Naked Prey

by John Sandford

  What was he forgetting? He walked through the whole scene, and remembered the shell from the .380.

  Found it in the kitchen, carried it outside, rolled it through Gene Calb’s fingers, and made sure he got one good right thumbprint on the cartridge, as it would be if Gene were pressing a shell into a magazine.

  Carried the cartridge back inside and tossed it on the floor.

  His mother had one last idea. Gene had a home office . . .

  They went through a Rolodex, and inside found a Kansas City phone number for Davis. He dialed the number and a woman answered, “Hello?”

  “My name’s Carl. We are asking Kansas City people for donations to the Missouri State Law Enforcement Association, which supports your local state, county, and municipal law enforcement officers—”

  “We gave some,” a woman’s voice said.

  “Our records don’t show that,” Singleton said. “We feel our law enforcement officers . . .”

  He strung the conversation out another ten seconds, until an increasingly irate woman said, “Go away,” and the phone slammed down. There’d be a record that just before the Calbs disappeared, they’d called Shawn Davis in Kansas City.

  Good enough.

  In the garage, he got a shovel, and they climbed into Calb’s truck. He had three hours before he went on duty. Needed another pill, too.

  As they backed out of the driveway he thought, Goddamn, those pork chops were good. Then he thought, Katina.

  Margery said, “Watch out for the mailbox, you dumb shit.”

  THE REST OF the evening was straight out of a horror film. By the time Singleton got home, he hurt so badly he could barely breathe. He peeled off his coat, peeled off the fleece under it, and found a three-inch bloodstain on his shirt. He took off the shirt, and his bloody undershirt, touched the bullet wound, and flinched. The scab over the hole had cracked open, and when he touched it, the pain flared through his rib cage, and ran around almost to his spine. At this rate, his arm would soon be useless.

  He began sobbing as he looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. Katina. What about Katina? Was she in heaven? Was she looking down at him, knowing what he’d done?

  He braced himself on the sink with both hands, and tipped his head down, and tried to cry something more than the gasping sobs . . . nothing came out. After a moment, he pulled himself back together and began looking at the wound again. Something had to be done.

  He carefully manipulated the bruised skin with his fingers, squeezing it, like a pimple, fighting the pain. The skin and fat wasn’t particularly thick at the entry point, and he thought—could it be his imagination?—that he felt a lump. The lump didn’t move, though.

  Hurt. But he couldn’t help himself. He went to the dresser and dug out a sewing kit, took out a needle, ran hot water on it for a moment, and then, using the eye end, probed the bullet hole. The probe hurt, but not as much as squeezing the wound. Holding his breath, he moved the needle around, then down a bit, maneuvered, felt as though he were pushing muscle aside—and hit something hard.

  Didn’t feel like bone. He moved the needle carefully now, judging the characteristics of the lump. Found the edges. “That’s it,” he muttered to himself. He found what he believed to be the center of the slug, and pushed on it. A little pain, but the lump didn’t move. He found the edge of it, explored beside it. Brighter blood was coming out now, apparently from freshly pierced capillaries, and it made the exploration more difficult, the lump more slippery. But he found the side of it, and pushed with the end of the needle. It didn’t move. He explored some more; he was sweating now, from the pain, but the pain was still bearable.

  After a minute, he pulled the needle out and looked at it. The bullet, he thought, was stuck in a rib—hadn’t gone through, but had gotten into it. Every time he breathed, or flexed, the motion was transmitted through his rib cage, and that was where the spasms of pain came from. He thought about it for a moment, then pulled on a sweatshirt and went out to the garage.

  If he hadn’t had just the right thing to work with, he might not have tried. But he did have the right thing, or what seemed like the right thing, in his tool box: a pair of tiny, needle-nosed pliers used to do automotive electrical work.

  This was going to hurt, he thought. But if it worked . . .

  He carried them back into the house, took two pills, scrubbed the pliers with antibacterial soap, and then, still not happy with their condition, dropped them in a saucepan, covered them with water, and put them on the stove. He let them boil for a while, then cool down underwater, as he waited for the pills to take hold. He glanced at the clock: forty-five minutes before he was due at work. He could do this.

  He did it sitting at the kitchen table. Probed the lump with the needle, then slowly pushed the pliers in until he touched it. The pain had been dulled by the pills, but this hurt as bad as anything yet. His right hand, the pliers hand, began shaking, so he pinned the pliers in place with his left hand, and leaned against the table, bracing himself.

  Then with his right hand, steady now, he slowly spread the pliers, pushed them down alongside the lump—or what felt like down, his hand shaking again—and squeezed. Pain flared through his body. Might have gotten some meat, he thought. Squeezed . . . and had it.

  Slow and steady. He held it, pulled, pulled . . . had some meat, but then suddenly felt the lump come free. Held it, held it, pulled . . .

  And had it out. It emerged like a small, gray larva, slick with blood, a .22 slug half the size of a pea.

  Blood dribbled out of his chest again, but now everything felt different. The pain was changed—there’d been an ugly, corrosive feel to it, and now it just hurt. This he could handle.

  He tottered off to the bathroom, looked at himself in the mirror. His face seemed narrower, sharper, wolf-like; and white, from the pain, his frown lines etched deep.

  But he could touch his chest without flinching. He could manipulate the wound area without the arc of pain. He took two tabs of penicillin and a pain pill and looked at his watch. Had to start moving. He patched himself with gauze and tape, carried his bloody shirt and undershirt and fleece down to the washer, and threw them in, poured in a half-cup of liquid Tide, and started it. Climbed into his uniform.

  Almost done now, he thought, as he buttoned up his shirt. There was Letty West—but if they were searching the landfill, he would have known about it, and so far, they weren’t. Maybe she didn’t know? Maybe he’d taken that risk for nothing?

  He had the night to think about it.

  And to think about the bullet. There was a sense of accomplishment with the bullet. Damn, that was a story. Maybe he could tell it someday.

  THAT NIGHT WAS the longest in Singleton’s life—and like most of the other nights of his life, nothing happened. He drove back and forth through town, his usual eleven o’clock grid, then headed out into the countryside, passing through a list of small Custer County towns, showing the flag for the sheriff. He tried to think about Katina as he drove, but where Katina used to be, there was a big dark box. He tried to focus on her face, and nothing came. He tried to think about what would happen in the next few days, and couldn’t think of anything.

  At seven o’clock, he signed off, went home, and crashed—lay fully clothed on his bed, unfeeling, until the telephone rang.

  19

  They were stuck.

  They’d spent the day before tramping around Broderick, talking with housewives and Calb employees, getting nowhere. The pitch Lucas had made to the sheriff’s deputies hadn’t produced anything yet, and Lucas began to wonder if he might be able to devise a way to pull the killer in. The problem was a lack of bait. There was Letty, but he couldn’t use her. Might have been able to use her if she was a fifty-year-old asshole who’d brought the trouble on herself, but not an innocent teenager.

  He worried a little that he’d even bothered to think of reasons not to use her . . .

  HE WAS SITTING on his bed at the Motel 6, reading a Star Trib
une story about the attack on the West house, and waiting for Del to knock. The TV was tuned to the Weather Channel, because they’d heard a rumor from the night clerk that snow was coming in. Coming in somewhere. When he looked out the window after he got up, there were a few fat flakes drifting around, but nothing serious. He was rereading the fire story when the room phone rang.

  Ruth Lewis: “The sheriff called. They want to bury Martha West tomorrow and I’m going to bring Letty back up. I wanted to let you know—the sheriff said they’ll provide security at the funeral.”

  “She can travel? Letty?”

  “Your wife says so. Your wife is the admitting physician, by the way. She said you didn’t know. She said they’ll need Letty back here in a week, but that she could travel tomorrow.”

  “Has anybody figured out where she could stay?”

  “Yes. She’ll stay with me. I have lots of room right now, and we get along.”

  “All right. I wish I’d known about the funeral. I might have tried to push it a couple of days.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Lewis said. “The sheriff said the arrangements had been made . . . and that’s what I know.”

  “Come and see me when you get up here,” Lucas said. “We’ve got more to talk about.”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  DEL CAME BY. “We doing Calb?”

  “I’ve got nothing else,” Lucas said.

  They got in the car and loafed up to Broderick, across the gray landscape, heading for Wolf’s Cafe, where they’d found that the pancakes were edible. The snow had gotten heavier, and a North Dakota radio station said there could be four to six inches by evening. There were a half-dozen cars parked outside Cash’s house—BCA crime scene guys, the FBI, and at least one deputy sheriff, Lucas guessed.

  Wolf’s was quiet, with only two other customers, both on stools at the bar, one talking with Wolf about going to Palm Springs, the other eating cherry pie and drinking coffee and eavesdropping. Lucas and Del took the furthest booth so they could talk. Through the window they could see the front of Calb’s body shop, and could see people coming and going.

  “Hate waiting,” Del said. “We’re just waiting for somebody to get killed so we’ve got something more to work with.”

  “We’d know what we were doing if we could figure out why he went after Letty. If he went after Letty. We’re assuming that, but what if he was after Martha? We’re thinking it was Letty because we’ve been hanging around with Letty.”

  “No, no. We think it’s Letty because after he killed Martha, he went after Letty,” Del said. “He tried to hunt her down out there, after he killed Martha. Letty says her mother was yelling at her to get out . . . Martha just got in the way.”

  Lucas nodded. “Okay. So what does Letty know that makes it necessary to kill her? Must be something.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t know she knows,” Del said.

  “We’ll talk to her again tomorrow. I keep going back to your theory that there can’t be two big separate crimes in one small town without them being related, somehow,” Lucas said. “We’ve got two big separate crimes—the drug running and the kidnappings—and they don’t seem to be related.”

  “Could be an exception, I guess,” Del said. “But . . .” He rubbed his chin, sipped at his coffee. “Maybe we ought to get with Ruth, or one of the other women, and do a whole history of how they got here. Why here? How did they get involved with Calb? Can’t be just a coincidence that Calb has these ties down to Kansas City car thieves and these women . . .”

  He trailed off, and Lucas said, “What?”

  “What, ‘what’?”

  “Where were you going with that? ’Cause you gotta be right. How did they hook all this together? How did they land on Calb, out here in the middle of the prairie? There’s gotta be more to it.”

  “That cheer you up?”

  “Gives us something to think about,” Lucas said. “Something to pull at.”

  WOLF BROUGHT THE pancakes over, and a couple of minutes later, as they were eating, a black Lexus backed out of the Cash house, rolled south, and pulled into the parking lot next to Lucas’s Acura. A white-haired man got out of the driver’s side, and a moment later, Jim Green, the FBI agent, got out of the passenger side. Green pointed at Lucas’s Acura and said something to the white-haired man, who went back into the Lexus and fished out a briefcase.

  They clumped inside and looked around, and Lucas lifted a hand. The two men came down and squeezed into the booth.

  “Tom Burke—Lucas Davenport, Minnesota BCA,” Green said. “You’ve already met Del.”

  “The FBI crew hasn’t found anything, any gravesites,” Burke said. “We don’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed.”

  Lucas shook his head.

  Burke said, “I have some paper that Jim said you may be interested in. When Annie was taken, the kidnappers told us that if we contacted the FBI or any other police agency, they would know, because they had a source inside the FBI. They sent us these papers . . .” He produced a neatly Xeroxed stack of papers and handed the stack to Lucas. “I took them to my attorney, who had worked with the Justice Department before he went into private practice, and he said they looked authentic. So we paid up, without calling in the FBI. I felt a little foolish even at the time, but I didn’t think we could take the chance. We never heard another word from the kidnappers.”

  Lucas riffled through the stack of papers, and Burke added, “Those aren’t the originals. The originals are back home, with the FBI.”

  “It looks like stuff I’ve seen from the FBI,” Lucas said.

  Green said, “Whoever did it had some idea of how the paperwork looks, but it’s not quite right. The fonts aren’t quite right, the formats aren’t quite right. It’s like they made them on a computer . . .”

  “Cash and Warr had a computer . . .”

  “Nothing on it but games,” Green said. “Not even a word processor. What those are, are supposed memos inside some kind of kidnapping unit. It’s all bullshit: the kidnappings they talk about never occurred. It’s just good enough to convince Mr. Burke not to talk to the authorities before he paid the money.”

  “Because we didn’t care about the money,” Burke said. “One million dollars, in unmarked, nonsequential fifties and hundreds. We thought that if we paid, maybe they wouldn’t kill her. It was worth the chance.”

  “If you didn’t care about the money,” Del said.

  “We didn’t. Not too much, anyway.” He showed a quick, thin grin, dug into his briefcase and pulled out another stack of Xeroxes. “I gave one of these to Jim. They’re checking the bills they got from Deon Cash’s house . . . I understand one of you gentlemen found them.”

  “Del did,” Lucas said. He took the second stack of sheets. They were legal-sized Xeroxes, each showing several fifty- and hundred-dollar bills.

  “What we did is, we got the money from the casinos, new bills, in stacks of sequential numbers. There were twenty bills in each stack. We Xeroxed all those stacks—the way it broke down, there were eight hundred and fifty of them—and from those, you can figure out all the serial numbers. You’ve got the top serial number, and the additional nineteen bills follow in order. Then we mixed them all up, so they’d appear to be nonsequential. But you can look at any bill, and tell if it came from the Vegas money.”

  “Pretty smart,” Lucas said. “The money in Cash’s place came from you?”

  “Don’t know yet,” Green said. “The money’s locked up in the bank, and we had to wait until it opened this morning. Time lock on the safe deposit. There was no great hurry anyway. We’ve got a guy over there now, looking.”

  “Did you ever have anything to do with Kansas City, or a Cash family in Kansas City?” Del asked Burke.

  “We have nursing homes in the Kansas City area,” Burke said. “I own six different chains of nursing homes in Minnesota, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri. But when Jim told me about the Kansas City connection . . . as part of
our public-relations campaigns, we donate money to various hospitals and medical schools for research on age-related illnesses. About a month before Annie was taken, we’d given two million dollars to the University of Missouri medical schools. Our public-relations people tried to get it in all the papers where we have nursing homes. They did very well—I suspect those stories were the proximate cause of Annie’s kidnapping.”

  “Oh, boy,” Lucas said.

  Del asked, “Where do you have nursing homes in Minnesota? Around here?”

  “Yes, in Armstrong, down in Red Lake Falls, Crookston, Detroit Lakes, Fergus Falls.”

  “And there was a story in the Armstrong paper?”

  “Yes. I’m afraid so,” Burke said. “I have to say that if I’d found out who they were, I wouldn’t have done what Mr. Sorrell did, but I understand it, and I applaud it. I wish to God I could have shaken his hand. Now we’ve got to get this last one, or the last ones. We have to root out all of them.”

  “Doing our best,” Green said. “We’ll get them.”

  “Him,” Lucas said. “It’s one guy.”

  “How do you know?” Green asked.

  “The feel of the killings. It’s one guy.” Lucas looked out the window toward Calb’s shop. Little bits of icy snow were drifting across the highway.

  “Cold up here,” Burke said.

  THEY FINISHED EATING and were pulling on their coats when Green got a call on his cell phone. They were at the door when Green said, “Hey,” and waved them back. They stepped back and he said, “Numbers match. On the ransom money.”

  Burke had tears in his eyes, but didn’t seem to know it.

  LUCAS PUT THE paper from Burke in the car, and they rolled across the highway to Calb’s. Inside, two guys were working on the truck they’d seen before, and it occurred to Lucas that there were too many people for too little truck. He stopped the closest guy. “Is Gene Calb around?”

  The guy shook his head. “Can’t find him. Should be here. We need the keys for the office.”