Naked Prey

by John Sandford

  “Can’t find him?” Lucas said.

  “No answer at his house. He’s always here first,” the guy said. “Don’t know where he could’ve got to.”

  Lucas and Del went back outside, to the Acura, moving fast. “Please, God, let him be at Logan’s Fancy Meats.”

  They sped back toward town, Lucas pushing the Acura hard. The snow was coming down harder now, the flakes a little smaller, but driven by a wind from the northwest. Now it looked serious. Two miles out of Broderick, a car a half-mile in front of them, and coming their way, suddenly showed the flaring red lights of a police roof rack. “Goddamn radar,” Lucas said.

  It was Zahn, in his patrol car. Lucas continued past him, then pulled to the shoulder, jumped out, and as Zahn swung around in a circle, waved at him. Zahn pulled up and his window rolled down and he said, “I hate to ask.”

  “Nobody can find Gene Calb,” Lucas said. “He’s not at work, not answering his phone. We’re heading for his house. You know where he lives?”

  “Follow on behind me,” Zahn said.

  They tucked in behind him and rolled down to Armstrong, and Lucas could see him talking on his radio. “Calling the sheriff,” Lucas said.

  A DEPUTY’S CAR was pulling up outside Calb’s house when they arrived. A neighbor across the street stood by his picture window, watching, as they all got out. The deputy asked, “What do you think?”

  “Knock on the door,” Lucas said. They all trooped up to the stoop, pushed the doorbell, heard it ringing inside. When nothing happened, Lucas knocked and pushed the doorbell again. Del went around to the back, looked in the window on the back door, then returned to the front of the house. “Can’t see anything in the kitchen—I think they’re just gone.”

  Zahn walked over to the garage and tried the door. It opened, and he looked inside, then closed the door.

  “Both cars here.”

  “Out for a walk?” Del asked.

  Lucas said, “Let’s go ask that guy.” He nodded across the street, at the neighbor in the picture window. He and Del walked across, and the neighbor met them at the door. He was wearing a blue fleece sweatshirt and had a pipe clamped between large yellow teeth. “Haven’t seen them,” he said. “What’s going on?”

  “When did you see them last?”

  Puff, puff, thought. “I saw Gloria yesterday evening, when she turned on the lights in the living room. That’s about it.”

  “Haven’t seen anybody coming or going?”

  “Nope. What’d they do?”

  “Nothing that we know of,” Lucas said. They looked up and down the street. “They have any friends close by?”

  Puff, puff, more thought. “The Carlsons, up in that stone-front house . . . they’d probably be their best friends. But we’re all pretty friendly around here.”

  “Thanks.”

  As they were walking away, the man said, “That red Corolla in front of the house. I don’t know who that belongs to.” He pointed with his pipe. “It’s been there all night.”

  “Yeah?” They stopped to look inside the Corolla, saw a clipboard and what looked like a daily diary on the passenger seat, and in the back seat, two packing boxes of canned food.

  “That looks like the stuff the church women take around,” Del said. “I saw a Corolla there, too.”

  “Been here all night?” Lucas tried the car door, and the door popped open. He reached across the seat and picked up the diary. Inside the front cover was a hand-written Katina Lewis.

  Lucas showed the diary to Del. “Is that . . . Ruth Lewis? Or somebody else?”

  Del shook his head. “I don’t know. And where is she?”

  They walked back across the street and talked to the deputy and Zahn. The deputy said, “Katina . . . she’s the other one’s sister. She’s going with one of our guys. Loren Singleton. She’s been sleeping over with him, but he’s like a mile from here.”

  “Give him a ring,” Lucas said. To Zahn: “Could you run down to the LEC and talk to the sheriff, and ask him to get a search warrant up here? You’ll have to swear that we were looking for Calb for questioning in connection with a crime . . . which we are.”

  “On my way.”

  “Let’s go talk to the Carlsons,” Lucas said to Del.

  LINDA CARLSON WAS a good-looking, blond forty-five-year-old whose husband worked as a State Farm agent. She had large eyes, slightly tilted upward, that made her look sleepy, as though she’d just been rolling around in bed with someone. Lucas saw her and thought, Mmm. “I called over there last night, but didn’t get an answer,” she said, putting a hand on Lucas’s sleeve. She was a toucher, too. “I was kinda surprised that there was nobody home, because I talked to Gloria yesterday afternoon and they weren’t planning to go anywhere . . .” She was wearing a fuzzy angora V-necked sweater and her hand crept up the V until it stopped at her throat, and she said in a hushed voice, “You don’t think anything’s happened?”

  “We’re just trying to get in touch,” Lucas said.

  “I’ve got a key,” Carlson said. “I can go down there anytime . . .”

  Lucas spread his hands—“We can’t go in without a search warrant. If you could just take a peek, if you don’t think the Calbs would care. All we want to know is that they’re okay.”

  “They wouldn’t care. Let me get my coat.”

  She went to get her coat and Del muttered, “You’ve got drool dripping out the side of your mouth, marriage-boy.”

  “Just looking,” Lucas said.

  BACK AT THE Calbs’, the deputy said, “I talked to Loren. He was on duty last night and didn’t see Lewis. He said he thought she was coming over before he went on duty, but she never showed up. He called the church and she wasn’t there.”

  “Okay.”

  Carlson’s key was for the back door. She went in, as Lucas, Del, and the deputy waited on the back porch. She called, “Gloria? Gloria? Gene?” She disappeared into the interior of the house, then came back and said to Lucas, “Maybe you better come in.”

  “What? Are they . . .”

  “Nobody’s home,” she said. She was nervous, turning pink. “I don’t know about these things, but Gloria’s a very neat housekeeper . . . If this . . .”

  She led Lucas to a hallway off the kitchen and pointed down. There was a dark spot on the carpet, about the size of a paper pie plate. Not coffee, not Coke. Heavier than that, crusty-looking.

  Lucas squatted next to it, then said, “Please don’t touch anything. Keep your hands by your side and carefully walk back out through the door, okay?” He followed her out to the porch and said to the deputy, “Wait out here, okay?” and to Del, “C’mere.”

  Del followed, and when Lucas showed him the rug, he squatted, as Lucas had, then said, “Yeah.” He stood up, went into the kitchen, tore a small sheet of paper towel off a roll by the sink, tapped it under the faucet head to get it damp, then stepped back to the hallway and touched the dark spot with the damp point of the paper towel.

  He held it up to Lucas. The towel showed a diluted blood-red. “That’s a problem,” Del said.

  LUCAS PULLED OUT his cell phone and dialed the LEC, asked for the sheriff. Anderson came on and he asked, “Have you seen Ray Zahn?”

  “He’s here now, we’re working out a warrant.”

  “Listen, a friend of the Calbs from down the street had a key and permission to go into the house. She went in, found blood, and invited us in. I don’t know the legal aspects of it, but it looks bad. We need that warrant down here right now, before we start pulling the house apart. But we need it now.”

  “Ten minutes,” Anderson said. ‘I’ll walk it around myself.”

  Lucas called Green, the FBI agent, told him about the blood. “Send our crime scene guys down here, will you?” Lucas asked. “We may have another scene for him to process.”

  “Right now,” Green said.

  Lucas rang off and Del said, “Over here.”

  He was squatting in a corner of the kitchen, and L
ucas stepped over. A pistol shell lay against a molding.

  “A .380,” Del said.

  “Yeah. Goddamnit. Listen, let’s do a walk-through. We’re okay on that—the blood’s fresh enough. Quick trip through the house.”

  THE HOUSE WAS large, but they did the first pass in five minutes. No bodies, but the house had been stirred around. “Closets are halfway cleaned out,” Del said. “Lot of stuff gone, and they were in a hurry.”

  “Whose blood is it, if the Calbs were running?”

  “How did they run, if both of their cars are in the garage?”

  “Taxi to the airport?”

  “Do they have a taxi here? Do they have airplanes that go anywhere?”

  “Shit, I don’t know.”

  They were snapping at each other, feeling the pressure. Three people on the line—the Calbs and the church woman, Katina Lewis.

  “Where’s the goddamn sheriff?”

  ANDERSON ARRIVED TEN minutes later—“Couldn’t find the judge. He was in, but he was down in the surveyor’s office, bullshitting. Took forever to find him.”

  “We’re okay to dig around?”

  “Go ahead,” Anderson said. “You need more people?”

  “I don’t know,” Lucas said. “The BCA crime scene people are coming down from Broderick. The FBI may be with them . . . First thing, we’ve got to figure out if the Calbs are really gone.”

  “Where’s that blood?”

  Lucas showed him, and Anderson shook his head. “That’s a lot of blood.”

  “But whose blood is it?” Lucas asked.

  HAVING GIVEN THE house a quick run-through, they checked the cars. The engines were cold, so they hadn’t been used in the past couple of hours. There was nothing in either one of them that helped.

  The lead crime scene guy arrived, with one of his subordinates, and with Del and Lucas trailing, they began in the basement and slowly worked their way to the top of the house. The subordinate noticed the strands of wool on the hatchway that led to the space under the eaves.

  “They wouldn’t hang there forever,” he said. “If they were in a hurry, what were they doing up there?”

  “Had something hidden?” Del suggested.

  They got a chair, and then an ottoman to stack on top of it, and Lucas and Del helped him balance as the crime scene guy stood on top of the ottoman, pushed the hatch up, clicked on his flashlight, and froze. “Oh, Jesus,” he said. “Aw, Jesus Christ.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. Get me down.”

  The tech hopped down and Lucas clambered on top of the ottoman. When he stuck his head through the opening, Katina Lewis’s face was four inches from his. Her dead eyes looked straight through him and he instantly flashed back to the hanging scene, the dead eyes of Cash and Warr; and he saw the face of the other woman, Ruth Lewis, in this woman.

  “Lewis,” he told Del. “Just like the other ones.”

  “Only her?”

  Lucas couldn’t see past her, but he could see the rest of the area, and there was nothing but pink insulation. “I don’t see anyone else. I need to get a little higher . . .” He grabbed the edges of the hatch, pulled himself up a foot, but didn’t have the leverage to get any farther. He could just see over Lewis’s body, and there was nothing but insulation. “Nope. I think it’s just her.”

  “I’ll get something out on the Calbs,” Anderson said. “You think it’s Gene doing this?”

  “Looks like it,” Lucas said. He climbed down off the ottoman and chair. “Whoever it is, he’s breaking up—he’s going through a psychotic break. If it’s Calb, I’d say his wife is in big trouble. He could kill anyone, now.”

  20

  The crime scene crew had suspended work at Cash’s house and had moved down to Calb’s. Lewis’s body was still in the crawl space under the eaves and nobody knew exactly when they could move her—removing the body would be a job, and they wanted as few people as possible going in and out of the house until it was fully processed.

  Lucas and Del carefully probed through the life the Calbs had left behind. Calb had a small home office, and one of the file drawers was open. Files had been taken, Lucas thought. He found income tax returns for 1996–99, but nothing newer. None of the files related directly to the body-shop business, but when they’d talked to Calb the first time, Lucas had noticed a row of filing cabinets in his office, so business papers might well be there.

  Del came in after a while, with a small zippered bag. He handed it to Lucas, who said, “What?” and zipped the bag open. An insulin kit.

  “Somebody’s a diabetic and didn’t take his or her shit,” Del said.

  “Unless this is a backup.”

  “Still.”

  A deputy came through, and they asked him about the airport; it was small planes only, and Calb wasn’t a flier, as far as the deputy knew. Nor were there any taxis in town.

  One of the BCA investigators from Bemidji, who’d been working at the Cash house, called to say that he and his partner had walked across to Calb’s place and had frozen it—all the employees were there, and they were detaining any more who showed up.

  Then the crime scene crew at Calb’s house found a fingerprint on the .380 shell. “We’ll do the Super Glue trick but it’s about the best single print I’ve ever seen,” the tech said. “We’ll have something for you.”

  Lucas, going through Mrs. Calb’s bedroom closet, found two shoe-boxes that contained virtually new shoes, with perhaps an evening’s worth of wear on the soles. In Calb’s closet, on the floor under some shoes, he found a steel box, and inside the box, a thousand dollars in ten-dollar bills and a loaded .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver.

  “I’m getting a bad vibe,” Del said. “He might leave the gun, if he’s got another one. Why would he leave the money?”

  A FEW MINUTES after noon, the sheriff came back, trailing a tall cowboy-looking cop who the sheriff introduced as Loren Singleton.

  “Loren was seeing Ms. Lewis,” Anderson said.

  “I’m sorry,” Lucas said. “About your friend.”

  Singleton was distant, a little vague. Lucas had seen it before. “I’m, a, you know, we were . . . hell, we were sleeping together. But, I, uh . . .” A tear ran down his cheek and he wiped it with his shirt sleeve. “Goldarnit. Why’d this have to happen? You think it was Gene that did it?”

  “Can’t find him. Do you know any reason he’d have a problem with Ms. Lewis?”

  “No, I don’t,” Singleton said. “I know what Katina was doing . . . I know what those women were doing, and I’m sure Gene knew . . . but how in the heck, I mean, what would that mean to Gene?”

  “What were the women doing?” Anderson asked, taking a half-step back from his deputy.

  “Bringing prescription drugs across the border from Canada,” Lucas said. “They had a little distribution thing going, giving out drugs to the poor.”

  Anderson nodded, glanced at Singleton, and said, “Well, tell you the truth, half the people in town do that sometimes. No point in smuggling, though—you can order on the Internet.”

  “Gotta have the Internet,” Lucas said. “Most of their clients are poor, and a lot of them are older—probably not too big on the Internet.”

  “How well did you know Gene Calb?” Del asked.

  “I grew up here, so I knew him pretty well,” Singleton said. “I didn’t think . . . I don’t know that he’d do anything like this. I mean, I refinish cars as a hobby, and once a year or so, I’d rent one of his paint booths to do some painting . . . That’s how I met Katina. At Calb’s.”

  “What was she doing there?” Lucas asked.

  Singleton shook his head—”Just chatting, I guess. I mean, there’re only forty or fifty people in that town. You tend to chat when you can.”

  “You know anything about Toyotas?” Lucas asked.

  “Toyotas?” Singleton looked at Anderson, who frowned at Lucas.

  “Toyotas?” Anderson asked.

  “There a
re some people down in Kansas City, associated with Deon Cash—members of his family—who apparently steal a lot of Toyotas. They’re never found again.”

  “Toyotas,” Singleton said. He scratched his breast bone. “You know, I never thought about this, but there were a lot of Toyotas going through Gene’s shop. You don’t see that many around here, but you’d see them in Gene’s shop. Just about every time I went up there, when I think about it. Didn’t seem strange then, but it seems kinda strange when you mention it.”

  “What were they doing to them? Rehabbing them . . . what?”

  “Sometimes, it seemed like they had some parts off, but they weren’t chopping them or anything. They were like fixing them. And painting them. Man, they painted a lot of Toyotas.”

  “Aw, Jesus,” Del said. To Lucas: “That’s where the hot Toyotas went.”

  “When the girls . . . the women . . . came back across the border, they were always in a Toyota Land Cruiser or maybe some old beat-up 4Runner. There’s always one of them around the church, up there.”

  “You didn’t think anything was weird about that?” Lucas said.

  Singleton wagged his head. “Well, sure. But I knew what they were doing, and I . . . guess I didn’t have much problem with it. I mean, gosh, everybody around here does it. Everybody’s drugstore is over there.”

  THEY TALKED FOR a few more minutes, then Singleton went to look at Katina Lewis. He came back down the stairs two minutes later, even more shaky, sweating a bit. “Jeez . . . Jeez almighty . . .”

  “Go home and lie down for a while,” Lucas said.

  “That’s gonna help?”

  “No, not much, but it’s better than walking around with everybody staring at you. You look kinda messed up.”

  “Aw, man . . .”

  LUCAS SAID TO Del, “They bought old Toyotas across the border, brought them down here, took what they needed off the bodies, junked what was left, then transferred the papers to the ones they’d just stolen and moved them back across the border. Probably sold them out in the woods somewhere, where nobody would ever give them a second look. Even if somebody looked, the papers would match, ’cause they were legitimate papers. You’d have to take the car apart to figure out something was wrong.