Naked Prey ld-14

by John Sandford

  After a while, "You got any kids?"

  "Two," Lucas said. "A daughter, and my wife just had a baby boy."

  "What's your wife do?"

  "She's a doctor."

  "I'd like to be a doctor," Letty said, looking out at the countryside. The countryside reminded Lucas of a modern painting he'd once seen at the Walker Art Center as a young cop, out on a sexual assault call. The painting had been done in two colors-a narrow band of black on the bottom, a wider band of gray above it. He still remembered the name: Whistler in the Dark: Composition in White and Gray. If the artist had known about it, he could have called it Winter Landscape, Broderick, Minnesota.

  "Or maybe run a beauty salon," Letty was saying. "We've got three beauty salons in Armstrong, two good ones and one bad one."

  "Mmm," Lucas said.

  "If I was a cop, I'd put secret agents in every beauty shop in town. Teach them to be hairdressers, but, y'know, they'd all have tape recorders and cameras hidden away. Like spies."

  "Take a lot of cops," Lucas said.

  "Yeah, but you'd know everything. I go to Harriet's Mane Line with my mom, and the salon ladies know everything that's going on. Everything. That'd be pretty good for a cop."

  Lucas looked at her again, more carefully. "You're right. That's absolutely right. Maybe you'll grow up to be a cop."

  "I could do that," she said comfortably. "Wouldn't mind carrying a gun. If I'd had a real gun this morning, I wouldn't have been scared at all. All I had was that crappy.22."

  The thing that made traveling across the land so strange, Lucas realized, was that you did nothing: you simply sat in the car and time passed. Driving almost anywhere else, the road moved: you went up and down hills and around curves and past houses, speed zones came and went, cars and trucks went by, and something new was always popping up. Out here, the road was dead straight, with hardly anything on it, or at the sides. Rather than whipping around a curve over the crest of a hill, and finding a town tucked away, surprising you, here the towns came up as a slowly growing lump on the horizon; you could see them, it seemed, for hours before you arrived.

  Though Broderick arrived quickly enough: Lucas slowed as they came into town. "So what's where?"

  "Okay. So there's the church," she said, pointing across the highway. "It used to be run by Don Sanders. He's kinda crazy and I stay away from him. For the last, I don't know, maybe two or three years, there are a bunch of women living there. People call them the nuns."

  "Are they nuns?"

  "A couple of them are. They wear old-fashioned dresses."

  "Okay. You know them?"

  "I talk to them in the diner, when I see them, but my mom says I should stay away from them because they might be lesbians. They claim that they're church people, and say that they take food and clothes to poor people."

  "Do they?"

  She nodded: "I guess. I got some jeans from them once. Chics. I know a couple of them, the nuns, and one of them, Ruth Lewis… I really like her. She doesn't take any shit from anyone. She says I'm as good as anybody and I should remember that."

  "How about the Sanders guy? Why do you say he's crazy?"

  "I just don't like the way he looks at me. I get a bad feeling."

  "Like what? Like he might hurt you?"

  "Like he might try to make me do something with him," she said.

  "Okay." He didn't comment; he simply filed it until he knew her better. Young girls, in his experience, were sometimes psychic in their ability to pick out predators. At other times, they were capable of straight-faced accusations against the absolutely innocent. "He's been replaced by lesbians?"

  "That's just my mom," Letty said. "I know that Ruth's sister is going out with a guy in town. The word is, she's no lesbian."

  Lucas said, "Huh," and took another look at her, and thought she might have blushed. She hurried on, pointing over the dashboard. "Those two big yellow buildings belong to Gene Calb, he fixes up cars and trucks. He's a real good guy. If I'm out with my traps, he'll let me come in and warm up. I can't go into the bar or the cafe because sometimes I'm a little stinky, but he doesn't care. I think Mom had a crush on him once, but he's married. I heard that sometimes the lesbians drive for him, like when he needs a car delivered somewhere. I could do that, if I had a license."

  "And you probably ought to wait for the license," Lucas said.

  "Yeah-yeah." She pointed: "That's the bar, the guy who runs it is named Pete. Mom used to go there when Randy Pearce ran it, but she says she doesn't feel welcome anymore. She says it's a dive now, a bunch of paint sniffers from the body shop. She says they're all jailbirds."

  "Are they?"

  She shrugged. "Some of them been in jail, I guess, but they seem like pretty good guys."

  On the other side of the highway: "The diner is run by Sandra Wolf, she's pretty nice, and John McGuire has the gas station, he's okay. And down there, right across from the barn… " She pointed down a side street, where a low rambling house sat across a graveled street from a small white barn. "… I don't know what those guys do, but if I was a cop, I'd take a close look at them."

  "Yeah? Why?"

  "I was walking through there, taking a shortcut back from the lake, and the guy came out of the house and yelled at me to get off his property. I was only about ten feet on it. And he's got dogs, big black-and-brown ones. He had these little paper flags around his property for a while. They said, 'Dog Training, Invisible Fence,' but I think if he sicced one of those dogs on you, that invisible fence wouldn't do any good. They'd go through it like it was, you know, invisible. "

  "But all he did was yell at you."

  "I thought it was pretty suspicious. I mean, he's got ten acres there, and I was about three steps on it."

  "What's the guy do for a living?"

  "Works at Calb's. Sometimes he's got a woman in there. I've seen a couple of them, different ones. He sure does keep you off his property."

  They were coming to the north end of town, and the house where Jane Warr and Deon Cash had lived. Two sheriff's cars were parked outside now, along with one of the BCA cars from Bemidji.

  "If you want to stop, I can wait," Letty said. "You might want to ask me some more questions after you look inside."

  He was being steered, Lucas thought-she'd shown signs of the female steering gene during the interview at the LEC, and even more on the way to Broderick. On the other hand, she was right. He pulled in and parked. A sheriff's deputy stepped off the porch and walked toward them. Lucas got out, said, "I'm Davenport, with the BCA."

  The deputy nodded. "Okay. One of your guys is inside."

  Lucas stuck his head back inside the car and said "Wait," shut the door, and followed the deputy up to the porch.

  "Where'd you get the kid?" the deputy asked, bending down a bit to get a look at Letty. She lifted a hand to him.

  "She was downtown making a statement. You know her?"

  "Sure. I know everybody around here. She's a pretty interesting kid. Don't let no grass grow under her feet, that's for sure. Gonna wind up rich."

  "Got a nice line of bullshit," Lucas said.

  "First thing you notice," the deputy said. He pushed the door open and Lucas stepped into the house, into an entry with a coat closet to one side. He continued into a living room, where one of the BCA guys he'd been introduced to that morning was standing at the bottom of a double-wide staircase, talking on a cell phone. He saw Lucas and held up a finger. Lucas nodded and looked around.

  The place smelled of macaroni, cheese, marijuana, and blood, not a new smell in the few hundred houses he'd been through on homicide cases. To his right, in the corner, was a wide-screen Panasonic television, and on a table next to it, a big Sony. A game console was plugged into the Sony, while the Panasonic had boxes for a DVD and satellite dish. A love seat and a leather chair faced the TVs.

  Straight ahead, behind the BCA guy, on the other side of the staircase landing, a hallway led to the kitchen. Lucas could see a breadmaker sitti
ng on a counter next to a microwave.

  To the right, an archway led into another room, with a dining table in the center of it. The table was stacked with boxes, most of them from small electric appliances. Fifty or sixty magazines, mostly on sex, European cars, or travel, were in heaps along one wall. A Bose Wave Radio sat upside down under the table, as though it had fallen off; it was still plugged into a wall socket. A set of earphones, one earmuff broken off, lay on the other side of the table, along with a generic-brand bottle of ibuprofen. A box of Wheat Thins sat on top of the litter of boxes on the table.

  The generally upset state didn't have the look of deliberation, of a search-it simply looked like bad housekeeping.

  "Hey… " The BCA guy came up behind him. "Look at this." He led the way to the kitchen. On the way he said, "I'm Joe Barin, by the way, we were introduced… "

  "This morning," Lucas said.

  "Here," Barin said. "Be careful where you put your feet. We've got some blood spatter."

  He was pointing into a wastebasket on the floor by the kitchen door. When Lucas looked inside, he saw two tiny Ziploc-type bags, the kind used by hardware stores to hold small collections of screws, washers, cotter pins, and the like, and by dope dealers to parcel out measured amounts of cocaine, heroin, and crystal methadrine. There were no cotter pins in sight.

  "You pull one out?"

  "Not yet. You can see there's some residue. I wouldn't stake my child's life on it, but it's coke."

  "They were dealing?"

  "We looked around, can't find any more baggies. So maybe just using. Or maybe we'll find more stuff later… and then, we've got these clothes." He pointed to another corner, at a heap of clothing. "It's all cut to shreds. This is where the killer cut the clothes off them."

  "So he comes in with a gun, cuffs them up, tapes them up, then cuts the clothes off them."

  "Beats the shit out of the guy, of Cash."

  "Beats the shit out of Cash, and then drags them both out the door, and throws them into his truck, and takes them down the road, and hangs them."

  "Yeah."

  "Tough guy."

  "Fruitcake."

  Lucas looked around the kitchen for a few more seconds: nothing for him here, that he could see. The crew might get something. "What's upstairs?"

  "Three bedrooms and two bathrooms," Barin said. "One of the bedrooms doesn't look too used. One of the other ones has a double bed, and there's some clothes hanging in a closet, a man's clothes, and some stuff in the bathroom, but it doesn't look like it's been used lately. The clothes are not Cash's, they're for a bigger guy. The third bedroom, the big one, was their regular bedroom. Clothes for both Warr and Cash. Lots of clothes. Lots of cashmere."

  "Let's get the crime scene crew over quick as we can," Lucas said. "Tear this place apart. If they were dealing, that would explain a lot. Could be punishment killings."

  "Okay." Barin hesitated. "I don't exactly understand the chain-of-command here… "

  "Where's Dickerson?"

  "Still out at the scene, I guess."

  "He's in charge on your side, I'm running my own thing. What I just suggested was… a suggestion." Lucas grinned at him. "Of course, I do talk to the commissioner five or six times a day."

  Barin shrugged. "I'm not big on bureaucracy. Tearing the place up is the right thing to do."

  "The guy with me, Del, knows every drug hideout invented by modern man. I'll bring him by later on."

  "Good enough."

  The deputy came to the door. "This young lady… " Lucas and Barin turned. Letty was standing behind the deputy, looking around with interest. "… says she has to use the bathroom."

  "Uh… not here. I'll run you home," Lucas said. To Barin: "So you know what you're doing. I'll get Del up here."

  "Okay." Barin was looking curiously at Letty. "Is this the young lady who found… " He tipped his head to the north.

  "Yeah," Lucas said.

  Barin said, "For a second, I thought she might be your daughter. She's got exactly your eyes."

  "I can walk back to the cafe," Letty said to Lucas. "It's only two blocks."

  "I'll take you," Lucas said. "C'mon."

  On the way out, Letty pointed at the wide-screen Panasonic television in the corner. "That used to be in the window at Lute's. You know how much that cost?"

  "Thousand, fifteen-hundred?"

  Letty snorted. "It was on sale for nine-thousand, nine-ninety-nine. Ten thousand bucks. High-definition TV. Sat there for six weeks, and then one day, it was outa there. Didn't know it came here, though."

  Lucas looked at Barin, raised his eyebrows. Barin nodded-he'd check. A ten-thousand-dollar television would give weight to the drug-dealing proposition.

  "So let's go," Lucas said to Letty.

  But outside, Letty said, "I don't really have to pee. I just wanted to get a look around."

  "Well, Jesus Christ," Lucas said, irritated.

  "I'm trying to help. You need all you can get," she said. Then, "Why couldn't I pee here?"

  "They have to process the whole place. Crime scene process. Like the shows on television. Bathrooms are good places to process, because they have good surfaces for fingerprints and so on. You can sometimes get DNA out of them."

  "Okay." She nodded. "Good reason."

  "Let's get you home," Lucas said.

  6

  Letty's house was visible from Cash's: a gray spot on the bowl-rim of the horizon.

  "What the heck are they doing?" Letty asked, peering out the passenger window, as they drove out of town.

  "What?" Lucas ducked his head to look through her window. Out over one of the farm fields, directly south of the line of cop cars at the crime scene, two helicopters were hovering thirty feet above the ground, kicking up a small storm of ice crystals and dirt as they moved slowly sideways, in line, toward the ditch and the police cars.

  "Television," Lucas said. He looked at his watch: not yet two o'clock. The newsies had been quick. "Taking pictures." He glanced over at her. "You really don't have to use the bathroom?"

  "Not really."

  "Okay. You better stick with me for a while."

  A Sheriff's car was parked across the side road, and Lucas held his ID out the window as he turned in. The deputy stopped to look through the windshield-it was one of the guys who Lucas had released from the hanging site-and waved them through. They continued down the track toward the cop cars.

  There were fewer cars now, but as they pulled up, they saw three men carrying a black body bag through the trees.

  "Are those the dead people?" Letty asked, peering out over the dashboard.

  "One of them," Lucas said. He popped the door and was about to get out of the car when his cell phone rang. He swiveled back into the car and punched the phone: "Yeah?"

  "Lucas. Neil Mitford." The governor's aide. There was electronic noise in his voice. Again, Lucas remembered, they were on the edge of nowhere. "Anything yet?"

  "One of the victims, the black guy, was in jail down in Missouri until he moved up here. That was probably a year and a half ago. The guys from Bemidji are running that down. And at the house where they lived, there're a couple of baggies in the wastebasket, small ones like the kind used for street drugs, that show some white residue-probably cocaine."

  "Excellent," Mitford said. "Is it too early to start spinning out a dope story?"

  "Don't let the governor do it. You want to be able to deny it if you have to," Lucas said. "But I think it'll hold up. They're just bringing the bodies out of the woods now."

  "Any film?"

  Lucas told him about the helicopters: "I don't know what they could see from out there. They'll be able to get pictures of the bodies coming out in the body bags."

  "But nothing of the trees?"

  "I don't know. I'll ask and get back to you."

  "We're pretty anxious," Mitford said.

  "I'll get back," Lucas said. He rang off and turned to Letty: "This time, you stay in the car."

&
nbsp; "It's a free country," she said.

  "You step out on the crime scene, which this is, and I'll put you in a sheriff's car and send you back to Armstrong to sit in the sheriff's office and think about it for a few more hours," he said.

  "Not fair," she said.

  "So take a couple aspirins and lie down," Lucas said.

  As he started climbing out again, Letty said, "Ex-con with bags of cocaine, huh? That's a pretty picture."

  "Stay,"Lucas said.

  As he got out of the car, Lucas spotted Ray Zahn leaning on the fender of his patrol car at the far end of the line. Zahn was watching the body bag being loaded into a Suburban. Lucas walked toward him. Zahn turned his head, nodded, and called, "Bringing them out."

  "ME still in there?"

  "Yeah, he helped take them down. He had them cut the rope so they could keep it around their necks to make sure that this rope was what killed them."

  "You think any of the TV helicopters got pictures?" Lucas asked as he turned into the trees. Zahn trailed behind.

  Zahn said, "Yeah. I don't know how much they could see, but if you go over there diagonally, look out over toward the field, there was an open line into the hanging tree. You don't see it right away because of the brush, but if you're up fifteen or twenty feet, looking down at an angle… that's exactly where the choppers were. They kept moving in and out of that hole."

  "Shit."

  "Maybe couldn't see too much."

  "Anything was too much." They could see the hanging tree and a group of men around it. "The ME's the guy in the black coat?"

  "Yeah. Henry Ford."

  "Really? Henry Ford?"

  "Yeah. He's out of Thief River. Good guy. Doesn't know shit about cars."

  Anderson, the Sheriff, Dickerson, the BCA supervisor, and a few other men were huddled to the left of the second black bag, cigarette smoke streaming away from them.

  "Cold," Zahn mumbled from behind him. "Radio says it's two below."

  "I heard," Lucas said. "But it's gonna warm up tonight. Then maybe snow."

  "We could use it," Zahn said.