Naked Prey

by John Sandford

  “The women took them back and forth, and the body shop guys probably rigged up some kind of plug-in carriers for the drugs—a false floor, some kind of undercarriage box, that you could move from one vehicle to the next. With their tools, they could build anything. You could get a million pills into a one-inch deep false floor in the back of a Land Cruiser.”

  “Don’t get two big crimes in a small town, without them being related,” Del said.

  “So the women would know about Calb’s little sideline, which was bringing in a few million a year,” Lucas said. Del nodded, and they both thought about it.

  “Okay—I can see Calb for doing Lewis,” Del said, after a moment. “But why in hell would he do the Sorrells, or Letty?”

  “Because Sorrell tortured one of their guys, Joe Kelly. Who knew what Kelly told him about the whole Kansas City arrangement? That’s why they had to act so fast—if Sorrell found a way to tip the cops . . . I mean, all we’d need is about three words, and we’d know all of it. If Sorrell called and said, ‘Hey, a guy named Gene Calb is buying cars across the border and switching them with cars stolen in Kansas City by the Cash gang,’ and if we’d called around, it’d take us fifteen minutes to put the parts together.”

  “How about Letty?”

  “I don’t know about Letty—but what if it was Letty’s mother? She’d lived there for a long time. Would she know something was going on at the body shop? Maybe even knew exactly what it was, the stolen Toyotas? So then, her kid is hanging around with us, and again, all she’d have had to say was about three words, and we’d have been on Calb like Holy on the Pope.”

  “Gonna be interesting talking to Ms. Lewis today,” Del said. He looked at his watch. “Funeral in two hours. They oughta be getting here.”

  RUTH LEWIS CALLED the Calb house a half-hour later. A deputy answered, and she asked for Lucas. The deputy handed the phone to Lucas and said, “Ruth Lewis.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  “How did it happen?” Ruth asked, when Lucas came on. She was croaking, as though she’d spent the morning crying.

  “We don’t know, yet. We didn’t know about the stolen car ring, so we didn’t lean hard enough on Calb. Something happened here last night—we think your sister was killed here and the Calbs are gone. If you’d told me about this, we might have avoided it.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Is there anything else I need to know right away?”

  “Oh, God . . .” Ruth was weeping. Then a different woman’s voice: “I don’t think she can talk any more.”

  “Where are you? Is Letty there?”

  “We’re up at the church: Letty’s here.”

  “Tell Ruth to stay there. We’ll be there in ten or fifteen minutes.”

  THE SNOW WAS steady, but not getting any worse. There were a few little drifts around the edges of buildings and down in the ditches, and the highway was slick. Maybe an inch and a half, maybe two inches, Lucas thought. Letty was waiting by the church door with the older woman who’d watched Night of the Living Dead with Del. Letty was happy to see them. She held up her hand, in a fiberglass cast, smiled automatically, but then her lower lip came out and tears started and she said, “My mom’s dead.”

  Lucas was not good around tears, even little-girl tears, and he tried to pat her on the back and she threw her arms around his waist and squeezed. “They say Gene Calb . . .”

  Lucas pried her off and walked her away from the older woman, sat on a chair, and asked, “Letty, think about it. Was the guy you shot at . . . was that Gene Calb?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said, shaking her head. “I would have known him. He was fat, and I couldn’t see the man, but I don’t think he was fat. I don’t think his voice was right. Was Gene shot? Because I shot the man.”

  “There’s a question about whether you hit him.”

  “I hit him.”

  “But if you’re shooting .22 shorts, it might not even have gotten through his coat. A cold night, he might have been all bundled up.”

  “Then why did he fall on his butt? You don’t fall on your butt if the bullet sticks in your coat.”

  “Maybe he was ducking.”

  “He wasn’t ducking. He fell on his butt. Then he crawled for a while and then he ran back to the house and then the fire started.”

  When they finished talking, Lucas sent Letty to the TV with the older woman, who told Letty that she had to change for the service. “For the funeral,” Letty said, correcting her.

  Lucas wagged his head at Del, and they walked through the church to the kitchen, where they found Ruth at the kitchen table. She was red-eyed, red-faced. “Gene did this? With Gloria? That’s . . . that’s . . . Are you sure?” She had a brown cardigan wrapped around her shoulders.

  “We’re not sure. We just can’t find them. There was blood on a carpet, and we found your sister hidden up under the roof.”

  “Why bother to hide her if she was so easy to find?” Ruth asked.

  “Maybe they didn’t think anyone would come looking. Or that if somebody did, they couldn’t look too hard. Maybe all they expected was a head start.”

  “Hard to believe. Gene wasn’t a bad man. I didn’t think he was.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “You know why,” she said, defensively. “You could let us go, when you knew what we were doing, but you could never let Gene go.”

  “How did you get hooked up with him, anyway?”

  She sighed. “One of our people up in Canada knew a man who bought a car from one of his . . . salesmen. We desperately needed different cars to bring the drugs across—you can’t keep going back and forth, two or three times a week, without somebody asking why. So when we figured out where the cars were coming from, I came down here and talked with Gene. He wasn’t too happy—but you know, if he’d done this, if he killed Katina . . . why didn’t he kill me way back then?”

  “Different situation,” Del suggested. “No pressure then.”

  “Maybe. Anyway, I talked to him. I told him that we would all be committing crimes together, so nobody could talk about anyone else. He really needed people to drive the cars across, since he was starting to do some . . . some volume. We were perfect. Older women, forties and fifties and sixties. Who would suspect? And Gene built some special . . . things . . . for us, that fit in the Toyotas, and let us bring the drugs across. It was all very smooth.”

  “Did you bring a Toyota through last night?” Lucas asked.

  “No. The last one was the one we had at the fire at the Wests’ house. You saw it. Gene took it. It was a wreck, though. I don’t think it would make another two hundred miles.”

  “You know what the license plates were?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Okay . . . You got some people killed,” Lucas said. He said it in a soft voice, but a mean one, taunting, like a bully trying to pull another kid into a fight. Pushing her.

  “But there was no connection between the kidnappings, between Deon and Jane, and the car deal,” she said. She said, “Listen to me: no connection. I knew Gene pretty well, and he didn’t even like Deon or Jane. He didn’t trust them. Deon wasn’t a big shot in this thing, he was a driver. He was a gofer.”

  “But if we’d had a piece of it . . .”

  “It wouldn’t have made any difference,” she shouted, tears running down her face. “You’re not listening to me. The kidnappings and all the rest of it weren’t connected. They weren’t.”

  A LITTLE LATER, Lucas spoke to Neil Mitford. “I don’t think the governor necessarily would want to know about this conversation,” Lucas said, as an opener.

  “That’s why I work here,” Mitford said. “Talk to me.”

  Lucas outlined the situation, including the murder of Lewis, and the cover-up of the stolen-car ring. “The women covered up material information. We could bust them six different ways. The thing is, I’m not sure that if they had told us, it would have made any difference to the killer. He�
��s operating on some other schedule—I can’t figure out why Calb would kill Lewis and then run for it. As far as we can tell, she didn’t know anything that all the other women didn’t know. If he was going to kill Lewis, he should have been up here, trying to wipe out the church.”

  “And if we bust the women, that’s the end of their little drug-running enterprise,” Mitford said.

  “That’s right. I don’t feel too good about that—and to tell the truth, I think we could smell a little stinky afterward. We bust them, and four or five thousand women don’t get their cancer pills.”

  “Let me rephrase that for you,” Mitford said. “Four or five thousand registered voters won’t get their cancer pills and they’ll complain to one of the biggest interest groups in the country, the breast-cancer coalition.”

  “You think we should let it slide?”

  “I don’t think anything. I’m not a law enforcement officer. I don’t even recall having this conversation. The governor certainly never knew about it.”

  “So I’m working on my own book.”

  “Welcome to state government,” Mitford said.

  LUCAS AND DEL left the church, so Letty and the other women could get ready for the funeral, and walked across the highway to Calb’s. The two BCA investigators were in the shop, working through the office. A deputy was sitting in the work bay, with a half-dozen employees scattered around the bay on folding chairs.

  Lucas briefed the BCA guys on the theft ring, then went out to talk to the employees. “You all may be in some sort of trouble, so maybe you want to get a lawyer or public defender out here . . . but none of you will be charged with anything right away. The guys in the office will want to talk to you individually. I would like somebody to tell me one thing, which won’t have any effect on you at all . . . Okay?”

  The men glanced around at each other, a couple shrugged, and a stocky man in a grimy Vikings sweatshirt said, “What do you want to know?”

  “You know that one of the women from the church—one of the nuns—was found dead at Gene Calb’s house. Shot in the head.”

  “Gene didn’t do it,” one of the men interrupted.

  “That’s not what I need,” Lucas said. “We’re not sure what happened, but we know that both of Gene Calb’s cars are still in his garage. What I want to know is . . . did one of those Toyotas come in last night, or the night before? One of the good ones?”

  The men all looked around at each other again, there was more shrugging, eyes drifted away, and finally the spokesman said, “I don’t know.”

  “Is there an old one around here? At somebody’s house, or around back? I haven’t looked around back.”

  “Not around here,” the spokesman said. No more eye contact.

  On the way out, Del said to Lucas, “So the Calbs are running in a wrecked Toyota. Why is that? Why not take one of their cars?”

  “Because if they can get it as far as the airport at Thief River, or Fargo, and if we hadn’t found out about it . . . we’d never know where they went.”

  “I’ll get some calls out,” Del said.

  MARTHA WEST’S FUNERAL service was held in a nondescript chapel at the funeral home, so nondescript that it could hardly even be called nondenominational—it looked like a grade-school cafeteria without the charm, and was cold, as if the funeral home didn’t want to waste energy on heating it. Seventeen people showed up, including cops. The coffin was sealed. Letty sat at the front and cried, her cast propped on the chair in front of her, her single crutch between her legs. A Lutheran minister called on Martha’s friends to talk about her, and a few did, without much to say.

  Couldn’t say that she drank a lot, and spent most of her time at the Duck Inn.

  Most talked about her songs, and how hard she worked on them, and what a good voice she had, for Custer County anyway, and let it go at that. A women’s group served Ritz crackers with cheese, and sliced celery and carrots with pimento spread, in a side room, for people who weren’t going to the cemetery. That was almost everybody.

  Lucas and Del drove out to the cemetery behind the hearse, with Letty crying in the back seat, and Ruth trying to comfort her when she wasn’t crying herself. The snow was blowing hard, and the grave looked like a big fishing hole in an ice-covered lake. The coffin went in the ground and they all left, with Letty peering back for as long as she could see the cemetery. And when she couldn’t see it anymore, she rolled facedown on the back seat and sobbed.

  The sheriff had made tentative arrangements for a foster home, but in the end, they didn’t take her there. They left her with Ruth, at the church, with the older woman. The arrangement, they agreed, was temporary, until they figured something out. “Don’t tell me you’re gonna try to find my dad,” Letty said. “There’s no way I’d live with that sonofabitch.”

  AS THEY DROVE away from the church, Del said, “What a wonderful fuckin’ day. If there was a four-story building in town, I’d jump off it.”

  “There’s the smokestack. There’s the grain elevators.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Lucas: “Got to think of something, man.”

  “I have thought of something,” Del said. He suddenly seemed comfortable, Lucas thought, which was odd, given the circumstances.

  “What?”

  “I’ll tell you in a while. I gotta make sure I can pull it off, first.”

  “What?”

  “Drop me off at the drugstore. I got things to buy.”

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Figured out how we’re going to end this thing.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I will—in about an hour.”

  21

  Del knocked on Lucas’s motel door an hour later. Lucas had been watching TV news, and he got up in his bare feet to answer the door. Del had his duffel bag slung over one shoulder, and a package wrapped in brown paper under the opposite arm. He handed the package to Lucas.

  “See ya,” he said.

  “Where’re you going?” Lucas was mystified.

  “Back to the Cities. Got a plane out of Fargo in two hours. Figure to get home by seven-thirty. Cheryl’s gonna pick me up at the airport, and I’m gonna take her out to LeMieux’s for a little French food, maybe a little wine, tell her on the way home how cute she looks with her hair that way, whichever way it is today.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Gettin’ laid,” Del said. He ticked an index finger at Lucas. “I’ve got a round-trip ticket, I’ll be back tomorrow by noon. Now. In that package you will find five different-colored fine-line Magic Markers and a large spiral art pad. So you get a couple beers down here, lock yourself in, and think. Draw your pictures on the pad, all those arrows and squares and shit. I’ll come back tomorrow and you can tell me who did it.”

  “Jesus, Del . . .”

  “We don’t need to be chasing people,” Del said. “We need to figure out what the fuck happened. I think there’s enough information—you just haven’t thought about it enough. So. See you tomorrow.”

  He reached forward, took the doorknob, and pulled the door shut. Lucas looked at the package, hefted it, looked at the closed door, and thought, This is ridiculous. He opened the door just in time to see Del slip inside the Mustang, which he’d had waiting in the drive. Del looked over at him, lifted a hand, and drove away.

  “Hey!”

  Del kept going.

  LUCAS WENT BACK inside with the package, tossed it on the second bed, went back to the television. The woman newscaster had the most amazing lips. They couldn’t be real, he thought—they must keep a bee in the studio, trained to sting them. Must hurt . . .

  He fell asleep for a while, got up with a bad taste in his mouth. Del didn’t understand about the arrows and boxes, he thought as he brushed his teeth. His seances with the drawing table and the arrows and boxes only worked when his head was right, when something down in the lizard part of his brain said that a solution was available . . .

  He wa
sn’t getting that message yet. He stopped brushing for a moment and looked at himself in the mirror. On the other hand, there was something. Not something he missed, just something about the killings that he hadn’t digested yet.

  Maybe he could figure something out, draw a box and a couple of arrows. Couldn’t hurt.

  First, get a few beers . . .

  HE WASHED HIS face, bundled up, and walked down to the Duck Inn. The bartender had been at the funeral that afternoon, and they nodded at each other as Lucas came in. “Bad day at Black Rock,” the barkeep said. “What can I do you for?”

  “Six-pack of Leinies, if you got it . . . Yeah. That poor kid is the one I think about,” Lucas said. “Bad goddamn thing to happen to a kid.”

  “She just went by—with one of them nuns,” the barkeep said. He lifted the six-pack of Leinenkugel’s onto the bar.

  “Just now? She went by?” Lucas asked, pushing a ten across the bar.

  “One minute ago. Heading over to Larson’s, the way they were going. She’s limping pretty good. She’s gonna need some clothes, I guess.”

  Lucas took the change from the ten, but pushed the six-pack back at the bartender. “Hold on to this, will you? I want to see if I can catch them.”

  “Larson’s—right down the block.”

  HE FOUND THEM in the women’s foundations area, buying cotton underpants. Ruth Lewis saw him coming, and smiled sadly. “Have you heard anything?”

  Lucas shook his head. “Not yet.” He looked at Letty, who’d been looking at an underwear rack. “How are you?”

  “We’re both pretty sad, me and Ruth, trying to figure out what’s going to happen,” Letty said. Her eyes were red, with circles below. Her lip trembled. “I never even got to see Mom.”

  “What’re you doing here?” Lucas asked Ruth.

  Ruth tipped her head at Letty. “She’s got nothing left. Nothing. No shoes, no underwear. We went through our stores at the church, didn’t find much.”