Naked Prey

by John Sandford

  “Running shoes?” Lucas asked, as Del climbed into the car.

  “Got boots in the bag,” Del grunted. He hadn’t bothered to shave, but his breath was minty-fresh. He was nut-tough, smaller than Lucas, street-weathered, shifty, a guy who could pass as a junkie or as homeless or almost anything else that didn’t involve a white collar. “Does Weather know about this?”

  “Left a message. How about Cheryl?” Lucas asked. Del’s wife was a nurse.

  “Yeah, called her. She’s working the first shift—I told her probably two or three days. What happened?”

  “Interesting problem,” Lucas said. He outlined what he knew about the hangings as they headed to Lucas’s house to pack.

  “A fuckin’ lynching, and we gotta fix it. For our own sakes, along with everything else,” Del said, when Lucas had finished.

  “Not a lynching.”

  “Walks likes a lynching, quacks like a lynching . . .” They sat silently for a moment, watching the snow come down around a red light. Then, “Could be a good time, you know?”

  LUCAS CHANGED CLOTHES and packed in ten minutes, stuffing underwear, jeans, a laptop, and a cell-phone charger into a black nylon bag. He said good-bye to the housekeeper; kissed the kid, who was taking a nap and who, with a beige blanket folded around him, looked a little like a submarine sandwich; and collected Del, who’d called a cab.

  The cab driver got lost for a while, trying to find the entrance to the National Guard site at Minneapolis–St. Paul International. When they finally arrived, the pilot and copilot, who had become impatient, briskly packed them into the back of the chopper.

  THE FLIGHT WAS uncomfortable: the old military chopper had been built for utility rather than comfort. Conversation was difficult, so they gave it up. Even thinking was hard, and eventually they huddled, nylon-and-fleece-clad lumps, on the bad canvas seats, closed up in the stink of hot oil and military creosote, heads down, fighting off incipient nausea.

  After an eternity, the chopper beat got deeper and they felt the beginning of a turn. Del unbuckled, half-stood, looked forward and then patted Lucas on the shoulder and shouted, “There it is.”

  Lucas pressed his forehead to the icy plastic window of the National Guard helicopter and tried to look forward.

  A THOUSAND FEET below, the Red River plains of northern Minnesota stretched north and west, toward Canada and the Dakotas. Though it was January, and the temperature outside the chopper registered at six degrees below zero, the ground below them was only dappled with snow. The few roads resembled lines on a drafting pad, dead straight across the paper-flat farmscape.

  To the southeast, along the route they’d just flown, the country had been rougher and the snow deeper. Dozens of frozen-over lakes and ponds had been strung like rosary beads on the snowmobile trails; jigsaw-puzzle farm fields, red barns, and vertical streams of chimney smoke had given the land a homier personality.

  Straight east, out of the helicopter’s right window, was a wilderness of peat bog punctuated by the hairy texture of trash willow. To the west, they could just see a shadowy hint of the line of the Red River, rolling north toward Winnipeg.

  They’d overflown the hamlet of Broderick, in Custer County, and were now closing on a line of cop cars parked on what Lucas had been told was West Ditch Road. The roof racks were flashing on two of the cars. To the north of them, in one of the bigger patches of snow, they could see a stand of leafless trees.

  The copilot leaned into the passenger compartment and shouted over the beat of the blades, “We’re gonna put you down on the highway—they don’t want the rotor blast blowing dirt over the crime scene. A state patrol car will come out to get you.”

  Lucas gave him a thumbs-up and the copilot pulled his head back into the cockpit. Del pulled off the Nikes, stuffed them in his duffel bag, and began lacing up high-topped hiking boots. Lucas looked at his watch: 11:15. The flight to Broderick had taken better than two hours. Minnesota was a tall state, and Custer County was about as far from St. Paul as it was possible to get, without crossing into North Dakota or Canada.

  Now the pilot dropped the chopper in a circle, to look at the highway where they’d land. At the same time, a state patrol car, followed by a sheriff’s car, rolled down the side road and, at the intersection, blocked the main highway north and south.

  “Better button up tight,” the copilot called back to them. “It’s gonna be chilly.”

  The chopper put down on the tarmac between the two cop cars, and the copilot came back to slide the door. Lucas and Del climbed out into the downdraft of the rotors.

  The air was bitterly cold. Dirt and ice crystals scoured them like a sandblaster, and, unconsciously ducking away from the rotors, they ran with their bags back to the state patrol car, their pants plastered to their legs, the icy air lashing their exposed skin. The patrolman popped the back and passenger doors, and as they climbed in, the chopper took off in another cloud of ice crystals.

  “That really sucked,” the patrolman said as they settled in. He was in his late forties, with white eyebrows and graying hair, his face as weathered as a barn board. “Didn’t even think about the goddamned prop wash, or whatever it is.”

  He buckled up and looked back at Del, nodded, then held out a hand to Lucas and said, “Ray Zahn. Sorry to get you up so early.”

  “Lucas Davenport, that’s Del Capslock in the back,” Lucas said, as they shook hands. “They haven’t taken the bodies out yet?”

  “No. They’ve been waiting for the ME. Couldn’t find him for a while, but he’s on his way now.” Zahn did a U-turn and they bumped off the highway onto the gravel road, and the sheriff’s car fell in behind them.

  “You know the people? The ones that got hanged?” Del asked.

  Zahn got the car straight and caught up with Del’s question. “Yeah. It’s a couple from down in Broderick. We’ve IDed them as a Jane Warr and a Deon Cash. They were living in an old farmhouse down there.”

  “Cash is black?”

  “Yup.” Zahn grinned. “Only black dude in the entire county and somebody went and hung him.”

  “That could piss you off,” Del ventured.

  “Got that straight,” Zahn said with a straight face. “Our cultural diversity just went back to zero.”

  3

  West Ditch Road was frozen solid, but sometime during the winter there’d been a thaw, and a tractor had cut ruts in the thinly graveled surface. As they bumped through the ruts, now frozen as hard as basalt, Zahn pointed to a house across the ditch and said, “That’s where the girl’s from.”

  “What girl?” Lucas asked. He and Del looked out the windows. A thirty-foot-wide drainage ditch ran parallel to the road and showed a steely streak of ice at the bottom. A narrow, two-story farmhouse, its white paint gone gray and peeling, sat on the other side of the ditch. The house faced the highway, but was a hundred feet back from it. A rusting Jeep Cherokee squatted in the yard in front of the sagging porch.

  Zahn glanced over at him. “How much you know about this? Anything?”

  “Nothing,” Lucas said. “They threw us on the chopper and that’s about it.”

  “Okay,” Zahn said. “To give it to you quick, a girl named Letty West lives in that house with her mother. She’s this little twerp.” He thought that over for a second, then rubbed an eyebrow with the back of his left hand. “Naw, that’s not right. She’s like a little Annie Oakley. She wanders around with an old .22 and a machete and a bunch of traps. Caught her driving her mother’s Jeep a couple of times. Got a mouth on her. Anyway, last night—she looked at her clock when she woke up, and she says it was right after midnight—she saw some car lights down the road here, and wondered what was going on. There’s nothing down here, and it was blowin’ like hell. This morning, about dawn, she was walking her trapline along the ditch, and went up on top to look at that grove of trees. That’s how she found them. If she hadn’t, they might’ve hung there until spring.”

  THEY WERE ALL looking out the win
dows at the girl’s house. The place might have been abandoned, but for a light glowing from a window at the front door, and foot tracks that led on and off the porch to the Jeep. The yard hadn’t been cut in recent years and clumps of dead yellow prairie grass stuck up through the thin snow. A rusting swing-set sat at the side of the house, not square to anything, as though it’d been dumped there. A single swing hung from the left side of the two-swing bar. On the far back end of the property, a forties-era outhouse crumbled into the dirt.

  Lucas noticed a line of green-paper Christmas trees taped in an upstairs window.

  “How old’s the girl?” Del asked.

  “Eleven or twelve, I guess.”

  “What’s the machete for?” Lucas asked.

  “Something to do with the trapping,” Zahn said.

  “She down at the scene, or . . .?”

  “They took her into town with her mother, to make a statement.”

  Lucas asked, “Who’d know about this road? Have to be local, you think?”

  Zahn shrugged: “Maybe, but I think it’s probably the first road the killer came to that led off the highway, outside of Broderick. First place he could do his business with a little peace and quiet.”

  “Must have scouted it, though,” Lucas said. The road was only slightly wider than the patrol car, with no shoulder on the left, and on the right, six feet of frozen dirt and then an abrupt slope into the ditch. “That ditch would be dangerous as hell. How’d he turn around?”

  “There are some tracks, you’ll see them up ahead. What’s left of them, anyway. He just jockeyed her around, and got straight. But you’re right; he must’ve scouted it.”

  “If this kid could see him, why’d he think he was out of sight?” Del asked.

  “We had a good wind through here last night, a nice little ground blizzard,” Zahn said. “From the grove of trees, on the ground, he might not be able to see the farmhouse, but from up on the second floor of the farmhouse, you could see his lights down in the grove. Anyway, Letty said she could, and there’s no reason to think she was lying. She never turned her room light on.”

  “Mmm,” Lucas nodded. He’d once been in a ground blizzard where he couldn’t see more than three feet in any direction, but if he looked straight up, he could see a fine blue sky with puffy, white fair-weather clouds. “So the victims lived back in Broderick?”

  “Yeah, down there in another old farmhouse. That’s how we identified them so quick. Took one look and knew who the guy was. Him being black.”

  “How long did he live here?”

  “Year and a half. He was in jail down in Kansas City, showed up here in July a year ago, and moved in with Warr. Warr was working at the casino in Armstrong, dealing blackjack. We just found out about the jail thing this morning.”

  “The Warr woman—she was from here?” Del asked.

  “Nope. She was from Kansas City, herself,” Zahn said. “Got into Broderick about a month before Cash, so we think she must’ve been his girlfriend, and came up here when he was about to get out of jail, to nail down the job. But to tell you the truth, we don’t really know the details yet.”

  “Okay.”

  “What about Broderick?” Del asked. ‘Anything there? What do they do? Farmers?”

  “Well, it was mostly a ghost town until Gene Calb got his truck rehab business going. There was always a gas station and a store, and a bar off and on, servicing the local farm folks. Just a crossroads. Then some people moved up here, to be close to work at Calb’s—houses are really cheap—and now, there must be twenty or thirty people around the place.”

  “So what the hell was an interracial couple from Kansas City doing there?” Lucas asked.

  “That seems to be a question,” Zahn agreed. They’d come up on the line of cop cars, which were parked on both sides of the narrow lane. A half-dozen cops were standing around, backs to the wind, ducking their heads briefly to see who Zahn was bringing in. Zahn threaded between them, slowed, pointed to a tall white-haired man in sunglasses, a camo hunting jacket, and nylon wind pants, who stood with his hands in his pockets talking to two other men. Zahn said, “That’s the sheriff, Dick Anderson. I’ll let you out here. I’m gonna find someplace to get turned around. I get claustrophobic when I’m pointed the wrong way.”

  LUCAS AND DEL climbed out, and the sheriff and the two men he was talking to looked down at them, and the sheriff said something to the other two and they both smiled. Del, who was coming up behind Lucas, muttered, “We’re city slickers.”

  “For a while, anyway,” Lucas agreed. He smiled as he came up to the sheriff. Lucas’s blue eyes were happy enough, but his smile sometimes made people nervous. “Sheriff Anderson? Lucas Davenport and Del Capslock with the BCA. We understand you’ve got a situation.”

  “If that’s what you’d call it,” the sheriff said. The sheriff was about forty, Lucas thought, with a pale pinkish complexion; he ran to fat, like a clerk, but wasn’t fat yet. His hands stayed in his pockets. A statement of some kind, Lucas thought.

  Anderson nodded to the two men with him: “These are deputies Braun and Schnurr. We understood that Hank Dickerson was coming up from Bemidji with a crime scene crew.”

  Lucas nodded, still smiling. “Yes. They should be here anytime. Del and I were sent by the governor to make sure everything was handled right.”

  “The governor knows about this?” Anderson asked doubtfully.

  “Yes. I talked to him this morning before I left. He said to say hello and that he hoped we could get this cleared away in a hurry.”

  “Maybe I should give him a call,” Anderson suggested.

  “I’m sure he’d be happy to hear from you,” Lucas said. He looked around. “Where are the victims?”

  Anderson turned toward the stand of trees north of the road, took a hand out of his jacket pocket, and pointed. “Back in there, where the guys in the orange hats are.”

  Lucas said to Del, “Let’s go take a look.”

  “Are you running this, or Hank?” Anderson asked.

  “Both of us, in a way,” Lucas said. “I report directly to the commissioner of Public Safety and to the governor. Hank reports up through the BCA chain of command.”

  “So what exactly do you do?” Deputy Schnurr asked. “Handle the politics or what?”

  “I kick people’s asses,” Lucas said. His eyes flicked over Schnurr and the other deputy, then went back to the sheriff. “When they need to be kicked.”

  He and Del both stepped away at the same time, toward the men in the orange caps. The sheriff and his two deputies hesitated, and Del and Lucas got a few steps away and Del said, “That was cool.”

  “Hey, the guy didn’t even shake hands.”

  “Yeah.” They pushed through a tangle of brush and caught a glimpse of the bodies hanging from the ropes; passed a few more trees and then saw them fully, in the clear. Lucas focused on them, got careless, pushed back a spring y branch and got snapped in the face by a twig. His cheek stinging, he said, “Careful,” to Del, and went back to staring at the bodies.

  They looked like paintings, he thought, or maybe an old fading color photo from the 1930s, two gray, stretched-out bodies dangling from a tree, half facing each other, ropes cutting into their necks, with four white men not looking at them—desperately not looking at them.

  As they came up, Del asked, quietly, “You ever noticed how hanged people sort of all look alike—like they lose their race or something? They all look like they’re made out of clay.”

  Lucas nodded. He had noticed that. “Except redheads,” he added. “They always look like they came from a different planet.”

  Del said, “You’re right. Except for redheads. They just get paler.”

  The four orange-hatted men were spaced around the bodies at the cardinal points, as though they might be rushed from any direction. A short stepladder was set up beside the bodies, and the snow had been thoroughly trampled down for fifty feet around. Two of the men were doing the cold-weathe
r tap dance, a slow shuffle that said they were freezing. When Lucas and Del came up, one of the orange-hats turned and asked, “Who’re you?”

  “BCA,” Lucas said. “Who’re you?”

  “Dave Payton.” The man turned back to the bodies and shivered. “D-Deputy sheriff.”

  “What’re you doing?” Del asked.

  “K-Keeping everybody out of a circle around the bodies. You guys are supposed to have a crime crew coming. You don’t look like them.”

  “They’ll be a bit,” Lucas said. His voice had turned friendly. “You get here early?”

  “I was the first car in, after the state patrol. Ass is freezin’ solid.”

  “Where’s the line they were brought in on . . . tracks or anything?”

  Payton jerked his arm toward the road. “Back that way, I guess. Pretty trampled down, now.”

  Lucas looked, and could see the kind of snaky break in the brush that often meant a game trail. If the bodies had been brought in along it, then the hangman had known exactly where he was going.

  Del had taken a couple steps closer to the dangling bodies. “Woman’s got blood on her face,” he said.

  “G-Guy’s pretty messed up, too,” Payton said. “Looks like somebody beat the heck out of him before he did . . . this.”

  “I don’t think it’s her blood,” Del said. “Some of it’s off to the side, and on her upper lip and nose.”

  “We’ll get the lab to check,” Lucas said. “That’d be a break, if it’s the killer’s.”

  Payton said, “D-D-D-DNA. We did a DNA in a rape last year.”

  “Catch the guy?”

  “N-N-No,” Payton said.

  Lucas said, “Look, why don’t you go sit in a car for a while and get warmed up, for Christ’s sakes? You’re shaking like a leaf.”

  “’Cause Anderson’d have a cow,” Payton said.

  “We’re taking over the crime scene,” Lucas said. “The BCA is. I’m ordering you to leave, okay?” He looked at the other guys, who were watching him, some hope in their eyes. “All of you. Get someplace warm. Get some coffee.”