Naked Prey ld-14

by John Sandford

  "What's that smell?" Del asked, as they came into town.

  Zahn looked at him. "What smell?"

  "Paper plant, or chipboard plant," Lucas said.

  "Chipboard," Zahn said. "I don't smell it anymore."

  "Jesus. It smells like somebody's roasting a wet chicken, with the feathers on," Del said.

  "Ain't that bad," said Zahn.

  "Yes, it is," Del said.

  The downtown was a flat grid, mostly brick, yellow and red, with meterless curbs along blacktopped streets, three or four stoplights. Lucas could see both a Motel 6 and a Best Western, Conoco and BP stations on opposite corners with competing convenience stores, a Fran's Diner followed by a Fran's Bakery followed by a Fran's Rapid Oil Change, a McDonald's on one corner and a Pizza Hut halfway down the block, a sports bar called the Dugout.

  At the heart of the town was a scratchy piece of brown grass, patched with gray snow, with a two-story, fifties-ish red-brick courthouse in the middle of it. A newer red-brick Law Enforcement Center hung on to the back of the courthouse, with a fire station even farther back.

  Three cops and a couple of firefighters were outside in the cold, leaning against the walls of their buildings, smoking.

  Holme's Motors was across the street from the LEC, in a metal building with a single plate-glass window looking out at a dozen used American cars. Red, white, and blue plastic pennants hung down from a wire stretched above the lot; there was just enough wind to keep them nervously twitching. Zahn pulled into the lot, and through the window they could see a man poking numbers into a desk calculator. "That's Carl," Zahn said.

  Carl Holme was broad and bald-headed, with a cheerful smile. "Heard about the Negro getting hung," he said to Zahn, when they pushed through the door. "That's gonna dust things up, huh?"

  "I'd raise your prices before the TV people get here," Zahn said.

  "Really? You think?"

  Five minutes after they walked in, they walked back out into the cold. Lucas took the Olds and Del cranked up the Mustang and they trundled behind Zahn, a three-car caravan, sixty feet across the street to the Law Enforcement Center.

  The smoking cops said hello to Zahn, looked with flat curiosity at Lucas and Del. Zahn took them inside, was buzzed through a bulletproof-glass door to a reception area, where he introduced them to Zelda Holme, the car dealer's wife, a pretty, round-faced woman who was also secretary to the sheriff.

  "Sheriff Anderson called and said you wanted to talk to Letty. We've got her back in the lounge," Holme said, smiling and friendly. "Come right along."

  "I'm gonna take off," Zahn said to Lucas, lifting a hand. "You've got my number. Call if you need anything."

  "See you later," Lucas said. "Thanks." He and Del fell in behind Holme, and as they followed her along a cream-painted concrete-block hallway, Lucas mentioned that they'd just rented cars from her husband.

  "I hope you counted your fingers after you shook hands with him," she said cheerfully. "Carl can be a sharp one."

  The lounge was the last door on the right, a pale yellow concrete cubicle with Office Max waiting-room chairs, vending machines, and a slender girl in jeans who had her face in an Outdoor Life magazine.

  "Letty, dear?" Holme said. "You've got visitors."

  Letty West turned her head and took them in.

  She was blond, her hair pulled back tight in a short ponytail. She had warm blue eyes that Lucas thought, for an instant, he recognized from somewhere else, some other time; and an almost oval face, but with a squared jaw and freckles. She wore jeans and a blue sweatshirt and dirt-colored gym shoes that had once been white nylon. A Coke can sat on an end table at her right hand. She might have been a female Huckleberry Finn, except for a cast of sadness about her eyes-a Pieta-like sadness, strange for a girl so young. Lucas had seen it before, usually in a woman who'd lost a child.

  A good-looking kid, Lucas thought, except for the weathering. Her face and hands were rough, and if you hadn't been able to see her preteen figure, you might have thought she was a twenty-year-old farmer's daughter, with too much time hoeing beans.

  "These gentlemen are here to see you from St. Paul," Holme said. She was stooping over like older women did when they approached younger children, her voice too kindly.

  "Cops?" Letty asked.

  "State policemen from St. Paul," Holme said.

  "Cops," Letty said.

  Lucas looked at the kid and said, "Hi," and then to Holme, "We can take it from here."

  "Okay," she said. Holme looked once at Del, as though he might be carrying a flea, and went back out the door. Lucas had the impression that she might have stopped just outside, so he said to Del, "Did I see a water fountain in the hallway?"

  "Let me check," Del said, smiling. He stuck his head out, looked both ways, and then said, "Nope. Nothing there." More quietly, "She's going."

  The lounge had two candy machines and two soda machines-one Coke, one Pepsi-and smelled like floor wax and spilled coffee, with a hint of flatulence. Lucas asked the girl, "You want another Coke?"

  "This one wasn't mine," she said, indicating the Coke with her elbow.

  "Well, you want a first one then?"

  "If you're buying," she said.

  He had to smile-something about her dead-seriousness made him smile-and he got a Diet Coke for himself, tossed a can of sugared Coke to Del, and she said, "I'll take a Pepsi, if that's okay."

  "That's fine." He slipped a dollar into the machine and pushed the Pepsi button.

  "Where's your mother?" Del asked, as he popped the top on his Coke.

  "Probably down at the Duck Inn," Letty said. "We figured I could handle this on my own."

  "Yeah?" Del's eyebrows went up.

  "She gets a little out of control sometimes," Letty said.

  Lucas asked, "She's still your mother. We could call her."

  "Not much point," Letty said. "She's probably pretty drunk by now. She's been at it since ten o'clock."

  "She drinks a little, huh?" Del asked. Del had dropped onto a couch next to the door.

  Letty took a delicate sip of her Pepsi, and then said, "No, she drinks a lot. Almost all the time."

  "Where's your father?"

  She shrugged. "Who knows? Last anybody heard, he was in Phoenix. That was when I was a little kid."

  "Ah," Lucas said. "That's tough… Listen, did you talk to some sheriff's deputies this morning? Make a statement?"

  "Yeah."

  "So what'd you tell them?"

  Her face went dark and her blue eyes skittered away from his. "About the bodies."

  "Let's start right from the beginning. Last night you were in your house… "

  The night before, Letty said, she had been in bed on the second floor of the house, just across the drainage ditch from West Ditch Road. Although the windows on the north and west sides of the house had been boarded up, and the rooms closed to cut heating bills, she had her own room on the east side of the house, and still had a window.

  She was in bed, asleep, when a vehicle went past the house on West Ditch Road. That never happened in the winter. The road was used by a local farmer as back access to a couple of fields, but was used mostly for ditch maintenance, and the strangeness of a passing vehicle was enough to wake her up.

  "When I heard the car, I was afraid it was Mom," she said. "She was out last night and it was windy and there was a little snow and if she missed the driveway… sometimes… I don't know. If she was drinking and she tried to turn around on that ditch road, she could roll the car into the ditch or something. So I got up and looked out the window and was watching the car and it stopped up the road a way, and I thought it was starting to turn around, and I was really worried, but then I heard my mom coughing downstairs and I went and called her. She came to the bottom of the stairs and I told her somebody just went by on the ditch road and they might be lost. She came up and looked out the window and we watched it, and it stayed there for a while, and then it drove out."

  "This w
as about midnight?"

  "Two minutes after. When I woke up I looked at my clock, and it said twelve-zero-two."

  "You didn't see the people?" Lucas asked.

  "I didn't even see the truck, except for the lights. The wind was blowing and all I could see was snow and the lights."

  "How long did you watch the lights?" Del asked.

  "Quite a while. I don't know, exactly. I didn't look at the clock before I went to bed."

  "You didn't see it again, after it drove out?"

  "Nope. Never saw it again."

  In the morning, she told them, she'd gotten up to run her trap line. She ran thirty traps up the ditch, and in the surrounding marshes, for muskrat. She'd get up at five in the morning, collect the day's catch of 'rats, reset the traps, dump the 'rats into a garbage bag, and haul them back to the house by seven. Since it didn't get light until seven-thirty or so, she'd do it all by the light of a rechargeable flash.

  This morning, after she'd run the traps, she'd climbed the bank onto the ditch road to walk back to her house. She hadn't been all that curious about the car from the night before, until she saw the tracks in the snow, and the lines in the snow where somebody had dragged something back into the trees.

  "What'd you think they were?" Lucas asked.

  "What I thought of was bodies," Letty said, holding his eyes. "That's the first thing I thought of. It scared me in the dark-but when people throw their garbage away out here, they don't haul it down the ditch road. They just stop on the side of the highway and heave it into the ditch. They don't hide it. So I couldn't think of anything else but… bodies."

  "So then… "

  "Well, I went back there, and I didn't see them at first, because it was still dark." Her eyes were wide now, fixed on Lucas, as she remembered and relived it. "I came to this place where there was a big square of messed-up snow with nothing in it. I just, I don't know, I guess I saw a dark thing, hanging, and I lifted up the light, and there they were. The black guy's eyes were open. Scared me really bad. I ran back out to the road and got my 'rats and ran all the way back to the house and woke up my mom. She didn't believe me at first, but then she did, and we called the cops."

  "That was it?"

  "Yup." She nodded and took a hit of the Pepsi.

  "Did your mom go down to the trees to look?"

  "No. She was afraid to. She doesn't like dead things. She doesn't even like to drop off my 'rats for me, and they're inside a bag and everything."

  "What do you, uh, do with the 'rats?" Del asked.

  "Sell them to Joan Wickery. She's the fur-buyer in these parts," Letty said.

  "How much do you get?" Lucas asked. He'd never met a trapper.

  "Depends on what it is," Letty said. "She gives me $1.75 for average 'rats, and six dollars for 'coon. Problem with 'coon is, they're smart and they catch on when you're trapping them. I have to drive over to the dump to get them. So I only go over about two days a week, get maybe two or three at the most. I can get twenty 'rats out of the ditch, and the marsh across the road, and be done before school."

  "You don't have to skin them out or… whatever?" Lucas asked.

  "Nope. Joan's boys do all of that. I just bring in the carcasses."

  Del was fascinated. "What do they do with all the muskrat bodies?"

  "Grind them up. Turn them into feed. I don't get paid for that, though. I only get paid for the fur. Joan says the carcasses pay her to keep the doors open, and the fur's her profit."

  Del asked, "Feed for what?"

  "Mink. Joan's got a mink farm."

  They sat and looked at her for a minute, then Lucas asked, "Anything else you can tell us?"

  "I hope I don't die by getting hung," she said. They all thought about that for a moment, then she added, "They twisted. Hanging there. They twisted." She made a twisting motion with her fingers.

  They thought about that some more, Lucas groping for something to say that might comfort her, but he couldn't think of anything. After a moment, he asked, "Listen, why'd you think it was your mom's car going down the road?" Lucas asked. "Anything about it?"

  She thought for a second, then nodded. "Yeah. It was a Jeep. I think it was. A Jeep Cherokee's got this big square red taillight… " She drew a big square taillight in the air. "And then a big square yellow light under that, that's your turn signal. Then there's a little white light which is the backup light, inside the yellow light. That's what I saw on the road. Those red taillights like my mom's, and then, when he was backing around down there, when I was afraid she'd go in the ditch, it had those white lights inside the big square yellow light-the yellow lights didn't come on, but you could see them because of the white light inside them."

  "Jeep Cherokee," Lucas said.

  "Yup. I didn't think of it this morning, when I was talking to the other cops."

  They talked for a few more minutes, and Lucas finally smiled at her and said, "Okay. I'm out of questions."

  "I got one," Del said. "I'm a city guy. How do you trap muskrats?"

  She told them quickly, about the difference between feeding platforms and houses. "The houses look like little tepees made out of sticks and cattails and stuff. You see them all over on marshes. Little piles. I went down to the Cities once with my mom and I saw a place by the airport that had more houses and feeders than I ever saw in my life."

  "Really." Del was charmed. "By the airport?"

  "Yup. Anyway, after freeze-up, you can open the houses and some of the big feeders with a machete or a hay knife and slip a trap right inside; there's a whole bunch of rooms in a big house. So you put the trap inside, and there's a chain off the trap, and you pin that down outside the house. Then you patch the hole in the house, so it's dark in there, and they'll walk right into the trap. Then, there's a hole in the bottom of the house that leads under the ice-that's how they get around after freeze-up-and when the trap snaps, they jump through the hole to try to get away, and they drown. I use mostly Number 1 jump traps."

  "So, what do you do, pull on the trap to see if there's a body…?"

  She shook her head, groped in her pocket, found a pencil stub, and got a napkin. "The chain comes out of the house like this… " She drew a chain with a bigger circular link at the end. "Then you put your pin through this circle, so that the 'rat can't pull it free. But you keep the pin in the middle of the circle, when you set it, so if something hits the trap inside, it'll pull the circle against the pin. That way, you can walk up to a house and see right away if anything has hit the trap."

  "Huh."

  "You can usually get four or five of them out of a house. You always got to leave some breeders."

  "How much do you make during a winter?" Lucas asked.

  She grinned at him and shook her head. "That's not polite."

  "You're a kid," he said.

  "Tell that to the feds when they want their taxes."

  "Think you could give me a ride home?" Letty asked. She crushed the empty Pepsi can in her hands, and tossed it into a waste basket.

  "What about your mom?" Lucas asked.

  "She can always get a ride from one of her friends," Letty said. "I don't want to hang around all day."

  Lucas nodded. "Okay. But let's go check with Mrs. Holme, see if they had anything else set up."

  "I'd rather ride with you," Letty said. "I don't like the deputies. They give me a hard time."

  "You get in trouble?"

  "Mostly about driving my mom's car. But I got no other way to get around, and it's too far to walk to town."

  "How old are you?" Del asked.

  "Twelve," she said.

  "That's a little young to be driving, don't you think?"

  "Might be for some people," she said. Then, "If you give me a ride, I could show you around Broderick. I know every house in the place."

  "Sounds like a deal," Lucas said.

  Holme was happy enough to let Lucas take Letty home. Outside, in the parking lot, they decided that Del would hit the local motels, and ask
about strangers driving Jeeps. Lucas would take a look at the victims' house in Broderick. Later on, they'd hook up for an afternoon snack, and then go out to the casino and talk with Warr's coworkers.

  Letty listened to them talk, then told Del, "There's four motels. You want to know where they're at?"

  Del said yes, and Letty started to explain the layout of the town, drawing with a piece of gravel on the blacktop, her hands rough, red, but apparently impervious to the cold. Halfway through the explanation, Lucas cut her off, and they walked over to the courthouse, found the county clerk, and bought maps of both the town and the county. Letty read the maps well enough and, with the clerk, pinpointed the motels.

  Outside again, Del took off in the Mustang, and Lucas and Letty headed back toward Broderick. As they crossed the river, Lucas noticed a dense spread of ice-fishing shacks at a bend to the north. A few were simply flat-topped boxes with doors, while others were more elaborate, with pitched roofs and American flags on door poles. Then the river was behind them and they followed the railroad tracks past the pastel Cape Cods and the dwindling businesses and quickly were back on the prairie.

  "You ever been out here before?" Letty asked after a while.

  "Not exactly here," Lucas said. "Been over to Oxford."

  "You got a gun with you?"

  "Yes."

  "You ever shoot anybody?"

  "Maybe," Lucas said.

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "It means you should mind your own business," Lucas said.

  He tried not to be mean about it, but Letty stayed on top of him. "Don't want to talk about it?" Letty asked.

  He looked at her. "Why don't we change the subject?"

  She shrugged. "Okay, if you don't want to talk about it."