Naked Prey

by John Sandford

  “I love to shop,” Lucas said.

  “Ohhh . . .” Ruth said. A skeptical smile, not the first time he’d gotten that reaction from a woman. But it was true.

  “I’m serious. I really like to shop. Especially for clothes. You wanta party?”

  Letty looked at Ruth, and Ruth said, “We don’t really need that much.”

  “I’ll let you in on a small secret, which I wouldn’t want you to spread around,” Lucas said. “Okay?” They both nodded, and Lucas said, lowering his voice, “I’m the richest cop in Minnesota.”

  “I knew that,” Ruth said. “Sister Mary Joseph said you have a ridiculous amount of money.”

  “So I can spend a few bucks on a good time,” Lucas said. “Let’s go.”

  They bought all kinds of stuff, with Letty getting seriously involved: Jockey underpants; a couple of brassieres that Lucas wasn’t entirely sure were necessary, but which he wouldn’t have remotely thought of questioning; three pairs of jeans and two pairs of slacks; and four sweatshirts, which Lucas thought was too many, but Letty said “they’re all I wear.” They bought four more shirts at Lucas’s insistence, a vest, a watch, some costume jewelry and a pair of pearl earrings, a parka, mittens, two hats, and a duffel bag that would carry everything that she didn’t wear.

  And though Ruth was skeptical, they spent half an hour and thirty-five dollars at the cosmetics counter.

  Out on the street, Letty said, happily, “That was the best time I ever had.”

  Further down the street, across from an Ace Hardware, they put the packages in Ruth’s Corolla, and Letty told Lucas, “I will pay you back every penny.”

  “I won’t take the money,” Lucas said. “Not a cent. You gotta learn to take gifts.”

  “It’s charity.”

  “It’s not charity,” Lucas said. “It’d be charity if I didn’t know you and didn’t like you. These are gifts, because I like you.”

  “Would you loan me some money? Right now? If I pay back every cent?”

  He hesitated, then said, “Probably. What do you want it for?”

  She nodded at the Ace Hardware. “I want to go in there and get a new gun. They took that piece of crap .22, and the deputy said I wouldn’t get it back. It’s evidence, if they ever catch the guy I shot.”

  “Oh, Letty . . .” Ruth said.

  “Lucas?” Letty asked.

  Lucas looked at Ruth, and then said, “I’d do it, unless Ruth absolutely vetoes it. The gun would be in her house, at least for a while.”

  Letty turned to Ruth, who said, “I really don’t think you need a gun, Letty.”

  “But you don’t really know me very well, do you?” Letty said. Lucas estimated her working age at a quick forty-three. “I do sort of need the gun.”

  Ruth said to Lucas, “If you want to loan her the money, I won’t say no.”

  ONCE INSIDE THE hardware store, Ruth went to look at other stuff—went to be away from them—while Lucas and Letty got into the details of the gun purchase. Letty wanted a Ruger 10/22 semi-auto; Lucas suggested a bolt-action Ruger 77/22. Letty said it cost too much, and she’d be more comfortable with the lighter semi-auto. Then the store manager, a thin man with spiky gray hair, and a hunter himself who knew Letty, jumped in and said they had an even lighter semi-auto, a Browning, that split the price difference.

  Lucas finally told Letty that he wouldn’t buy a semi-auto, because he worried that an auto-loader was not safe enough. “I want you to know when you’ve got a round in the chamber, because you put it there yourself.”

  Then Letty got pouty: “I’ve been doing this for years . . .”

  “Yeah, with a single-shot . . .”

  “. . . and I know when there’s a round in the chamber.”

  Lucas stood firm, and the manager said, “You know, I’ve got a Remington pump in the back. It’s used, but it’s in perfect shape. I could let you have it for three hundred bucks.”

  Lucas and Letty looked at each other, and Letty said, “Bring it out.”

  They took the pump, but Letty got it for two seventy-five, with five boxes of .22 long-rifle shells thrown in as a deal-sweetener. She said to Lucas, “I’ve had enough of that .22 short bullshit. Next time this jerk comes around, he better be wearing a bulletproof vest.”

  LUCAS ENJOYED POETRY. Couldn’t help himself. He was especially fond of haiku, the Japanese form, and in reading haiku from time to time, he’d encountered talk of Zen Buddhism, and the concept of the koan. A koan was a kind of a riddle, or paradox, without a solution. They were used by the Zen master to demonstrate the ultimate futility of logic, and to provoke—with some pupils, anyway—instant enlightenment.

  Lucas heard Letty say bulletproof vest and took a step toward enlightenment, though later he thought the enlightenment might have been provoked by the way she’d orally italicized the better be.

  DEL ARRIVED BACK the next day at one o’clock, knocked on the door. Lucas was lying on the bed with the door unlocked and called, “Come in.”

  Del pushed the door open, stuck his head in, and said, “Am I too early? Or have you figured it out?”

  “I don’t have a name yet,” Lucas said. He held up the art pad, and the top page was covered with red and green squares and arrows. “I’ve got some thoughts.”

  Del tossed his duffel in the corner, sat on the second bed. “Give.”

  Lucas said, “One: We figure out in the evening that the killer was probably Sorrell. Then we drive home, and about twelve hours after we leave Armstrong, we arrive at the Sorrell house. He’s dead, and he’s been dead for at least a little while. That means that the killer had to hear that we’d figured out Sorrell, had to make a plan, and had to drive seven hours, at least—Rochester is more than an hour south of the Cities—and then he has to find Sorrell’s house, where the phone number is unlisted, do the killing, and get away. That’s pretty amazing, when you think about it.

  “Two: Thirty hours after he hanged two people in Armstrong, Sorrell lets his own killer into his house, with his wife standing right there with him. He’s unarmed and is shot down in cold blood. He takes no precautions, he never thinks that the guy at the door might be connected to the murders.

  “Three: Why did the guy attack Letty? We don’t know. But we do know that Letty’s mother let him in the house after midnight, when both she and Letty knew there was a killer running around loose.

  “Four: Letty claims she shot the guy, but none of the hospitals inside two hundred miles report a guy shot in the chest with a .22, that might possibly be our guy. Why is that?

  “Five: I talk to Burke, Annie’s dad, and he shows us stuff that looks like it came from the FBI. It looks real. How’d they know how to do that?

  “Six: I talk to Letty last night after you head back to the Cities . . . Hey, did you get laid?”

  “Yeah.” Del nodded. “It was wonderful.”

  “I have fantasies about Cheryl. Maybe you could tell me . . . Never mind.”

  “C’mon, wiseass.”

  “All right. Anyway, I talk to Letty, and one thing leads to another, and we buy her a replacement rifle down at Ace Hardware. And she says to me that if this asshole comes back, quote, ‘He better be wearing a bulletproof vest,’ unquote.”

  Lucas looked at Del and raised his eyebrows. Del asked, “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  Del shook his head. “Maybe I can get a refund on some of them pens. Looks like you only used red and green.”

  “Think about it for a minute,” Lucas said. “What are the chances that . . . the guy is a cop?”

  DEL THOUGHT ABOUT it for a minute. “If the guy is a cop, he would have heard about Sorrell really early. If he was wearing a uniform, people would let him in their house any time of day. He’d see FBI stuff, so he’d know the format. And if he was wearing a bulletproof vest . . . it would explain all of that shit.”

  “We know that there are at least two cops who were friendly with Gene Calb—Ray Zahn and this other gu
y, the boyfriend of Katina Lewis. Zahn sometimes hung out there, and the boyfriend painted his cars up there.”

  “How many points did you have? Six?”

  “Six,” Lucas agreed.

  Del nodded. “Then here’s number seven. If you were running a major car-theft ring, there’d be nothing more valuable than having a cop inside the only major police agency for miles around. In fact, you’d just about have to have one.”

  THEN LUCAS SAID, “I got another list.”

  “Yeah?”

  Lucas said, “One: You’re a friendly looking guy like Gene Calb, maybe with a spy inside the department, or maybe not—it’s a small town, and word gets around. He bluffs his way into Sorrell’s house, kills him, and gets back here.

  “Two: He goes after Letty. We don’t know the specific reason, but we do know that Letty hung around his shop and maybe he’s afraid that she saw or heard something. And Calb is a friendly guy, everybody likes him, and if he knocks on the door, maybe Martha West lets him in—Letty told me one time that Martha’d had a crush on Calb.

  “Three: Calb kills Katina Lewis. Why? We don’t know, but suppose that Letty really did shoot him, and hit him in the chest like she said. He was hurt, but not badly. Maybe his wife patched him up or something. But suppose he bled through his shirt, or did something that tipped Katina that his chest was hurting. Heck, maybe she patted him on the chest. Anyway, the instant that she suspected, he’d have to get rid of her, because all she’d have to do is tell any cop, and we’d go straight to Calb and take his shirt off. We find a bullet hole or even a bruise, he’d be toast. So he’d have to kill her. Maybe that was done so spontaneously that he panicked, and ran.”

  DEL LAY BACK on the bed, and after a minute said, “I like the first one better. The cop.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it all goes back to kidnapping the girls, and everybody says that Calb wouldn’t do that. He might have been a criminal, but he wasn’t a nut. Because if this car ring worked like we think it did, he was up to his ass in money—why’d he need to kidnap somebody? And most of all, he really seemed to think that Deon Cash and Jane Warr were stupid assholes. Would he get involved in a kidnapping with partners he thought were stupid assholes? I don’t think so.”

  LUCAS THOUGHT ABOUT that for a while, then said, “Let’s go talk to Letty and Ruth Lewis. They’re up at the church. I think we ought to stay away from the sheriff’s office until we’ve got something solid.”

  “I don’t think Ray Zahn,” Del said. “He’s one of our guys.”

  “Yeah, well. I don’t think so either, but . . . we gotta keep him on the list. And we gotta think about the possibility that it’s nobody we know yet. Maybe a cop, but nobody we know yet.”

  “Think we’ll have him by midnight?” Del said, joking.

  “I don’t know. If I were gonna bet, I’d say a week. Or less.”

  22

  The older woman came to the door of the church and said, “If you’re looking for Letty and Ruth, they went up to the dump to shoot that gun you bought.” Her tight lips suggested that she didn’t approve. “Another fan,” Del said, as they got back in the car. “Dump?”

  RUTH LEWIS’S TOYOTA Corolla was parked at the dump gate, and they could hear the little .22 banging away. “You don’t think they’d shoot back this way, do you?” Del asked.

  “Jesus, I hope not.” He hadn’t thought of that. “Where are they?”

  “Sounds like they’re over to the left.”

  THEY WALKED CAREFULLY toward the sound of the shooting. A .22 long-rifle slug makes a distinctive whip sound as it goes by, and they didn’t hear anything like that. Eventually, they crossed the high point of the dump and spotted Letty and Ruth at the far left edge of the raw dirt, shooting into a mound of clay. Ruth had the gun.

  “May have been a conversion here,” Lucas said. “Lewis wasn’t that happy about buying the gun.”

  “Oughta get her an NRA membership,” Del said. “My cold dead hands . . .”

  “From what I’ve seen of her, she’d probably take the damn thing over,” Lucas said.

  LETTY AND RUTH saw them coming and stopped firing. Letty’s crutch was lying on the ground, so her ankle must be feeling better. When they got close, Lucas saw that they were shooting at Campbell’s soup cans, which made good reactive targets. He called, “How you doing?”

  As they came up, Letty said, “The gun’s not as bad as I thought.”

  “She hit the can every time, right from the start, even with the cast. Now she’s trying to hit the gold medal thing every time,” Ruth said. “I haven’t hit the can once.”

  “I can’t even see the gold medal thing from here,” Del said. The cans were twenty-five yards away.

  “It’s sure a lot quicker than that old piece of shit,” Letty said. “Even one-handed.”

  “Letty . . .” Ruth said.

  “I know; watch my mouth.” She took the gun from Ruth with her good hand, braced it over the cast on the other, and sighted down the barrel at one of the cans. She pulled the trigger and the can hopped across the ground. She turned the gun upside down with her good hand, got the pump under the upper part of her bad arm, trapped it, pumped, aimed and fired again, hit the can. She looked nonchalantly at Lucas. “So what’s going on?”

  “We stopped at the church, they said you were out here.” He looked around. “Whatever happened to those traps you put out before the fire? Are they still out here?”

  Letty shook her head. “Naw. I had Weather call Bud, from down at the hospital. He came and picked them up the next morning. We already checked, and they’re all gone. I gotta get them from him.”

  Lucas nodded. “Okay. Listen. We need to talk to both of you about . . . mmm . . . whoever might have done all this. We were wondering specifically—do you know anything about any police officers who might have been connected with Gene Calb or with Deon Cash and Jane Warr?”

  Letty looked at Ruth, and then Ruth asked, “Do you think this . . . person . . . might be a police officer?”

  “There are some things,” Lucas said. To Letty: “Who would your mom let in the door after midnight? We know it wasn’t her boyfriend, because he was still down at the Duck Inn. Who else?”

  Letty thought. “A guy? There might be a couple of guys, but I don’t know. It never happened.”

  “How about a cop that she knew?”

  “You’d always let a cop in,” Letty said. “Especially since all the trouble.”

  “Ray Zahn? Or how about that boyfriend of Katina’s?” Lucas looked at Ruth.

  “Loren Singleton,” she said, slowly. She pinched her bottom lip, thinking. Then, to Lucas: “I . . . oh, God.”

  “Look, we’re interested in one thing: finding the killer,” Del said to her. “We don’t care about all this other happy horseshit, the cars and the drugs and all that. If you know something about a cop . . .”

  “Loren kept an eye out for us at the sheriff’s office,” Ruth said.

  Letty said, “Really?”

  “Was that because of his relationship with your sister?” Lucas asked.

  “No. They met at Calb’s. Loren was being paid by Gene before Katina got here. I don’t think he’d . . .” She stopped, they waited, and then she said, “I was going to say that I don’t think that Loren would hurt Katina, but when I think about it now, I’m not sure. But I can tell you one thing: I’ve talked to Loren since the fire at Letty’s, and he certainly wasn’t shot.”

  Lucas said, “Huh.” Then, “I talked to him, too, and I didn’t see any holes in him. He seemed pretty freaked out by what happened to your sister.”

  “He was—I talked to him that night. He was really shaky.”

  “Do you see him as a kidnapper?” Del asked.

  “I don’t . . . You know, I’m not sure he’s creative enough, if that’s the word. If he’s ambitious enough. I didn’t know Deon very well, but Deon was this ocean of want. He wanted money and he wanted dope and he wanted cars and he wanted
clothes and he wanted to go to Vegas and LA and he wanted season tickets for basketball . . . I don’t think, I mean, Loren didn’t seem to want anything. He didn’t seem to care about anything, or even do anything, other than sleep with Katina.”

  “He had his Caddys,” Letty chipped in. “He was always driving one old Caddy while he worked on another one. I heard he made some good money selling them.”

  “A Caddy,” Lucas said. He looked at Del. “Where’d we see that Caddy? You said something about it . . .”

  “Right here,” Del said, jabbing a thumb back at the gate. “When Letty brought her traps up here.”

  “Day of the fire,” Lucas said. He looked around at all the raw black dirt of the dump. “If you were gonna bury somebody in the wintertime, with snow around, and you didn’t want a hole that looked like a grave . . .”

  Del asked Letty, “You ever see him out here? Singleton?”

  “No, not that I remember.”

  “But you used to come out here all the time. Couple times a week, you said.”

  “Yeah.”

  Lucas to Del: “Jesus, what if he was afraid that Letty saw him? Then he sees us out here with her.”

  “Let’s go take his shirt off,” Del said.

  Lucas shook his head. “Not yet. If he was wearing a vest, and that’s what stopped the slug, then we’d tip him off and we wouldn’t have anything. I’ll tell you what: Why don’t we get the California crew up here? They aren’t finding anything around Cash’s house. They could come up, pick a good spot, and start sweeping it. We’d know in a few hours.”

  Ruth said, “Loren did it?”

  Lucas shook his head. “It’s a possibility. Maybe one chance in three. We’re really at the end of a long string here, but nobody can figure out why Letty and her mom were attacked, and why he came after Letty especially. It had to be something that she either knows, or that he was afraid she knew. And he saw us here, together, that afternoon, and then he hauled ass without a word. Turned around and took off.”

  Ruth looked at Letty in wonder, and Letty said, “Loren Singleton?”