She got on the phone and Lucas answered instantly: “Dad, I found them, Pilate—and then I lost them. I think they’re on the road.”

“Are they in one tight convoy?”

“I don’t know. There are all kinds of cars coming and going,” she said.

“You okay?”

“Not exactly,” she said, pressing the gauze pad to her nose.

•   •   •

LUCAS GOT THERE fifteen minutes later, along with three sheriff’s cars and six deputies, all in plain clothes. Letty was waiting at the entrance to the parking lot, and when he got out of his car, Lucas said, “Aw, Jesus Christ, Letty . . .”

He reached for her, to hug her, but she flinched away and said, “Don’t do that—I might have a cracked rib or something. Pilate kicked me. It hurts.”

“Need to get you to the hospital, need to get you going.”

Lucas looked frightened, something she really hadn’t seen before. Frantic, yes; frightened, no.

Letty said, “I’m not gonna die, I just don’t want to be squeezed.”

“Let me see your face.”

After they did all the father-daughter stuff, Letty told Lucas and the ring of cops, “They were parked right here.”

She told her story, about the disappearance of Skye and the attack by Pilate, and how the man in the John Deere saved her, and how just before they left, Pilate and his disciples had been in the trees across the entry road. She pointed past the parking area, to the straggly stand of pine and aspen. “. . . and they did a little dance, jumping up and down.”

By the end of the story, she was shouting at them. The music had stepped up another notch, now as loud as a jet plane at takeoff, loud enough to feel it scratching at your face. The group onstage had set off whirling green laser lights that flashed up into the trees around the field, and made the branches seem to sparkle with thousands of emeralds.

Lucas took a moment to walk away to the fat man in the John Deere and say something to him, and then slap him on the back, and say something else, and then he walked back to Letty and the deputies and said, “I’ll talk to that guy again. Now, where were they parked exactly? And you say there was another RV?”

Before she could answer, he said to one of the deputies, “And I need one of you guys to run Letty into the clinic.”

“Not yet, not yet,” Letty protested. “In a minute.”

“Yet!” Lucas said. There was a copper taste in the back of his mouth, like blood. Letty was still bleeding from her nose and would have a major black eye: he could see it already.

“In a minute,” she said again.

Another cop car had come in and a seventh deputy joined them, this one in a uniform. They all had flashlights and they walked across the circular parking area inch by inch, and dumped out a plastic trash bin that sat at the edge of the parking lot, thirty or forty yards away, checking the contents under the flashlights.

As the deputies were doing that, Lucas scuffed around the fire, his own flashlight probing the dirt, looking for something, anything—a charge slip would be good, something with a credit card number—that might tell them something about Pilate’s group, and at the same time lecturing Letty. “Goddamnit, Letty, I know you’re grown up and all of that . . .”

Letty pointed to the clump of trees. “I’m going over there, where they were dancing.”

“You’re going back to town.”

“In a minute.”

He followed her and rolled on through the lecture as they got into the trees. Nothing there but a pile of brush, and some scuffed-up dirt. The strobe from the stage was flickering off the tree branches and aspen leaves and made it hard to focus on anything.

Lucas walked back until the brush got dense enough to drag at his jeans, then shone his light deeper into the trees, saw nothing interesting, and walked back toward Letty. To get to her, he had to circle the edge of the pile of tree limbs, and caught a flash of yellow-white: the stump end of one of the tree limbs was fresh, recently ripped off a tree. He stopped and shone the light into the pile, and saw more fresh breaks.

Letty asked, “What?”

“These branches. Looks like somebody just broke them off the trees.” He shone the flash around the clump of evergreens and spotted a couple of places where the limbs had been pulled off, leaving a white gash in the bark. They moved the smaller branches and Letty, one arm clutched to her injured side, tugged away a bigger one. As she dragged it out, she spotted a streak of deep pumpkin orange, in the light of the flash. Her hands went to her mouth and she said, “Oh, no. No.”

“What?”

“Skye bought some orange socks at REI. We joked about it.”

Lucas shone the light deeper into the pile, caught the flash of orange. “Okay. Get back. Get out of the trees.” Letty backed away and Lucas shouted at the deputies, who hurried over.

Lucas said, “We might have something here. We don’t want to move any more stuff than we have to, if it turns out to be a crime scene. But there’s an orange . . . something . . . under these tree limbs. Might be a sock. Somebody hold the light.”

They spotted the streak of orange again, and two of the deputies lit it up from different sides, and then the third deputy held Lucas’s belt, at the back, so he could lean far into the pile without touching anything, and he pushed aside some bark and pine needles and said, “It’s a foot. There’s a body under here.”

“We gotta get her out,” Letty cried. “It hasn’t been long. She could still be alive.”

“Don’t think so,” Lucas said. “Can’t take the chance. Let’s see if we can spot how she’s oriented under there.”

They pulled out a few more tree limbs, discovered a lower arm, and Letty, standing next to Lucas, with both hands now clutching her chest, saw the plastic exercise bracelet she’d given Skye in San Francisco.

“Oh my God, it’s her, it’s her, it’s her . . .”

She was babbling, and knew it, but couldn’t stop. One of the deputies put an arm over her chest and pulled her away. Lucas decided where Skye’s head must be—the body was hardly buried, mostly just covered with damp leaves, pine needles, and brush. When Lucas found Skye’s face, the first thing he saw was one dead blue eye, nearly popped from its socket, behind a crushed zygomatic bone.

•   •   •

WHEN HE SAW IT, and the graying flesh behind it, the anger finally ripped through him. It had been a year since he’d felt anything like it: since the fight in a madman’s basement. Letty’s actions had frightened him, but he’d always known, through the series of phone calls, that she was all right.

But Skye . . . a young woman who had no parent or anyone else to look after her, except his daughter; and this could have happened to Letty, if a fat man hadn’t been there.

If they’d dragged her off between the cars . . .

For a whole year, he’d been stuck in bureaucratic mode, running down little ratshit criminals. Even in the larger cases, like the Merion murder case, the trial would turn on sleazy money-conflicted witnesses. This was different. This was a kid . . .

He backed away: “She’s gone. She’s gone. Goddamnit. We need to get a crime scene crew out here . . . Ah, Jesus Christ . . . she’s gone.”

He wrapped an arm around Letty and one of the deputies went running to his car, to call more cops. In the background, the rap went on, and the strobe bounced its wicked multi-multicolored light off all the clown faces around them.

Letty started to cry into Lucas’s shoulder.