Naked Prey

by John Sandford

  “How about his pal, Joe?”

  “I hardly knew him, but he always seemed to be walking behind Deon. I think Deon impressed him. Deon impressed Jane, too—she liked him being crazy. Like it gave her status.” Again, she looked away, thinking, and then turned back. “We see that quite a bit, actually. Women taking status from the violence of their men.”

  “A sense of protection, if you live in a slum,” Lucas said.

  But she shook her head. “Not just in the slums. All kinds of women. Even nuns.”

  She showed a little smile and Del grinned at Lucas and said, “Ouch.”

  Lucas said, “Tell me one good fact. One thing that will point me somewhere. Something you know, way down in your head, about Deon.”

  “I’ve thought about this, ever since they found Jane and Deon,” she said. “I keep thinking, Deon was from the big city, Kansas City. So was Jane. They hated it here. I don’t think they even knew anybody, besides a couple of people at Calb’s. But they stayed, so there had to be a reason. Something they couldn’t do in Kansas City. Maybe they were selling the dope, maybe it was the kidnapping. Whatever it was, came from up here.”

  “Good,” said Lucas.

  OUTSIDE, DEL SAID, “Sister Ruth does a little dope herself.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I could smell it on her. Faintly. Raw, not smoke.”

  “Brownies.”

  “Maybe.” Del looked around at the white-on-white landscape, at their lonely car sitting in the empty, snow-swept parking lot outside the empty yellow building across the highway. “I can’t blame her. It’s like, it’s dope or network TV. There ain’t nothin’ else.”

  “I’ll ask Elle about her,” Lucas said. “I’m not sure the sister was entirely straight with us.”

  “What’d I miss?”

  Lucas shook his head. “Maybe nothing. I counted eight cots in there and most of the rooms seemed to be lived in. That’s a sizable operation. What would a hundred dollars a week mean to them? I mean, if they each worked one night in a Holiday store, they’d make three or four times as much. If they need the money that bad . . .”

  “Maybe it’s just easy, casual. Pin money. Take it if they have somebody around, skip it if they don’t. Wouldn’t be tied to a schedule.”

  “Could be,” Lucas agreed. “She seemed pretty rehearsed . . . but then she might have expected us.” He looked at his watch, and found a patch of white skin where the watch face should have been. Not having a watch was going to drive him crazy, he realized. “The bar’s closed. Let’s go try the cafe, and then the grocery.”

  “It feels hopeless,” Del said. “Knocking on doors in nowhere.”

  ON THE WAY to the cafe, Lucas’s cell phone rang, and when he answered it, a voice said, “This is Deke Harrison. Is this Davenport?”

  “Yeah, it is. How are you, Deke?”

  “Interrupted. I was halfway through an anchovy, pepper-cheese, onion sandwich and you know what it’s like to be interrupted halfway through one of those.”

  “So are—”

  “Halfway through, when somebody called for somebody else who got a call from Mark Johnson that said you wanted him vouched for.”

  “You vouching for him?”

  “Yeah. He’s a good guy, knows what he’s doing. Takes care of his sources.”

  “I might chat with him, then.”

  “Excellent. If you ever run for governor of whatever hick state you’re in—Minnesota?—you’ll know that the Tribune stands behind you.”

  “Far behind.”

  “You stepped on my line,” Harrison said.

  “Yeah, I know,” Lucas said. “It was such an original. Go back to the sandwich.”

  SANDY WOLF, WHO ran the cafe, told them that Deon Cash liked coconut cream pie and that Jane Warr was allergic to sulfites used as a preservative. She said that she’d never seen them argue. Every time they left the cafe together, she said, Warr would go through the door first and that Cash would reach out and squeeze her ass. Wolf also knew that Cash liked basketball and was a Los Angeles Lakers fan, and that he didn’t care for football and especially hated the Green Bay Packers and the Minnesota Vikings. She once had a Vikings game on the television, and Cash asked her to turn it off. “He had a mean look in him, so I turned it off,” she said.

  THE CONVENIENCE STORE/gas station was run by John McGuire and McGuire’s sister, Shelly. McGuire was a lean man who might have been taken for a farmer; his sister, equally lean, reminded Lucas of a pool shark he’d known in Minneapolis, who eventually became a successful rug-cleaning franchisee. Both of them knew Cash, who, in addition to whatever dope habits he might have had, also was attracted to the orange Halloween Hostess cupcakes, and had bought four dozen of them last Halloween, all that the store had in stock.

  They had also known Joe Kelly and said that he seemed like a shy man. Every night when they saw his car parked at Cash’s place, Kelly came in and bought a twelve-pack of Budweiser. “We think he had alcohol issues,” Shelly McGuire said.

  “I should have offered to take him to my AA meeting,” McGuire said, “but I wasn’t sure he was drinking it by himself, and I couldn’t get him talking. And I thought, you know, him being colored, maybe colored people can drink more than white people.”

  The bar was closed.

  THE DOG HOUSE on the side street was a manufactured home, built in a factory and trucked to the homesite, where it was hammered together on a prepoured slab. The siding felt like tin. Del knocked, and a man in a sleeveless undershirt came to the door while the dogs went crazy in a back room. Lucas, without looking, could feel Del loosening up his Smith.

  The man said, “Yep?” He propped himself in the door, and Lucas could smell tomato sauce and dog shit in the overheated air streaming out. The man had an American flag tattooed on one shoulder, and on the other, a skull with a dagger through its eye, and the legend, Death From Above.

  “We’re with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. We’re investigating a series of crimes . . .”

  “Got an ID?”

  A woman in the house yelled, “Who is it, Dick?”

  Lucas held out his ID and Dick glanced at it and yelled, “Cops, asking about Cash,” and stepped out on the porch. “What can I do for you?”

  “Don’t want you to freeze,” Lucas said. He would have liked a look inside.

  “I’m fine,” the man said. His arms were turning red. “Don’t feel the cold.”

  “We understand you work at Calb’s, and we’re looking for any information . . .”

  The man’s name was Richard Block, and the woman inside was his girlfriend, Eurice. He was a prep specialist who set the trucks up for painting.

  “I didn’t have nothin’ to do with the drivers,” he said. “I was always back in the sanding booth; I ain’t management. I don’t think I talked to Cash more than once in my life. Never did meet his old lady, except to nod at her in the store. She never came to the bar. Talked to Joe, once or twice. He was interested in the prep business, he wanted to paint his own car. Don’t know anything about him, though.”

  They bounced a few more questions off him, looking for an edge, and found nothing but genuine ignorance.

  “You ever meet any of the nuns, er, whatever, over at the church?” Del asked.

  “Never saw them, except at the cafe and maybe at the store. Call them the rug-munchers, over to the shop,” he said.

  “I thought they drove for Calb?” Lucas said.

  “Not that I know of,” Block said, his eyes shifting away, momentarily. He was lying. “You have to talk to Gene about his employees. I mean, I ain’t in management, and I don’t want to piss anybody off. I’d like to keep the job.”

  He had nothing more to say, except that he hoped to build a kennel and breed pit bulls.

  “Nice tats,” Del said, as they backed away from the door.

  The man glanced at his dagger tattoo and for the first time showed a hint of a smile. “Sometimes I wished I’d gotten Mom. But I was
in the Army, and only Navy guys get Mom.”

  THE MAN STEPPED back inside and closed the door behind himself. “Why would he lie about the nuns?” Del asked, as they walked away. “He was doing good up to then.”

  “I don’t know,” Lucas said. “Let’s try some more.” There were a half-dozen trailer homes scattered around town. One had unbroken snow around it, and was apparently not being lived in. Of the others, three were being lived in, but nobody was home. At the other two, they talked to men who worked for Calb, but seemed genuinely confused about the killings. One of the men, who smelled strongly of beer, said, “We’re sittin’ here with a gun, tell you the truth.” He reached sideways onto a table, picked up a heavy-frame revolver, waggled it at his ceiling, and said, “I dare the motherfucker to come in here. He’ll be walking home without a couple of pounds of meat.”

  “Make sure who you’re shooting it at,” Lucas said.

  “I don’t know—I think people get more scared when they think that you’re crazy and maybe drunk. Tend not to fuck with you,” said the man, smiling in a distinctly crazy way.

  “You could be right about that,” Lucas said.

  As they walked away, he looked at the patch of white skin on his arm. “Let’s go get Letty.”

  LETTY WAS OUT on the dump when they got there, a small figure in dark clothes, kicking through the trash pile. Letty was concentrating on something, and didn’t see them pull in. Lucas got out and yelled, “Hey. Letty.”

  She turned, waved, and skidded down the side of the pile of trash, and clumped across the dirt pan between the edge of the trash pile and the gate. When she got to the gate, she passed him the .22 and the empty gunny sack, then climbed the gate. When she dropped down beside him, he got a whiff of aged garbage.

  “You oughta stay out of the trash,” he said. “You don’t know what might be in there.”

  Letty said, “Nobody knows what might be in there. Phil gets all kinds of good stuff out of there.”

  “Who’s Phil?”

  “Drives the Cat,” she said, nodding at the bulldozer. “He gets about one good computer a week.”

  “Won’t do you any good if you die of some weird disease,” Lucas said. “You better take a shower when you get home.”

  “Water kills cancer?”

  “You’re also a little stinky,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah? It’d be worth it, stinky, if I could get a good computer out of it,” she said. “My computer is worse than this old piece-of-crap .22.”

  They were loading into the Acura as she said it. Del asked, “If the gun’s a piece of crap, why don’t you get another one?”

  “’Cause they cost money, and this one works,” she said. “I mean, it’s a piece of crap, but that’s all I need. My computer . . . that’s just a piece of crap.” As they were backing out, she added, “You know what I’d do if I was a cop? I’d tell the guy at the dump to turn in all the computers he found. Most of them work, they’re just old. When people throw them away, they leave all their letters and stuff on them—he finds out the neatest stuff about people, messing with the old computers. It’s his hobby. One time he found, uh . . .” She suddenly colored, and snapped her mouth shut.

  “What?” Lucas asked.

  “Never mind.”

  They both looked at her, and then Del said to Lucas, “I need to get my old computer back.”

  14

  Singleton could not remember feeling exactly like this: unable to breathe, unable to think. He’d driven out of the dump, down the gravel road, and straight through the stop sign onto the highway. He was heading south before he realized he’d missed the stop. He might have died right there, he thought, if there’d been a Molson truck coming through from Canada.

  Goddamn Letty West. She was out there all the time, trapping the goddamn ’coons. He was sure that she hadn’t been out there when he’d buried the girls. Except that he hadn’t checked. He had the same sense of uneasiness that came when he was sure he’d unplugged the iron before leaving town, or when he was sure that he’d locked the doors before going to bed . . .

  He was sure, but he wasn’t sure.

  He knew she was often out there, even late, because he’d seen her walking along the highway in the evening, carrying her rifle and her bag.

  If she had seen him, hauling the garbage bags that held the girls’ bodies, she would have assumed that he was getting rid of his own household trash. Though it wasn’t legal, people did it—did it all the time, after hunting and fishing trips, to get rid of fish guts or deer remains.

  But: the girl had been dragging around town with the two state cops, had apparently helped them reach the unbelievably quick conclusion that the Sorrells had been involved in the hanging of Deon Cash and Jane Warr. Now she had taken them out to the dump.

  Did she know something? Were the state cops looking at him? Maybe he shouldn’t have left so quickly, maybe he should have stopped and chatted. He could say that the dump was part of his check-route. But if they started to ask him questions, what would he have said? He wasn’t ready for that.

  Then: if the state cops were looking at him, why hadn’t he felt anything at work? There hadn’t been any curious looks, or veiled questions. Could the state cops be holding it that close, not even letting the sheriff in on it?

  Or—how about this—they’d found out that he’d been hanging around Calb’s, and in the process of checking on him, they’d talked to Letty and she’d mentioned seeing him at the dump, dragging the bags. Of course, putting him with Calb wouldn’t get them to Deon and Jane, because he’d kept that connection very quiet.

  Think.

  All right, here’s another possibility: it was all a coincidence. She was out there trapping, and the cops had taken her out. But why would the cops do that? It wasn’t like they were a taxi service.

  Think.

  Better talk to Mom.

  THE DAY HAD started simply enough. He’d slept late after a strenuous evening with Katina Lewis, had then gotten up, gotten dressed, and had gone into the office to see if anything had happened with the murders of the Sorrells.

  Micky James was working the comm center: “The state boys are back,” James said. “They’ve been asked in to cover the Sorrell murders, too. They’re going to be up around Broderick. What the hell you think is happening?”

  “Dope dealing up at the res, if you ask me,” Singleton said. “It’s all gotta be tied together.”

  Back home, he’d decided that snooping was probably more dangerous than doing nothing—and his thoughts turned to the Caddy out in his garage. He needed to do some fine sanding on the last clear coat, and doing that kind of work always smoothed him out, along with the car. Gave him a chance to think.

  In the garage, he realized that his breathing gear was still out at Calb’s, and the paint he was using always specified breathing gear. That meant a trip to Broderick.

  He’d gone to Broderick without a thought in his mind. As he came into town, he saw a silver SUV. pulling out of the body shop, heading out on the highway, north. He pulled into the spot that the SUV had just left and found the shop deserted. Not unusual for a Sunday. He ran the door up with his remote control, went inside, and got the breather gear. Didn’t feel the slightest vibration from the silver truck.

  “Loren?” A woman’s voice called to him. He looked back to his right, and saw an older woman walking across the highway from the church. “Hey,” she called. “Did you talk to Katina?”

  “Not since last night. She said she was heading back here . . .” And for a moment, Singleton thought the woman was going to tell him that Katina was missing. If she’d gone missing, for any reason, he might be cooked.

  “She was here, until ten minutes ago,” the woman said. She was an older woman, who looked like a Saturday Evening Post caricature of Grandma. “She tried to call you—she’s probably down at your place, now. She said if you came by, looking for her, to tell you that she’d wait.”

  “All right.”

&
nbsp; “Did you talk to the state policemen?”

  “No . . .”

  “They were just here. They’ve been going around town.”

  “Silver truck?”

  The woman nodded. “Yes. You just missed them.”

  THEY WERE HEADED north. To Letty West’s? He thanked the woman, and as soon as she was back in the church, headed north out of town, after the silver SUV. He was no more than fifteen minutes behind it, he thought. He took it slow going out, looking for their car at West’s house. It wasn’t there—in fact, there was no car at West’s. Of course, they might have come back past Calb’s when he was getting the breathing gear, but he hadn’t seen or heard any traffic, and the shop was quiet.

  They were headed north . . .

  Then it hit him. Shit. The dump. He denied it to himself—Couldn’t be the dump.

  He wheeled the Caddy out of the parking lot and put his foot down. The Cadillac would make a hundred and ten. He had to fight the undulating highway and the soft suspension, but he stuck with it, pushing the car as hard as he could. The dump road came up in four minutes, with no sign of the silver truck. He turned the corner, eased down the road . . . saw nothing until he came to the entry.

  Turned in.

  There they were, caught like deer in the headlights. The whole goddamned bunch of them, standing around the SUV.

  He lifted a hand, mind gone blank, backed out, and raced away . . .

  THE SCENE WENT round and round in Singleton’s brain, and he couldn’t stop it. There were too many permutations, but it all came back to one problem: he didn’t believe in coincidence. The state cops had been out there with Letty West for a reason.

  He’d put the two girls four feet down in the center of the landfill, under the clay cap. He’d dug through to the garbage layers, shoved the bodies in, refilled the holes and carefully tamped down the clay. Even if he went out to look for the bodies, now, he’d be lucky to get within twenty feet of them. Letty West, if she’d been back in the woods and had seen him cutting the holes, would never be able to put the cops on the exact spot.