Naked Prey

by John Sandford

  Payton bobbed his head, said, “Aye aye, cap’n.” The four men hurried in a wide circle around the hanging bodies, another of them muttered, “Thanks,” and then they all scuttled off through the naked trees toward the cars.

  “ANDERSON COULD BE a problem,” Del said, conversationally, when the deputies were out of earshot. He and Lucas were still looking at the dead people. The ghastly fact was that Cash and Warr hung only a few inches off the ground, and neither one had been tall—Lucas and Del were looking almost straight into their dead, half-open eyes, at their purplish faces, and the two bodies swayed together as though dancing on the same floor where the two cops were standing. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Del continued. “Half the goddamn crime scene is stuck to the bottoms of the deputies’ boots. Then he left them out here to freeze.”

  “Yeah.” Lucas decided that they were gawking at the bodies. “We’re gawking,” he said.

  “I know,” Del said, looking at Warr. “How many dead people we seen in our lives? You think a thousand?”

  “Maybe not a thousand,” Lucas said, still looking.

  “I don’t dream about any of them, except maybe one burned guy I saw, all black and crispy but still alive . . . died while we were waiting for the ambulance. And a little kid who drowned in a creek, she was my first one right after I went on patrol.”

  “I remember my first kid.”

  “Everybody does,” Del said. He did the cold-weather tap dance, and blew some steam. “I’m gonna remember this one for a while.”

  “THEY’RE ON DISPLAY,” Lucas said after a while. “You think it could be a biker thing? Bikers do this kind of shit, sometimes.”

  “I’ve never seen it,” Del said doubtfully. A gust of wind came through, and both of the bodies slowly rotated toward them.

  “Neither have I, but I’ve read about it,” Lucas said.

  “Read about it, or seen it in the movies?”

  “Maybe the movies,” Lucas admitted. “The thing is, the guy who did this wanted everybody to freak out. This isn’t just a murder. This is something else. The guy was making a point.”

  “No clothes around,” Del said. “Must’ve pulled the clothes off somewhere else, or took them with him.”

  “Somewhere else. This was all planned,” Lucas said. “The killer wasn’t struggling around in the dark, pulling their clothes off. He didn’t have to look for this place, off the top of his head. He knew what he was going to do. He worked it all out ahead of time.”

  THEY WERE TALKING about the line the killer took through the trees, and the angle down to the kid’s house and the distance from the town, and more about the display of the bodies, when they heard people coming in. Anderson was pushing through the brush with Braun and Schnurr, followed by three more men in bulky uniform parkas and insulated pants. “Must be the guys from Bemidji,” Del said.

  They were. Dickerson, a tall man in a tan parka, with straw-colored hair and gold-rimmed glasses, introduced himself and the other two agents, Barin and Woods. All of them gawked at the bodies as they talked. “The crime scene and special operations guys are about five minutes behind us,” Dickerson said. “The ME’s out on the road right now. The special ops guys’ll get it on film and we’ll process the scene, then we’ll get those folks out of the trees.”

  “We need a careful sweep,” Lucas said. “I mean like, crazy careful.”

  “Pretty screwed up already,” Dickerson said. Then he second-thought himself, with the sheriff right there, and diplomatically added, “We’re getting set up now. We’re bringing in a propane heater, and after we get finished crawling the place, we’ll melt out the snow and make sure nothing was trampled down into it.”

  “Excellent.”

  “You and I ought to go off somewhere, and decide who’s going to do what.” Again, a bureaucratic wariness.

  “Del and I don’t have anything to do with crime scene stuff,” Lucas said. “That’s all yours—but make sure the ME takes a close look at the woman’s mouth. That blood on her face looks like it might not be hers. We’ll want a DNA on it and we’ll want her mouth cleaned out.”

  “Sure.”

  “Otherwise, we can chat if you want, but basically, Del and I just go around and talk to people,” Lucas said. “Your guys should do the same thing—interview whoever you want. Duplicate us. No problem.”

  “So we’re not . . . one investigation.” Dickerson looked skeptical.

  “Nope.” Lucas shook his head. “Del and I have done this a lot, in Minneapolis. We find it’s handy, with the hard ones, to have two investigations running side by side, if you can do it without a lot of infighting. You get different ideas going.”

  Dickerson shrugged. “It’s all right with me. These two guys”—he turned a thumb to Barin and Woods—“will be doing all the work. I’m going to get us set up, hang around today and maybe tomorrow, and then I’ll be on call down in Bemidji. I understand the governor’s taken an interest.”

  Lucas said, “He has. He’s worried about the image. Two people hanged, naked, the man’s black.”

  “Got a pretty good dick on him, too,” said Schnurr, the sheriff’s deputy.

  Lucas turned on him, his teeth showing. “Shut the fuck up. Honest to Christ, if I hear anybody talking like that, I’ll personally slap the shit out of him.”

  “Didn’t mean nothin’,” Schnurr said. He shuffled his feet like a child who’d been bad in class; but he had mean eyes.

  “If a reporter heard that, or even heard you’d said it, sheriff’s deputies making cracks like that, we’d have twice as much trouble as we do now. So keep your fuckin’ mouth shut,” Lucas finished. To Anderson: “I don’t know how much you like your job, but your whole goddamn county is about to get smeared in the national media. Do you understand that?”

  “I . . . don’t know,” Anderson said, uncertainly.

  “Believe me, it’s gonna happen. And one asshole making comments like this guy, it could mean that you don’t only lose your job, but you gotta move to Arizona and change your name.”

  Anderson glanced nervously at Schnurr and said, “We’ll keep a lid on it.”

  Dickerson was peering up at the bodies, embarrassed, Lucas thought, to be from the same agency as Lucas. “You better,” Lucas snarled. He looked again at Schnurr, nailing him in place, then asked Anderson, “The little girl who found the bodies—is she in town?”

  “Giving a statement,” Anderson said.

  “We’d appreciate it if you’d have somebody call in, tell them to keep her there until Del and I have a chance to talk to her.”

  Anderson nodded.

  Lucas said to Dickerson, “Good luck. You guys got it.”

  “We got it,” Dickerson said.

  “NEED TO GET to that little girl,” Lucas said, as they walked back out to the line of cars. “If the sheriff’s crew is as bad as it looks, we need to talk to her before somebody fucks her up.”

  “Gotta get some wheels,” Del said.

  “Get them at a car dealer, probably, if we get there fast,” Lucas said. “Tomorrow morning, you won’t be able to rent a car anywhere north of Fargo.”

  “Zahn oughta know.”

  ZAHN DID KNOW. “Holme’s Motors in Armstrong,” he said. “Fix you right up. How many do you want?”

  “Two?”

  As they bounced slowly down the dirt road, past the girl’s house to the highway, Zahn fumbled out a cell phone, pushed a speed-dial button, and said, “This is Ray Zahn. Let me talk to Carl.” And a moment later, “Hey. I gotta couple of cops in town from St. Paul. They need two cars, good shape. Uh-huh.” He turned to Lucas: “What kind of credit card?”

  “American Express or Visa, whatever they take,” Lucas said.

  “American Express or Visa . . . yeah. Yeah. Ten minutes. Yeah, see you then.” He hung up. “All fixed,” he said. “One of you gets a loaded three-year-old Oldsmobile, the other one gets a six-year-old five-liter Mustang.”

  “I’ll take the one
with the best heater,” Del said.

  “We need to get over to the sheriff’s department, quick as we can,” Lucas said. “Is that the courthouse?”

  “Law Enforcement Center,” Zahn said. “Three years old, state-of-the-art, behind the courthouse and right across the street from Holme’s car lot. The LEC is the reason Dick Anderson’s the sheriff.”

  “He built it?” Lucas asked.

  “No. The last sheriff did. Bobby Carter,” Zahn said. He grinned at Lucas and pumped his eyebrows. “Don’t tell anybody I said so—Bobby’s a friend of mine—but he got a little too close to the construction process. Nobody went to jail, but people around here figure that a good chunk of money stuck to his fingers. He’s back to farming.”

  “What was Anderson? Not a deputy?”

  “He was a lawyer, private practice. Real estate, mostly. He worked with the county attorney, sometimes. When Bobby got into trouble and figured he better get out, he put up one of his good old boys to run. That pissed people off. Anderson jumped in at the last minute and got elected.”

  “A political wizard, huh?” Del said.

  Zahn smiled into his steering wheel as they bumped over the last set of ruts onto the highway, and turned south toward Broderick and Armstrong. “Never heard anybody use the word wizard around him,” he said. “He’s pretty much wholly owned by Barry Wilson, who’s the head of the county commission. That’s okay, most of the time. Doesn’t work too well when there’s an actual crime, or something.”

  THE TOWN OF Broderick was a few hundred yards down the highway, and Zahn took them through it at a crawl.

  The town was built along two streets that intersected the highway at right angles. A big four-square farmhouse sat on the north edge of town, on the west side of the highway. A sheriff’s car sat in the driveway, in front of the garage, and Zahn said, “That’s the victims’ place.”

  “Okay.” It looked like a rural murder scene on a CNN report, a lonely white farmhouse surrounded by snow, with a cop car in the yard.

  Farther south, still on the west side of the highway, they passed Wolf’s Cafe, which looked like a shingle-sided rambler; the Night Owl Club; and a building with a wooden cross fixed above the door and a bare spot where a sign had been pulled down. “That used to be the Holy Spirit Pentecostal Church—holy rollers,” Zahn said. “They eventually rolled out of town. Now a bunch of women work there. Like religious women, do-gooders, I guess. Some Catholics and some Lutheran women from Lutheran Social Services, and I heard one of them’s a Quaker. One of the Catholics is a looker. The other ones are the blue-tights kind.”

  Scattered among the buildings were a half-dozen small houses, a couple of trailer homes, a corrugated-steel corn silo with a cone-shaped roof, and a red barn.

  The east side of the highway was sparser: a Handy Mart gas station and convenience store; Calb’s Body Shop & Tow, in a long yellow metal-sided pole barn; Gene’s 18, an over-the-road truck rehab place; and two more houses.

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it, that’s the town,” Zahn said, as they rolled out into the countryside.

  Del asked, “What’s all the truck places, the body shops? Isn’t that pretty heavy industry for a place like this?”

  “Naw . . . I don’t know. Would you drive your car nine miles to get it fixed? We’re nine miles from Armstrong.”

  “I guess I would,” Del admitted. “Actually, I know I would, ’cause I have.”

  “And it was an inheritance deal. Gene inherited the body shop from his old man, and then he added the truck rehab business. Truck rehab, you can do anywhere. He does pretty good. He’s why the town started coming back. Most everybody who lives here works for him. Not a bad guy.”

  “A long way out,” Del said.

  “Some people like it lonely,” Zahn said. “Some people don’t.”

  Then they were out of town, out in the countryside. A crow or a raven was flying south, parallel to the highway, a fluttering black speck against the overcast sky, the only thing besides themselves that was moving. Del said, “Jesus Christ, it’s flat.”

  They rode in silence for a couple of minutes, then Zahn started a low, unconscious whistling. Lucas recognized the tune, probably from an elevator somewhere. “What’s that song you’re whistling?”

  “Didn’t realize I was whistling,” Zahn said. He thought a minute. “It’s that thing from Phantom of the Opera.”

  “That’s right.” After a second, “You don’t seem to be too upset, you know, by the bodies.”

  “Well, you’re with the Patrol, you learn not to be a pussy, like a homicide cop or something,” Zahn said.

  “All right, pussy,” Del drawled from the back seat.

  Zahn glanced over the seat and said, “Every time I go out to an accident and there are a couple of high school kids bleeding to death right in front of my face, and screaming for their dad or their mom, I know them. They’re kids from down the street. You do that for a few years and a couple strangers up in a tree won’t bother you much. Unlike some homicide pussies.”

  4

  Katina Lewis got out of bed at one minute to ten o’clock in the morning, the goose bumps like oranges in the chilly morning air. She padded barefoot across the cold wooden floor, into the bathroom. She was a round woman who no longer fought the roundness, thirty-six years old, five years divorced. With her dark brown hair, she was a rarity in this corner of the country, where it seemed everybody was blond or towheaded. She had good English skin from her father, a short nose and a bow lip from her German mother, and she had her hopes and her religion.

  She desperately hoped for children, though she felt the time running out. She prayed to the Lord to help her, and had faith. More than faith: she had fine discriminating morals—she could run drugs for God, knowing that she was on a mission of love, knowing that God was love.

  Katina Lewis wasn’t silly about love, didn’t walk around with a moony glow on her face, and she could get as cranky as the next woman. She simply thought of love as something real and tangible and everyday, like crackers or soap, that she simply hadn’t been able to acquire. But if you looked for love long enough, she believed, if you kept the idea in your heart, if you had faith, you would surely find it. God would not keep it from you.

  Now she’d found it in this unlikely place—this bleak, gray, flat prairie. As she headed for the bathroom, she glanced back at the bed and the top of Loren Singleton’s towhead.

  She loved him, she thought.

  He’d make a good father, if he let himself go. If he loosened up. But she wouldn’t want him to loosen up too much. She loved that cowboy thing, that sandpaper jaw in the morning, those bitten-off words, the stoicism that rode on his face. She loved the look of him, lounging with a shoulder against a wall, feet crossed, showing his boots, a Marlboro hanging from the corner of his mouth.

  She’d begun to talk to him about it. She’d talk more, maybe today, or someday soon. Time passed—that was one thing she’d learned in her twenties, and in her first marriage. Time passed and was gone and you couldn’t get it back.

  LEWIS HAD SET her alarm clock for ten. In her urgency to make it to the bathroom, she’d forgotten about it. At ten o’clock exactly, the hourly livestock report trickled out of the two-inch speaker, five feet from Loren Singleton’s ear.

  Quietly.

  As though a strange man had stolen into his house, to whisper in his ear, “. . . slaughter steers, choice two to three, 1,125 to 1,637 pounds, sixty-one dollars to sixty-two seventy-five. Select and choice two to three, 1,213 to 1,340 pounds, sixty-one to sixty-one ten . . .”

  The voice took a minute to penetrate, and then Singleton stirred, squeezed his pillow around and cocked an eye at the clock, and the man said, “That’s the South St. Paul stockyard report. Ed Wein will have updates through the day, right here on your feeder-cattle central. Now, from our news bureau, we have a report here from Broderick, Minnesota, where two people have been found hanged in a grove of trees just nort
h of Broderick. The first reports said that two people, a black man and a white woman, were found hanging . . .”

  The words were so flat and so unbelievable that they took a few seconds to connect. When they did, Singleton’s head popped up: “What?”

  Lewis called from the bathroom, “Did you say something?”

  “Shut up,” he shouted back.

  The man on the radio said, “. . . Anderson confirmed that two people were dead, but deferred further comment until the medical examiner could reach the scene. We will follow this story during the day, so keep your dial set here to North Dakota’s All-News Central . . .”

  The voice was both tinny and tiny. Singleton rolled across the bed, grabbed the clock, tried to find the volume control, heard the weatherman come up and say, “You never know what life’s gonna bring, Dick . . .” and then his voice was lost in the noise of the flushing toilet.

  LEWIS CAME OUT of the bathroom, pulling her cotton nightgown down over her hips, her heavy legs jiggling at him: she was annoyed. She didn’t like being shouted at, being told to shut up.

  She opened her mouth to say so, when Singleton, still staring at the radio, said, “Did you hear that?”

  “I heard you shouting at me,” she said, letting a little of the annoyance seep into her voice.

  “Somebody killed Deon and Jane,” Singleton blurted.

  The irritability vanished. “What?”

  “Gotta call . . .” he said. Over his shoulder he added, “They were found hanged in a tree.”

  He trotted naked out of the bedroom and down the hall. Nothing bounced or bobbled when he moved: he was solid. Lewis looked at the radio, which was now firmly into the weather. More gloom. That was the essence of it. Cold and gray and maybe, if we were unlucky, a lot of snow, followed by more cold and gray.

  Jane and Deon? She called after him, “What did the radio say? What did they mean, hanged?”