“Your mom’s already gone,” Del said.
“Straight to the Duck Inn,” Letty said. She added, without irony, in a voice that sounded older than her twelve years, “It’s a tragedy.”
THEY DROVE BACK down to the Cash/Warr house in the Acura, Letty fascinated by the CRT screen in the dashboard. “Can you play movies on it?”
“Nope—you get the information screen and the map screen, and that’s it. Unless you have to eject.” Lucas kept his voice flat. He was a firm believer in lying to children. “If you need to eject, you go to the information screen, and push History, and one second later, you’re history. Throws you right out of the car, through the moon roof.”
Letty, in the back seat, thought about it for a second, then said, “It’s not nice to fuck with kids.”
Del twisted and said, “Jesus Christ. Watch your mouth, little girl.”
TWO VEHICLES WERE sitting in the driveway at the Cash/Warr house: a BCA crime scene van, and a sheriff’s department car. Lucas pulled in behind them. They all climbed out, and a deputy sheriff came out on the stoop and said, “Your guys are out in the garage, if you’re looking for them.”
“Thanks,” Lucas called back. They trudged up the driveway to the garage, and went in through the side door. A BCA tech was standing at the open trunk of Jane Warr’s car, and said, “Hey, guys.” When he spoke, another man, shorter and stockier, backed out of the trunk. He was holding a plastic bag and a pair of forceps. A magnifying hood was pulled down over his glasses, and his eyes appeared to be the size of ashtrays.
“Doing any good?” Lucas asked.
“The trunk is full of stuff—we’ve got hair for sure, we might have some blood, but it could be something else, too,” the shorter man said. “Typical trunk.”
“How about Cash’s car?”
“Same thing. All kinds of stuff.”
“How long before we know if anything’s good?”
The taller tech shrugged. “Depends on how much stuff there is . . . a week or two. Anything we can do for you?”
“We’re gonna look around the grounds,” Lucas said. “See what there is to see.”
“Uh, Dickerson called this morning, said something about a guy with ground-penetrating radar.”
“Could happen,” Lucas said. “But he can’t do the whole place. That’d take weeks. We’re gonna see if we can find a place to start.”
“Good luck.”
LUCAS, DEL, AND Letty went back outside, and Lucas turned around once, looking at the house, the garage, an old dying tree line that once marked the southern boundary of the farmyard, a fence that might have marked the western end.
“If you had to bury somebody . . . ” Letty said.
“I wouldn’t do it here,” Del said, turning like Lucas. “I’d take her someplace.”
“Everybody in the state was looking for her.”
“Probably not yet, when they killed her. If they killed her before Sorrell brought in the FBI . . . ”
“But they couldn’t be absolutely sure that he hadn’t done that right away,” Lucas said. “If they had her here, in that cell, they wouldn’t want to take her too far. Especially if, like Letty says, everybody sees things here. Everybody would remember a black guy with a little blond girl, up here, even if they thought it was innocent.”
“Keep her in the trunk?”
“Too many things to go wrong,” Lucas said.
“They drove her all the way up here from Rochester.”
“What can I tell you? They did that. Maybe. But when it came to getting rid of her, do you think they’d drive her all the way back down, and take another big risk?”
“Dunno,” Del said. “I just don’t know where we could start looking.”
LETTY POINTED: “OUT there in the trees. That’s the crick. Five-minute walk. You could carry a bag. If you walked out there right at dark, nobody would see you, and you could walk back in the dark. How old was she?”
“Eleven.”
“Skinny?”
“Not fat,” Lucas said. “Sort of fleshy.”
“Minnesota skinny.”
“That’s it.”
“So she weighs seventy or eighty pounds. Five-minute walk.”
“You’d leave footprints,” Del said.
“Not in December. I remember how cold it was, but it wasn’t snowing. We had hardly any snow at Christmas.”
“Let’s go look,” Lucas said.
THE CREEK BEGAN as a swale in a farm field, narrowed into a line, not really a depression, toward the back of the Cash/Warr land, and finally deepened into a knee-deep notch in the black earth, surrounded by willows and box elders.
They started with the first tree, at the north end of the property, and followed the deepening notch into the thicker line of trees and brush, walking on the ice of the little creek itself. The band of trees was no more than thirty yards wide. They followed the creek for two hundred yards, until it ended in a bog. They saw nothing unusual—no disturbed earth, and the only tracks they found had probably been left by Letty.
They finally walked back up the creek; halfway back, three dogs began barking from the back of a house that lay down the highway from Cash’s place. They were black and brown, square-faced, crazy: pit bulls. “That’s the dogs I’ve been telling you about,” Letty said.
“Scare the heck out of me,” Del admitted. To Letty: “They ever let them out on you, you shoot first and ask questions later.”
Lucas was annoyed. “You just stay away from there,” he said. “You don’t need to do any shooting.”
“Maybe they fed the kid to the dogs,” Letty suggested.
“Goddamnit,” Lucas said. And as they came to the top of the creek, “Goddamnit. We could be standing ten feet from the Sorrell kid and not know it.”
“How would you do it?” Letty asked. She looked up at Del. “If you killed a little kid, and brought her out here, where would you put her?”
Del said, “I don’t think you should be here.”
“C’mon, Del. Look around. What’d you do?” she asked.
Lucas looked around, then down at his feet. “Is there always water in the creek?”
“No. But most of the time, there is.”
“Under the creek?” Del asked, skeptically.
“It’s a possibility,” Lucas said. “But if he was going to dig around here, I bet he’d be down here in the creek bed. Maybe digging in the bottom, or in the creek bank. Couldn’t be seen, but he could see people coming.”
“Unless it was at night,” Letty said.
They walked up and down the creek ice, looking at the banks, but couldn’t find anything unusual. Lucas probed a low cut-bank with a stick, then shook his head and threw the stick back into the trees. “We need the crime scene guys down here, and the radar guy, and maybe some dogs or something.”
DISCOURAGED, THEY WALKED across the thin crunchy snow back up to the house, and Lucas looked at his watch and said, “Little early for lunch, but we could get some breakfast.”
“Can I see the cell?” Letty asked. “The room in the basement?”
“Fuckin’ TV,” Del said. The cell had been mentioned prominently.
“Watch your mouth around a kid,” Letty said, payback for the little girl comment. To Lucas: “I’d really like to go down there. I’m a kid, maybe I could think like a kid or something.”
Lucas sighed, looked at Del, then said, “All right. Two minutes.”
They trooped through the house, nodded to the deputy, and took Letty into the basement. Inside the bathroom—the cell—she turned round and round, then sat down on the floor, then lay down and looked at the ceiling, her arms outstretched as though she were making a snow angel. She closed her eyes, and a minute later, she said, “If they left me here alone—if they left me here alone—I would try to write my name somewhere.”
She opened her eyes, found Lucas’s eyes, and asked, “What do you think?”
“Sit up,” Lucas said.
She
sat up, and Lucas and Del sat down, and they began scrutinizing the walls. Nothing apparent. Lucas stood up, pulled the top off the toilet tank, and looked inside. Nothing visible. Lucas flushed, watched the water go down, pulled the float to stop water, and groped around the bottom of the tank with his hand. The shower stall was bare, not even a bar of soap. He pulled open the medicine cabinet, found it empty. Del looked inside the cabinet under the sink, and found four rolls of toilet paper. He looked through all the toilet paper tubes. Empty. Lucas checked the rim on the top of the medicine cabinet, and got his fingers dusty.
“I would write something,” Letty said, a little defensively. “I would scratch it with something.”
She crawled around on her hands and knees, peering at the baseboard. Then Del, who’d crawled over to the toilet, said, “Got something here.”
“What?” Lucas got down on his stomach, and Letty crawled over.
Del was lying face up. “Something twisted around the water line . . . it’s a chain. Let me . . . ” He fumbled under the tank, said, “Uhhh . . . ” Then: “Got it.”
He slid out from under the toilet. A silver locket, a small oval, dangled from his fingers on a short silver chain.
“Aw, Jesus,” Lucas said. “Don’t fuckin’ move. Don’t even twitch.”
Lucas ran up the stairs, dashed through the house to the mudroom door, outside to the garage, and said, “You guys . . . get some shit, get some baggies and those tweezers . . . c’mon.”
BACK DOWN IN the basement, the stocky crime scene guy grabbed the locket with his forceps, held it sideways to one of the overhead lights and said, “There’s a partial print on the back. If it’s not yours . . . ”
He looked down at Del, who shook his head: “Not mine. I never touched the locket part, only the chain.”
“Looks like a good print,” the tech said. He turned it in the light. “It’s got an inscription. The locket does.”
“What?”
The tech’s lips moved as he worked through the script. Then he frowned and asked, “Who the heck are Jean and Wally?”
Lucas scratched his head. “Maybe somebody the Sorrell kid knew. Her grandparents, or somebody?”
“Whoever, she put it down there,” Del said. “The locket didn’t just fall in there.”
“Where’d you find it?” the tech asked.
Del explained, and the tech looked around and finally said, “Did you check the mirror? And the shower booth walls? If she used hot water in here, they’d get steamed up, and she’d write in the steam. If she had soap or shampoo or oil on her fingers, you might get the image back.”
“I do that every time I’m in the bathtub,” Letty said. “I write on the mirror when I get out.”
Lucas said, “Worth a try, I guess.”
The tech said, “Let me put this away, and get my camera. Huh. Wally and Jean.”
WHILE THE TECH went to put the locket away, Lucas, trailed by Letty, went out to the car, got his address book out of his briefcase, and looked up the numbers for the FBI agents on the Sorrell case. He got Lanny Cole’s wife on the second ring, and she said Cole was out shoveling the walk. “Just had a quick two inches,” she said. “Of snow.”
Lucas heard her calling her husband, then some stomping around, and then Cole was on the line. He didn’t know the names on the locket. “We were told that she probably wasn’t wearing any jewelry when she was taken—she was just a kid, and she had a pretty limited set of stuff. Nothing like a locket, far as I know. Sorry.”
“Thought we had something,” Lucas said. “It’s weird.”
“I’ll ask around,” Cole said. “I wouldn’t hold my breath. Maybe the print will turn out to be something.”
Lucas hung up and Letty said, “No luck?”
“Not yet.”
“It’s gotta be something,” Letty said. “It didn’t belong to the plumber.”
BOTH TECHS WERE in the basement with Del, the hot water pouring out of the shower, when Lucas and Letty got back down the stairs. They half-closed the door of the bathroom, waited fifteen seconds. The mirror steamed, and showed several finger-drawn lines, but nothing they could make sense of. The tech took a picture anyway. The walls of the shower showed what looked liked sponge marks: “Somebody cleaned up,” the tech said.
“Good try, guys,” Lucas said.
Feeling a little morose, they all wandered back up the stairs, and the burly tech said that he’d recheck the walls with his magnifying hood as soon as the humidity cleared. “Maybe somebody wrote really small—it’d be about the only thing you could do. It was a good idea, looking for a name. It turned up the locket. That’ll be something.”
Lucas looked at Letty. “Maybe you oughta be a cop.”
Letty shook her head. “Nope. I’m going to be a reporter. It’s decided.”
Lucas said to Del, “We could be responsible for that.”
“I’ll never feel clean again,” Del said. “Want to head down to the Bird? My gut says it’s lunchtime.”
They rode down to the Red Red Robin in near silence, all thinking about the house and where the Sorrell kid’s body might be. Del finally said, “If they thought they ever might be suspected of anything, they wouldn’t want a body anywhere around. They must’ve driven it out into the countryside. All right, if they’re seen, they’re seen, but they could fix it so they weren’t. Scout out a spot ahead of time, dig a hole, drop the body during the night, fill the hole—it’d only take a couple of minutes—and get out of there.”
“Yeah, I know,” Lucas said. “She’s probably gone for good.”
THE BIRD WAS as below-average as it was the first couple of times: below-average coffee, below-average food. Below-average: Letty ate everything in sight, with the shifty-eyed compulsion of a kid who’d gone to bed hungry a few times, who was afraid the food might disappear.
“You okay with your mom?” Del asked halfway through the meal.
“Gettin’ this far with her was the hard part,” Letty said, working around the edges of the mashed potatoes, so the gravy wouldn’t spill out of the center cup. “Now that I’m in middle school, things are smoother. I ride the bus back and forth, she can do what she needs to.”
“Just checkin’,” Del said. “I’ve had a little trouble with alcohol myself. It’s a bitch to get off your back, but it can be done.”
“You drink?” Letty asked Lucas, holding his eyes. Lucas shook his head. “A bottle of beer, few times a week. I never got the hang of it.”
“That’s good,” Letty said.
THE PHONE IN Lucas’s pocket rang, and he pulled it out. “Davenport.”
“Hey, Lucas, this is Lanny Cole.” The FBI man sounded like he was having a hard time catching his breath. “You said Wally and Jean on that locket. It was a white gold oval locket with a white gold chain and the names in script in the front oval. Picture of an elderly couple inside.”
“We didn’t look inside because of the print, but you got the rest of it, except that I thought it was silver,” Lucas said. “Was it Tammy Sorrell’s?”
“No.”
“No?”
“It belonged to a girl named Annie Burke, fifteen, daughter of the owner of a chain of nursing homes from Lincoln, Nebraska. One of our guys downtown remembered the locket thing. She was kidnapped last April. A million-dollar ransom was paid, but she was never returned, never heard from again. The deal was, the kidnappers told Burke’s father that they had an in with the FBI, and they left him a pack of papers that looked like FBI printouts. They told him that if he contacted the FBI or any police agency, they would know. He bought it, made the payoff. And get this: he got the money in Vegas, same way Hale did.”
“Oh, boy.”
Letty said, “What?”
“We’re coming up there,” Cole said. “We need that locket, we need that fingerprint. I’ll talk to your boss. What do you need up there?”
“You got people who can look for soft spots in the ground, under the snow?”
“W
e got that. We have a team in California who do exactly that. They can be here in forty-eight hours.”
“Bring them in,” Lucas said.
13
AFTER LUNCH, THEY took a protesting Letty back to her house. “I can still help you.”
“If we need you, we’ll stop by,” Lucas said. “We really do appreciate what you’ve done.”
Her face anxious, she asked, “If I get my traps real fast, could you drop me at the dump? It’s only five minutes in the car. I can walk back.”
Lucas said, “We’re pretty busy.”
“I helped you,” she said. “I need to get some clothes. TV might come back.”
Lucas sighed. “Get the traps.”
She took ten minutes, getting into an old pair of jeans, her boots and her parka. She got a can of generic-brand tuna cat food from under the kitchen sink—bait—the gunny sack with her traps, and her .22. The .22 was an old Harrington & Richardson bolt action single-shot, probably made in the 1940s. She tossed it all in the back of the Acura.
Six miles north of Broderick, on a back road, the landfill was marked by a clan of crows flapping overhead like little specks of India ink thrown against the gray sky. Lucas pulled into the entrance road, next to a sign that said “Quad-County Landfill,” and stopped by a locked gate. Inside the landfill, a small Caterpillar sat at the base of a wall of garbage.
Lucas got out of the truck at the same time Letty did, and looked over the locked gate. The dump was bigger than he’d expected, covering a half of a square mile. Much of the garbage appeared to be pizza boxes, though it smelled more like old diapers. Letty walked around to the back of the truck to get her gear.
“Six miles,” Lucas said, as he walked back around the truck and popped the lid for her. “How’re you gonna get back home?”
“Walk, or hitch a ride,” she said. She dragged the sack of traps out, stuck the rifle under her arm. “I won’t have my traps. Do it all the time.”
Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15 Page 121
