Naked Prey

by John Sandford

  THE KID WAS in bed, the housekeeper was in her apartment. Lucas went up and took a quick shower, and got back downstairs just as Weather arrived with the sandwiches. They sat at the kitchen table, eating them and splitting a bag of potato chips. “I thought things would go easier, with the new job,” Weather said. “I think Cheryl thought so, too. Del’s been in some scrapes, but nothing bad since that deal with the pinking shears.”

  “That was more . . . grotesque . . . than really bad,” Lucas said. “I mean, it wasn’t like he couldn’t work for months and months.”

  “SO WHAT’D THIS Anderson character have to say? The sheriff?”

  “About what?”

  “About the autopsy, for one thing. You said they were going to do them today.”

  “Singleton had eight bullet holes in him. Two were mine, two were Zahn’s, and four were Letty’s, from two different guns. She said she shot him, and she had—he had a hole in his chest, but somehow he got the slug out.”

  “Jeez.”

  “Yeah. The two little girls were killed with injections. They’re not sure what the agent was, but when I heard that, it kind of weirded me out. I don’t know what to think about that.” He frowned, contemplated his sandwich, and added, “The Calbs were killed with the same gun used on the Sorrells, but it wasn’t Singleton’s service revolver. He probably ditched it somewhere. His mother said he had another, smaller gun, which sounds right. But the injections . . . that kind of worried me. Doesn’t sound like Singleton.

  “But then, the sheriff tore apart Singleton’s place—actually, it was the guys from Bemidji and a couple of deputies—and they found a load of cash in the basement. More of the kidnapping money. A lot of it’s missing, but they probably just spent it. If the Burke guy wants, he could probably bring an action against the Calb estate and the Cash estate and get some of the money back from the sales of their houses, and so on. I don’t know if it’ll come to much, now—the Cash house, anyway. With Calb out of business, I think Broderick’s probably gonna sink back into the prairie.”

  “Huh.” Weather took an unladylike bite out of her sandwich.

  “DID YOU SEE Letty today?” Lucas asked.

  “Yes,” Weather said, talking with her mouth full. “They took the cast off to have a look, put another one back on. They think that they might do some revisions next week. She’s going to be a hurting little kid for a while.”

  “Huh. She was pretty unhappy when I talked to her last night,” Lucas said. He half-grinned. “Anderson took her new gun away from her, for one thing. I don’t think she’s gonna get it back.”

  “She’s gotta be traumatized,” Weather said. “Her mother might not have meant to do it, but that little girl has been abused. That’s what it amounts to. Taking care of a drunk when you’re twelve years old? And she’s done it for years. She was the adult in the family. And then she’s shot and shoots back, and her mother’s killed . . . It’s amazing that she hasn’t gone catatonic.”

  “Yeah . . .” They chewed for a moment, then Lucas said, “Anderson said that Ruth Lewis took off. He’s trying to find her, but the older lady up there, at the church, said Ruth crossed into Canada, something to do with her network. Said she’d be back in a few days. Sheriff said he checked, and the border people have a record of her crossing this morning. So . . . I suspect she’s rearranging things. They’ll be bringing the dope across somewhere else.”

  “Hope she pulls it off,” Weather said. “She seemed like she was trying to do the right thing.”

  “I don’t know,” Lucas said. “I’m not smart enough to figure out all the what-ifs.”

  THEN LUCAS SAT tapping his fingers on the table for a minute, inspecting an olive that had squirted out of his sandwich, and finally, Weather said, “What?”

  He put the sandwich down and made his face sincere, like when he wanted to do something that Weather might not like. “You think, uh, Letty might be able to move in with us for a while? Until things get figured out?”

  Weather ripped open the nearly empty sack of potato chips, and dumped the last four chips on the table. She took two of them. “I wondered if you were going to ask. I think we could, though I would predict some trouble. She’s tough, she’s gonna do what she wants to do, and she doesn’t mind giving you a hard time.”

  “Which reminds us of who?” Lucas asked.

  Weather was puzzled. “Who?”

  “Jesus Christ, Weather, you just described yourself perfectly.” He took one of the remaining chips.

  “I did not.” She was amazed. “I’m the most flexible person I know.”

  “Aw, man . . .” He gave up. “But you think we can do that?”

  “I think we could. I like her a lot,” Weather said. “We’ve got plenty of room. Even if we have another child, the two little ones could sleep together until Letty went off to college . . .”

  “Another . . . hmm.”

  “I’m not pregnant, dummy,” she said. “I’m just talking theory, at this point.”

  Lucas looked at the table. “You gonna eat that chip?”

  THAT SAME NIGHT, Margery Singleton was surprised to find her back door open when she got home. She always locked it. Or almost always—though, it being a small town, she sometimes forgot.

  She pushed inside, trying to recapture the feeling of the morning. Hadn’t she gotten the key stuck in the door that morning? Or was it yesterday?

  She pushed the door closed, flipped the light, took a step into the kitchen and stopped. A woman was sitting at the table and Margery took a step back. “Who the hell are you?” Then she saw the pile of money on the table. “That’s my money, there.”

  Ruth Lewis picked up Loren Singleton’s .380.

  “You killed my sister, Mom. And you killed those little girls with needle injections. And God only knows who else. Something has to be done about that.” She was pointing the pistol at Margery’s chest.

  The pistol, which Ruth had picked up at the church, had been surprisingly simple to work. She’d done a little practice before she’d sent another one of the sisters across the border with her driver’s license. Ruth would cross herself later that night, with that sister’s ID. A simple-enough alibi—she’d learned to think like a criminal.

  “Well, you can’t just shoot me,” Margery said. She was thinking ahead two squares, like she had with Loren. Loren had been dead and gone before he’d left her house that night, and she’d known it. But Loren was screwed up in the head, and if the cops had gotten a handle on him, he would’ve spilled all the beans. And when they found the little girls at the dump, and found those needle pricks . . . who would have thought they could do that, after all this time?

  “You can’t just shoot me,” Margery was saying. If she could get close enough to the table . . .

  Ruth said, “I don’t see why not.”

  She flinched with the blast, deafeningly loud in the small room. But she showed that cold, wintery smile when Margery Singleton went down.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  John Sandford is the pseudonym for the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Camp. He is the author of twenty-eight Prey novels, most recently Twisted Prey; four Kidd novels, eleven Virgil Flowers novels, and six other books, including three YA novels co-authored with his wife, Michele Cook.

  Visit johnsandford.org or find him on Facebook.

  ALSO BY JOHN SANDFORD

  Rules of Prey

  Shadow Prey

  Eyes of Prey

  Silent Prey

  Winter Prey

  Night Prey

  Mind Prey

  Sudden Prey

  Secret Prey

  Certain Prey

  Easy Prey

  Chosen Prey

  Mortal Prey

  Hidden Prey

  Broken Prey

  Invisible Prey

  Phantom Prey

  Wicked Prey

  Storm Prey

  Buried Prey

  Stolen Prey

  Silken Prey


  Field of Prey

  Gathering Prey

  Extreme Prey

  Golden Prey

  Twisted Prey

  KIDD NOVELS

  The Fool’s Run

  The Empress File

  The Devil’s Code

  The Hanged Man’s Song

  VIRGIL FLOWERS NOVELS

  Dark of the Moon

  Heat Lightning

  Rough Country

  Bad Blood

  Shock Wave

  Mad River

  Storm Front

  Deadline

  Escape Clause

  Deep Freeze

  Holy Ghost

  STAND-ALONE NOVELS

  Saturn Run

  The Night Crew

  Dead Watch

  BY JOHN SANDFORD AND MICHELE COOK

  Uncaged

  Outrage

  Rampage

  TWISTED PREY

  Lucas Davenport had crossed paths with her before.

  A rich psychopath, Taryn Grant had run successfully for the U.S. Senate, where Lucas had predicted she’d fit right in. He was also convinced that she’d been responsible for three murders, though he’d never been able to prove it. Once a psychopath had gotten that kind of rush, though, he or she often needed another fix, so he figured he might be seeing her again.

  He was right. A federal marshal now, with a very wide scope of investigation, he’s heard rumours that Grant has found her seat on the Senate intelligence committee, and the contacts she’s made from it, to be very useful. Pinning those rumours down was likely to be just as difficult as before, and considerably more dangerous.

  But they had unfinished business, he and Grant. One way or the other, he was going to see it through to the end.

  HOLY GHOST

  A Virgil Flowers Thriller

  Pinion, Minnesota: a huge city of all of seven hundred folks who define the phrase ‘small town’. Nothing has ever happened in Pinion and nothing ever will . . . until the mayor of sorts (campaign promise: ‘I’ll Do What I Can’) comes up with a scheme to put Pinion on the map.

  He’s heard of a place where a floating image of the Virgin Mary turned the whole town into a shrine, attracting thousands of curious people and making the townsfolk rich overnight. Why not stage a prank in Pinion and do the same? No one gets hurt and everyone gets rich. What could go wrong?

  And then a dead body shows up. It turns out that lots can go wrong with a get-rich-quick scheme like this one . . . and lots will.

  It’ll take everything Virgil Flowers has to put things to rights – before someone else dies.

  GOLDEN PREY

  Lucas Davenport has a job with the U.S. Marshals Service – an unusual one. He gets to pick his own cases, whatever they are, and follow wherever they lead him.

  And where they’ve led him this time is into real trouble. A house at the centre of a drug-smuggling ring is attacked and briefcases full of cash are stolen. But whoever took the money left something behind: five bodies, including that of a six-year-old girl. Davenport vows to track down the cash and find the killers. But he’s not the only one on the hunt . . . the drug smugglers want their money back, and they’ve sent two assassins, including an infamous torturer known for her creative use of home-improvement tools, after Davenport.

  It’ll take every ounce of Davenport’s predatory instinct to track down the killers and money before he becomes the prey.

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2003

  A CBS COMPANY

  This edition published 2019

  Copyright © John Sandford, 2003

  The right of John Sandford to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-4711-8196-2

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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