Still, the lights. He walked around the side of the building and peeked through a window, and found a meeting: Gene Calb, Ruth and Katina Lewis, and a black man that Singleton had never seen before. Both women had taken their coats off, as if they’d been there a while. The black man was leaning back in an office chair, idly swiveling a few inches from left to right.
Singleton watched for a while, but couldn’t hear anything. Why had they left him out? Were they suspicious?
He eventually crunched back around to the Caddy, climbed inside, rolled back to get square with the overhead door, and punched the garage-door opener. As the door went up, he eased the Caddy inside, punched the remote again, and as the door started back down, got out of the car.
Calb and Katina were standing by the corner of the bay, Calb with a cup of coffee in his hand. “Hey, come on back. We’re having an argument.”
“Who’s we?” Singleton asked.
“Me and Shawn Davis and Ruth and Katina,” Calb said. “Shawn came up from KC. You heard about the Sorrell thing?”
“On the radio, a while ago,” Singleton said. “What do you think?”
“That’s what we’re arguing about,” Katina said. “I tried calling you but didn’t get an answer.”
“Been running around,” Singleton said. He looked at the bridge of her nose, rather than in her eyes, so she wouldn’t see the lie in his eyes. And he thought: Okay. They tried to call him, so they weren’t cutting him out.
He started past her, but she caught his arm and stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek and asked, “You busy tonight?”
“I sure got some time if you do,” he said. She stepped ahead of him and he touched her on the butt.
Inside the office, Calb introduced him to Davis: Davis was a tough-looking forty-five, not impressed by much. He lifted a hand and nodded, and Singleton gave him his best grim cowboy look. “You got any special insight into this mess?” Davis asked him in a twangy Missouri drawl. “Gene said you knew Deon and Jane and Joe as well as anyone up here.”
Singleton hurried to deflect that idea. “I have no idea what’s going on. I used to stop by and talk to Deon, but that was just part of my deal, you know. Keep an eye out. I keep thinking it’s Joe, that maybe they had a fight or something.”
“Joe’s dead,” Davis said bluntly. “He never went more than five miles from his mama in his life, until he come up here. Called her every day, then he talked to her one night and the next day he was gone. She hasn’t heard a word since. He’s dead.”
“Goddamn,” Calb said. He stood up and wandered in a tight circle, his hands jammed in the back pockets of his jeans. “This kidnapping . . . if they think it’s outa here, they could be all over me. You too, Shawn. If they really started pounding my books, looking at how many people I employ and how much commercial rehab we do . . . they could give me some trouble.”
“Might be time for a fire,” Singleton said.
They all looked at him for a moment, and then Calb said, “You’re not serious.”
“Take care of the book problem,” Singleton said.
Calb’s eyes rolled heavenward, as in prayer, and he said, “It wouldn’t take care of shit, Loren. You’ve never been a businessman—there’re records all over the goddamn place. Payroll tax receipts, workman’s comp, insurance, income tax. The only thing that would happen if I burned down the shop is that I’d have a burned-down shop. Then they’d really get interested. If they get really interested, they’re gonna get to all of us, including you, Loren, and the women too.”
“Which gets us away from the question I want answered, and I want to know that I’m being told the truth,” Ruth said, squaring off against Calb and Davis. She had her wintery fighting smile fixed on her face. “This kidnapping thing. This Sorrell girl. You didn’t know about it, you didn’t have any part of it, either of you. This wasn’t some kind of money-making deal that went wrong.”
“My God, Ruth. No. Never. I’m not nuts,” Calb said. The way he said it made her believe him.
Davis was quieter, but just as convincing: “The thing is, Ruth, if these news stories are right, the kidnappers wanted a million bucks for this kid. They were gonna cut it three ways that we know of, and probably had to be four, since it seems like there’s a fourth one on the loose. That’d be a quarter-million apiece, for risking the death sentence. Gene and I make that much, every year, just running our quiet little car business. There wouldn’t be no sense in it.”
“Some sense for somebody like Deon,” Singleton said. “He was getting nothing but chump change.”
“Just like you, Loren, and both of you happy to get it,” Calb snapped.
“Hey—shut up,” Ruth said. She looked at the two men, poked a finger at them. “We don’t need a quarrel. So . . . what does Gene say to the police?”
“He plays dumb,” Davis said. “That’ll work, if you let it work. If you don’t get smart. You go ahead and sweat, and wiggle around, and apologize—the man always likes to see that. But just be dumb. Yeah, you hired him, because I asked you to, to get him out of the neighborhood. They come to me, and I say, ‘Hell, yes, it was a big favor, gettin’ Deon off my back, and his old lady, too.’
“We tell them that his pay probably wasn’t enough for some city boy who wants to put cocaine up his nose, and so he went off on his own,” Davis continued. “I mean, this thing they did with this little girl—Deon’s crazy enough, but no cop down in KC who knows me would say that I’d do it. Nobody up here would think that Gene would, either.”
HE PAUSED, AND in the absence of words, a full-color motion picture popped up behind Singleton’s eyes: a picture of Mom getting the little bottle of drugs out of her bag, and the syringe, and sucking the fluid out, and holding the needle up, and squirting a little bit of it, then putting the smile on her face before she went in with the girl.
The older girl might have known what was going on. She’d taken the shot with a dark-eyed passivity, her eyes locked on Singleton’s. She’d had a blue ribbon in her hair, with a knot in the middle.
The younger one had a stuffed toy that Jane had gotten her, a hand-sized white-mouse puppet with a pink tail. She’d said, “Okay,” and had lain back on the folding bed and rolled her arm around to take the shot. Brave little kid: went to sleep with the mouse on her chest.
He’d dug her down through the clay cap and placed her in a pile of old Yellow Pages phone books, and that was that.
Wasn’t hard. Didn’t seem crazy; just was.
DAVIS STARTED TALKING again, and popped Singleton out of the mental movie. “So we play it dumb: what you see is what you got. Three dumb assholes decide to kidnap a girl because they want more money and they get killed for their trouble.”
“Four dumb assholes,” Calb said distractedly. “Maybe the other guy was like down on the other end of the thing, set up the girl, or something.” He looked at Singleton. “They never mentioned a friend or anything?”
“No. They kept talking about all their friends down in KC.”
“Whatever,” Ruth said. “The thing is, I need something to tell the women who work with me. Some of them are afraid that somehow, everything is linked—the cars, the drugs, and the kidnapping. If somebody put pressure on them, came at them the right way, they’d probably give up the whole story. Feel morally obligated to.”
“Shit,” Davis said.
“Well, I agree with them,” Ruth said, showing the cold smile again. “The only difference is, I know Gene.” She lifted a hand toward Calb. “If I thought we had anything to do with all of this, I’d go to the police myself. But I think it was Deon Cash and Jane Warr and Joe, trying to make some money. And the fact is, even though we don’t know anything about it, it could drag us all down.”
“So tell them the truth,” Calb said. “Tell them that we’re just as scared and confused as they are. We don’t know what the hell’s happening, and we’re desperate to find out.”
“Dumb is best,” Davis said again. “Believe
me on that—you don’t know nothin’ about nothin’. If you don’t know nothin’, nobody can trip you up—not your friends, not the cops.”
THEY TALKED FOR another half-hour, and then broke up. Davis said he was heading back to KC that night, after eating dinner at the Calbs’. Katina walked out with Singleton and Ruth. Ruth kept going, across the highway and down toward the church. Katina held back and said, “I’d like to come over.”
“You’re the goddamned horniest little thing,” Singleton said. He touched her face and said, “Don’t worry. You worry too much.”
“I just want everything to be right,” she said. “You never talked to Deon about anything, did you?”
By anything, she meant the kidnappings, Singleton realized.
“Jeez, Katina . . . ” He was insulted.
“I’m sorry, I’m just so upset.”
“It’ll be okay, honey.”
“Not just that. I sorta need to . . . get close to somebody. After all this.” She stood close to him and fumbled for his hand.
“So come over. We’ll just, you know . . . hang out.”
“I’ll see you there,” Lewis said. “I’ll take my car so I can get back. Maybe we could go down to the Bird for dinner.”
“Love you,” Singleton said, talking down to her. First time he’d said that; no place romantic, just standing in a snow-swept parking lot in the middle of nowhere. “Love you,” he said.
12
SUNDAY.
Lucas and Del went north in a two-car convoy, Lucas leading in the Acura, Del trailing in the rented Olds. They left the Big New House at three-thirty in the morning, out past the airport, around the sleeping suburbs, then northwest on I-94.
Rose Marie had called ahead and cleared them with the overnight highway patrolmen, and Lucas put the cruise control on eighty-five, with Del drafting behind him. They made the turn north at Fargo in three hours, picking up a few snowflakes as they crossed the narrow cut of the Red River. The snow got heavier as they drove north up I-29, but was never bad enough to slow them. After a quick coffee-and-gas stop at Grand Forks, they continued north, then cut back across the border to Armstrong, and pulled into the Law Enforcement Center a few minutes before nine o’clock.
Bitter cold now, but the snow had quit for the moment. More was due during the day, and Lucas wanted to get started in Broderick before conditions got too bad. The sheriff wasn’t around—probably at church, the comm center man said—so they left a message that they’d be somewhere around Armstrong or Broderick, then stopped at the Motel 6. With the discovery of the bodies of Hale and Mary Sorrell, most of the reporters had gone, and they got rooms immediately.
“Like a land office in here the night before last,” the clerk said. “Now we’re back to Sleepy Hollow.”
“All the reporters gone?”
“All but one.” The clerk leaned across the desk and dropped his voice. “A black guy from Chicago. He says he’s a reporter, but I wouldn’t be too sure.”
“Hmm,” Lucas said wisely, and took the room key.
ON THE WAY out of Armstrong, rolling through the bleak landscape, Del punched up the CD player and found Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page,” in the cover version by Metallica.
They listened for a while, and then Del said, “I like Seger’s better.”
“Close call, they’re both good,” Lucas said. “I go for the Metallica. Great goddamn album, anyway.”
“Dusty fuckers versus metalheads; and you always leaned toward the metal,” Del said. “Back when you were running around town on that bike. I remember when you went to that first AC/DC concert. You talked about it for weeks.”
“They kept your motor clean,” Lucas said. They were coming up on Broderick. “Tell you what—let’s go on through town and find that kid.”
“Letty . . . ”
“West.”
A FORD TAURUS was parked in the yard next to the Wests’ Cherokee. Lucas and Del trooped across the porch, and Martha West met them at the door before they had a chance to knock.
“The state policemen,” she said to the room behind her. She pushed the door open and said, “C’mon in.”
The front room was too warm and smelled of wool and, Lucas thought, old wine and maybe Windex or lemon Pledge. Letty was sitting on a piano bench in front of a broken-looking Hammond organ; a short, muscular black man with a notebook was perched in an easy chair, forty-five degrees to her right, a Nikon D1X by his feet. A pillow sat on the floor at the third point of the triangle, where Martha West had apparently been sitting.
“Hey, Lucas and Del,” Letty said. She got up, smiling. “Did you see me on TV?”
“All over the place,” Del said. “You were like Mickey Mouse.”
Martha West said, “We’ve been having an interview with Mr. Johnson from the Chicago . . . ” She looked for the name but couldn’t find it.
“Tribune,” the black man said, standing up. He wore round, gold-rimmed glasses and looked like he might once have been a lineman for Northwestern. “Mark Johnson.” He reached out to shake hands with Lucas, and then with Del. “You’re agents Davenport and Capslock?”
Lucas nodded. “I’m Davenport and this is Capslock. I’m surprised you’re here. Your friends got out of town fast enough,” he said.
“Mostly TV,” Johnson said, as if that explained everything.
“We need to talk to Martha and Letty, but we don’t want to disturb your interview,” Lucas said. “We can come back, if you’d like.”
Johnson shook his head. “I got most of what I was looking for. I’m trying to figure out how in the hell Cash ever wound up here.”
“Learn anything?”
“No. The guy down in the car shop won’t talk because he’s afraid he’ll get busted, or even worse, get sued. The guy with the dogs won’t talk to me because of his American principles. And the women at the church think I’m probably a rapist because I’m black, but they’re too nice to say so.”
“We can’t help you with Cash,” Lucas said. “We’d like to know ourselves. He just doesn’t fit.”
“He was pure-bred city,” Johnson agreed. “I called some people down in KC and they tell me there’s no truck-driving job in the world that’d keep him up here. He’d rather have some cheap-ass job like robbing 7-Elevens.”
“Interesting,” Lucas said.
“It is,” Johnson said, gesturing with his notebook. “Now you tell me something. Do you really think Cash and this Joe guy and Jane Warr kidnapped the Sorrell girl? If they did, why in the heck would they be out in the country where everybody could see them coming and going, and know every move they made?”
“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “But I think they were involved in the kidnapping. I think they did it for the money and we’ll eventually nail it down. We’ve got a state crime scene crew taking their cars apart, looking for DNA that might tie them to the girl.”
“Can you tell me precisely why you think they were involved?” The notebook was poised again.
Lucas thought it over, then asked, “Do you know Deke Harrison?”
“Yeah, sure. He’s my guy at the Trib,” Johnson said. “He runs our desk.”
“He used to come through the Cities,” Lucas said. “For years. We’d go out and get a drink.”
“Yeah. That’s my job now. He moved up,” Johnson said.
“Tell him to give me a call,” Lucas said. “I’ve got a cell phone.”
LUCAS GAVE JOHNSON the cell phone number, Johnson said good-bye to Lucas and Del, went out through the door, and then a moment later stuck his head back inside. “Find a good place to eat?”
Letty said, “The Red Red Robin.”
“That’s the best? God help us.” Johnson said, and he was gone.
Letty put her hands on her hips and looked at Lucas. “Hey! What’s that supposed to mean?”
LUCAS TOLD LETTY and Martha West what they needed: any hint of an irregularity around the Cash-Warr property. “There is no body in the house—we took t
he place apart after we found the money and the dope.”
“So they must’ve buried her,” Letty said, crossing her lips with both of her forefingers, thinking. Martha shivered at the thought, and looked at her daughter. Letty seemed more interested than scared.
“I imagine they did,” Lucas said. “But out here . . . there’s ten thousand square miles of unbroken dirt and bog.”
“Yeah, but even out here, there’s always people going by. You couldn’t just drive out somewhere and spend an hour digging a grave and be sure nobody saw you,” Letty said. “People see you out here, because—wherever you are—you’re unusual. They notice you. I’ll be walking across the lake down by the old dump and two days later somebody’ll say, ‘Saw you down by the dump with your gun.’ And I never saw them.”
“Gives me the creeps,” Martha West said. “You got no privacy.”
Letty looked out the window, the white winter light picking out her blue eyes. Still not much snow. “Why don’t we go look around?” she asked. “I’ll come with you, see if I can see anything. I walk up and down there all the time, on my way to the crick. If we wait until tomorrow, there might be too much snow.”
“Must’ve been snow since the girl was taken,” Del said. “She was taken before Christmas.”
“There’s been some, but not much,” Letty said.
“If you guys are gonna take Letty, could I get you to buy her some lunch or something?” Martha West asked. “I’ve got to run into town for a while.”
“Sure,” Del said. “Down to the Bird.”
MARTHA WEST WAS suddenly in a hurry, and Del looked past Letty at Lucas, catching his eye, with an uh-oh twist of his head: Martha West needed a drink right now. Lucas nodded and said to Letty, “Get your coat.”
“Want me to bring the .22?”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“Piece of crap, anyway,” she said, and headed up the stairs to her bedroom.
Martha West was gone before Letty came back down. Letty came down wearing a slightly too big parka, pac boots, and carrying a pair of mittens. “S’go,” she said, clumping through the living room to the door.
Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15 Page 120