town, right on the road. When they went to look, they couldn’t find Frey. They began calling his phone, as they walked along the road, and eventually heard it ringing from behind some brush across the roadside ditch.
He’d been shot once in the head, but for some reason, was still alive, though he couldn’t move and he couldn’t talk. They loaded him into a police car and sent him to the hospital in Munising.
One of the state cops told Lucas, “I know you were doing the right thing by chasing these assholes down, but I wish you’d done it in some other state.”
Lucas thought, Fuck it, declined a ride back to town and walked back by himself.
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HALFWAY BACK, he took a phone call from Jenkins. “I’m standing here with Shrake and Julie Katz and her cadaver dog.” Lucas had lost track of who was doing what with the Merion case: it seemed like he’d last talked to Jenkins or Shrake about a hundred years earlier.
“At Merion’s cabin?”
“Across the road from his cabin. The fuckin’ dog indicated . . . is that what they call it? Indicated? Yeah, anyway, he indicated, and we’re looking at the end of one of those banister things. I don’t see any blood, but the dog says it’s there. We’ve stopped digging, we’re getting the crime scene crew out there.”
“Good doggy,” Lucas said. “Listen: my buddy Park Raines is going to claim that you guys planted it. It won’t work, because if there’s blood, we’ll get DNA from it, and if Merion handled it, we could have his DNA, too. But Park’s gonna say that you planted it. So don’t touch anything.”
“We haven’t touched anything.”
“Good. Call the sheriff’s department and ask them to send a couple of deputies to stand guard, so you won’t be involved anymore,” Lucas said.
“What about you?”
“What do you mean?” Lucas asked.
“You oughta be here for this, when the news gets out,” Jenkins said. “You know, for the glory.”
“Yeah, whatever,” Lucas said. “Get the ball rolling. For Christ’s sakes, don’t contaminate anything . . . Hey, Jenkins: you got him. You fuckin’ got him.”
Made him happy, and he picked up the pace. Called Weather with the news, and told her, “I can’t get back tonight. I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“You don’t have to hurry—don’t try to drive back at a hundred miles an hour.”
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