“Uh-oh,” Lucas said. “You’re gonna have to stop at the drugstore.”

“I always thought stool softener was for old people,” she said. “Maybe you could get it for me.”

“Screw that,” Lucas said. “I’m not doing it.”

A few minutes later, she said, “The nose . . . it really hurts. It feels like somebody stuck a blowtorch up there.”

Neither one of them felt like eating more Cheerios, left over from Lucas’s first night at the cabin, so they drove back to the Juggalo Gathering site, which had sprung a hundred tents, and more people sleeping in cars, and, on one side, a big no-go zone defined by yellow crime scene tape and a bunch of sheriff’s patrol cars and a Wisconsin crime scene truck. A group of Juggalos was disassembling the stage, and when Lucas asked, a deputy said they were going to move the stage to the other end of the field, where the bonfire had been.

The crime scene crew had exposed Skye’s body; her head was misshapen, like a partly deflated soccer ball. The leader of the crime scene crew said he’d heard that Lucas thought she’d been kicked to death, and he said, “I think you’re probably right. Doesn’t look like clubs, no bark or anything in her face or her arms. Skull was crushed, with impact marks everywhere. Dollars to donuts, they kicked her to death.”

“DNA?”

“We’re sampling everything that looks possible.”

The deputies said that there’d been no convoys spotted overnight, but they did have tag numbers for a half dozen vehicles from California, which had been run when the cars were stopped. None of the people stopped were wearing Juggalo makeup. Nothing had come back that would allow the Wisconsin cops to hold the cars.

The deputy said: “What are we gonna do? We got nothing to go on, but that one tag from Minnesota, and we never did spot him.”

Lucas said, “Gimme what you got. All the California tags you stopped.”

•   •   •

BOTH LUCAS AND LETTY had to go into Hayward to make formal statements for the sheriff’s department, so they continued into town.

The guy who would take their statements wasn’t in yet, and wasn’t expected for half an hour, so they walked over to Main Street, looking for breakfast. The Angler’s Bar and Grill, where Lucas usually ate, wasn’t open, so they settled for coffee and scones from a coffee shop around the block. Then they weren’t far from the Walgreens, so they walked across the highway, and Lucas lingered by the book rack as Letty was checking out with the stool softener.

Outside, Lucas asked, “You got it?”

“Yeah. I told the checkout lady that it was for you, but you were embarrassed to ask for it.”

Made him laugh.

•   •   •

AS THEY WALKED BACK toward the sheriff’s office, they talked about the murder. Letty told Lucas, “Skye was going to stop at three Juggalo Gatherings. One here, one in the UP, and one down by Detroit somewhere. She thought Pilate might be going to them, too. All the people I saw with Pilate were wearing Juggalo gear, like they were really into it.”

“Where is it at? And when? The next meeting?”

“Let me look at my phone . . .”

A half block farther along, she said, “It’s in Sault Ste. Marie. The American one. Actually, on a farm south of the town. It’s next weekend, and the Detroit one is two weeks from now.”

“Sault Ste. Marie is a hell of a long way from here,” Lucas said. “I drove it once, years ago, on my way to New York. If I remember, it’s a six- or seven-hour drive from here. Eight hours or more from the Cities.”

“You think you might go?”

Lucas scratched his cheek, where a mosquito had bitten the night before, then said, “I don’t know. Maybe, if these guys haven’t turned up by then. The fastest way to get out of this area would be to go south. Once you get down to I-94 you could head down to Chicago or start back toward California. They’d have a whole choice of routes. If they drove all night after killing Skye, switching off drivers, they could be . . . through Omaha, through Kansas City, down to Chicago. Unknown California license tags would be meaningless in the big cities. Tomorrow morning, they could be damn near to Phoenix, or Vegas, or out to New York. We’ll put out watches, but our best chance of finding them would be when they go back to L.A. The California cops are really hot for Pilate.”

“So they’re gone. As far as we’re concerned,” Letty said.

“They might be. But if they went south, they’d be in Wisconsin for a long time, where everybody was looking for them and not finding them. So they might have headed for the nearest state lines—back to Minnesota, or east to Michigan. Depends on what this Pilate guy wants to do, I guess. If he’s really a Juggalo freak, he could show up in Sault Ste. Marie next week, and then Detroit. I’ll tell you something—you could hide a jumbo jet in the UP so nobody could find it. There’s not a lot up there. If I were them, that’s where I would have gone.”

“What are we gonna do?” Letty asked.

“What are we gonna do? I’ve got the Merion case hanging over my head, and a bunch of other stuff.”

“You can’t just drop this . . .”

“I won’t. I might ditch you at the cabin, to wait for your mom. If I leave right now, I could get over to Baudette, where those Minnesota plates came from, by early afternoon. See what I can see. Make it down to the Cities by late tonight. Then, if nothing turns up, I might zip over to Sault Ste. Marie and sniff around. Between you and me . . . if this thing is outside Sault Ste. Marie, that means the city cops won’t be covering it, and the county cops are gonna be way overloaded.”

“But I—”

“. . . Will not be going to Sault Ste. Marie. I’ve had busted ribs and you’re not going to want to walk around a lot. Or even hit potholes, as you’ll find out this afternoon when your mom takes you home. She’s never met one that she didn’t hit. So basically, you’ll be hanging out with your yuppie friends, trying to decide what kind of obscenely expensive hipster hi-tops you’ll wear back to your obscenely expensive college in the fall.”

“You know I’m not like that,” Letty said.

“You’re like that a little bit,” Lucas said. “Like me, though not as much.”

“Thank Jesus. I really don’t know where you get the time to shop.”

“It’s more important to look good, than to feel good,” Lucas said.

“What?”

“Never mind. Before your time,” Lucas said.

•   •   •

THE STATEMENTS TOOK an hour, starting with Letty’s meeting with Skye and Henry in San Francisco, through the discovery of Skye’s body. Lucas filled in bits about the discovery of Henry’s body in South Dakota, the relationship to the probable L.A. murder of Kitty Place, about the shooting of Bony.

As they were finishing, a deputy came in and said, “They found an ID on that girl. Her name wasn’t Skye, it was Shirley Bellows. She was from Indiana, had a couple of arrests for shoplifting and minor possession. We’re trying to get in touch with her folks now, but we’re having trouble locating them.”

Letty and Lucas looked at each other and Letty teared up, didn’t try to hide it, and Lucas said to the deputy, “Thanks for letting us know.”

When they got out of the sheriff’s office, they walked down the street to the Angler’s Bar and Grill and got cheeseburgers for breakfast, then Letty wanted to stop at the bookstore on the corner and get newspapers, to see if there’d been any coverage of the murder the night before.

There had not been: “Too late,” Lucas said. “We’ll see it tomorrow.”

Letty went to get a magazine for the trip home, and Lucas took a minute to browse the hunting and fishing books. Somebody had left a book, facing out, about cadaver dogs. He read a few pages of it, until Letty was ready to go.

Outside, she asked, “Are you going to Baudette?”

“Yeah, but I won’t get there until late in the day—four o’clock, if I leave the cabin as soon as I get you back there.”