Naked Prey

by John Sandford

  “No. She’s a doctor.”

  “Then she’ll know. I promise you this, Lucas, and Sister Mary Joseph would tell you the same thing—this is only for people who might die if they don’t get the drugs. People can get the standard chemotherapy, one way or another, even if they don’t have money, but the ancillary drugs and the follow-up drugs . . . lots of times, it comes down to a choice between eating and taking the drugs. I’m absolutely serious about that—that’s what it comes to. Our drug shipments involve about four thousand patients at the receiving end.”

  “Four thousand—”

  “And we’re growing.”

  “And you weren’t involved with Deon Cash or Jane Warr or Joe Kelly.”

  “No. Except that we drive for Gene Calb, and they did.”

  “They never tried to cut in on your drug deal.”

  “There is no money in the drugs. We don’t get any money. We don’t buy or sell anything—the whole point is that our clients can’t afford to buy it. You have to understand, except for marijuana, all these drugs are legal down here. We’re not so much smuggling the drugs, as smuggling the prices paid for them.”

  They sat looking at each other for a minute, then Lucas said, “That’s crazy.”

  “Want to know something even crazier? There probably isn’t any way to make it work better. Ask your wife.”

  Lucas took a few seconds to think about it, then said, “My partner claims that a tiny town like this can’t have two big crime deals going on at the same time without some relationship between them. I tend to agree, but if you’re telling me the truth, I don’t see what it could be.”

  “There isn’t one,” she said.

  “So tell me one more thing,” he said. “Where’d you get that Land Cruiser you were driving last night?”

  She blinked. “Up in Canada.”

  “In Canada?”

  “Yes. At an auction. We need a four-wheel drive for some of the roads here, when we’re doing our regular charity work. It’s a terrible truck, it has two hundred and fifty thousand kilometers on it, we’re always afraid it’s going to blow up. The transmission feels like . . . you’re shifting through a pound of liver. It squishes,” she said. Then, “Um, why did you want to know?”

  He was a little embarrassed, and shrugged. “I don’t know. You told me that story about raising pin money by driving for Calb.”

  “That’s true.”

  “But I’ve looked at trucks like that and they cost sixty thousand bucks or so. So . . .”

  “What? We have the receipt.” She was getting a little warm. “We paid one thousand five hundred dollars for it.”

  “Okay, okay.” Lucas stood up to go. “You’re going to go down and talk to Letty?”

  “I’d be gone already, if Sister Mary Joseph hadn’t called. I’ll be going in one of our Corollas. Our expensive Land Cruiser might not make it that far.”

  “All right, all right. I had reason to ask.”

  “So what’re you going to do?”

  “Try to find whoever is doing the killing. I don’t care about your drugs, but if you think of anything—anything—that might hook it all together, you’ve got to call me. This guy won’t stop as long as he thinks he’s in danger.” He took a couple of steps toward the TV room, then looked back and said, “When you’re taking weed across the border, you’ve got to be careful. My partner could smell it on you the other day. He’s worked with dopers a lot, and he’s pretty sensitive. The guys at the border probably are, too.”

  “We were repacking that day,” Lewis said. “We’re very careful before we go across. We have no drug abusers here—zero. That’s one of our rules. The only people we allow to use drugs are survivors. Some of them are still on tamoxifen.”

  LUCAS LEFT THE room, looking for Del, then turned around and went back to her. “Why isn’t there a better way to price the drugs?”

  “Because the drug companies say, and they may be right—although they lie about everything else—that they won’t be able to create new drugs that everybody wants, or specialized low-profit drugs, if they don’t make a substantial profit from the ones they’re selling now. So they’re allowed to charge what they want in the United States.

  “Canada’s a small part of their market, and it’s got one central bulk buyer—the government, and they make the best deal they can. So the drug companies sell to Canada for a little bit more than cost, because the market’s small enough that it doesn’t have much effect on their overall profit.”

  “Why don’t we just make it legal to reimport the drugs?”

  “Because then Canada would essentially become a drug-wholesaling middleman for the U.S. The drug companies won’t allow that. They’d start charging Canada the American price, to get the profit they say they need. The end effect would be that Canadians would pay more, or go without, and Americans wouldn’t pay less.”

  “You know that bumper sticker about the Arabs? ‘Nuke Their Ass and Take the Gas’? Why doesn’t the U.S. just nuke the drug companies’ ass and take the drugs?”

  “Then who’s going to develop the new drugs we need? The government? The people who brought you the CIA and airport security and the Bush-Gore election?”

  LUCAS FOUND DEL watching Night of the Living Dead with the older woman who’d met them at the door. “You at a good part?” he asked.

  “There are no good parts,” Del said. “Everything okay?”

  “Okay,” Lucas said. “Let’s go.”

  “At least you didn’t open fire on anybody,” the older woman said to Del.

  “That’s a good thing,” Del said.

  OUT IN THE car, Del asked, “You gonna tell me?”

  “Yeah.” Lucas put the car in gear, sighed, and said, “We’ve gotta talk to the sheriff, and the crime scene guys from Bemidji, start looking through their paper, see if there’s anything. Gotta think about it. ’Cause it ain’t these guys.”

  “So . . . what’re they doing?” Del asked.

  Lucas told him. When he was done, Del said, “I actually heard rumors about them. Down in the Cities. Never made the connection with these guys. I just thought it was some kind of feminist-wicca-earth-goddess-conspiracy urban-legend bullshit. Huh.”

  “Where’d you hear it?”

  “My old lady.”

  “Yeah? You know where Lewis said I should go for more information?”

  “Where?”

  “My old lady.”

  They laughed about that for a very short time, and Lucas said, “Let’s go talk to the feds.”

  17

  On the way up the street, Lucas got back on his cell phone and called the sheriff’s office. He got the sheriff on the line, explained what he needed.

  “That’s not a bad idea,” the sheriff said. “I’ve got three guys on duty at the schools, but that’s not critical—I could have everybody who’s in town down here in forty-five minutes.”

  “That’d be great,” Lucas said. “We need the help. We’re really stuck.”

  THE FBI SQUAD was led by Lanny Cole and Jim Green, the agents they’d met at Hale Sorrell’s home. Cole was standing in the yard, talking to a man in an Air Force snorkel parka, the fur-rimmed snout sticking eight inches out from the man’s face. Lucas and Del got out, and Cole came over with the parka and they shook hands.

  “This is Aron Jaffe from Hollywood,” Cole said, nodding at the parka. The parka nodded back. “He’ll run the GPR search team.”

  “Can you hear me in there?” Lucas asked, talking at the snorkel.

  “I can hear you fine,” Jaffe said. “Only my legs are frostbitten.”

  “Is the frozen ground gonna screw you up?”

  “Naw. Might help,” he said. “We might see some seriously unconsolidated stuff.”

  They talked for another minute, then Cole said, “The second girl, Burke—her parents are driving up here from Lincoln. They want to look at the locket, although I don’t think there’s any doubt.”

  “Okay,” Lucas said. �
��Are you all straight with the BCA crew?”

  “Yeah, we’re fine. You got anything going at all?”

  Lucas shook his head. “Not much. You know about the fire last night.”

  “Went up and looked at the hole this morning.”

  “The girl who was hurt says the killer sounded like he was from here. His voice did, the way he spoke.”

  “The Fargo accent,” said the guy from Hollywood.

  “Yeah. We know that three of the kidnappers worked for the Calb auto-body place, and the whole Cash family down in Kansas City is supposedly heavy into car theft. So . . . there’s a thing here.”

  “A nub,” Del suggested.

  “A nexus,” said the guy from Hollywood.

  “Whatever. I think it’s about fifty-fifty that the killer’s not more than two or three hundred yards away from us. Somebody from here, connected to Calb’s.”

  “You wanna jack the guy up? I could come along, add a little federal heat.”

  “Probably. But I’m going down to the sheriff’s office first. We need to talk to the deputies, to everybody that knows anybody up here. There’s gotta be some kind of edge we can get our fingernails under.”

  Before they left, they walked Jaffe around the place, and pointed out spots along the creek, behind the house, where bodies could have been buried. “That’s a sizable chunk of ground. Gonna take a while,” Jaffe said.

  THEY LEFT THE FBI men, stopped at Wolf’s Cafe, found it empty except for Wolf, ordered pancakes, and asked her to name everybody she knew in every building in the town. “Please God, don’t tell anybody I helped. That poor goddamned Martha West, getting roasted.”

  “Nobody’ll hear it from us,” Lucas said.

  She started reciting names, and Lucas got a piece of paper from his notebook and drew an outline map of the town and slotted the names in cartoon houses. They took the map south, to the sheriff’s office, and found twenty or so deputies milling around. The sheriff came out and said, “I got a courtroom upstairs. Already some people up there, I’ll send the rest of them up now. Only got two or three who can’t make it.”

  Thirty people, half of them in uniform, had gathered in the courtroom. Two or three people who looked like courthouse loafers had squeezed in, curious, and Lucas ordered everybody who wasn’t a sworn deputy to leave. The loafers squeezed back out, and one of the deputies closed the doors.

  “I don’t want anybody to talk about what goes on here,” he said. “If you gotta talk to your wives, tell them to keep their mouths shut. I know it’s hard, but it’s only for a couple of days. What I have is a list of everybody who lives in Broderick.” He waved Del’s yellow legal pad. “I think I have the name of everybody. And we need to have a real gossipy talk about who does what up there. Who’s been busted, who’s been warned, what kind of trouble they’ve gotten themselves in, if they have—we need anything you’ve got. I’m telling you fellas, after last night . . . we need to nail this sucker. And we don’t have a hell of a lot to go on.”

  “No DNA at all?” one of the deputies asked. Lucas recognized him as one of the guys who’d been at the fire.

  “We’re not too hopeful,” Lucas said. “Mrs. West was burned beyond recognition, and those of you who’ve been up at the house know what that looks like. It’s a big pile of charcoal.”

  “Cash and Kelly worked for Gene Calb; have you talked to Gene?”

  “Yeah, but he says he doesn’t know nothin’ about nothin’. So what I need to know from you is, What about Gene Calb? Does he really not know nothin’ about nothin’?”

  “He’s always been a pretty good guy,” one of the deputies said. “Can’t see him killing anybody.”

  “Ever been in trouble?”

  “Traffic tickets, I guess. Maybe a DWI when he was a kid.” The deputy looked around, picked out a man in gray coveralls. “What do you think, Loren? You go up there.”

  The man named Loren cleared his throat and said, “I rent a paint booth from him for a couple days, every year or so—I refinish cars as a hobby. The thing is . . . there are some pretty tough hombres up there. Mike Bannister or Kiley Anderson or Dexter Barnes, everybody knows them. Gene handles them, though.”

  “So what about these guys, Bannister and Anderson and Barnes?” Lucas asked.

  The deputy said, “They’re mostly just hell-raisers, but they’ve been known to steal a car occasionally. There’s one guy out there, Durrell Schmidt, will steal a calf every once in a while. That’s what we think, anyway.”

  “Had some marijuana around there,” another man said.

  “Had some everywhere, it’s mostly just ditch weed,” a third deputy said.

  They went around for a while, told Lucas a story or two, and laughed at them. Lucas finally asked, “So who up there could kill somebody? Who up there, if he really got his back to the wall, could do that?”

  Loren said, reluctantly, “You could see three or four of those guys getting drunk and maybe something happens and they get crazy with a gun and shoot somebody, almost like an accident—but if it came down to sitting around and thinking about it, and then doing it . . . I gotta say Gene Calb. Maybe Dexter Barnes. I mean, if it came right down to having to do something really tough, and then doing it, one of those two guys. I don’t think they did, but I don’t know anybody else up there who . . . who . . .” He scratched his chest as he looked for a word. “Who is really organized enough to do this. Organized isn’t the right word, maybe . . .”

  There was some nodding of heads, but then another deputy said, “Do we know for sure that the guy who killed the Sorrells and West had anything to do with the kidnappers? Or that the guy who killed the Sorrells is the same guy who killed West?”

  Lucas smiled. That was a new thought, that everything was unconnected. “We believe there’s gotta be some connection—if there isn’t, we’re really out in the dark.”

  Another deputy said, “I talked to the doc this morning, the medical examiner, and they X-rayed Martha West and she’s got a slug in her head. You know about this?”

  “I haven’t talked to the ME today,” Lucas said. “Good slug?”

  “Most of it’s there. So if it’s the same guy who did the Sorrells, you could get a match.”

  “All right. Listen, guys, I want you all to go out and question everybody you know. I don’t mean interrogations, just ask around. Was there anything weird going on up in Broderick? Anything that’s sort of undercover around Calb’s place? If you hear anything, from anyone, that seems like it might be real, give me a call. The comm center here has my number.”

  “So what’re you gonna do?” somebody asked. “Wait for us to call?”

  “We’re gonna go back up and walk the town again. The FBI is up there now—there are rumors about a second kidnap victim, I’m sure, and I can tell you that it seems likely that there were at least two girls, not just one. So . . . ask around. Let me know.”

  BEFORE THEY LEFT, Lucas asked a woman in the comm center if there was any place that they might eat a late lunch that didn’t involve the Bird. She suggested they try Logan’s Fancy Meats, which was down two streets and around the corner, on the right. They tried it, and found a slow-talking thin man standing behind a meat counter. He was wearing hawkish black-plastic-framed glasses, the kind that New York authors wear, and was reading a copy of The Best-Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. He sighed when he put the book down, and said, “What can I do for you gentlemen?”

  Lucas asked, “Those pretty good poems?”

  The thin man’s eyebrows went up; he was skeptical. “You read poetry?”

  “I do,” Lucas said. “I’ve seen the book, but haven’t had a chance to look through it.”

  “It’s very good,” the thin man said. “Do you know Kubla Khan?”

  “Of course,” Lucas said. “Maybe the best beginning of a poem ever written. It’s wonderful.”

  Without prompting, the thin man lifted the book, and read, “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure do
me decree, where Alph the sacred river ran . . .”

  When he finished, his eyes gone dreamy behind the black glasses, Lucas and Del shuffled their feet, as cops will do when caught listening to poetry, and then Del cleared his throat and said, “Could I have a cold chuck roast sandwich?”

  THEY LEFT WITH heavy sandwiches on thick rye bread, chuck roast for Del and hot sliced chicken for Lucas, along with bottles of cream soda, and ate in the car on the way back to Broderick.

  “Gonna walk the place again?” Del asked.

  “No choice—things have changed since the fire. This time, we try to scare them into talking . . . if there’s anything worth talking about.”

  WITHOUT THINKING MUCH about it, Lucas headed for the Cash house, where they could at least be inside. When they pulled up, Cole, the lead FBI agent, coatless, was walking out of the house. A black Lexus sedan was parked in the yard behind the federal cars. A fiftyish couple had apparently just gotten out and were standing passively next to a sheriff’s deputy.

  “Aw, man,” Del said, as they pulled into the yard. “Must be that Burke kid’s folks.”

  “Worst goddamn thing I can think of, having your kid snatched and killed,” Lucas said. “You want to talk to them?”

  “Maybe to see what they have to say,” Del said.

  “Good. Go talk to them. I don’t want to. I’m gonna start hitting all the houses again. Find me when you’re done with them.”

  “All right. We going after Calb? Looks like there are people over at his shop.”

  Lucas looked down the highway. There was smoke coming out of the shop chimney, and a half dozen cars were parked around the lot outside.

  “Maybe wait one day,” Lucas said. “Do the whole town today, and jack him up tomorrow.”

  18

  Loren Singleton hurt. The pills helped, but they wouldn’t last. The bleeding, at least, had stopped, but a bruise was growing across his chest, from his breastbone to his armpit. The bullet hole looked like a black mole, clogged with hardening blood. He had a fantasy: drive to Fargo, buy some women’s makeup at a Wal-Mart, paint his chest so it looked okay, then go bare-chested for a minute or so in the deputies’ locker room.