Naked Prey ld-14

by John Sandford

  "Check the companies for new activity."

  "Under way," Dickerson said.

  "We got another thing," Del said. "Maybe."

  "What?"

  "I want you to look at it," Del said. "Then you tell me."

  Lucas followed him, Dickerson trailing, down through the house to the basement. On the way down, he told Dickerson about Washington Fowler. Dickerson was unmoved.

  "You're pretty calm about it," Lucas said. "The guy goes around starting fires."

  Dickerson smiled. "That's your problem, general, not mine. You're the guy who's supposed to fix shit."

  The basement was unfinished concrete block and exposed joists, but with a new-looking furnace, a new hot-water heater, and new wiring and fluorescent lights. In one corner, a new bathroom had been built in a beige-painted cubicle, with a standard toilet and a sink, and a fiberglass shower booth with sliding glass doors.

  Del said, "Well?"

  "Well, they just remodeled it," Lucas said. He looked around, saw nothing of obvious interest. Del had to be thinking about the bathroom, and Lucas went that way. The bathroom was bare, and smelled of disinfectant. Large, lots of room to move around. Lucas swung the entrance door, then knocked on it. Looked like wood, sounded like a metal fire door. Knocked on the walls: not drywall, as he'd expected, but painted plywood. And heavy, probably three-quarter inch. Yale keyhole lock with a bolt, lockable from the outside. No keyhole on the inside…

  He stepped back and said to Del and Dickerson, "It's a goddamn cell."

  Del turned to Dickerson. "You heard it here first."

  Twenty minutes later, Lucas, Del, and Dickerson walked through the gathering collection of cop cars in the yard. Letty was sitting on the hood of the car again, while her mother waited inside. When she saw them coming, she climbed out, and Lucas introduced Dickerson. "Hank will help you with the TV commentary. And he'll get you home."

  "Cops say you found a bundle of money in there," Letty said to Del. "That right?"

  "Just a rumor," Del said.

  Dickerson, looking from Lucas to Del, asked, "What're you guys doing next?"

  "Gonna talk to St. Paul, and maybe wander around some more," Lucas said. He looked back at the house. "This thing is getting interesting."

  7

  Free of Letty and her mother, Lucas and Del caucused at the cars. "Moose Bay?" Del asked.

  "That's a big topic," Lucas said. "Why don't we talk to this Calb guy?"

  They both looked across the highway at the yellow metal buildings with the trucks parked out front, and Del nodded.

  Calb had two buildings, an auto-body and tow building, and a truck-rehab building, connected by an unheated shed-like walkway. They went into the auto-body building, which consisted of a small office and a series of repair bays at the back; a woman in the office directed them through the walkway to the truck-rehab wing. The truck area was bigger and more open, forty feet long and thirty wide, with a thirty-foot ceiling; it smelled of diesel and welding fumes. A row of red toolboxes sat at the back, and an electric heater was mounted high on one wall and glowed down over a burgundy Peterbilt. Three men were clustered around the open door of the truck, peering inside, and one of them asked, "What the fuck were they carrying in there? You think there was some acid dripping in there?"

  "I don't know… " Then one of the men saw Lucas and Del, and nudged the heavyset man who was deepest into the truck. He backed up, saw them, stood upright, and asked, "Can we help you fellas?"

  "We're with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension," Lucas said. Del held up an ID case. "We need to talk to Gene Calb."

  "That's me… I'll be with you in just a second." He turned to one of the other men. "I don't know, Larry. I'd go after it with a grinder, and if you don't get good metal… we'll cut another piece off a wreck and weld 'er in. There's a hulk down in Worthington, out of a fire, oughta work."

  "Looks like it's rotten all the way to the bottom. I could push a nail through it," said an emaciated man in oil-stained Mr. Goodwrench coveralls.

  "Well, cut through it and find out."

  Calb shook his head as he turned to Lucas and Del. "The whole floor of the passenger side is eaten away. Not the driver's side, just the passenger side. It's not rust, exactly, but it's rotten. Like they spilled acid on it or something and then let it soak for a few years."

  One of the other men said, "Cat pee? Cat pee'll rot holes in hardwood floors."

  "Well, Jesus, how could he stand the smell?" Calb shook his head once more. "If I were you, Larry, I'd keep my hands out of it."

  "You sure as shit can count on that," said the man called Larry.

  To Lucas and Del, Calb said, "C'mon this way, fellas. We'll go back to my office. You want to know about Deon? I already talked to some of you guys. With the BCA, right?"

  "We're doing a little back-checking," Lucas said. "How well did you know Mr. Cash?"

  They pushed through a door into another small office and Calb gestured at a couple of guest chairs, then settled behind his desk as he answered. A caution flag signed by Richard Petty, and a Snap-on tools calendar from the 1980s hung on a wall. Everything else was parts books.

  "He worked for me," Calb said earnestly, leaning across the desk to Lucas. He had a big head and a blunt nose and square, mildly green teeth the size of Chiclets-the face of a plumber or a carpenter or a character actor playing a hardworking joe. "We weren't friends. An old Army buddy down in KC asked me if I could get him a driver's job. I knew he was just out of jail and, tell you the truth, I'm not sure he was that much reformed. With what's happened, it looks like he wasn't."

  "What do you think happened?" Del asked.

  Calb said, "Well-you know. Somebody took him out and hung him. I know it wasn't none of my boys, because none of my boys could do that. Jane too, killing both of them. I think it's gotta come out of KC. He was in jail, that's what it's gotta be. Somebody back there."

  "How about Jane Warr?" Lucas asked. "How well did you know her?"

  "Not real well. She didn't hang around or anything. She came up with Deon, from KC. She wasn't much-she was a card dealer up at Moose Bay, I'm sure you know."

  "So… were they renting that house? Own it? What was the situation there?"

  "They bought it, cheap-thirty-six thousand, I think. Then they fixed it up. Joe Kelly did some of the work, he'd once worked as a handyman, and they had a couple guys in from town, they did some of it."

  "There are rumors around town that she might have had a relationship with a guy up at the casino," Del said.

  "I wouldn't know about that," Calb said, shaking his head. "Like I said, she wasn't that bright, but I don't think she'd be dumb enough to play around on Deon. Deon had a mean streak. That's why he was in jail. If he'd found out something like that, he would have beat on her like a big bass drum."

  "Mmm."

  Calb picked up a piece of paper from his desk, something with a printed IRS seal, looked at it, flicked it off to the side. "Then there's the whole thing about Joe. Joe's gone-and nobody knows where he went. Never said a word to anyone. One day he was here, and the next day, he wasn't. He was from KC, too."

  "You think it might be possible that Joe did this? That there was some kind of an argument, and for some reason… "

  Calb shook his head. "Nah. To tell you the truth, Joe just didn't have the grit to do this. Not hanging them, where he had to look them in the face."

  "So maybe he just took off," Del said. "Or maybe… "

  "Something else I thought of, after the other BCA boys was here," Calb continued. "If this whole thing didn't come out of the Kansas City jail-and that's gotta be it, in my opinion, but if it didn't-then you oughta get up to Moose Bay. That would be the place to look, along with KC."

  "Why?" Del asked.

  "The word around town is that Letty West saw them out there at the stroke of midnight," Calb said. "Is that right?"

  Lucas nodded. "Close to that."

  "Jane worked the three-to-eleven sh
ift. She couldn't have got home much before half-past eleven, and last night, with that ground blizzard, it was probably later. If he took them up there to hang them at midnight, he must have grabbed her the minute she got home. So he was waiting for her-or followed her home."

  Lucas and Del both nodded. They talked for another five minutes, and Lucas got the impression that Calb was genuinely confused by the killings. Cash had had some words from time to time with coworkers, but never anything serious, nothing that had even led to a confrontation. "Just that, you know, mechanics and guys like Deon don't mix. He thought he was a basketball star. One of those bad gangsta dudes, whatever they call them. That's what he thought."

  Outside, walking back across the highway, Lucas said, "I thought about her getting off at eleven, and being hanged at twelve."

  "I did too," Del said. "I was saving it up."

  "Pig's ass," Lucas said. "Anyway, somebody thought of it."

  "Maybe Warr was the target," Del said. "We've been doing nothing but talking about Cash."

  "Got to get on her, get some background going. I'll talk to Dickerson."

  "Gotta get up to Moose Bay," Del said. "How's the heater in the Olds?"

  "Fine."

  "Then let's take your car. Mustang heater wouldn't soften up butter."

  Moose Bay was run by the Black River band of the Chippewa, on the banks of a river whose water was stained so absolutely black by decomposing vegetation that when it froze over, even the ice looked black. From Cash's house to the res was twenty-four minutes, nine minutes down to Armstrong, then another fifteen minutes through Armstrong and out the county road to the casino.

  "Tell me your theories," Del said, on the way out. "You give good theory."

  "I'm thinking… drug deal," Lucas said. "Calb was probably right both ways: it's connected with Kansas City and Cash's jail contacts, and it's probably connected with the casino. The casino Indians don't have much truck with drugs, but the people who come in to gamble, have a good time… they'd do a little coke."

  "So the money's drug money," Del said. "All in cash, all bundled up, but not fresh bricks. Cash makes the wholesale contacts, driving for Calb back and forth. Warr has the contacts up here, delivers it out to the individual dealers. Or deals it herself."

  "Then they fuck with somebody. Or, somebody knows they've got that money, and they come looking for it."

  "But then they'd just shoot them-they wouldn't hang them," Del said.

  "Trying to get them to talk?"

  "More likely they fucked with somebody and got made an example of," Del said. "A bigger network that's still up and running, where they need an occasional example."

  "Maybe," Lucas said. "Where does Calb come in?"

  "He doesn't. Not necessarily."

  "Look at the farmhouse-there was a lot of work done in there, new work, and it cost a bundle. Believe me, I know." The Big New House back in St. Paul had cost $870,000. "If Calb knows Cash is only getting paid for driving, and if Warr is just dealing cards, where'd he think they got the money to fix that place up? There's a hundred grand in work in there, minimum, and a ten-thousand-dollar television set."

  "Tell you what-if the total's a hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars, that's not much for a house, with two incomes, and a guy upstairs who might be paying rent," Del said.

  "C'mon," Lucas scoffed. "How many drug dealers do you know who have a mortgage? How many have bought a house?"

  "Jimmy Szuza bought a house for his mother."

  "Jimmy Szuza was working for his mother, the treacherous old bitch. He was fronting for her."

  "Still." After a couple of minutes: "And what about the cell?"

  "Beats the shit outa me."

  "Calb was right about the travel time," Lucas said, glancing at his watch as they rolled into the casino's parking lot.

  The casino looked like a larger version of Calb's truck shop, but a truck shop on steroids: a huge, rambling, two-story yellow-and-green metal building with a prism-shaped glass entry built to resemble a crystal tepee. "Liquor in the front, poker in the rear," Del said.

  "Bumper sticker," Lucas said. "But I don't think they sell booze."

  The Moose Bay security chief was a cheerful Chippewa man named Clark Hoffman, who hurried down to meet them after a call from the reception desk. "Figured you'd get here sooner or later," he said, shaking their hands. He looked closely at Del. "Did you hang out at Meat's in the Cities?"

  "Yeah, I'd go in there before it closed," Del said.

  "It closed? Shit."

  "Couple years back."

  Hoffman thought about that for a moment, then said, "I used to kick your ass at shuffleboard. I thought you were a wino."

  Del grinned and shrugged. "I remember. You told me you were at Wounded Knee."

  "That's me," Hoffman said. "Sneaking through the weeds with a hundred pounds of frozen brats in a backpack. Fuckin' FBI-no offense. C'mon this way."

  They followed him upstairs to his office, Del filling him in about Meat's. "Trouble with the health inspectors," Del told him. "You name it, they had it: mice, rats, roaches, disease. The only thing that kept you from dyin' was the alcohol."

  "Everything did have a… particular flavor," Hoffman said. "Ever notice that?"

  "Yeah."

  "I always sorta liked it. What happened to Meat?"

  "He moved to San Clemente and opened a porno store."

  "Not much money in retail porno anymore," Hoffman said, shaking his head. "Not since they started piping it into every motel room in the country."

  Jane Warr's employment file sat in the center of Hoffman's desk. He pushed it across at Lucas and said, "Not much there. She learned to deal at a school in Vegas, held a couple of jobs there, worked at a Wal-Mart for a while, outside of Kansas City, then came up here."

  "We heard a rumor that she might have had a relationship here with a guy named Terry Anderson."

  Hoffman frowned. "Where'd you hear that?"

  "Downtown. Can't tell you exactly who mentioned it," Lucas said.

  "I'll check, and I'll find out. I hadn't heard anything, but then-I might not have. About anyone else, but not about Terry."

  "Why not Terry?" Del asked.

  "He's my brother-in-law," Hoffman said. He grinned at Lucas, but it wasn't a happy face. "He's married to my sister."

  "Aw, shit," Lucas said. "Listen, all we heard was one guy, who didn't like Warr, but maybe got turned down by her and knew we'd be up here talking to you. Maybe just a wise guy."

  "One way or the other, I'll know in the next half hour," Hoffman said. He interlinked his fingers, stretched his arms out in front of him, and cracked his knuckles. "I'll let you know."

  "Take it easy," Del said.

  "I'll take it easy," Hoffman said. "My sister, on the other hand, might kill his ass. If it's true."

  "Tell her to take it easy, too," Del said. "I mean, Jesus."

  "You have any cocaine going through here?" Lucas asked after an awkward pause.

  Hoffman spread his hands. "Sure. On the res, and some of the customers bring it in. We try to keep it out-we make so much money that we try to keep everything spotless. We don't need to give some asshole state senator an excuse to build state-run casinos. When we see it, we call the cops. Anybody caught with it is banned, no matter what the cops do."

  "Any chance Warr was dealing?" Del asked.

  "Not in here," Hoffman said. "We watch the dealers, and they know it. We tape them every minute they're working."

  "Really? Do you still have last night's tapes?" Lucas asked.

  "Sure do. We've got tapes for the last month, and tapes of anything that might ever come up in the future. Catch people stealing, they'll be on tape until the next glacier comes through."

  Del said, "We don't have a line on who did this, but we'd sort of like to see a guy, big guy, new beard, dark watch cap or ski cap, dark parka and jeans, drives a Jeep Cherokee."

  "I don't know about the Cherokee, but I know who you're talking abou
t. We've got him on tape," Hoffman said.

  "You know him?" Lucas asked. "Who he is?"

  "Not who he is, but I looked at him pretty good. He'd be on the tapes, though most of what you'd see is the top of his head. The camera coverage on the slots isn't as good as it is on the tables, because the slots aren't as much of a problem."

  "When can we see them?" Lucas asked. And, "How do you know it was him?"

  "Right now. And I know who you're talking about, because some people don't act right, and you tend to notice them. This guy wasn't interested in gambling. I couldn't tell what he was interested in. I noticed him the night before last, and then he came in again last night," Hoffman said. "He was plugging dollar tokens into the slots, but slow, and he hardly paid attention when he won, like he didn't care. People don't act like that in casinos. They're always walking around counting their coins and looking at machines, or they get perched up on a chair and they start pounding away. One thing they don't do, is they don't not give a shit."

  Del looked at Lucas. "Hell of a long thread, from the motel guy to here."

  "Gotta pull it," Lucas said. To Hoffman: "Let's go see the tapes."

  Hoffman took them to a surveillance room-on the way, he asked, "You really think your info on Terry might be good?" and Lucas said, "Jeez, I hope not"-where a half-dozen women roamed along twenty monitors, watching the activity on the floor below. There were good overhead shots of all the blackjack tables, but most of the cameras over the slots looked straight down. Only a few looked at the slots from shallow angles, and those were farther back.

  "The main problem with the machines is theft-guys dipping coins out of other people's coin buckets," Hoffman explained. He pointed at a monitor showing a woman who was sitting in front of a machine feeding in quarters. All they could see was the top of her head, her shoulders, and her arms. "See, like this lady, she's pushed her coin bucket halfway around the machine. If you're on the next aisle over, you can reach across and dip her. We get one of those a week, guys who never think about cameras. Dumb guys. But you can't see them dipping from the side. You can only see them reach from the overheads."