Free Gathering Prey by John Sandford

skanky chick he had. I said no, and we kept on walking. But it was like he knew who we were. I mean, travelers.”
    “Where’s Tony now?”
    Ranger shrugged. “He was planning to go over to Hayward for the Juggalo Gathering. If he got some money, he could’ve gone back to the mall. He’s kind of a puss hound.”
    “You think these women could have baited Henry in?” Lucas asked.
    Ranger shook his head. “No, Henry was a nice guy, but he was kinda gay.”
    “Gay?”
    “Yeah. He didn’t really do nothin’ about it, but we all knew,” Ranger said. “You know, he was like from Texas, cowboy boots and jeans, but sooner or later, he was going to find out . . .”
    Letty looked at Lucas and said, “Skye kind of hinted at it when I was talking to them in San Francisco. I didn’t pick up on it, though.”
    Lucas asked Ranger, “You think they might’ve run into Skye?”
    “I can’t tell you that,” he said. “She was dragging around town, looking in all the places that we hang out. We do go up to that mall, sometimes, and she probably would have gone up there, sooner or later.”
    “This is not good,” Letty said to Lucas.
    “If you guys run into Skye, or Tony, or see Pilate, you call me.” He gave them his number, written on a page, and this time, he did wrap a fifty around it. “Please, don’t let it go.”
    •   •   •
    ON THE WAY BACK to Duluth, Lucas took a call from Robinson, the L.A. homicide cop. He asked, “Did you see the autopsy photos?”
    “No, I’ve been on the road,” Lucas said.
    “Okay. Well, we’ve got them, and we got a nine-alarm fire here. The cuts are the same. Same pattern on this kid, as they were with Kitty Place. Big knife, slashes start up around the shoulder, and then go all the way down the body in one long slash. Right across the face, too. It might not stand up if they got a good defense attorney, but I personally think it’s about ninety-nine percent that it’s the same killer. You got a walking nightmare on your hands, my friend.”
    “Did they say if the kid was raped?”
    “That, I don’t know,” Robinson said. “All I got were the pictures. They don’t have an autopsy report yet.”
    “I’ll call them, get reports for both of us.”
    “You chasing this guy?” Robinson asked.
    “Looking for him.”
    “Send him to South Dakota if you get him. They got the death penalty. Unlike us, they use it.”

P ilate and the disciples got out of South Dakota in a hurry, traveling in an eight-vehicle caravan spaced out over a mile or two, twelve men, seven women, leaving Sturgis and the motorcycle rally in the dust.
    So far, the Great Northern Expedition had been a marginal success. They’d spent two weeks in San Francisco, buying dope, then headed east to Reno, where they peddled the weed to tourists. They ran into some Colorado competition there, but it wasn’t too bad, because the Colorado dope was fairly janky, plus, it had tax paid on it, so it couldn’t compete on price.
    Pilate tried to use the money from the weed to step up to cocaine, but good clean coke was hard to find and they wound up with a small bag of coke and a fat bag of meth. They also lost two crew members, Biggie and Darrell, who wandered away one day and never came back.
    From there, they had taken I-15 north all the way to Butte, Montana, mostly because Pilate didn’t like to drive across mountains if he didn’t have to. From Butte, taking their time, they’d gone to Dickinson, North Dakota, where they unloaded most of the meth, for cash, to be sold to the oil field workers, and then they turned south to Sturgis, to catch the motorcycle rally.
    The meth sale in Dickinson had gone well, and they got to Sturgis with more than twenty thousand in cash and no dope at all. Pilate spent almost half the cash buying cocaine and then they’d gone through that. Then they’d gone camping up in the hills, had their fun with Henry, and then they got the fuck out of South